Bulletins and News Discussion from October 23rd to October 29th, 2023 - Tunnel Vision
Bulletins and News Discussion from October 23rd to October 29th, 2023 - Tunnel Vision
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
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.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine, though we will switch next week to a new country.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly (biweekly?) update is here.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
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thread (nitter alt) about how Hollywood propaganda has completely broken people's brains about US military capabilities
One of the worst moments in the history of military cinema was the final battle in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Considering that film was heavily supported by the Pentagon, recent events have put a sinister cast on what is facially just an over-the-top action scene. ... an American general in a high-tech command center sees the battle happening on a drone feed and barks out orders to commence the operation. This causes a US Navy armada (including one destroyer mounting a railgun) to magically appear off the Egyptian coast and launch an amphibious assault with LCACs 110 miles up the Nile Delta to Giza to put US Army tanks on the ground and firing on Megatron in what appears to be literally a couple of minutes of in-universe time.
Of course the good guys win, hooray, it's a fun action set-piece in a lowbrow blockbuster. But here's the thing. This entire sequence was vetted and approved by the Public Affairs Office, and the US military was heavily involved with the production - to the point some of the "special effects" in the battle were live tank gun rounds being fired into the set. And yet, apparently, none of the soldiers involved with this thought for a moment to pump the brakes and point out that all of this was ridiculous. How ridiculous? This is a franchise about transforming robots from outer space and somehow the most unrealistic moment in all five movies doesn't even involve them. That cinematic low point instead falls on a depiction of the United States military teleporting its entire joint force enterprise into battle over the course of a literal phone call. And nobody thought to point this out to Michael Bay, probably, because that was exactly the message the Pentagon wanted to send.
And now we have people on this website assuming that the United States can just handwave the kind of military forces out of thin air needed to deter and, if necessary, defeat Iran. Logistics, basing, access, transit times, force correlations, who cares - we've got this. And that is, unfortunately, exactly in line with the Pentagon's most public messaging about its own capabilities. This has seen the US government repeatedly embarrassed and the US public disappointed in recent years when it turns out that American aircraft take days, carriers take weeks and tanks take months to arrive at the crisis of the hour.
Parenti joked that the US military budget doesn't cover war. We should add to this: neither does it's existing military infrastructure. It's a terrorist organisation. And even then, it takes years and years to prepare for it's bigger terror campaigns. The US ambushed Iraq and Afghanistan and while the destruction was enormous and devastating, it didn't 'win'. War with Iran? They don't have the advantage in surprise and it'll be much more of a peer conflict.
I think the other article about the "grand success" of the invasion of Iraq and the memory of it has coloured what a "real professional military" can do more than like a dozen movies. Not that it isn't important.
Look, you obviously have no idea what you’re up against.
We have 700 state-of-the-art F-35 5th generation stealth fighters that nobody else in the world has. With a radar cross-section the size of a SMALL BIRD, they are virtually undetectable by any radars and can launch deep strike missions into Russian territories . Then, we have 6000 M1 Abrams main battle tanks that shredded Soviet T-72 trash during the Gulf War with NO LOSSES on our side.
In 24 hours, all Russian air defense systems would be neutralized by our SEAD missions using cutting edge networked platform linking our F-35s with all air and ground assets. In 48 hours, our ground invasion troops supported by M1 Abrams MBT, and F-16s and A-10s as close air support assets would be driving out all Russian troops from Ukraine, and eliminating those that refused. And in 72 hours, we would have breached Moscow and taken Kremlin by nightfall.
We could defeat the whole of Russia in a week if we really wanted to.
This is sarcasm, right? You don't actually think that. Surely no one on this site is that delusional
A good bit is indistinguishable from
opinions
Lmao is this a bit?
Permanently Deleted
On D-Day, H-Hour, elite special forces SEAL Team 6 that has long infiltrated deep behind enemy lines would scale the walls of Kremlin and capture Russian President Putin and successfully extracted with stealth Black Hawk helicopters. The Russians wouldn’t even see what’s coming for them.
causes a US Navy armada (including one destroyer mounting a railgun)
Remember when we put all of our R&D money into railguns instead of hypersonic missiles because of Battlestar Galactica?
Running my global war machine with Just-In-Time logistics. Amazon Prime 2 day shipping an Abrams to Iran.
Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS), formerly called Prompt Global Strike (PGS), is a United States military effort to develop a system that can deliver a precision-guided conventional weapon airstrike anywhere in the world within one hour, in a similar manner to a nuclear ICBM.
I fucking loved that movie when I was a kid. Watched it on repeat. I don't even know why, because it's objectively garbage.