(credit to RomCom1989 for the title)
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.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
https://xcancel.com/ProudSocialist/status/2033904391963447558
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK AN ECONOMY IS!? JUST A BUNCH OF DOLLARS FLOATING OUT INTO THE ETHER?
have the US economic elite been so mindbroken by financialization and stock buybacks that they genuinely can't conceptualize that products need to eventually be bought by someone at some point? do they think they can just keep money moving back and forth between a handful of bank accounts while the general populace is reduced to a medieval peasant level of economic participation?
The economy is the Line. The Line is Going Up. The Dow is Over 50,000.
It's also just market manipulation. The Trump administration believe that they can manipulate the markets and the media long enough to accomplish whatever goal they have in mind.
Unfortunately it works. Somehow media outlets failed to notice the scale of the US military buildup before the war, likely due to a lack of knowledge about how modern air power works. Despite having vastly fewer aircraft deployed, the US+Israeli coalition is equal in firepower to the coalition from the Gulf War, and averaging the same amount of targets hit per day as the Gulf War air campaign (around 1000).
it's not though
*fifty thousand dollars
Yep. It's called wall street. It have nothing to do with the real world, it's just a game they're playing
Kinda seems like it works that way though for the most part.
You just pump your fiat currency into finance and promise it can pay debt and, so far for decades, everything has "worked out" fine for them.
This will, ofcourse, end in a catastrophe that would make the great depression blush when it collapsed in on itself seemingly overnight as the entire economy is turned into a black hole from the sudden realization that it's overvalued potentially hundreds of thousands of times over.
But you know what? If you're a rich fuck all you really have to worry about is cashing out fast enough before the house of cards falls apart and you'll still probably be better off than the serfs by miles. And given how things go in the Club(tm), they'll get a big enough heads-up that cashing their chips out so they can flee comfortably to Europe or wherever will be a sinch.
In the best of cases, they'll live like an absolute king with no consequences. In the worst of cases: they'll live like a lavish prince with minimal consequences.
You'd be an idiot not to let this ride until it burns down in their position.
To these people the "economy" is not an allocation of finite resources with associated opportunity costs, it's a stockmarlet casino.
classic tankie ignorance
here is economy 101:
fuck the consumers/workers -> more gooder economy
Ah yes, the guy who described US workers as “human capital stock”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/human-capital-stock-kevin-hassett-trump-economic-advisor-back-to-work/
It's honest because most of the economy is an AI bubble with some creative finance accounting sprinkled on top.
What a fuckin bonkers thing to say out loud, these cockroaches are really feeling their oats, the media echo chamber they suffuse themselves in is generating miscalculation after miscalculation
I think they know that 99% of Americans will never even see that comment, or if they did, think about it for more than 3 seconds before they go onto something else
One day, some generation of economists will learn the shocking truth that there is more to the economy than just money
It's like the "top climate scientist" Nordhaus who tells us that because agriculture only accounts for 3% of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a large effect on the US economy.
Any time I hear something from a big brained economist I just tend to assume the opposite is true.
They're banking (heh) on the hope that their supporters are still fully bought in (hah) to the idea of "trickle down economics", so let's see how that works out for them I guess
Trickledown economics is like trying to fly by pissing in your shoes
Sounds pretty foolproof to me
Where's PissWizard when we need their expert opinion??
I find this really funny. The contradictions are heightening
I find this really scary. The contradictions are frightening 😰
Valid. It's getting a little scary. But I'm trying to be less doomer
[the economy] = [rich people's money]
thinken about dolar