Bulletins and News Discussion from March 11th to March 17th, 2024 - It's Eurover - COTW: Portugal
Bulletins and News Discussion from March 11th to March 17th, 2024 - It's Eurover - COTW: Portugal
This year really is just gonna be us swinging from election to election, I suppose. I feel Lenin's beaming red eyes on me.
Up next on our electoral tour is Portugal. The current government - a coalition of the center-left Socialists and the center-right Social Democrats - has been mired in corruption scandals, resulting in a general election being called a mere two years after the last one. The fascist and vaguely populist Chega party has gained significant support over the last two years due to the economic hardships. Yesterday, the Social Democrats secured a narrow win of 79 seats compared to the Socialists' 77. Chega, in third place at 48, would appear to be the best candidate for a coalition, though the leader of the Social Democrats has said that they would refuse a coalition with them due to their xenophobic views. Regardless, the fascist surge is worrying, if expected.
Portugal's economy is going pretty badly even as European countries go, with little growth in productivity or investment over the last decade. The origins of this crisis date back to Portugal making the euro their national currency in the early 2000s, thus surrendering their ability to control their own currency, becoming reliant on investment from Germany and France, and suffering greatly in the 2012 European debt crisis. Unemployment and low wages spurred emigration; in 2013, the youth employment rate was about 40%; this has only come down to 25% recently and is increasing again. The government is heavily reliant on debt for public spending, with a debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketing to over 100% in the two decades since the turn of the millennium. The capitalist sector is simply not profitable enough and hasn't been for 40 years, which is only a problem if you are a capitalist economy. For more on the Portuguese economy, check out Michael Roberts' recent analysis, from which I obtained a lot of this information.
Inside Portugal is the same story playing out across much of Europe. A failing center or center-left political party, unable to cope with the economic troubles of the last few years due to absolute obedience to neoliberal policies. A fascist party rising, but with no alternative economic plan, hoping that perhaps oppressing minorities and going after "wokeism" will make their God, The Economy, rain blessings down on them again.
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 Portugal! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
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 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.
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On reflection, a tank commander is just a backseat driver AND has control over the music.
in my personal hypothetical ideal revolutionary tank crew/microcommune, the role would be more like a tank lookout or scout, an extra set of eyes looking through periscopes instead of gun sights. some modern tanks give this position a remote machinegun turret or at least a camera system as well. pretty useful just to have extra situational awareness in a tank, and to have an extra guy to help with dismounted tasks and maintenance, but it does come with the drawback of making the vehicle bigger and heavier. obviously the driver should have control of the music, or arguably the gun loader if its manual.
i think there were some weird arrangements with older like world war 1 and 2 vehicles where either the driver or the gunner or the loader or the radio operator was also the commander.
French tanks at the start of WW2 still only had a crew of two, a driver and a commander/gunner. What this meant in practice was the gunner had to keep popping their head out of the turret to look for enemies, remembering where they were and then scrambling back down to the gun to try and get the scope on them and fire. Meanwhile the Germans had crews of three, so the gunner could focus entirely on reloading and aiming while the commander pointed out targets and maintained general awareness, so they more or less steamrolled the French in the few tank battles that occurred.
Partly that, French turrets (on tanks) favoured enough space for one guy, who was busy with shooting, loading, signals (sticking flags out), and shuffling his feet when he turned the turret.
The French tanks were generally considered better armed and armoured than most of the German tanks, but the German tanks were grouped into tank formations whereas the French tanks were split up among infantry formations. This meant that the French were always outnumbered.
There was a lot of confusion about the role of the tank in warfare, and so every country's designs reflected different ideas. The Germans and Soviets participated in the Spanish civil war, so had experience with tanks in various ways (and the role of AA guns in an anti-tank role), so their designs seem more complete. The soviets also had khalkin Gol in the east. The Italians primarily focused on a Colonial policing role for their tanks (despite also participating in the Spanish civil war), so their tanks wound up being outclassed by even British Cruisers.
France both wanted a high proportion of tanks to crew, and for those tanks to support infantry.
We've sort of come back to that, but tanks will probably keep turret baskets and the third crew member, if only to stop tankers from going nuts while they spend a week parked on a hill.
Yeah, the commander fills all the ancillary roles that isn't directly managing the machinery. It's a useful role to have, I just thought the division of labour was dryly amusing, especially given a lot of drivers do not like this (the sitA that drivers of commercial vehicles get is usually better than in a Tank, and giving good directions is always useful)