Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn't an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.
Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia's oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that "align themselves with BRICS." Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I'm not sure what exactly "alignment" means, but it could be pretty bad.
Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It's easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).
Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I'm cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it'll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn't impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Want to share an article I read in the Financial Times over the weekend. Really lays bare the reality of the global situation, where even the most ghoulish financial columnists can no longer deny the shifting global power dynamics to China. The whole article is worth reading, but I'll share some choice quotes here.
And take a look at how they admit that even the "massive real estate meltdown" a few years ago that most Western commentators said would cause "China's collapse" has been handled with relative grace.
Also some fun riffing on AI:
Overall a good look at how some of the ghoulish businessmen understand view the world at this moment in time; certainly not encouraging for the United States.
Why is this a valid argument at all? This absolute nonsense. Be very conscious here, there is only one reason the west is praising the CPC's stance on AI. Its because they're in favor of it, yet we've been here before, Did anyone forget the dozen a day articles about "draconian" censorship laws and how the CPC is evil bad dictatorship for requiring things like masks and ID-movement tracking during COVID?
Of course they`ll flip the script because for now China is doing exactly what they want. Nobody on the left should be happy about this, at least unironicaly, This is literaly "trust the plan" but capitalists using it against ourselves to justify their own garbage slop.
So we know AI is just garbage slop but if it was realy bad surely China would've just banned it already? Surely it wont turn out exactly like it happened the last time the CPC did a crackdown
AI will be so much bigger than this and no IMO there is a near zero chance the CPC will stop AI if it gets big enough. The only possible time is now or in case of massive public backlash, otherwise its pretty damn indisputable, if the CPC couldn't handle Tencent having a single bad day lol, then they wont bother with their NVDIA size AI slop maker either.
The best we'll get is some "feel good" laws like Chinese teenage gaming laws that barely do anything for the vast majorty, but hey at least they have something so their hands are clean.
I don't think it's unfair to assume that if AI poses any sort of "threat" to communist power over China they will act, and act fast. The Chinese response to covid-19 was absolutely not business brained, and only bungled in the end primarily because the rest of the world made lockdown untenable and the business freaks in Shanghai fucked over the rest of the country. AI is legitimately useful for many things, and it's not unreasonable to spend a lot of money towards that field. Look at what China is doing with robotics, for example, leagues ahead of the West. For every "China can't stand Tencent having a bad day" there the counterargument of "China nukes Alibaba's payment IPO and humbles Jack Ma" or "China evaporates the entire field of private tutoring." The CPC can and has done big moves in the past, and I don't see any reason why if the party saw AI as something legitimately threatening their interests they wouldn't stop it. Backtracking on gaming limits for gatcha boxes is a not an existential threat level thing.
You seem like you're unaware but you're kind of at least 6 months out of date btw.
I don't think the whole CPC owns the billionaires narrative is particularly compelling these days when China is also the country with literaly the most of them and in any case if "exile" is only temporary why should anyone give a shit?
Being put in temporary exile is still humbling, no? He's back because the party decided he could be back, and he sure won't try what he did again. Besides, the United States has double the number of billionaires as China with one fifth the population. Also I'll post again the classic article. https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
I think at least 50% of AI researchers are Chinese nationals, or something like that. I kid you not, but this is a country where many people unironically like Elon Musk and see him as some kind of visionary genius. They love this kind of stuff.
But the traction on AI at the national level really only took off after DeepSeek exploded as a phenomenon. Before that, nobody (important in the country) gave a shit about DeepSeek, until prestigious Western universities started talking about how much of a game-changer it was, and only then did the government officials at the national level began to take notice.
What’s funny is that immediately after the government turned towards AI as a potential platform for “economic transformation” (against the backdrop of the infrastructure building era coming to an end), many Chinese businesses started to adopt DeepSeek in almost everywhere - they put it into refrigerator, into vacuum cleaner etc lol. These businesses will do anything to jump on the hype train and hope that consumers will fall for it.