Below is my weekly summary/preamble, spoilered so that you can get down into the comments more easily.
preamble
I don't think I've ever seen a ceasefire that, for weeks, is so obviously about to be broken at any given moment and yet nonetheless continues. So-called Operation Freedom may mark a resumption of hostilities, as the US seems to once again be trying an active role in attempting to take control of the Strait of Hormuz. The initial, ridiculous claim was that the US Navy would itself be escorting ships (i.e. just getting your destroyers sunk for no reason), and as expected, this was just said to try and calm markets. Nonetheless, there is reporting that other military measures may be taken against Iran soon if they continue to keep the Strait closed, so we'll see how that all goes.
US gas prices at the pump have hit close to record high numbers, and generally the average citizen is growing mightily displeased with Trump, even those in previously safe demographics. Unfortunately, this discontent is not immediately geopolitically relevant - as both parties are staffed from top to bottom with pro-war Zionists with only a small group of exceptions, and third parties will necessarily never be allowed to take power, there is no way for US public discontent to manifest itself in a change of policy. What is more likely to cause changes in policy will be grumbling from American capitalists, of which there are many factions. The fossil fuel capitalists seem perfectly content for this situation to continue indefinitely, with record profits. I imagine the financial sector is pretty nervous, but aren't currently demanding Trump cease fire - same for the tech industry which has now been engulfed in AI, as the bubble seems to be close to, but not quite, popping. Smaller businesses and agriculture are perhaps the most likely to be crying uncle, but may have limited representation.
Going back to Western Asia, the situation from last week has remained broadly the same. The Zionist tactic in Southern Lebanon appears to essentially be "If we can't occupy this land, then you won't be able to, either," as they are doing their utmost to physically destroy as many towns and villages on the border as possible. Hezbollah's success at keeping Zionist territorial gains fairly minimal, and the growing onslaught of not only anti-tank guided missiles but also FPV drones causing chaos where the Zionists attempt to hold and advance, have, I believe, partially contributed to Iran not pushing the issue of a comprehensive ceasefire in Lebanon so far as to cause them to feel the need to resume fire on the occupied territories.
The US blockade has truly been a mixed affair. While it's obviously quite leaky and many Iranian ships are getting through, Naked Capitalism and others have pointed out that it's not just Iranian ships that are transporting goods, and that there are ~70 Chinese ships with Iranian oil that are much less willing to risk running the blockade. But, once again, the success of the blockade isn't all that relevant. Iran has experienced periods of a couple years straight without meaningful oil exports and survived, and their extensive land borders make a true siege impossible - goods can and are still pouring into the country, and with Pakistan recently allowing Iranian exports through their border, as well as the Caspian Sea in the north and Iran's railway link to China, Iranian exports can still leave just fine. Another interesting indication is that China's government has ordered Chinese businesses to ignore US sanctions against Iranian oil, so we'll see how that develops. And while the issue of maintaining sufficient public cohesion in the wake of economic suffering is a potential long term problem, we haven't yet seen any meaningful scenes of public discontent inside Iran. Internal unity appears to be staying at record levels in the face of total war.
Even being as careful as possible to check my own biases, it's difficult for me to form any other conclusion other than that Iran is winning, and people like Armchair Warlord have even pointed out that American tactical victories have been pretty minimal so far.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
KLM flight attendant hospitalized after contact with hantavirus cruise ship passenger cool cool cool
Please don't become another fucking pandemic. I've finally been picking my life up again and socializing more after being the only one in my area still taking precautions years later. Just let me fucking live.
the odds of it transitioning to a full pandemic are low
but not zero
The odds would be low if it had been handled well. This one seems like a fuckup
It has spread to at least one person who just shared part of a plane ride with the widow of the first deceased. That seems like pretty reasonable cause for concer
It is definitely cause for concern; it is not cause for declaring this a high likelihood pandemic.
I don't think a potential pandemic has literally ever been handled well outside of an ML state. Still, we've only had one in living memory. We used to get "new pandemic" scare viruses every 2 or 3 years prior to covid and only that, with its extremely high rate of contagion, could actually deliver on the media hype. I don't think anything was fundamentally structurally different in society with covid vs ebola or bird flu or swine flu or [insert 2000s media panic disease here] - it is the disease itself that made the difference. We have grown much more societally cautious now given our experience with covid, and so it's easy to forget that the vast majority of these just don't have the viral juice to pan out.
Sorry i meant it in a joking sense. Basically just wanted to point out that are lot of safeguards were ignored
still good to lay out the case because I think a lot of people are spiraling around this news, which is not a materialist analysis
I think if we're going to be throwing around words like "materialism" then we need to acknowledge the many good reasons to distrust western health organisations communication. It is not at all unreasonable or immaterialist to look at two possible infections from briefly sharing an airplane and then worrying about pandemics - especially if official communications try to downplay worries, and you are one who bases your distrust of those orgs on reasonable foundations.
Any actual "materialist" analysis of the situation needs to include that as part of its data.
HIV/AIDs isn't that long ago. And there was the swine flu in 2009.
AIDS has never been a pandemic. Swine Flu was classified a pandemic but was orders of magnitude smaller than covid, to the extent that it shouldn't really go in the same category imo
In what way was it never a pandemic?
Covid19 was unique as a pandemic. But swine flu was still major enough to lead to things like short-term school closures. It just wasn't a historically notable pandemic like covid19, hiv, spanish flu, or a few of the black death pandemics or the smallpox epidemic/pandemic in the Americas.
Perhaps we need a another term to refer to diseases above some specific danger score (severity*spread) rather than just based on spread?
Yeah I'm no epidemiologist either, but there's something significant about a [x]demic with the impact of COVID. It killed as many people as AIDS in a tenth the time, fundamentally disrupted life for most humans for at least a span of months if not longer, caused immediate dramatic impacts across every country on the entire planet, has left lasting global repercussions economically, politically, physiologically, and psychically, and inarguably altered the course of planetary political economy, acting as a key event in the degradation of neoliberal imperial capitalism and the rise of socialist China as the world's leading power. So I'm not really trying to quibble over the pandemic label as much as I am disputing the sense I see that hantavirus will be COVID all over again or worse.
I'm sorry to be using NATOpedia as a source, but it seems like it is classified as a pandemic
I'm not a disease specialist though
I saw it classified as an epidemic elsewhere on NATOpedia, so I guess you're right.
And another point to mention: we weren't getting news of COVID until thousands had already contracted it.
Having it harboured amongst a comparatively small, relatively isolated population, one that has the means to get emergency healthcare at short notice is a "good" circumstance to be in! This was caught way earlier than COVID.
There's ways this can fuck up way way worse, but it's not the first time since COVID some deadly and transmissible pathogen made headlines. We've been hearing about Meningitis B in the UK for the last couple of months, and that has stayed pretty localised.
But... It wasn't really caught? Folks who were exposed have been traveling unrestricted for some time and no precautions are being taken regarding them.
And this time there's no slop to hold out for. At least I had The Boys, Better Call Saul and probably some other dumb shit I've forgotten since, to wait for on the other side of lockdown. Now I just have to settle for friends and family???
Anything but friends. It's a terrible show.
I've never seen a complete episode
Don't start!
First as farcical tragedy, second as tragicomedy.
I don't even think we'll get a new lock down even if it becomes the black death.
businesses will install bubble offices for sick employees to work from rather than letting anyone work from home again
No way the chuds around me would accept any form of lockdown even if the government tried implementing one. I don't even see mask mandates working, like half of people refused to wear them properly even during the height of covid and the second it wasn't legally mandatory basically no one wore one.
Not so rare anymore is it?
I was wondering how this was happening. I don't think the normal US hantavirus can spread human to human.
Nor the one found around here in North Europe, but apparently the world traveling bougies managed to pick it up and possibly spread it to several islands along the way.
Also, the so far non-mentioned fact that everyones immune system is wrecked from covid and how that would impact tourists getting shit like this is definitely a thing that should be analyzed imo. This will probably never get done because line must go up.
Looks like these are most slightly older folks, probably covid veterans many times over, who decided to go frolic in the wild without washing their hands much or taking much care, in typical white tourist fashion. And it will again be the poor who die from it.
Also can't imagine the possible harm on wildlife and local communities along the route of the boat as they went to shore in many places after someone was already sick with it.
That makes two confirmed off-ship so far. Both "just" from sharing a plane ride. Considering how it is said to have low human-human infectivity that might not be the case.
A flight attendant handing over a drink is enough? That’s as infectious as any flu.
How many people on that plane might be infected?
I don't know if that's enough, but maybe it's like COVID and aerosols+ recycled air on a plane= whoops
Perfection
oh cool, another deadly contagious disease with a long incubation time.
Not sure if I'm being reasonably worried about it, if I'm just traumatized from the last pandemic and overreacting, or if I'm not worried enough
Given that potentially-exposed American passengers have already returned home, and that American governments at all levels can be guaranteed to make the absolute dumbest decisions possible in a pandemic situation, and that the partially-American-hosted World Cup is coming up soon, and that covid-19 has taken a figurative wrecking ball to everyone's immune systems, I'm sure we have nothing to worry about.
I'm thinking back to 2020 and I remember saying to myself "This covid thing is probably going to just be another swine flu/SARS/minor pandemic that's being overblown in the media, so long as it doesn't start spreading in the states things should be okay"
Things were not okay
Edit: plus on top of the factors you mentions tons of people have "pandemic fatigue" and won't accept health measures like quarantines/lockdowns/mask mandates/etc until it's too late, if ever