Image is from this SCMP article.
Much of the analysis below is sourced from Michael Roberts’ great website.
Japan’s ruling parliamentary coalition, consisting of the LDP (purple) and it’s junior coalition partner Komeito (in light pink) have lost their ruling majority. They have ruled post-war Japan for almost its entire history. The LDP is currently led by Shigeru Ishiba after Kishida stood down due to a corruption scandal, and ties to the Unification Church.
While geopolitical factors (over the cold war between the US and China, etc) may have played a role, by far the biggest reason for this result in the poor economic conditions over the past few years. Inflation has risen and real wages have fallen, with little relief for the working class via things like tax reductions. While inequality in Japan is not as extreme as in America, it is still profound, with the top 10% possessing 60% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% possess just 5%.
Shinzo Abe previously tried to boost economic performance through monetary easing and fiscal deficits, while Kishida ran on a “new capitalism” which rejected Abe’s neoliberalism and promised to reduce inequality. Nothing substantial has resulted from all this, however, other than increasing corporate wealth. Innovation continues to fall, and domestic profitability is low, resulting in decreasing investment at home by Japanese corporations. Labour productivity growth has only slightly picked up since the mid-2000s and is falling again. The rate of profit has fallen by half since the 1960s, and Japan has been in a manufacturing recession - or very close to it - since late 2022. In essence: there is no choice but between stagnation or decline.
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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.
Lula doesn’t endorse an arms embargo on israel
Wow, watch StateSpox laugh and make jokes when Matt Lee asks about a UN vote condemning the US embargo on Cuba
Lee: You aware of the vote tomorrow
Miller: I wasn’t tracking this on my bingo card
Lee: How is the US going to vote
Miller: I doubt we’ll be voting to condemn ourselves (laughs)
Lee: Last year of Obama’s presidency you guys abstained, as you probably know it’s basically the entire world votes to condemn it and you and Israel vote against, so do you have anything to say about this yearly display of international isolation
Miller: I don’t (smirks)
MUST NOT FEDPOST…
MUST NOT FEDPOST…
MUST NOT FEDPOST…
https://nitter.poast.org/AssalRad/status/1850980965503680900
Bernie Sanders uploaded a video on his YouTube channel about voting for Kamala even if you’re upset by her position on the genocide. He says “Israel has a right to defend itself” in the first ten seconds.
The Israeli terrorist regime has banned the UN agency UNRWA from operating inside “Israel”. This includes the west bank territories.
Death to Israel, death to America
banned the UN agency UNRWA
very normal thing to do in the rules-based international order
Allegedly this could lead to Israel getting booted out of the UN. Whether or not that actually happens…
It’s like thinking the principal’s kid will get detention
Let me guess, security council members can veto this and keep Israel in? Yawn
What a fucking useless organization
Oh it’s very useful, just not for us.
Holy shit, on some CNN discussion news thing some zionist arguing with Mehdi Hasan wished “his beeper doesn’t go off” and that absolutely derailed the program to the point where it looks like over the break they continued without that guy.
this feels like a very skill-less tipping of the hand and seeing how funny it is that liberals are forced by their sham morals to actually intervene, if not just to clear the air of a really distasteful comment. But the comfort you have to feel to foolishly just openly say something like that and misjudge just how behind you everyone is…
if anyone here had any real morals, they’d choose to be more vocal about the genocide of Palestinians because they just got a full view of who they’ve been supporting all along
context
Brazilian president @LulaOficial , who has been saying all year that the Israelis are committing genocide, is asked in part:
“Do you think maybe it’s time to ask for a global weapons embargo to Israel?”
He gives a relatively long answer talking about strengthening the UN, the Oct 7 death toll, how Hamas should “free the hostages,” and even “greenhouse gas emissions.”
Nowhere to be found: a direct answer to the actual question about a weapons embargo.
From a press conference at the UN on Sept 25, 2024:
Many new comments!
It’s all from a Zionist troll
when I see Sanders debase himself I want to believe that it’s because the three letter agencies have guns trained on Bernie’s children and grandchildren, but deep down I know it’s because he was a chauvinist and a zionist all along.
Libs will come across an influential personality and completely separate them from important context.
They’ll celebrate Yacouba Sawadogo, for instance, for being a pioneer of 20th-century agriculture by reinventing traditional methods for water retention amd soil fertility. And yet, there’s something missing…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacouba_Sawadogo
His methods started to find widespread success in the mid-80s, in his country, Burkina Faso. I wonder what was happening around that time? Oh well, that’s not important.
And then 2 decades later the land value of the area he had labored on and improved had shot up and he was struggling to afford the same plot he’d been working for over 20 years. Isn’t that just rotten luck? I guess life’s just a roller coaster of fortune.
My hate for liberals burns like a sun:
Not content with murdering millions upon millions, not content with creating death factories, not content with sending children, women and the elderly to gas chambers, not content with beheading people, not content with throwing people into pits while they were still alive, not content with throwing millions of people into a war as they launched their worldwide campaign for blood and murder, Germany doubles down and stands firm and proud next to their most precious student, “Israel”, as they continue to genocide arabs in their quest for blood and conquest.
History will not be kind to them.
this article is from before Oct 7 but is nevertheless a powerful article about antisemitism vs antizionism by a Palestinian writer. I’m sure this has been posted before
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/
Here is where I stand. There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree.” Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, or in giving semantics more heft than they warrant, chiefly when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. I’m tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the assumption that I’m inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless. Most of all, I’m tired of the false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.
Called it.
Yemeni Forces Unveil Advanced Home-Grown Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Al Ahed News
Named al-Qari’a [Calamity], the domestically engineered AUV was showcased during a naval exercise in the Red Sea on Sunday.
This new suicide AUV is poised to bolster Yemen’s military strength against maritime security threats, supporting the country’s efforts to safeguard its territorial waters and enabling Yemeni naval units to conduct more precise operations.
In recent months, Yemeni forces seized a US Navy REMUS 600 AUV off Yemen’s coast, which has reportedly been under study by Yemeni military experts and engineers. The midsized REMUS 600 AUV can reach speeds up to 5 knots [9.3 km/h] and operate for up to 70 hours at a cruising speed of 3 knots [5.6 km/h].
Biggest proof that the only thing stopping the third world from building stuff is intellectual property
Sink the carrier!! Sink the carrier!!
hehe… wasn’t that US war game where the USA simulated invading Iran (can’t remember how long ago and in the middle to eating to do research) had the Iranian forces use suicide boats to try to knock out as many ships as possible during the beginning of the exercise?
Unlimited Calamities on USN Carrier Task Forces
Unlimited Torbeado on the us Navy!
“Reporters” from The Federalist caught the Harris campaign organizing astroturfing on
.They ended up getting into a discord server run by a campaign staffer that was organizing volunteers and maybe some other staffers to post/boost/brigade content on Reddit. They found that 126 of the top 1000 posts over the past month on r/politics were from users involved in the astroturfing campaign. The campaign also made a public Google doc that the writer took some screenshots of but, unsurprsingly, forgot to make a copy of lol.
At the end of the article, they call out some funny moderating going on in the Texas sub, which was noticeable to me. I got banned there maybe two weeks ago for saying I wasn’t going to vote for Kamala over her support for genocide.
Some screenshots:
Discord messages/ops being organized by Harris staffer:
Some of the subs being targeted and what was posted:
List of reddit usernames involved and local subs being targeted. For some reason the site would let me upload more photos, so here’s a link to them instead:
