I know the Rambo title card is a hoax.
The COTW was chosen in the wake of the aborted sequel to the attempted assassination of Trump being performed by a guy who is VERY enthusiastic about Ukraine, to the point of trying to sneak Afghan soldiers into Ukraine by setting up a house in Pakistan to house them and then further transport them. He also apparently offered to send thousands of Afghan soldiers to Haiti to help them combat gang violence. Whomst among us doesn't have the numbers of thousands of Afghan soldiers on speed-dial. Do you reckon there's a group chat?
Anyway, while there is still no official recognition of the Taliban's government by any country, China has taken a different course than the late USSR and the US - forming economic in-roads, rather than trying their own invasion. This has been a big boon for the struggling country, with various mines and oil and agriculture deals helping keep things barely afloat. A total disintegration of the social fabric of Afghanistan is not in the interest of any of the powers that border it - China, Pakistan, and Iran, with Russia not too far away - so an interesting dynamic of helping-without-official-recognition has been established. I wonder who will be the first country to fully recognize them?
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Afghanistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Something bad or violent happened in America? Well, it was definitely caused by some poorly defined "mental illness" and it couldn't possibly be an expected outcome of four hundred years of bloodshed, oppression, poverty, and unspeakable cruelty.
Definitely just those crazy people. We should probably make them illegal.
This particular violent thing is easily traceable to the media and DNC and deep state pushing anti-Russia narratives and scaring the shit out of a lot of gullible libs. It’s pretty direct 1:1 blowback
libs unknowingly doing stochastic terrorism
They know perfectly well, which is why they’re desperately trying to downplay his banderite sympathies with BBC noting that he “felt strongly about Ukraine”
"Violence has no place in America"
It should be exported!
Conservatives’ idea of addressing mental health crises is bringing back 1900s asylums and lobotomies. Maybe that’ll get the wife to shut up
They would never do 1900's asylums. You can't do big government institutions with doctors and nurses on staff. Those things costs money. What they're going to do is to throw them in some private for-profit prison where they'll be cared for by anthropomorphic thumbs whose only qualifications are a few days of training on how to do violence against inmates.
Were they ever state run lol my understanding was that they were all private, and many of the administrators and pioneers went on to create cults that led to the troubled teen industry
In the 1800's and 1900's they were. They were constructed for a mixture of eugenics and humanitarian reasons, and doing so was seen as a natural function of a modern developed state. Instead of the "insane" languishing in whatever care their local community could and would provide, which was often very little, they were to be removed from society and put in dedicated modern institutions run by scientific principles and controlled by doctors. This was seen both as a way of proving a more dignified existence and as a way of protecting society against dangerous and subversive people.
In practice the humanitarian ideals were mostly just that, ideals and the asylums were institutions of social control more than of altruism. Life at these institutions were often characterised by hard labour, abuse and dehumanisation. The medical treatment provided, most often without any shred of consent, was rooted in junk science and was abusive in itself, lobotomies, uncontrolled usage of strong antipsychotic and sedative drugs, forced sterilisations and the removal of teeth to cure psychosis.
The concept of "insanity" was much wider than what we would think of today. Any kind of unconventional or disruptive behaviour could get you labelled a [R-word] or "morally insane", especially if you were from a marginalised underclass. Many times sexual promiscuity or petty crime could be enough to get you locked up for years.
As society and medical science progressed the asylums seemed more and more outdated and eventually inmates were treated more humanely. Ideals about integrating people with mental disabilities into society began to gain traction. A lot of this development coincided with the arrival of neoliberalism, making the big expensive asylums seem outdated in more than one way.
Eventually they were closed down. The good part of that was that many mentally disabled people were able to live more independently and more in contact with the rest of society. But the bad part is that a lot of people who had previously been cared for by the state were now left to their own devices, having to rely on chronically underfunded out-patient psychiatric care.
The pet project of a politician in my area (in Northern California) is literally to get a jail expansion so they can put a "mental health" wing in. A jail run by a sheriff whose office is pretty notorious (even relative to U.S. cop shops generally) for torturing and murdering neuro-divergent and disabled people.
Wow that truly is commiefornia!
The part that drives me up the wall is how many working-class "progressive", or even nominally "lefitst", people fall for this shit. Like, I'll often hear "their politics are generally conservative and awful, but at least they're doing something about mental health".
Me: