Bulletins and News Discussion from May 20th to May 26th, 2024 - Never Break TrueAnon's Rules For Life - COTW: Azerbaijan
Image is of Azerbaijan's President, Aliyev (left) and Armenia's President, Pashinyan (right) in a meeting a month or two after Azerbaijan took Nagorno-Karabakh.
Never go to a second location.
Always get the interior ministry post.
Never get in a helicopter or any small aircraft.
If someone with a gun enters your car, they’re gonna kill you.
If someone tells you they’re not going to kill you, they’re calming you down to kill you later.
Never give up your nukes.
Never release the opposition's political prisoners.
Never let the opposition delay elections.
If someone starts to get into German runes, drop them.
Never trust a South American with a German name.
Never move anywhere for a religion.
Never go into the sewers unless you’re a sewer guy.
If someone’s trying to get you to commit a crime, they're FBI (sometimes CIA or military intelligence).
Never become an FBI informant.
If you do become an FBI informant, record everything.
Never relinquish your arms.
Always get it in writing.
If you keep gambling, you’ll eventually win.
Never talk to cops without a lawyer.
Always pay your mercenaries.
Don’t let anyone take your passport.
To add an addendum to rule 3, never put your President and Foreign Minister in the same helicopter or small aircraft. Especially if doing so in bad weather conditions. Especially if you're already under threat from a hostile nuclear power in the region with a proclivity for terrorism (though this probably isn't Israel's doing, in this particular case).
Anyway, Azerbaijan. Not a great country, I think. Did some genocides. They're a petrostate that is hosting Cop29, which I suppose is a way for the bourgeoisie to implicitly convey their contempt for the green movement. They got weapons from Israel, too.
Just for the record, there's an Iranian province called East Azerbaijan, which is not the same as Azerbaijan.
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 Azerbaijan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
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.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has argued that members of the US-led military bloc should let Ukraine freely use their weapons to launch strikes deeper into Russian territory.
“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said on Friday in an interview with The Economist.
“Especially now when a lot of the fighting is going on in Kharkov, close to the border, to deny Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.”
The young Jens soon found his feet as he tackled the art of expressing himself. As a pupil at his Rudolf Steiner school he took part in a youthful performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. He joined the DNA, a party which had been founded in 1887, when he was 14 and at university, where he took a course in economics, he refined his political skills not least in street demonstrations during which stones were thrown at a Western embassy.
The lesson here is obvious: if you're a leftist, never take economics courses. And it's probably not a bad idea to avoid A Midsummer's Night Dream just in case
in street demonstrations during which stones were thrown at a Western embassy.
AFAIK
They were protesting the Vietnam war and throwing stones at the US embassy, and several of them were arrested and I think the young Jens was released quickly or wasn't even arrested?, which makes him sus
Later he steered the Norwegian succdems to be more friendly with the US & NATO
KGB was very interested in him, and tried to flip him, but I also think that Stoltenberg was probably trying to flip the KGB agent
These are the main things that makes me suspect he was a CIA plant in Norwegian politics
(feel free to correct me though)
Just consider: spy agencies like to have their "own" "civilian" politicians. It's pure pragmatism. So among all the well known European politicians there's a very good chance one of them is a CIA asset. My guess is Stoltenberg. I'd bet €10 on this. It's just an educated guess haha
Of course, him becoming the general secretary of NATO is just redundant (because it's as close to being an US politician as a European can get), though he's very much a hawk as we can see
We'll probably never know, or maybe 50 years from now they declassify something.
I don't know much about Stoltenberg but his predecessor Anders Fogh Rasmussen is one of the worst ghouls my country has ever produced. He became NATO chief as a reward for loyal service to the empire, having lied Denmark into America's illegal and unprovoked full-scale invasion of Iraq. To get Erdogan to accept him he had to ban the Kurdish TV station ROJ TV who was operating out of Copenhagen at the time, something he did willingly. Before that, his tenure as prime minister was marked by extreme subservience to the yanks, normalisation and embracement of the far right, immeseration of the poor and an unsustainable economic policy based on bribing homeowners.
After retiring as NATO figurehead he went on to work as a pro-american "consultant" for the Saudis and other unsavoury regimes, made a Prager U video and tried to organize something called the Alliance of Democracies which is exactly as insufferable as you would expect.
I feel like the launching of missles inside of Russia is the type of thing that makes Russia more apt to occupy larger and larger amounts of territory, but I’m just a Doctor
Since capital exteriorizes its costs, including costs of wars that cheapen resources and unredeemed effects of pollution, to make higher profits, the exponential growth or profits must corrode the social and natural bases that support life. Capitalism is not here until the end of history; it is here to end history. The clash of civilizations is not a clash of cultural beliefs It is a clash between people being consumed by the capital system, mainly residing in the South, and people consuming the South. In such a two-tier system of cannibalizing and cannibalized people, the structure of capital in the North, manifested in the achievements of Western civilization which is no more than trail of death and destruction, imposes such civilization upon masses that struggle to survive.
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Regarding the nuclear race, a different atmosphere prevails in this day and age – an atmosphere of silence. This eerie silence is the absence of dialogue on prohibition of nuclear weapons and an insinuation that the scare tactic of nuclear war lurks in the background. One only needs to observe the insane frequency with which the word "nuke" has been mentioned in recent news reports to realize that Armageddon may not be just a mythical story.
Loose talk of military conflicts between nuclear nations, like the US intervening in Russia or fighting alongside Taiwan, is thrown without regard to the fact that by the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma, no conventional war between nuclear powers remains conventional. Fearing that the other might use nuclear arms to strike first, both powers will resort to an early strike to hedge against the losses attendant upon first strike capabilities.
at this juncture, the losses of NATO in Ukraine and the genocide against Arabs in Gaza, which had further exposed the true nature of Western civilization, fuel geopolitical tensions for a US empire that cannot relinquish the mandate of commodities over history. It cannot renounce destroying society and nature to make ever-rising profits, especially when the dominant roadmap of its social mind, the dominant ideas, amounts to all ideas that ethically justify making profits at any cost. To add to the pot of tensions, the recent BRICS expansion, de-dollarization and the inexorable rise of China, all corner the US-led Western hemisphere into drastic measures to arrest the decline.
...
The US primarily relies on militarism to expand and maintain its dominance. Its foreign policy is inherently aggressive because financial domination is intricately tied to military power. In terms of ethical considerations, it is crucial to bear in mind that capital’s interests are benchmarks for moral actions. This implies that anything conflicting with processes of accumulation is deemed devious. US-led capital, in particular, has an extensive history of leading military interventions aimed at thwarting anti-systemic formations, not only cheapening labor and resources but also robbing masses of the capacity to develop. Essentially, capitalism is geared towards the destruction of value, and paradoxically, the more it destroys, the stronger it becomes.
Does this imply that the US would immediately turn to nuclear warfare? Certainly not. There is a strategic progression to be followed, eliminating options that prove ineffective, beginning with diplomacy, then issuing warnings, moving on to military confrontations, until reaching the final recourse: the consideration of a first strike – and the option will continue to be entertained as long as the weapons exist. On this note, it is worth pointing out that the US is progressively running out of options as it faces an increasing sense of isolation on the global stage. The refusal of longstanding allies to join Operation Prosperity Guardian has particularly become a source of embarrassment for the US.
Especially now when a lot of the fighting is going on in Kharkov, close to the border, to deny Ukraine the possibility of using these weapons against legitimate military targets on Russian territory makes it very hard for them to defend themselves.
Maybe if ukraine hadn't been shelling illegitimate civilian targets in Russian territory from karkov Russia wouldnt have felt the need to carve a buffer zone.