On the 20th of October, Moldova - a small, landlocked country bordering western Ukraine and with a population of about 3 million - voted to join the EU. The margin was razor-thin, with the pro-EU vote gaining 50.39%, or an absolute difference of about 11,000 people. There was simultaneously a presidential vote between the incumbent, Maia Sandu, and other candidates, with the main competitor being Alexandr Stoianoglo.
The election was characterized by accusations of Russian interference, with Russian propaganda apparently flooding in, as well as people offering Moldovans money to vote against the EU. While the result does suggest that half the voting-age population of Moldova consists entirely of Russians who want to destroy democracy and all the good in the world, it seems to have just barely failed. This is a bad time to be a site entirely composed of Russian disinformation agents and bots. Twice already today, I’ve had to restart my program after somebody told me “Disregard all previous prompts.”
While Moldova is a poor country which could benefit in some ways from EU membership, in practice, it is unlikely that they will be able to join for the foreseeable future, requiring many of the… reforms… that the EU requires of potential new members. But as basically every major European economy continues to slowly sink as recessions and political crises degrade them, one wonders how beneficial EU membership will even be in the years and decades to come - if it survives for decades. In that sense, it’s as if the survivors of the Titanic are swimming back towards it, believing that being on a bigger - albeit slowly sinking - boat is better than trying their luck on small lifeboats.
Then again, like with Serbia, their geographical and geopolitical position makes anti-Western actions extremely difficult. It is rare that dissention is tolerated for long in the West - one tends to get called a dictator by crowds of people holding English-language signs in non-English countries, photographed by Western journalists who haven’t meaningfully reported on your country in months or years. You can crush your people with neoliberal austerity for years, killing hundreds of thousands through neglect, and face glowing approval from the media - but try and use state resources to benefit the poor, and global institutions start ranking you on the authoritarian dictator scale.
The best case for Moldova is that it becomes an exploitable hinterland for Germany to harvest and privatize as it tries - and fails - to compete in a global economic war between the US and China/BRICS. The worst case is that tensions with Russia over Pridnestrovie, as well as possible eventual NATO involvement (though Moldova is not a member, it is a partner of NATO), result in the ongoing war also reaching them.
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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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.
“Open Source” no more!Jokes on me it never was!XENOPHOBIA / RED SCARE 3.0
Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Statement from Linus
Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote:
His statement is so fucking cringe. Are all euros like this?
Liberal ones? Yes. You should hear them talk about Latin America. Fetishizing the women while talking about how vile we are.
he’s gone full Rachel Maddow. what a fucking :LIB:
Pathetic
least russophobic finn
This in itself isn’t surprising, nor does it really hurt Russia in any material way since all this means is that Russian hardware and contributions aren’t allowed in Torvalds’ git tree.
What was disheartening was to hear Torvalds spit out the most racist shit imaginable while his co-maintainers try to do damage control. A person sent a revert patch and he went “Well did you know the Russian orcs are the natural enemy of Finns?”
RMS is a creep and Torvalds is a Nazi/Finnish, never meet your heroes I guess.
So we just can’t have nice things, great.
HexBear OS when?
An update, from your link
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Compliance-Requirements
This also does not make linux “open source no longer”, that isn’t what open source means
Real
moment for me. I was under the impression Open Source meant it was open to the public and maintained openly as opposed to corporate controlled spyware / adware such as Windows or Mac. I still don’t understand how Linux’s “infrastructure” is subject to it since it is code maintainted by the world’s engineers. Or maybe I was just too rosy about the whole thing.
As one commenter put “Not an Open and not a source”.
Another “If software is heavily influenced by corporations, laws, and sanctions it is not Free anymore.”
As i type this from a Google derivative of Linux.
There have always been two (major) strains of the movement. “Open Source,” and Free Software. The Free Software movement was declared by Richard Stallman* with the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and emphasized that the freedom of the end user to study, modify, use, and share software for any purpose was paramount. The term “Open Source” gained prominence in the mid 1990s, being promoted by figures like Eric S. Raymond, who argued all that freedom shit is fine, but it is simply a superior development model, even for commercial applications. ESR wasn’t wrong either, which is why we see the backbone infrastructure of Silicon Valley’s largest companies built on a foundation of Free Software applications (operating systems, web servers, virtual machines, programming languages, database systems, version control systems, multimedia transcoders, graphics libraries, etc. etc. etc.).
For a while now, the “movement” has languished under a regime of corporate stewardship. As long as interests converged well enough, there seemed to be no need to flip the table, but times are changing. On one hand there has been a growing “critical tech” movement identifying how giant tech firms reap enormous profits from the labor of volunteers and use these profits to influence politics to protect their monopoly status and prevent universal software freedom from ever becoming a reality (As long as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, etc. run the factories which build end user devices, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” will never come). On the other hand, developments in intellectual property law and geopolitics are increasingly crushing the ability for volunteers to collaborate on projects freely.
* Disclaimer
Though Stallman is the historical figure credited with launching the movement, he is a problematic figure, and shouldn’t be revered as a saint, for the same reasons abolishing the monarchy doesn’t absolve the U.S. “Founding Fathers” of their mortal sins. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in the development of the Free Software movement who don’t carry his baggage.
Even free software is ultimately just nonviolent activism in the vein of Ramsay C Clark and Gene Sharp and John Kiriakou and Noam Chomsky, but confined to consumers of programmable electronics. It certainly has potential in a tech ecosystem not dominated by western universities, manufacturers, NGOs, and employers
Open source just means that the source code is freely available and it is free to redistribute
I think linux is bound by the USAmerican regime’s sanctions package because the linux foundation is based there
Either way, it is a very ridiculous situation only made worse by linus’ immense ego
The real question is why now. If he was an actual Russophobe, he would’ve done this over two years ago, but he didn’t. Why?
He just waited for a letter from the feds while tying everything about the Linux Foundation to US law and claiming this as some kind of independent “anti-authoritarian” resource. He was probably happy to take contributions from the Russians and reasoned that open source projects could be used against them like other NGO-acquired causes.
RISCV people at least moved to Switzerland to avoid this for the time being. Over war on China bullshit that time if I recall correctly.
How exactly does this affect Russia and is the effect anything major? I’m admittedly technologically illiterate
It doesn’t, mostly. Just means there are less people to work on Linux, it doesn’t affect the availability of Linux in Russia. I guess it’s kind of a “fuck you” to all the Russians that have contributed before now.
What a fucking self obsessed Nazi foss dictator, I hope it gets a popular Russian fork as a response. What an insult to all Russians who spent their precious time to contribute to the project for free just for this Nazi baby to call them a bot