MultigrainCerealista [he/him, comrade/them]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Qatar, and by extension of cash money also Al Jazeera, is very anti-Iran.

    I’m not seeing any news of this at all in Iranian media, which actually is fairly tabloid and weight lifting is a big thing in Iran. Even if you want to tell yourself the regime has absolute control over information, which isn’t true, they’d still need to provide a cover story due to the high profile nature of it and I don’t see one.

    Also Iranian social media is vibrant and also I don’t see anything in Persian but maybe I’m using the wrong search terms?

    All I see are the bbc and the telegraph and cnn etc etc etc repeating almost exactly the same story word for word.

    It seems like fake news to me. The classic case of one biased journalist writing a story, sending it to AP, and the entire western media just repeating the thing word for word because it’s free news inches and posting propaganda of this nature is oddly enough free in our modern system of journalism.

    It seems unlikely to actually be true to me. It seems more likely that it’s being syndicated without any critical enquiry because it agrees with the establishment narrative about Iran.


  • Archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20230827092741/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-counteroffensive.html

    Ukrainian Commander Urges More Defenses in the Northeast

    In an apparent break with Pentagon advice, Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top general in the east, called for “all measures” to defend an area where Russia was threatening to take more territory.

    As Kyiv and Washington debate where Ukraine should commit troops along the war’s front line, Ukraine’s top general in the east has called for more reinforcements in a patch of territory where Russia is threatening to make additional gains.

    Russian forces have managed to push forward around the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk in recent weeks as Kyiv’s forces have made slow headway in their continuing counteroffensive in the south and the east. Russia’s gains, while not significant, have led Ukrainian forces to dedicate some troops to defend parts of the sprawling front line, which stretches for several hundred miles, despite their need elsewhere.

    “Enemy units continue to inflict damage with artillery, mortars and aircraft,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s eastern forces, said on the Telegram messaging app on Friday. “Under such conditions, we must promptly take all measures to strengthen our defenses on the threatened lines and advance where possible.”

    The debate over Ukraine’s strategy has spilled into public view in recent days amid a flurry of news media reports, including from The New York Times, in which U.S. officials have blamed Ukraine’s slow progress in large part on its strategy.

    Under the Pentagon’s reasoning, Kyiv should have massed an outsize number of forces on one portion of the front line to attempt a breakthrough. Ukrainian commanders have instead tried to divide troops and firepower in a manner that they consider to be as fair and as equal as possible between the east and south.

    President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine responded bluntly to the American criticism this past week, saying that shifting Ukrainian forces away from places like Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, is what Russia is trying to accomplish.

    “We will not give up Kharkiv, Donbas, Pavlohrad or Dnipro. And that’s that,” he said during a news conference on Wednesday according to the Ukrainian Pravda news outlet. “And let all the analysts in the world not even count on it.”

    General Syrsky’s remarks were another reminder that despite the public focus on the counteroffensive in the south, other parts of the front line remain volatile.

    “The enemy is now regrouping its forces and means, while also transferring the newly formed brigades and divisions from the territory of Russia,” General Syrsky said. “Russia’s key objective is to increase the level of combat potential and resume active offensive actions.” His claims about the arrival of new units could not be independently confirmed.

    ave called for the evacuation of Kupiansk as Russian forces edge closer and shelling continues far behind the front lines. On Saturday, two civilians were killed in shelling in a small village just east of the city, according to local officials.

    Ukraine took the city back from Russian control last September after it had been under occupation since the war’s early months, and losing it again would be a major blow. It appears unlikely, however, that Russian forces would try to retake the city, since that would put them in the position they faced before they were forced to retreat from Kherson last year, holding a city with a river at its back and limited supply lines.

    Russian forces could instead try to push to the Oskil River, which runs north and south, and then use the waterway as a natural barrier against further Ukrainian attacks.

    “Kupiansk will not be occupied anymore under any circumstances,” Andrii Besedin, the head of the Kupiansk city military administration, said on Telegram.


  • I see a lot of geopolitical calculus in your response - to what extent is the influence of the US over Europe and European markets limited by a Russian victory. You present something of a US-centric point of view but sure it’s a valid one. If Russia wins then yes likely the geopolitical influence of the USA will be knocked back to where it was in the 1980s with true multipolar politics, and it’s also true that if Europe wasn’t sanctioning Russian energy then they’d likely be buying that much cheaper energy, thereby reducing the geopolitical influence of the USA over Europe.

    So I think I agree with most of what you say. But your perspective leaves something very important out of the equation:

    Where does the will of the people who live in Donbas and Lubansk and Crimea factor into your math? Do we respect their right to self-determination? If not, why not?







  • It is though. You can look at so many measures from perception of democracy among the citizens, the degree to which power is devolved to the local level most answerable to the community, and the turnover of elected officials being far higher than western democracies which usually feature politicians with what amounts to lifelong tenure.

    People actually think China is still run the way it was back in the 1960s because their world view is formed from memes. It’s a democracy and a more vibrant one than what we usually see in the west.

    But someone will reply to this with a meme about social credit without realizing they don’t earn Reddit gold here.