The war in Sudan has so far been marked by a lot of incompetency and mismanagement by government forces (the SAF). After months of bitter fighting, in late 2023, the opposing Rapid Support Forces suddenly expanded their control towards the southeast of Khartoum after not a lot of resistance, most notably taking the city of Wad Madani. This led the SAF supporters and officials to panic and point fingers at each other about what the hell the army is even doing, while RSF soldiers looted the city.
These victories led to a short period in late December and early January where diplomacy and peace talks were considered, but such attempts fell apart. The leader of the RSF visited various African countries, including meeting Paul Kagame in Rwanda, to boost his legitimacy. Then, the RSF attacked into South Kordofan and consolidated their hold on other areas.
The Sudanese capital of Khartoum sits on a river which divides it from the city to its west, Omdurman (see the post image). The SAF and RSF have been fighting over this grand urban area for the whole war, with the RSF holding most of Khartoum (with an entirely cut-off SAF force holding on in the center), with a similarly cut-off SAF force also in eastern Omdurman, up against the river. For 10 months, this force has been under siege - but no longer. In perhaps the first actual W of the war for the SAF, they finally managed to break the siege a week ago, pouring supplies in. This leaves a section of the RSF now cut off, though Omdurman is still not under full SAF control (and, who knows, the whole situation could once again go badly for the SAF).
Meanwhile, the Sudanese socioeconomic situation has completely collapsed, with potentially a 20% fall in GDP and 8 million people displaced, with 2 million from Khartoum alone. 18 million Sudanese, or about a third of the population, is in acute hunger, and 20 million children are out in school. The refugees streaming out of the country are causing knock-on effects in neighorboring countries like Chad. Nobody is even really counting the dead anymore.
Red is the government forces, the SAF. Blue is the RSF opposition. Other colours are various factions.
The Country of the Week is Sudan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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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.
Western leftists are the most domesticated and toothless people you’ll ever see. The leader of the Danish conservatives just dropped dead at age 52 from a cerebral hemorrhage. As can be expected from a senior conservative politician he was a vile disgusting little turd of a man, a nationalist, a monarchist and a zionist who never saw a cop, a flag or a troop he didn’t want to shag, never saw a refugee, a minority or a poor person he didn’t want to harm and never saw an oligarch he didn’t want to enrich. He was a pompous self-righteous prick who always kicked downwards.
And how does the Red-Greens, the self-described revolutionary socialists who are the furthest left you get in this deeply unserious country, react? I swear to God, they released a statement about how good and generous a man he was and about what a great loss for democracy him kicking the bucket is. Not a word about the evil he did or the pain he caused his victims.
With leftists like these, why do we need succdems?
NATO leftists gonna NATO leftist. They would be just as useless if they were actually in power.
Did they get the semen in time?
Dead at 52 from cerebral hemorrage does not sound normal. In particular for a rich guy in a country with decent healthcare. Covid related? If so thats really concerning.
Vaxxed?
Me or this guy? Me not really, my country only allows you 2 shots and private selling of vaccines was forbiden until recently, so currently there is no private distribution. I got the 2 official shots and made fake papers to get 3 extra reinforcmets every 4 months as per the manufacturer sugestion. But then the distribution stoped so i have been without a reinforcment for a year and a half or so.
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Whoa that is a number. “Drugs are bad” doesn’t even touch a number like that.
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comrade covid putting in the extra hours
I don’t know if he had COVID but being a politician I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on some high-powered cocktail of booze and performance-enhancing drugs.
At this point I feel it’s a safe bet everyone has had COVID 3 or more times. Most of those cases will come with only minor or no symptoms, but those can still cause an increase in stroke, heart attack, etc after the fact.
looking into their website they come off as more eurocommunistic and reformist than revolutionary, so it tracks they play the bourgeoise politics game
Reminds me of a reddit conversation I had regarding Anne Rice after she died; aside from harassing fanfic writers Anne Rice was also part of Stop the Goodreads Bullies (For those who don’t know, STGRB is what you get when a bunch of authors and their fans set up their own kiwifarms to attack bloggers that call out bigoted writing and rating manipulation while claiming to be an anti-bullying movement. Gamergate’s own wiki last time I checked sees them in positive light.).
When I pointed out the latter to the OP that wanted to discuss her death OP and other users were like ‘she just died’, ‘there are worse people out there’ or ‘she supports lgbtq/ is pro-democrat’. Later on other redditors commented that ‘yeah in view of what I said she is kind of a pos’. OP deleted the thread after that.
Ah, that sucks. I didn’t know anything about Anne Rice other than the content of her fiction. Which IMO were pretty damned good, and indeed pro-LGB (probably not so much TQIA+). And she was definitely the OG humanizing vampires queen. Kicked off the trend that turned into the Vampire tabletop roleplaying game, etc. Unfotunate that it eventually turned into a fad of vampires-vs.-werewolves-no-matter-how-pathetic-the-content, but that’s a separate commodification issue. Anyway, disappointing as usual to learn what a POS she was outside of the authorship.
I actually just made a comment about Anne Rice’s work in a Reddit thread that was about a Contrapoints video where she starts the discussion talking about fucking Twilight; the absolutely pathetic and badly written Anne Rice knockoff. The funny thing is that I thought I’d avoid saying something negative about Contra by just making a parallel statement about the work being discussed—and that wasn’t even really at odds with what she said about it, except where she, I think somewhat sarcastically, praised it—but the rabid and paranoia-laden Contra fandom took at as an attack anyway, down-voted it to hell, and screamed in the replies about it being argumentative and ignoring the message of the video (no, nothing about the reaction was regarding Anne Rice’s extra-literature character, which I’m happy to be educated about). Stay real, liberals. Ugh.