Bulletins and News Discussion from May 6th to May 12th, 2024 - The Nagorno-Karabakh Nosedive - COTW: Armenia
Image is of Stepanakert, essentially the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. It is now a ghost city, and Azerbaijan has recently torn down the parliament building and various other important places. Sourced from this article.
A quick look at Armenia's geographical position reveals the folly of trying to create some kind of Western outpost. With a hostile Azerbaijan to their east, a very unfriendly (albeit NATO member) Turkiye to their west, an ascendant Iran to their south, and Russia not far from the action, there is little hope of doing much more than causing a little chaos in the hopes it'll momentarily distract Russia while it makes inroads most everywhere else on the planet. The political situation appears miserable for Pashinyan, but there isn't really a popular alternative to take the reins. A truly cursed situation.
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 Armenia! 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.
US & Friends are complaining a lot about China subsidizing their EV industry, so I tried to look up what those subsidies are, but it seems like no one really knows any specifics? Maybe I'm just bad at searching for information, but I couldn't really find much at all about what kinds of subsidies they're supposedly using, and how they're different from the subsidies the Western countries are handing out to their own industries. It looks to me like they're just mad coz bad at free market competition.
China gives support in the form of reduced taxes on purchases of EVs and rebates that amount to around $7500 per EV sold.
The USA hates this because it also supports EVs in the exact same form of reduced taxes and rebates that average out to be around $50,000 per EV sold.
Although almost half of that is paid as regulatory credits for theoretically reducing carbon emissions in a scheme that doesn’t actually reduce carbon emissions it really just functions as a cash transfer to the mega-wealthy (eg this is the only reason Tesla ever had a profitable year and why Elon isn’t bankrupt and is instead a very wealthy man) so if you’re being perfectly fair then really it’s more like $20-30,000 in subsidies with the other $20,000 really just being straight up plundering by the ruling class rather than a protectionist trade policy.
They’ll claim whatever they want to justify it and their populations see Communism=Government controlled.
So then they can read the articles and go, “yeah it’s unfair how those commies have the lazy-inducing government back their businesses instead of the free market like ours do.”
They're also mad that China is an industrial powerhouse. With such heavily concentrated industry and low rentierism the chinese are able to keep costs down compared to anything the west produces. There's also the "dumping" angle where they say the chinese are intentionally undercutting our industries so that they can be destroyed.
Another thing that China is increasingly threatening is the west's technological edge that is used to maintain unequal exchange. If the chinese are able to get a hold of future industries then the west has less global control. It is important to the imperialists that they at least establish themselves in the ev market but China has already shown that the west cannot control this international market.
Basically they're mad that China, as the world's factory, produces things so cheaply that it threatens their industries before they even get going. China wasn't supposed to modernize, it was supposed to be a giant sweatshop.