Macron has recently called a snap parliamentary election in the aftermath of the far-right getting a large proportion of the votes in the EU elections. Why exactly he called an election at a point of profound weakness is a little beyond me. Explanations that I've seen range from "He thinks the element of surprise will benefit his party and not others," to "WW3 is about to start and he doesn't want to be leader for it," (which, like, isn't true - Macron is the President of France, not Prime Minister, he won't be unseated by this election and he has said he will not stand down regardless of result), to "He doesn't want to swim in the shit-filled Seine."
While we still have a couple weeks to go, the polling I've seen generally puts the far-right in first place with the left-wing coalition slightly behind, with Macron's party all the way back in third place. Anybody who knows anything about French politics knows that while France does actually have something of a left opposition in aggregate (in contrast to the two wings of the Capitalist Party in the UK and the US, for example), French left coalitions are profoundly unstable and this one will inevitably split - perhaps even before the voting begins - meaning they aren't nearly as useful as they otherwise could be.
Living in a France governed by far right parties would be awful, but maybe they might at least be against the carnage in Ukraine, and sue for peace with Russia? Well, possibly not, if the example of Meloni in Italy is anything to go by. It seems that the differences between the "centrist" parties and the fascist ones truly are not that great, beholden to the exact same set of capitalists regardless of which party wins, and will likely bend the knee to NATO, though they may grumble a lot. Would a left coalition be better on Russia/NATO? They have already helpfully told us that they won't (only opposing sending French troops to Ukraine but otherwise being full steam ahead), and additionally are genocidal Zionists. Western leftists have long been hampered by a dramatically faulty misunderstanding of how geopolitics works, with many seemingly believing "imperialism is when countries interact with other countries" and "democracy is when you can vote between two parties even if widely popular policies aren't at all represented by either of them, and if those popular policies are enacted but it's by a one-party state then that's authoritarian evil" and other such strange ideas, making them terminally useless on foreign issues and pretty unremarkable on domestic issues too. France is no exception.
And just to top it all off, this is coming in a period of further imperial decline for the tattered remains of the French empire, with West Africa rebelling and Kanaky (New Caledonia) deeply unhappy with recent French decisions.
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.
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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.
In Danish media, so-called security experts are currently inventing a guy and getting scared of him.
In statements to media the experts speculate that Russia could use it's "shadow fleet" of oil tankers as "a weapon against the maritime environment" and deliberately cause an oil spill in Danish waters as part of hybrid warfare.
It goes without saying that no evidence is presented but as one expert is quoted for saying: "in a time with increasing Russian hybrid warfare, only imagination sets the limit".
Las time an environmental disaster was deliberately caused in Danish waters was when Nordstream 2 was blown up, most likely by the yanks.
I love how stupid the Western elites are. The "Shadow Fleet" is a silly descriptor for ships bought outside of the Swift banking system, done so purely because the West have banned Russia from using it. They're not secret, the West just voluntarily blocked Russia from using the banking system set up to make tracking shit easier.
Fuck we're so stupid.
Actually the shadow fleet was constructed by Darth Putin using lenin's star forge, which is currently in orbit in the tunguska system
the Rakata are the most American of all Star Wars aliens. Lenin would have the Incom factory or something (guy who made the Xwing used it to fuck over the empire).
Jk lol deserved
Mean, you’re the one who said Lenin would have torture factory
The perfidious Russians are hiding from me on the other side of my closed eyelids
this is like an institutional version of when the general public start becoming conspiracy theorists about vaccines and shit as a deranged response to distrust in state institutions. instead of your 55 year old aunt talking about how "they just have honest questions about vaccine and lockdown efficacy!" it's now media and thinktank experts putting out reports that Russia may plan to block out the sun using a giant satellite as a response to the failure of their disastrous authoritarian deluded ill-advised tragic brutal totalitarian communist fascist violent devastating terrible ruinous incompetent orwellian amateurish oppressive awful inept attempted illegal unprovoked imperialist colonialist invasion of Ukraine
Too many pastries have rotted their brains. They should start speculating why a business partner would blow up a profitable pipeline, destroying both revenue and leverage with the Europeans.
Of course they blew up their own pipeline that they invested billions of dollars into. What, you think their biggest competitor in natural gas supply would have some kind of motivation to do it? That's absurd, be realistic.
Perfect profile picture for that comment too.
like neal stephenson writing termination shock imagining
spoiler
the dastardly chinese causing a tsunami using underwater explosives to torment the wholesome dutchN.Stephenson has always been deeply unserious.
Despite his incoherent ideology these days, I'm still a fan of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. The latter because there's some genuinely insightful class consciousness / class warfare stuff in it (despite the insane ending). And the former because it's batshit crazy fun that reads like an action movie, but also has the occasional nugget of insight like the line "It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists."
Snow Crash is a fun read, but I enjoyed it a lot less on a recent reread of it and Reamde because of how fond he is of SA scenes to show off how actiony his female leads are.
I read somewhere that over the course of the last two decades he's become good friends with Jeff Bezos, which lines up on the timeline with me giving up partway into The Baroque Cycle and not picking up any of his stuff since