this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is of a Khorramshahr-4 medium range ballistic missile, which has a range of about 2000km.


As I said in the last megathread, trying to figure out what exactly is happening is becoming ever more difficult. The gist of things is that Iran has, very justifiably, refused to negotiate (assassinating their leader and striking their country with hundreds of missiles in the middle of negotiations causes some reluctance to return to the table, I suppose). Censorship across the Middle East has further ramped up, with reportedly extreme punishments for posting footage of Iranian strikes online. From what I can gather, Iran's number of strikes have stabilized at a comfortable daily rate, with strikes into both the Gulf monarchies and Occupied Palestine continuing apace. Official charts of these strikes over time seem very disconnected from reality on the ground, but again, it's hard to really get at the specifics.

The messaging on how long the war is expected to last is rather muddled on both sides. The Trump administration fluctuates more than daily - and even sometimes in the same speech - on whether the war is already won or whether it's going to last months longer. The US seems to be coming up a new possible scheme every few hours: a ground invasion with the Kurds? A ground invasion without the Kurds? An amphibious assault? A series of commando operations to steal Iranian uranium? A massive parachuting operation into Tehran? Fuck it, let's just send the Navy into the Strait of Hormuz? There doesn't seem to be a coherent plan for continuing hostilities beyond firing more and more of a limited stockpile of cruise missiles into mostly non-military targets, hitting easily replaceable drone and missile launchers with a limited stockpile of drones, and burning a limited stockpile of interceptors at an astounding rate (and, in the process, disarming every other Western-aligned country of their interceptors).

Meanwhile, from Iran, I've seen rumors and reports from classic anonymous "senior IRGC officials" (no doubt some invented by Zionists to sow confusion), that I don't know how to substantiate, ranging anywhere from "If the US pulls back their forces now, we will restart negotiations," to "It doesn't matter what the US or the Zionists do or say, we aren't stopping until every last trace of Zionism in the Middle East has been extinguished," to a few positions in between those poles. Despite the damage to infrastructure in Iran, it doesn't seem like there has been any political or social fracturing. Not to speak too soon - perhaps the West will start earnestly trying to overfly Iranian territory to drop their very plentiful bombs soon - but every indication is that there will be no regime change nor societal collapse in Iran in the short and medium term.

The US is desperately trying - and mostly failing - to keep a lid on the economic firestorm they have ignited. There has been much ado about oil prices and oil futures and indexes and what all the myriad Lines going up and down signify and things like that, which is befitting such a financialized empire which is so disconnected from the actual physical flows of materials and much more attuned to vibes and speeches. The only thing I'm personally paying much attention to on the economic front is the drones and missiles slamming into fossil fuel infrastructure, the Hormuz blockade, and the resulting global shockwave of shortages, stoppages, closures, bankruptcies, and force majeures spreading out from the epicenter that is Iran.


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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 the Zionists' 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.


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[–] Sickos@hexbear.net 20 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Ok r/worldbuilding I am having trouble with a storyline. Modern era althistory except America never did the Louisiana purchase and Stalin didn't stop at Berlin. How long could a country of plucky resistance fighters survive an attack in approximately the highlighted area from the combined forces of the old USSR and most of Europe? The resistance has every modern warfare technology at their disposal and have been two weeks away from having a nuke for the past 47 years.

[–] TrippyFocus@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Does this mean the Louisana purchase area is French and now (I assume) USSR or was it its own breakaway colony after WW2?

[–] jack@hexbear.net 13 points 5 days ago

The French sold the territory to the US because they were fucked up from their own wars and had no actual capacity to settle, control, or extract value from it. It was a way to get money out of an already existent reality. If the French instead held onto it out of stubbornness, they do worse in their European wars without all that American capital. Assuming the US state respects the settlement boundaries (which they would probably sort of do, as they didn't go invading Canada in this time), you'd have smaller than historical waves of American settlers entering into legally French but de facto Native territory. They wouldn't have as much support from the US state. The US would not be as effective at expelling the Natives in the east without someplace to force them to, and they could either be more violently genocidal or be forced to recognize more indigenous rights and autonomy.

Taking the more optimistic view, the smaller waves of western settlement lead to greater degrees of integration and cooperation among Euro settlers and Natives, as was often the case in the first phases of settlement in a given area before it ramped up with state legal and material support. Native nations west of the Mississippi would be better able to secure economic leverage against the US, which would remain constrained to the eastern ~22 states. Native nations would end up close to fully exteripated in the mid-Atlantic, as they are today, but probably much more prevalent in the South, upper New England, and the 'West' (west of the Ohio, essentially). The US still becomes a major industrial and agricultural power, but its explosive growth is restrained without an endless frontier, and class conflict would be much more intense as a result. That will probably end producing a far more left-wing country by the end of the century, and one far less capable of breaking out of its continental barriers and establishing its global empire.

We don't really know a lot about what large-scale, long-term French settler colonialism would look like in the Americas. Spanish and English settler colonialism were materially different in many important ways leading to wildly different outcomes for the indigenous nations, but the French were out of the game with the Lousiana Purchase and the loss of Haiti. My guess is they would take an approach of extensive trade, where settlement is focused on major waterways and largely commercial rather than agricultural. France would not bother with the important of large numbers of African slaves into the territory and would not carry out comprehensive genocidal efforts against indigenous nations. Instead they'd maintain large scale fur trade and probably want to arm Native people to prevent the US from taking over in systemic fashion. You might end up with a colonial capitalist elite from a wide variety of European, African, and Native backgrounds who speak a creolized French that becomes a lingua franca among settlers and Natives. Many Native nations have a smoother entry into the capitalist world system while retaining most of their traditional lifeways and languages. The territory inevitably becomes formally independent sometime after Mexico. If the patchwork factions can pull together a pseudo-state confederation for mutual defense and international representation, they'll be able to roughly stabilize themselves from fuckery from the US and Europe. It acts as an essential commercial power linking the US and Mexico and providing access to the most ecologically rich part of the continent.

The native nations of Washington and Oregon may be able to successfuly play Canada, Franco-America, and Mexico against each other to retain economic and political sovereignty - they had a well-established and highly developed class society that could have transitioned into capitalism if given respite from the US's incomparably genocidal violence. Russia retains Alaska and no major settlement moves are ever made there. Under the USSR it becomes the most autonomous and least-developed zone in the Union except for a single port city.

Mexico retains its land and ultimately emerges as a large and powerful capitalist state with a world-dominating oil industry, the world's longest coastline extending from Chiapas to the redwood forests of California, and a much stronger campesino political class without US fuckery.

We end up with a North America split along three major European-derived axes each with very distinct sets of Native nations and multinationalism. They roughly balance each other to the benefit of Natives and workers, and the class conflict intensification within the US propels it into socialist revolution shortly after the USSR. In the middle and west of the continent, Native nations largely retain territorial integrity and don't suffer anywhere near the same levels of dispossession and violence, though they definitely still end up marginalized in many more populated areas in ways that look more like modern Mexico than the modern US.