Livejournal, Time to Backup?

[aggienaut]

I've just backed up my livejournal to dreamwidth (https://aggienaut.dreamwidth.org/), and I strongly recommend that any of the rest of you who doesn't want to lose your livejournal content do the same or back it up somewhere. I haven't heard anything specific about livejournal and if someone more plugged in to that angle has more to say I'd love to hear it; but as an amateur political scientist who has been closely following recent developments, knowing that the livejournal servers are located in Russia and not only has Russian censorship ramped up to Soviet era levels but the connection between Russia and the rest of the world on MOST social media platforms has already been severed (generally from the outside cutting off Russia but I'd imagine it could happen vice versa either as a retaliation or just asa result of some general data link obstruction thrown up), I for one am rather concerned we might lose access to livejournal. (obviously this is small potatoes compared to the incredible suffering people in Ukraine are suffering right now, as well as the loss of rights of the innocent people within Russia, but I'm just saying, from a livejournal user perspective, probably best to back this thing up).


And here's a flag meme I made. Same old Soviet repression classic, but now in corrupt capitalism flavor!

Also I've been posting a daily "news roundup" every morning about the war in Ukraine on facebook, which my friends seem to really like. I've started crossposting it to medium on a friend's recommendation though I'm still unconvinced that anyone reads anything there. But you can see them there at https://medium.com/@kris.r.fricke

Because I happen to be posting this right now, here's today's update:

   Daily news round up, okay there's some noteworthy things today.
   All day yesterday there was a lot of chatter amongst the commentators that Russia seemed to be laying the political groundwork for using chemical or biological weapons, namely, Russia kept banging on about the US and Ukraine using biological weapons, culminating in Russia calling a special session of the UN Security Council to claim the US was, i kid you not, training birds and monkeys to spread biological weapons in Russia and Belarus. The other countries' representatives then all made statements that this is a ridiculous piece of disinformation that demeans the Security Council to take seriously and an obvious pretext for Russia to set the stage for its own chem/bio use; though concerningly China was like "well this is concerning and we should investigate" 🙄
   And speeaking of false flag operations, Russia has reportedly bombed Belarus with intent to blame it on Ukraine and get Belarus into the war (his puppet pet president MyBelarus guy was with him at the time this happened). Normally we hear "false flag operation" and think crazy conspiracy theory these days but Russia actually has a history of doing these things.
   Russia has announced 16,000 Syrian troops have "volunteered" to join them in the war. They'll be from Assad's war-crime-happy regime of course. Hope they like snow. On the other side there's so many (500) Canadian volunteers for Ukraine that they have their own brigade. We know they don't mind snow.
   Reportedly a fourth Russian general has been killed in Ukraine. There were 20 Russian generals in Ukraine, a mortality rate of 20% for the people at the very very top has got to be making the generals a bit uneasy. (For comparison the US has lost three generals through some form of combat in the last 50 years, though one was killed when the plane hit the pentagon, one was killed by a rogue Afghan soldier on base in Afghanistan, and one was killed in actual combat in Vietnam exactly fifty years ago)
   Meanwhile reportedly Putin has fired 8 generals over this fiasco (though I don't know if that was any of the 20 in Ukraine or is at general staff in Moscow); also reportedly five of the very top staff of the FSB (Russian intel) have been arrested (they'd have been responsible for the analysis that had said this was a good idea; but I've also read they'd be in the best position to overthrow Putin).
   All in all, I'm concerned because while Russia appears to be losing, losing is _not an option_ to Putin. He's just not a man to ever admit he's wrong or lost. It is more or less inconceivable he'd just pull his troops out without something he could spin as a win. He'd be more likely to up the stakes in a huge shocking escalation calling the bluff of the west to retaliate than that he'd quietly admit retreat. So all this about chem/bio weapons is _very_ concerning.


Also also, I have finally, finally, started using twitter a bit, mainly just to retweet things so I can find them again for my own use but hey follow twitter.com/arrrghonaut for lots of tweets about noteworthy news items about the war in Ukraine.