Image is of a protest in Pakistan after the attempted assassination of Imran Khan in November 2022.
What a clusterfuck of an election.
Imran Khan, the previous official Prime Minister of Pakistan, was removed by the command of the United States in April 2022 in a no confidence motion. This made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Imran Khan and his supporters have protested since then against the Pakistani state, which is more-or-less governed by the military despite the furnishings of civilian rule. This has ranged from largely peaceful protests to trying to burn down and occupy houses and headquarters.
It was assumed by the Pakistani elite that they could make the problem go away by arresting Imran Khan and effectively forcing many PTI candidates to run as independents while hounding them with police raids and stopping them from campaigning - and adding salt on the wound by disabling social media access and mobile services on the day of the election to make it more difficult to co-ordinate. Fortunately, these people don't seem to quite understand how the internet works in the current day, and so Khan's supporters started up WhatsApp groups and improvised websites and apps to spread the word about which candidates to vote for, leading to Khan's party getting the plurality, though not the majority, of votes in the election.
This has created a rather depressed mood in the Pakistani elite. A coalition of eight parties joined together, obviously excluding the PTI, but this coalition is shaky and lacks much legitimacy, with two major parties inside it, the PML-N and PPP, being ideologically opposed on several issues. It has been regarded as "the coalition of losers" by Khan's supporters. The new Prime Minister is Shehbaz Sharif, who also ruled from April 2022 until August 2023 and is the younger brother of Nawaz Sharif, who served as Prime Minister three times before in the last few decades. With inflation at 30% and the economy greatly struggling, there are fears that things may only stay together for months, not years, before the coalition fragments and something else has to be done.
Your Monday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Thursday briefing is here in the comments and here on the website. Your Sundary briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
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.
The Country of the Week is Pakistan! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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 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.
I got a question for everyone here, in your country/region/state is the 4 day work week being talked about very often in the media or by center-left political figures?
I ask because for whatever reason this shit has really taken off here in Portugal to the point where they got my old former maoist uncle telling me "you're only going to be working 4 days soon!".
And I mean yeah I'm all for it, except that the way it's being pushed is not with "fuck the bosses we deserve to work less" and an associated mass movement (the communist friendly labour union approves it but they don't have the power alone to do it), it's with very technocratic arguments about productivity increases, sometimes mentioning the human worth of free time and recurring to the handful of limited experiments which are always successful, basically in the logic of "no class war here this is actually good for everyone!", which I don't know if that's true, feels like employers would 100% get fucked with this (unless they get to cut wages or increase work hours).
I already mentioned some of the reasons I'm skeptical this will ever actually be implemented anywhere, but another big one is that here in Portugal it's implicit in this idea of the 4 day work week that it has to be the center-left (often much closer to the center than the left) "socialist" party which has been in power for 9 years (and might get booted in next sunday's elections), and this is crazy because there's no way they would actually do this it doesn't matter how many studies are comissioned saying it's great policy that would favour anyone, like, WE WILL WORK LESS, idk how this can be discussed technocratically yes I'm sure some professions (mine included but probably not my way of working specifically) will 100% probably have increased productivity, but will everyone? To the point where the right and employers actually accept this? I can't see it.
So is the 4 day work week being discussed and debated positively in your country or is it still a fringe left idea?
Edit: Thank you all for the responses!
The only 4 work day plan here outside of nerd experiments here in the u.s.a is only if you're working 10 hour shifts
Or getting paid 4/5 of a full-time wage, of course. They're often happy to do that shit. Sure: go ahead and work 4 days a week...at this one job, while you desperately search for a second or third....
Here in the UK the media literally never ever talks about it. The 4 day week comes almost exclusively from the socialists and socdems. The Starmerites hate it, Tories literally never engage with it at all and I haven't seen any of them on to talk about it.
A few business-ey types have talked about it with left politicians on tv from time to time, the ones that are willing to trial it.
In the UK, you get studies and recommendations about it (and I've seen a fair share of videos online over the years about how great it is) but I don't think the people who want this without being socialists quite understand that the suffering is a feature, not a bug. Let's say the total labour done by the population does actually increase if a 4-day work week was mandated - the thing is that you're meant to feel permanently exhausted from work, that's one of the negative forces keeping workers from putting effort into things like creating organizations and parties.
The only way I could see it taking off is if a socialist government took power electorally and wasn't immediately couped (impossible) or if businesses decided by themselves to do this. And again, outside of pilot studies, it's simply not going to happen. You're not going to convince them, you'd have to use force, and that is hecking anti-free market and therefore the worst possible blasphemy against our holy god, The Economy. But liberals and socdems think that those businesses can be convinced, hence all the studies, so at this point I almost feel a kind of disdain for the idea despite it being theoretically good just because it's wasting time and energy.
I could see businesses doing it piecemeal for the pmc/labor aristocrats and the capitalists themselves. You know, the people who deserve it so that they can golf more or dedicate an entire day to brunch. It's not like they were doing much in the office anyway.
The labour aristocracy office workers behind support for the 4 day week are the ones who need to feel permanently exhausted
It's definitely not a trend here, but when it does come up it's very technocratic and always in the context of well-paid email workers. It feels more like the tech and finance PMC pushing for job benefits on an individual level, not connected to class consciousness. The argument also makes more sense for those jobs: "we all know we aren't actually doing anything productive anyway, can we have Friday off? We'll just cancel a few timewasting meetings."
There's a <30 hrs work week at my job but only applies if you have a PhD and have multiple peons doing the grunt work.
Same with my boss. He does probably only 25 hours every week and somehow all the work still gets done. Quite a mystery if you ask me :^)))
back in highschool in KKKlanada our teachers always said by the time we were out of college there would be a 4 day work week. Never heard it said by a politician.
Here in Aus there is no discussion of it AFAIK. I don't pay much attention to asutralian politics because it is 100% red vs blue id-pol.
I had the option of a 4 day work week in several previous jobs but we still had to do 40 hours in those 4 days so it just ended up making me feel awful from Monday to Thursday when I tried to do it
Same, I'm currently working 40 hours a week 4 days a week. I'm lucky, though, since there's rarely anything I have to do in the extra 2hr/day, so I end up getting paid to read theory on my phone. But I can imagine if your boss sucks things would be different.
Yeah, that's what a lot of people think it is.
Wait, when people are talking about a 4-day workweek, they're talking about a 32-hour workweek?
People who are forced to work fewer hours can often do more work in those fewer hours. Opposition to the four-day week, like opposition to free healthcare, does not even make economic sense. It is purely a form of sadism.
There has been a few faint whispers about it in Denmark but these have been thoroughly beaten down. The prime minister, succdem chairman Mette Frederiksen, even went on stage and said something along the line of "some people are even talking about a four day work week. Forget it friends!", going on to rant about how people need to work more to ensure funding for the welfare state.
No major political party supports a four day work week except maybe for the radlib green Alternative party or maybe, on a good day, the eurocommunist Red-Greens. Both of these parties are completely politically irrelevant and is going to be so for years.
While nobody supports reducing people's workload, few seems more obsessed with increasing it than the succdems. It has been a fixation of theirs for at least a decade when then PM Helle Thorning Schmidt made great efforts to get people to work "just 12 minutes more" each day. That attempt, like most others of her administration, failed.
Last year Frederiksen's succdem-led right-wing regime fulfilled a long-held wet dream of succdem ghouls in the finance ministry by abolishing a public holiday, thereby increasing work hours. Their fixation on getting people to work more has even led them to toy with the idea of increasing opening hours in daycare to enable parents to work more. A prominent succdem minister (don't ask me who, I can't be bothered to keep track of these c*nts) felt compelled to write a long public condemnation of some harmless "simple living" grifter who had written a book about her family living to a small island to work less and have fewer possessions so they can spend more time together. Reading his ranting vitriol would give you the impression that it was people like her who was responsible for the crumbling welfare state and he was literally accusing her of being "unsolidaric" for not working "at least full time".