Image is of a Russian missile impacting Ukraine.
As we rapidly approach the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Ukraine War (an anniversary I absolutely did not expect would occur while the two sides were still in combat), we have seen Russia turn to a new strategy, starting late last year but intensifying in December and now January.
Russia seems intent to disconnect Ukrainian cities from the electrical grid by focussing bombing on thermal, gas, and hydro stations, causing major power blackouts across the country. Russia is also bombing substations relatively close to Ukraine’s three nuclear power plants (Zaporzhye, the fourth, remains under Russia control), studiously avoiding hitting the premises of the NPPs themselves for obvious reasons. Even if they’re far away from the NPPs, striking the substations does have risks, because if the nuclear reactors aren’t shut off before the substations are bombed, there is a possibility that there will be insufficient backup power to prevent a meltdown - hence why Russia hasn’t really attempted to do this for four years.
Most of the electricity generated in Ukraine comes from the nuclear power plants, both because of the infrastructure they had initially (Ukraine was 7th in the world in nuclear electricity generation before the war) and because Russia has bombed most non-nuclear power stations and substations already. Over the last couple weeks, we have seen Ukrainian media fly into a frenzy about long-lasting blackouts, especially in the middle of winter. After the Zionist entity destroyed virtually all civilian infrastructure in Gaza while the West cheered on, they now appear to have changed their mind on whether such strikes are an effective and humanitarian option to subject millions of people to.
Regardless of whether you personally believe these Russian strikes are justified (I’m pretty iffy myself), it must be stressed that Ukraine has been bombing Russian tankers and oil refineries and power stations for a long time now, so in a sense, this is a retaliation. It’s also remarkable, compared to Western wars, that Ukraine was even still allowed to possess a functioning electrical grid for nearly four years into a war of this magnitude. That all being said, while Ukrainian strikes have been somewhat but not overly impactful on the Russian oil sector, the response is clearly very asymmetrical: Ukraine’s power grid is, according to Ukrainian energy corporations, now 70% degraded and is virtually impossible to now repair, and blackouts can last most of the day.
For everybody’s sake, I hope a ceasefire and peace deal will be reached soon. But after four years of seeing opportunities for an end to this war squandered over and over, I’m not holding my breath.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
I think we are talking past each other. You seem to think that I am insisting the entire feudal institutions are inherited without changes, while I have clearly said that these evolved out of the traditional institutions and repurposed under capitalist mode of production.
I will give you an example: patriarchy is a feudal institution, yet it continues to perpetuate in modern day society to serve a different purpose under capitalism. This does not negate the fact that patriarchy emerges out of its feudal past and retains (“inherits”) many elements, reactionary and destructive, that hold back socioeconomic progress.
This is the essence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao saw the need for a complete and decisive break with the past traditions and saw it as a necessity towards building socialism. Of course, the liberal reformers disagree, we all know that. I am not saying Mao is completely right here but you are ignoring an important aspect of how modern Chinese bureaucracy is shaped by dismissing them all out of hand. Traditions don’t simply disappear, they evolve and stay latent in how we interact with the world every day.
China is the only civilization in the world today that has retained a continuity of its institutions for over 2200 years. To ignore that role and impact of such long-lasting traditions and equate them with the much younger, modern Western states is to ignore the historical role of such institutions in the sociopolitical and economic spheres of modern day China.
Similarly, gaokao is not the exact same institution as the Imperial Court Examination, but it is an extension and an evolution of such system. The tradition of “lineage” that has been so dominant throughout Chinese history is very much alive in modern day China’s academia, private sector and government bureaucracy.
I don’t know if you are Chinese or not, but anyone who grows up in the culture knows just how such “unwritten rules” remain in modern Chinese society, whether you are interacting with family members and at the workplace with your superiors etc.
I think I understand your point more clearly now, and you’re right that institutions do not vanish magically when one mode of production replaces another. I like all marxists fully accepts that superstructural forms can persist, mutate, and be repurposed under new material conditions. Patriarchy is indeed the classic example to explain this.
But this is exactly where precision matters. Patriarchy persists under capitalism not because of cultural memory alone, but because it continues to serve material functions: reproduction of labor power, unpaid domestic labor, inheritance control, and stabilization of wage relations. Its survival is not explained by history, but by utility to the dominant mode of production. Without that utility, patriarchy would decay rapidly regardless of tradition. The same standard must be applied to bureaucracy, lineage, and examination systems.
If a social form persists, scientific socialism through dialectical materialism demands we ask: what material role does it currently play? Not where it came from, but why it continues to reproduce itself today. This is where I think your argument still slips from materialism toward historical determinism. You are correct that China has unusual institutional continuity. That fact alone, however, does not explain causality. Continuity describes form; it does not explain motion.
What reproduces hierarchy today is not the memory of imperial lineage, but concrete mechanisms:
These mechanisms would generate elite reproduction even if the imperial examinations had never existed. This is precisely why similar phenomena appear in the USSR, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, and even France’s grandes écoles system, societies with no shared civilizational origin.
The resemblance is structural, not genealogical. On gaokao: yes, there is historical resonance. But resonance is not determination. The gaokao functions today as a labor-allocation mechanism under industrial conditions. Its brutality comes from scarcity and competition, not Confucian morality. If economic structure changed such that upward mobility was not concentrated into narrow credential channels, the social meaning of education would change accordingly, just as it already has for segments of the urban middle class.
That demonstrates material causation, not cultural destiny. Regarding “unwritten rules,” when have I denied their existence. But unwritten rules are not ancient ghosts; they are informal adaptations to power concentration. Wherever access to resources depends on approval from superiors, informal relations emerge, whether in Chinese ministries, Soviet factories, Wall Street firms, or Western universities.
Calling this “lineage culture” risks obscuring the real issue: bureaucratic power without sufficient mass supervision. Chairman Mao understood this clearly. The Cultural Revolution was not an attempt to annihilate tradition for its own sake. It was an attempt (however flawed in execution) to prevent the crystallization of a new bureaucratic class by mobilizing the masses against administrative privilege. Its target was not history. Its biggest target was power.
That is why Chairman Mao emphasized “those in authority taking the capitalist road,” not scholars, families, or customs as such. He did not argue that culture autonomously reproduces class society. He argued that class society reproduces culture. This is a fundamental difference. If tradition itself were the decisive force, then socialist transformation would depend primarily on ideological purification. Chairman Mao rejected that. He insisted that ideological struggle must be rooted in mass participation and material change, not moral critique.
This is also why later socialist practice emphasized institutionalization rather than permanent mobilization, not because the problem disappeared, but because contradiction must be handled at a level consistent with development.
So yes forms evolve. Yes history leaves traces. Yes people experience continuity in daily life. But dialectical materialism draws a firm line:
The question is not and should not be whether tradition exists. The question is what reproduces power today. That is where scientific socialists must always place their focus, not in inherited memory, but in living relations of production and authority that can actually be transformed.
Sorry I really don’t want to accuse you of anything, but the way you write is all ChatGPT-style sophistry.
“It’s not this, but that…” “This is precisely where it matters.”
Lots and lots of these circular statements. There is no concrete example or evidence being presented here. It’s all vague statements you typically get from chatting with an LLM. I spent the last hour trying to write a detailed response but I don’t even know how to respond when the statements are sufficiently vague that you can write any answers and they still fit and continue to go in circles.
We keep going in circles because you remain entrenched in an idealist framework, even while sometimes using materialist language. You constantly redirect the analysis back to historical origin, tradition, or civilizational continuity. When asked to identify concrete present-day mechanisms, the answer becomes imperial examinations, lineage culture, or institutional inheritance, rather than existing relations of production and authority.
When I distinguished between historical origin and present function, you treat that as if I am denying history itself, which allows the same claim to be restated without actually engaging the critique.
You have repeated this consistently. When comparative cases are raised (the USSR, France, Japan, Korea) instead of explaining what is materially different in China, you bypass comparison by asserting uniqueness. When patriarchy is discussed, you accept that it persists because it still performs material labor functions, but you refuse to apply that same standard to bureaucracy or lineage, never specifying what concrete economic function those traditions perform today. When the USSR collapse was raised, material transformation was replaced with cultural reversion.
This is why the discussion cannot move forward. You continusly treat history as an active causal force in itself, rather than something whose continued influence must be explained through present material conditions. Your analysis is idealist: tradition is allowed explanatory power independent of political economy. As long as that framing remains, we will keep talking past each other.
As for my writing style, it may come across as rigid or formulaic simply because this is not my native language, I am still far from 100% comfortable in it and thus fallback on standard easy to use structures to try best convey my thoughts.
Also, I don’t mean to accuse: I am getting ChatGPT vibes here. Are these posts assisted with LLM in some ways?
I am trying to compose a detailed response to your long comment and it took more than an hour just to write the outlines, whereas yours took mere minutes to respond. The more I read, the less these arguments make sense to me.
There are a lot of circular ChatGPT-like arguments (“it’s not this, it’s that”) so I don’t even know how to respond without concrete examples being presented. I feel like I am arguing with an LLM lol (no offense, but maybe you do write like that).
If you’re interested in furthering the discussion, we need concrete examples beyond the vague LLM-style sophistry where we can go in depth and dissect in detail the historical progression of the Chinese bureaucratic system. Otherwise the answers are always going to be vague and we go in circles.
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What? We should judge arguments on their merits, not on how long the person making them has been here. Every account here was just a week old at some point.
It’s also particularly silly to invoke this in a discussion with xhs, one of our most prominent examples on this site of people deleting accounts and making new ones (although I think the xhs account has actually hung around for quite long compared to some of the previous ones).
The whole paranoia about new accounts being wreckers or otherwise suspicious could never really coherently fit in with the simultaneous site party line about the importance of opsec, and practice of account switching. In fact, I’m pretty sure we’ve already had this struggle session, but I’ve kind of lost track of those.
I’m not passing judgment on the arguments, I think the discussion is interesting.
I’m referring to the age as evidence of whether the account’s responses are llm assisted, where it carries a small amount of weight.
I don’t see how that tracks. They themselves have mentioned that English isn’t their first language, and I could see an argument for that being proof of them using an LLM, but just because an account is new doesn’t mean they must be using an LLM, I don’t understand how “new account” and “LLM” are related in any way.
And I can’t believe I’m defending LLMs, but the actual content of an argument is what is important, not whether they used an LLM to help deliver it. LLM speak is bad because it usually waffles on about nothing and fails to have a clear and direct point, entire paragraphs with 0 information. But I’m not getting that at all from QinShiHuangsShlong’s comments, they have clear points they are making. Sometimes people get so hyper-vigilant at spotting “AI speak” that they forget that AI constructs sentences that way because a ton of the data it scrapes from speaks like that.
It just feels like a low blow to accuse them of using an LLM rather than addressing the points they make in their argument, xiaohongshu might as well be calling them a fed or a wrecker, because that seems to be the intention behind this “polite” accusation, to discredit the person rather than address their argument.
Like it or not, I’ve seen my ESL coworkers use AI to write out their emails. Critical support because it’s a world-historic injustice for people to be forced to learn English.
Now — I’m — just — an — it? — I’m — not even — a — person — in — your — eyes?
That’s — not — just — rude — it’s unnecessary.
My — account — may — be — only — 5 — days — old — but — your — 小鸡鸡 — is — only — 5cm — long.
Doesn’t — feel — so — good — when — people — are — rude — for — no — reason — does — it?
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If you don’t know someone’s pronouns, ask, or use their name. If someone calls you out on it, apologize and correct. This is uncomplicated and there’s no excuse for it.
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Hilariously enough even though you are clearly attempting to dehumanize QinShiHuangsShlong by “not using pronouns”, you immediately used the wrong pronouns in your flaccid defense of your own ignorance. Go do some self crit but you’re not welcome to misgender other users here
Yet I am a person and when talking about benefit of the doubt you were talking about me.
You could have said “them” you chose “it”.
You are not your account comrade, 他, 她, & 它 all have a pretty similar meaning, it is a valid first person pronoun, you’re just too english language structures
please do not respond to someone saying what approximates to ‘i can’t take you seriously’, by immediately invoking a phalus, the fact your account handle invokes a phalus is offputting enough
if you’re feeling put out, take a breath, take a break, do something that makes you happy for a while
它 is specifically for non human things. I am a human.
When talking about benefit of the doubt that is talking about me the person behind the account and if I’m trustworthy.
As for “phalus” (are you a professor?) this is the pig pooping on its balls forum I never could have imagined penis jokes would be too much for such a place.
I am my account and if I’m banned, I die in real life, SAO-style.