Image is from Futurama.

Happy holidays, fellow godless communists. We are in year three of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate all Christmas cheer and create a world free of the joys and festivity of Christmas. Nobody should have to be reminded that in our concrete brutalist communist strongholds, NO ornaments are allowed in December. Please report any Christmas trees, snowflakes, baubles, and presents to the evil secret police, and anybody caught violating their Volcel Pledge by having a tentative kiss under a mistletoe will be shot on sight.

Developments lately have been grim. Our Supreme Communist Dictator Brandon is being removed from office by Christmas-loving patriots, and soon, Christmas will adorn the White House for another four years. This is obviously very disappointing, but while Christmas joy is strictly prohibited, good vibes are still strongly encouraged. Revolutionary optimism (a term we only bring out when things are going very badly and we need to be delusional) shall triumph over defeatist rhetoric by stooges of the Christmas regime.

We must have hope. Our foreign allies aiding us in destroying Christmas now possess hypersonic weaponry, allowing us to compete with and overcome the engine technology powering Santa’s sleigh. Abroad, they have destroyed factories and hit cities with missiles travelling at unimaginable speeds into precise targets, while the Christmas regime struggles to produce their own such missiles, as they are still reliant on aircraft bombing campaigns. Precision has a quality all its own, or something along those lines. We just have to hold out another two years or so, and I swear to you: we will live in a world without this accursed holiday.

No current struggle session discussion here in the news megathread please, you will be banned from the comm and your comment will be removed.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.

  • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    75·
    2 days ago

    Is jacobin fucking high?

    One of Karl Marx’s most persistent points, from “On the Jewish Question” forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state — the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion — we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree.

    But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and more resistant to these efforts. Producing a situation that is, in some sense, the mirror image of what Marx described.

    You are totally free, unless you protest anything state deems important. Or strike in important industry. Look at my leftist “intellectuals”, we are boned sadness-abysmal

    • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      1 day ago

      These people are like megachurch owners who quote Marxism like scripture to make themselves sound trustworthy and enlightened, despite not having even a surface level understanding of the material. Western radlibs eat this shit up and the imperial core thrives once again.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      38·
      1 day ago

      I call this style the “Nuh uh” school of sociopolitical analysis, just assert bullshit without data or even a formal structure and use people who actually knew what they were talking about as a crutch or in this case a punching bag

      • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        24·
        1 day ago

        I call it active recuperation, just under the surface: amerikkka decentralized system of education is great as it allows to resist “tyrants” (tyrants in that case is retvrn christians and anyone trying to talk about native genocide). Palestinians and trans people can be hand-waved away to be discussed “later”:

        There are exceptions to this rule: the most obvious ones being the suppression of the debate over Palestine and the mobilization against trans people. These all need to be part of our analysis. But the resulting portrait may be more complicated than many of the recent accounts suggest.

        Like that those happened under democrat president? Or maybe that state doesn’t care one bit about trans issues, and allows people to fight over it, while being very concerned with palestine (just as it was with black power and peace movement before)

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          24·
          1 day ago

          But the resulting portrait may be more complicated than many of the recent accounts suggest.

          Translation from academic newspeak: “I don’t care about Palestinians or trans people, in fact they brought the “complications” on themselves”

          I fuckin despise these weaselly cockroaches

    • GrosMichel [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      35·
      1 day ago

      Doesn’t even make sense. The mirror image would be something like a misrepresentation of the USSR where the government is presented as over-bearing and bureaucratic but through it people’s economic/work life and social/non-work life were expanded greatly compared to what their lives would be like under capitalist development.

      Also, when would they say this inversion took place in liberal society exactly? Also, also, if they’re pointing out that people are resisting an oppressive state them that’s not a mirror image but a 3rd square in their little chart of formally/actually free/unfree.

      Formally free / Actually free (communism)
      Formally free / Actually unfree (liberalism, as Marx described)
      Formally unfree / Actually unfree (fascism?, what imperial society is careening to)
      Formally unfree / Actually free (his “mirror”, what I’d say is socialist development?

    • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      41·
      1 day ago

      They really allow anyone to write there. picard

      Pro-Palestine campus protests are effectively banned, right? The state doesn’t have to be directly involved.

      The attacks on economic rights and economic freedoms provided during the New Deal and Social Democratic era also extents to the social freedoms.

      The only reason why the state allows some dissent, instead of putting people in jail is because it doesn’t see much threats.