Image is of Joseph Robinette Biden, who has stepped down and will not run against Trump in the 2024 election.

In the aftermath of Trump surviving an assassination attempt, many professional opinion-havers are now talking about the scourge of “political violence” that has overtaken, or will soon overtake America, and how we must not let chaos rule. This is, of course, patently absurd. The American government and its allies have been the greatest force of political violence on the planet since the beginning of colonialism, and the foundations of the country are made of corpses. Today, America commits political violence by forcing Ukrainians into the maw of Russian artillery instead of trying to reach a peaceful settlement, which Russia has repeatedly expressed interest in and offered Ukraine relatively favourable terms. They supply Israel with endless weaponry to destroy entire cities and populations, while Biden supporters insist that somehow things could be worse than daily massacres and mass starvation.

In May 1945, French police fired on protestors, causing retaliatory attacks on French settlers, killing about a hundred. In response, the French murdered 45,000 Algerians in a little under two months, in a frenzy of political violence called the Sétif and Guelma massacre. As the massacre was being completed, the International Court of Justice was established. It goes without saying that Algeria never benefited from the ICJ, and the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 was made inevitable. Over a million Algerians were killed before France could bear the fighting no longer and gave up, and Algeria won itself a state. Comparisons to the ongoing war of independence and genocide in Palestine are obvious.

While the means of colonial violence have evolved over the centuries, the basic structure of it has not. As in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, resistance groups in and around Palestine are fighting for a world with less political violence. The American government would drown every city in the developing world in blood to prevent peace.

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 Algeria! 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

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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.

Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.

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.
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.

  • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    110·
    4 months ago

    Joe Biden just stepped down? Wow. I didn’t know that. You’re telling me now for the first time.

    He led an amazing life. What else can you say? He was an amazing man. Whether you agree or not, he was an amazing man who led an amazing life. I’m actually saddened to hear that. I am saddened to hear that.

  • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    100·
    4 months ago

    NYT on Crooks’ motive…

    "When the F.B.I. was able to finally access Mr. Crooks’s cellphones and other electronic devices, agents could see that he had searched for images of Mr. Trump as well as President Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and even F.B.I. Director Christopher A. Wray.

    Mr. Crooks also had at typed in “major depressive disorder” and searched for dates and places for appearances for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

    One of Mr. Trump’s planned appearances happened to be about 50 miles from Mr. Crooks’s house in Bethel Park, Pa."

    Motive might have just been that Trump was a shorter drive than Biden or others.

    Extremely American.

  • MelaniaTrump [undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
    96·
    4 months ago

    https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeBiden/comments/1e8vnow/im_sitting_here_taking_in_the_news_a_manual/

    Which one of you wrote this highly upvoted masterpiece on /r/JoeBiden?

    I’m in shock. I don’t know what was the final straw for the President, a man who I have considered – and still do consider – to be a real-life Jed Bartlett hybridized with Captain America.

    I trust the President and always have. He has never let me down. For him to make such a move means he must have compelling reason to do so.

    I keep thinking back to 2020. That year, in a moment of somber and morbid inspiration, we lost Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an icon to whom, if she were a religion, I would convert despite my pro-life – yet otherwise liberal – tendencies. Her death was like a clarion call for all of us to rise up and remove the now-convicted-felon donald trump. I wondered much these last few weeks what would be the move which would propel us in this election.

    Starting now, we must quickly pick up the pieces and, just as Captain America said in Endgame, we must “Assemble”. We have a convention coming up. The delegates, democratically chosen by the voters, will democratically elect at that Democratic convention the nominee of the Democratic Party.

  • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    96·
    4 months ago

    the libs on reddit are all shouting “donald trump is the oldest presidential candidate now! haw haw haw!”

    this argument makes liberals sound insane after riding for biden for so long but they’re just as out of touch as the republican base are

  • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    96·
    4 months ago

    Apparently there is some MASSIVE IT fuckery afoot right now. We are almost certainly in the midst of the single largest IT outage in history. Will update the list below as necessary, and I’m sure there’s a lot more than this too

    911 services disrupted in AK, AZ, IN, MN, NH, OH

    London stock exchange major disruptions

    Payment systems in UK and Australia major disruption (Australian government has called for an emergency meeting)

    Several major banks experiencing payment issues

    Widespread outages in USA hospital EMR systems

    Major Microsoft services out

    FAA has grounded delta, American, United flights

    Berlin has suspended flights

    UK and Australian supermarkets experiencing widespread outages

    ALL airports in Spain impacted by outage

    Sky News went off air for three hours, came back on air for 5 minutes, is now back off air

    Singapores Changi airport only able to do manual checkins. Same situation in Hong Kong

    Telegraph reporting that ALL of their PCs are down

    Airports around the world reaching deadlock as flights are grounded, delayed, and then unable to be rescheduled or rebooked

    University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein is forced to cancel all planned operations today

    JFK Airport checkins are backed up out of the door at 5:20am

    Widespread reports of PCs being stuck BSoDing (Blue Screen of Death)

    Washington DC suspends ALL rail service

    MTA claims that NYC transit will remain functional for use but is having back end issues providing information to riders

    Pharmaceutical companies reporting widespread outages

    Belfast airport being forced to resort to using whiteboards for updates on flights

    NHS reporting outages impacting critical systems

    Widespread rail service disruptions across the US and UK

    Stores across Japan unable to do business

    Systems at Paris Olympics are not functioning properly

    Container ships unable to load or unload cargo at some ports

    I would advise that if you have a PC that you

    don’t

    update it

    for now.

    Ok you should be good to update it now. A fix has been rolled out but like… don’t update to fix it yet if you could just keep not doing work and getting away with it. And we certainly haven’t seen the last of the impacts yet so I’ll keep updating if anything else juicy happens

  • da_gay_pussy_eatah [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    94·
    4 months ago

    A drone has exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, less than 100m from a US consulate building. At least 8 settlers have been wounded with at least 1 death, and Netanyahu has reportedly cancelled his US visit in response. Yemen is claiming responsibility for the strike, which reportedly entered “Israeli” airspace from over the Mediterranean.

  • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    92·
    4 months ago

    just learned that not a single president has won a second term with an approval rating below 48% before election day (dubya in 04 was the lowest and only won by a pretty small margin)

    lmao joe biden’s at 37%. lyndon johnson dropped out of the race when he was slightly higher than that (from 538, data since 1945, scroll down n hover around day 1,835 1,385)