(credit to RomCom1989 for the title)
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 an Iranian soldier exulting in the launch of a ballistic missile aimed towards the imperialists.
short summary this week: US doing pretty bad and Iran doing pretty good all things considered, Strait of Hormuz is closed and will almost certainly remain so until the end of the war, Trump has no idea what to do, global economic crisis from strait closure is basically guaranteed at this point but who will ultimately benefit most and who will ultimately lose most is still up in the air.
longish summary is below in the spoiler tags
longish summary
While there are still major debates raging about how badly things are actually going right now and what the post-conflict map may look like, as we blaze past the two week mark on this conflict, it's becoming ever more obvious to almost everybody involved that this war is not going according to plan, if there ever was one. US airstrikes are, from what I can best determine, still mostly done with relatively less powerful (but still very dangerous!) and much less plentiful standoff munitions launched from bombers, though certain border and coastal areas are being struck with more powerful and more plentiful short-range guided bombs. This indicates that Iranian air defense is still sufficiently functional throughout most of Iran that the kinds of true carpet bombing done against Korea and Vietnam in the past (and Gaza very recently) is still too risky, though their airspace is still very much under assault, as we appear to have images of small groups of Western fighters breaching relatively deep into the country. Under some kind of Iranian pressure (drones? missiles? speedboats?) one aircraft carrier has retreated to a thousand kilometers from Iran, hiding behind the mountains of Oman; the other is sitting in the Red Sea, rather pointedly out of range of Yemen. As such, the ranges that Western aircraft must travel to bombard Iran is increasing, which reduces their frequency and increases strain on maintenance and logistics in the medium and long term.
While there is tons to say about the current social, economic, and military state of Iran, I don't think I have a reliable enough picture to give a good summary beyond "they aren't close to defeat or regime change". What has instead captured much of the world's attention is the continuing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has inspired some of the most delusional statements I have seen so far in my life, which is sincerely a profound achievement. For those out of the loop: the strait is currently closed to all shipping except those going to very particular countries (I've seen China and Bangladesh mentioned, and apparently India is in the process of working something out and may succeed or fail). This is because most ships are not risking the trip due to the ~20 tankers and container ships that Iran has already struck and disabled in the strait and in the Persian Gulf. Additionally, the threat from Iran's military to Navy ships is such that attempting to create a convoy to guide tankers through it is suicidal to both the Navy and merchant ships. Right now it cannot be done, and it very well might be the case that it could never be done, simply due to the combination of Iran's naval forces (hundreds, perhaps thousands, of armed, specialized speedboats designed for exactly this purpose), their drones (in the tens of thousands), their torpedoes, and if all else fails, their naval mines.
The Western reaction to this has been so moronic that it has almost integer underflowed into being philosophical: what does it truly mean for a passage to be "closed"? Has Iran truly "closed" the strait, or is the risk of traversing it simply too high for these cowardly sailors (who, for some strange reason, seem to care about their "lives" and "families")? How is it possible for Iran to have closed the strait if, according to the West, Iran's military has been totally obliterated? All these questions and more plague the minds of those who cannot accept the now-proven fact that there are indeed military forces on this planet that the US Navy with all its aircraft carriers and destroyers and submarines cannot defeat; and one of those minds is, rather hilariously, Trump himself. His thrice-daily positive affirmations that Iran has been defeated are taking on an increasingly deranged and almost pitiable tone; the lamentations of a man who has finally found a situation where him merely stating that something is true is insufficient to change the situation one iota. Despite stating that some kind of naval compact or alliance is being established to protect shipping, every Western country so far - from the UK, to France, to Japan, to Australia - has publicly stated that they will not risk their ships to do so. All this as the continued blockade yet further guarantees a worldwide energy, production, transportation, and food crisis that will have major global ramifications for at least the rest of the decade and almost certainly beyond.
If the anti-imperialists play their cards right, the US could lose much from this crisis, and others, like China and Russia, could gain a great deal. To quote Nia Frome (co-founder of Red Sails): "An effective Marxist has to be enough of an accelerationist/pervert to treat the obviously bad things that are going to happen as the political opportunities they are."
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.
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.
JPMorgan downgraded traditional software companies because of "AI disruption". This will hit some private credit companies like Blue Own and Blackstone that are lending heavily to traditional software companies and to AI companies - the very reason for those traditional software companies getting downgraded. I still believe that private credit will be the first sector that cracks.
Meanwhile, oil futures are trading below $100, but actual physical oil is changing hands at ~$150.
How does the "AI disruption" excuse work given that there is no established increase in productivity?
It's disrupting CEOs brains and convincing them they are inventing new types of math.
Yeah but JPMorgan is surely run by cynical nerds that care about the fundamentals, right? Even when the fundamentals are finance tech nonsense they want to actually make money based on facts.
Not necessarily, remember, this is a brain on liberalism,
At the greatest heights of finance operations the liberals seem to get pretty realistic, though. Forced materialism, of course not untethered from liberalism.
Do they? The finance markets have been divorced from any actual productive forces for years.
You got shitcoins, Tesla, now ai. It's all bullshit.
Financialization means they can even focus on destroying productive forces to make nice profits. But the stated logic was "AI disruption", so they have some kind of logic around productivity or likelihood of companies to fail.
It's the brain worms logic of " ai magic will solve all our problems". these people are divorced from all consequences, and material reality.
That doesn't mean they're actually operating on fundamentals. They're getting their brains disrupted by the same LLMs as everyone else.
I suppose. I would guess it's more likely they're trading on the hype cynically than being true believers impressed by the responses of their own personal lie machine. Like trading based on speculation on future productivity gains (because they do not presently exist) or based on financialized leveraging, trying to make a buck off of others' investments and debts.
I know they're not all brain geniuses and are subject to ideology, but I would be surprised if they ignore productivity numbers to such a degree.
JPM believes there is or will be and that is all that matters for the downgrade. And if they believed the opposite, they would downgrade AI debt and most of the same companies would get hit because they are on both sides of this. Very nice!
The productivity schtick is what gets bosses to sign onto AI, and then they twist the little dial that says "labor costs" by firing human staff until it balances out with productivity as before (but cheaper!).
Then once the AI ghouls cash in on a bunch of dangerously-reliant customers who don't have the expertise to migrate, the whole thing goes kaput
Well that works for the short term stock boosting / profit boosting move, yes. That's a classic use of any automation or technology to discipline labor and do layoffs, regardless of whether the tech actually changes productivity. MBAs love that shit, they do it all the time and versions of them have been doing it since the beginnings of capitalism at minimum.
But productivity itself will actually decrease if they fire "too many", which they usually do. Consequently it is just a dance everyone involved (except the workers, often) recognizes, they know what the effects should be, that the company is potentially effectively downsizing in order to grow their capital, taking a productivity gamble. A good decision depending on the timing of the business cycle, from their point of view.
Point being, the higher up finance nerds know this. They know it is a game and that productivity itself may go down, that it is a labor discipline tool, that they are shifting from productivity to capital, sometimes a war chest.
If the tech actually "works", which is to say creates a monopoly (productivity doesn't mean actually coherently useful things exist, just that you create and sell a commodity), yes they are stoked to milk that monopoly for all it's worth. The silicon valley finance arrangement is all about throwing ridiculous amounts of capital at "tech" in the hopes of that monopoly ("market share") and milking profits from it, rent-seeking style. But if AI doesn't actually work, will their "monopoly" mean actually customers? Imagine if nobody used Uber anymore because you could use free car shares or something, as could happen with "AI" (plus the actual perceived utility may wear off).
Cutting 1,000s of staff saves money and raises profits, ala DOGE
In the short term, always, yes. It directly raises capital for the company. But if you cut too many staff you can't create your product anymore, or you end up raising prices to account for worse productivity, and get worse sales. It is theoretically a "curve" and very frequently it's on this side of "profits up now, much lower soon". This can be very profitable for certain strains of capitalist and disastrous for others, it depends on their relation to the capital and production. The vultures making piles of money from disassembling SEARs vs. various "just in time" failure stories due to how brittle their supply chains and labor productivity become.
Would investing in aluminum futures be a good idea?
I'm not saying yes or no about this particular investment, but in general I'd say that it's impossible to do better than the stock market in general. You or me is not going to be making better judgements than JP Morgan Chase or Deutsche Bank who have entire teams dedicated to any niche withing any market of financial products on the world.
If you're investing, for that reason, I'd always recommend some sort of product which has a value which is the weighted average of thousends of financial products (like an ETF/tracker), make sure it's one which actually does that, and isn't just 25% Tesla for example.
Making bets on this or that industry or stock is a quick way to lose all your money.
Don't believe me? Here's a former City of Londen trader saying the exact same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-ohZ74hdeI
You'd drive yourself insane trying to beat the market in day trading, the same way crypto bros do, you either need money to spare you can set and forget, or you need to not get involved
as much as I want to go and drop all my saving in a Chinese weapons company lol
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: