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Bulletins and News Discussion from August 5th to August 11th, 2024 - LGBT - COTW: Iraq

Well, Iran and their allies' response may happen sometime this week and apparently they aren't talking to the US in order to negotiate how and where they will hit Israel (and Shoigu arrived in Tehran rather auspiciously), the Bangladeshi government just fell, F16s have been given to Ukraine, there are fascist riots in the UK, and Japan just had its worst stock fall since 1987 and seems to be taking several other countries/corporations with it. I don't really know where to look right now.

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 Iraq! 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.

2.2K comments

  • I am declaring unlimited vendetta on anyone who starts boosting Walz. I will fight you. I will bite. I have 20 years of rage built up from living with those racist passive aggressive backstabbing jackasses, I lived under a year of police terror under the Walz regime, I am not letting anyone lesser evil that fuck. Tim Walz sent the US FUCKING ARMY to crush an anti-cop PoC uprising. That's who he is, that's what he did. He's not a nice old man, he's not a "progressive", he's not going to save Palestine, he's not going to fix anything. He's the competent fascist we believed was going to follow Trump and that's why he's being picked. They didn't pick him for his progressive ideals, they picked him because he proved he'd be willing to send armed soldiers in to America's streets to ruthlessly crush dissent Because he actually did that.

  • i have not ONCE seen kamala look or act remotely with genuine anger until pro-palestine protestors interrupted her. she almost always seems a bit upbeat even when assertive, but there she looked full of pure contempt.

  • The Trump/Bolsonaro-style "stop the steal" tactic has failed in Mexico. "3 parties submitted over 230 challenges to the electoral data, arguing that there were irregularities in the process. After the information was analyzed, the Electoral Court rejected them."

    Holy shit, now every fucking time a leftist wins an election, the conservatives and far-right will accuse them of fraud. This shit is getting boring. It's always the same arguments.

  • Sure, electorialism is a fuck. But it's also funny as hell sometimes.

    Let's recap: Trump was going to win so hard against Biden, he had it locked. The Democrats were scrambling all over the place trying to convice stubborn joe to drop out, but he wouldn't, the Democrats were showing a lot of weakness. Then the assassination attempt happened, and it was super joever, 99% guaranteed he was going to win. But then genocide joe dropped out, KKKamala replaced him just because she's next on the line (if the Democrats had an actual primary she would have lost 100%). Meanwhile Trump selects JD Vance, a man with the charisma of a dirty diaper, as his VP, then Kamala begins to grow in the polls, appoints the generic wholesome old white man as VP, then stares down at people calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (no no no, not for the actual disappearance of the genocidal state, FOR A SIMPLE CEASEFIRE) and now Trump is completely lost and doesn't know what to do. He doesn't have an effective strategy against Kamala nor Walz (his attacks are very erratic like trying to call Walz "more radical than crazy Bernie" and trying to put Biden back in the discussion) and his VP is a fucking problem.

    This happened in like 3 weeks lol.

    Either way, neither Trump nor Copmala can save the United States of America from it's downfall. It's coming.

  • Tim Walz is a surprising pick. Doubt he’ll be Henry Wallace or LBJ 2.0 but still not bad.

    The amount of NATO leftists saying, “I know I’m a communist but I just donated ☺️” makes me realize that the majority of them are probably children or adults under 30. No way in hell would a 50 year old Communist say something like that after getting burned for that long.

  • David Lynch has revealed he can no longer leave his house since being diagnosed with emphysema.

    The director of films including Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, who created and starred in Twin Peaks, shared the revelation in a new interview about his career.

    Speaking to Sight & Sound magazine, Lynch, 78, said he was diagnosed with emphysema due to smoking throughout his life and said that, if he directs again, it will have to be remotely as he cannot “go out” due to fears he will get Covid.

    “I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. It would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold,” he said, revealing that he “can only walk a short distance before” he’s “out of oxygen”.

    It’s because of this that Lynch says it is unlikely he will direct again, but if he does, he will be unable to do so in person. However, while saying “I would do it remotely if it comes to it”, he said: “I wouldn’t like that so much.”

  • Iraq COTW? Let's GO!

    Free Iraq AMA for the news mega today. My wife is Iraqi and I've spent more time there than in Syria and Lebanon in the last 5 years. I pretty much know about the situation there more than Syria, I had to impress her dad.

  • Thesis: Iran does something and causes the Zionist entity to collapse.

    Antithesis: Iran does nothing because nothing ever happens.

    Synthesis: The Zionist entity collapses on its own while Iran does absolutely nothing.

  • Nicolás Maduro corners the United States, threatening to sell oil and gas only to BRICS countries, and Washington backs down from declaring candidate Edmundo Gonzalez the winner of the July 28 elections.

  • an olympic runner (noah lyles) basically collapses from covid after a race and everyone is like "yea cool ok no big deal"

    my coworkers are like "yeah it's endemic at this point" YEAH PURPOSEFULLY IT'S NOT NATIVE MOTHERFUCKER IT'S 4 YEARS OLD

  • It is well and truly Joever. Sometime in the last 24 hours my neighbor finally took down their enormous BIDEN 2024 banner. Their blue-and-yellow "Stop the War!" handpainted sign is still there, unaccompanied by any Palestinian colors or messages.

  • So there is lot of talk from the McDonalds "Left" about the Venezuelan elections being fraudulent or whatever. I don't have first hand experience but a journalist that I respect has and she went as an election observer in Venezuela. (Breakthrough news has also done some great coverage from what I have seen)

    She reported that:

    • The election system that they have is probably one of the best (if not the best) in the world and is very hard to cheat. They have a triple verification system where you vote in an electronic machine using your fingerprint (instead of just an ID), you then get a receipt of what you voted (without any identification on the paper), and also the machine leaves a physical vote in a separate box so afterwards they can verify the differences between the receipts and what's in the ballot box.
    • Things were very calm in every election center she went. There was violence in certain places elsewhere. The world on the street was that certain people(...) where giving 150 dollars to anyone willing to participate to anti government riots. She said there is tremendous misinformation. At some point they were saying that an airport was taken over by anti-government forces. The problem was she was at that airport at that time and nothing was happening!
    • Internet is completely censor free. (Maybe you should rethink of it Nicolas...)
    • Maduro made a request to the Venezuelan supreme court so that the opposition parties submit any evidence that they have in regard to the elections so they can be cross examined. (BTW, the supreme court is elected by the parliament that included the opposition parties of course...)
    • Maduro had 5 assassination attempts against him in March alone. He wears bulletproof vest in his public appearances.
    • In the last 15 years the government has built 5 million houses and has made the country food independent.
    • Maduro when he gathered people around to express his thanks after the election he had 3 ambassadors beside him, those of China, Turkey and Iran
    • Many of the cars in Venezuela streets are Chinese (a phenomenon that I see not only about cars but in everything across Latin America)
    • Burgerland companies like Edison Research (that takes contracts from CIA, Voice of America etc.) where trying to create a climate, months before the elections, that basically the opposition was far ahead (they were polling the opposition as high as 70%!) so that when the real election results came they could say "Aha you see, our polling (that was 100% real of course) didn't match the election results so that means the government cheated!". So the western muppets ("left" and right) take what burgerland polling companies claim as better evidence than the election results themselves!
    • NYT about a month ago reported that the base of the opposition was inside the embassy of Argentina! They did that because the government can't check what's getting in and what is getting out of an embassy. That's why we show supporters of the government trying to get inside the embassy after the elections.

    Loser "Left" is very concerned about elections in Venezuela, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet in China, arming Naz...excuse me freedom fighters in Ukraine, women rights in Iran at convenient times, LGBT rights in Palestine at convenient times and voting for the lesser of two evils in the imperial core in order to protect their proper...democracy. All of this just happens to be a stance that is very convenient for the US state department...nothing to see here.

  • An extremely interesting post from a few months ago (apr 27) translating Ansarallah politburo member Abdulmalik Alejri where he discusses Marx and capitalist crisis.

    "The death of Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani brings to mind the era of global jihad led by Salafi Jihadism and the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s against what was then termed the communist threat. The result was that they handed America and the capitalist West a victory without war, as then-US President Reagan borrowed a phrase from his predecessor Nixon. In the context of the Cold War, Afghanistan, that distant corner of Central Asia, transformed into a hub of Islam, and Kabul became a destination for Arab mujahideen, while Palestine, with Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Prophet's Ascension, was within arm's reach, yet failed to attract Arab mujahideen to jihad or to the allure of the virgins. Ironically, when America occupied Afghanistan, Kabul ceased to be a hub of Islam and a destination for jihad.

    At that time, Western capitalist intelligence agencies and their Arab allies succeeded in portraying Marx and socialism as a threat to religions, whereas the truth was that they posed a threat to exploitative capitalism, and Marx's battle was fundamentally against capitalist exploitation. Marx's legacy fundamentally did not prioritize religions, and all he wrote about them was few and scattered texts. His most important work, "Capital," in which his genius shines, explained the structure of capitalism, analyzed its internal mechanisms and contradictions, its capacity for expansion, crisis generation, and self-renewal. Even according to his adversaries, Marx's legacy remained the primary reference for analyzing capitalist crises, with his ideas resurfacing with each historical cycle of capitalist crises.

    Marx believed that the Enlightenment had overthrown the exploitation of the church and that the real looming danger was capitalist exploitation, even suggesting that religion could play a positive role in mobilizing against capitalist exploitation. I don't understand how some perceive Marxism and communism as a threat to religion while finding no risks in liberal capitalism, even though the Enlightenment movement with its liberal tendencies was the one that battled the church, and the French Revolution raised the slogan "Hang the last king with the intestines of the last priest," while the slogans of the Bolshevik revolution called for overthrowing the bourgeois government. Naturally, this is just a question of amazement, as the issue as a whole is not as simple, and civilization cannot be reduced or approached solely from the angle of combating religion.

    The real danger to religion is such exploitation of religion to serve the battles and projects of America and the imperial West in the region, and those involved should take heed from the dramatic end of the Afghan jihad."

    https://xcancel.com/aldanmarki/status/1784319180822417791?s=46

  • Nicolas Maduro announces that he has ordered, through the Telecommunications Commission, the blocking of Twitter (X) in the country, for a period of 10 days. The reason would be violations of Venezuelan laws.

  • Damn, Trump hitting on the democrats by saying Barack HUSSEIN Obama. This is so 2010.

    Dude's so fucking cooked lmao. He will lose to fucking kamala harris. KAMALA THE SAME ONE WHO GOT THIRD PLACE IN HER OWN HOME STATE.

  • US Muslim group urges Blinken to resign over refusal to sanction Israeli army unit

    The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) says the US secretary of state has “knowingly violated US law by backtracking” on plans to sanction the Netzah Yehuda battalion over rights abuse allegations.

    The Israeli military unit “has clearly committed gross human rights violations using US weapons”, CAIR Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said in a statement.

    “Secretary Blinken’s cowardly, morally reprehensible and blatantly illegal decision confirms what numerous State Department whistleblowers have said: he is disregarding the conclusions of career diplomats, as well as experts on federal and international law,” Mitchell said.

    “Secretary Blinken is now as much of a war criminal as the war criminal he will continue to arm, Israeli defense minister Gallant, and he should resign his office in disgrace.”

2166 comments