Image is of destruction and damage inside Israel, sourced from this article.
Iran and Israel have struck each other many times over the last few days. There has been a general focus on military facilities and headquarters by both sides, though Israel has also struck oil facilities, civilian structures and hospitals, and in return for this, Iran has struck major scientific centers and the Haifa oil facilities.
Israel appears to have three main aims. First, to collapse the Iranian state, either through shock and breakdown by killing enough senior officials, or via some sort of internal military coup. Second, to try and destroy Iranian nuclear sites and underground missile cities, or at least to paralyze them long enough to achieve the first and third goals. And third, to bring the US into a direct conflict with Iran. This is because the US better equipped to fight them than Israel is (though victory would still not be guaranteed depending on what Iran chooses to do).
Iranian nuclear facilities are hidden deep underground (800 meters), far beyond the depth range of even the most powerful bunker busters (~70 meters or so), and built such that the visible ground entrances are horizontally far away in an unknown direction from the actual underground chambers. Only an extremely competent full-scale American bombing force all simultaneously using multiple of the most powerful conventional (perhaps even nuclear) bunker busters could even hypothetically hope to breach them (and we have seen how, in practice, American bunker busters have largely failed to impair or deter Ansarallah). There are several analysts on both sides who have concluded that it is entirely impossible to physically prevent Iran from building nukes.
I fully expect the US to join the war. I believe the current ambiguity is a deliberate invention of the US while they work to move their military assets into position, and as soon as they are ready, the US will start bombing Iran. After that, Iran's leadership must - if they haven't already - harden their hearts, and strike back with no fear, or risk following the path of Libya, Syria, and Iraq, either into either surrender, occupation, or annihilation. Every day where they do not possess a nuke is a day where lives are being lost and cities are being bombed.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
Hey news nerds give it to me straight, how cooked are we?
We don't know yet, we're currently in a bit of a free-fall moment and we haven't hit the ground yet.
Firing 30 cruise missiles at the other two facilities is basically entirely for propaganda purposes, given that Israel has already tried that and not achieved much. We don't know how much damage Fordow has taken; sending only 6 of the bunker busters at it feels like it's more symbolic than wanting to guarantee that the facility is crippled, but the GBU-57 has been basically mythologized at this point by the media so who even fucking knows what it can actually do. It can penetrate [random number between 1-80] meters of rock, [random number between 1-80] meters of reinforced concrete, and [random number between 1-80] meters of the hardest reinforced concrete. If the speculation continued for a few more days, they'd start claiming that they've been enchanted by powerful warlocks or perhaps sorcerers to automatically home in on evil. I have no idea.
The big joke of all this is that Fordow was already evacuated days if not months in advance of enriched uranium and other important things because the US didn't stop fucking talking about bombing it for a week straight so the Iranians had time to make preparations.
The interesting thing from this point on will be what Trump does now. The US media basically seems to be in triumphalist victory mode, which for the reasons I've given above is nonsensical and senior US and Israeli figures know that it's nonsensical and that Iran is still perfectly capable of making nuclear weapons, but if they are nonetheless going to try and sell it as a war-ending victory then that indicates that they know that further US involvement would be a disaster.
As in, if you're saying on television "We did it, we saved the day, we dropped the GBU-57 into Mount Doom and hit Fordo and Dark Lord Khamenei's plan to make nukes has been terminated from now until the end of time!" then it doesn't really make sense to then, 24 hours later, go "You know, this Iranian nuclear threat is really serious. We need to act now to stop it and/or overthrow the Iranian government." Like, that's a blatant contradiction, because that would mean the strike on Fordo failed and you can't stop the Iranian nuclear program in a tidy set of strikes. So we'll see what the government tells the media to do after this.
Anyway, conventionally, I don't think anything has really changed, Iran keeps striking Israel and did so hours ago with a yet higher tier of missile. Iran may or may not strike US bases, I don't really know. I think it's more likely than not, but a response is not certain, especially if damage on Fordo is indeed very limited, because then what's really the point of a big strike other than to uphold deterrence that you may not even be able to establish with the US in the first place? I have immense doubts that Iran would strike the US and then Trump would go "Ah, fair enough, we hit you so you hit us. It's a fair deal folks, I wrote about this in my excellent book, best-seller by the way."
Depends. Do you live within a thousand kilometers of Iran and do you drive a car?
I had a dream today where I was nuked. Hope it's not foreshadowing. The fucked up thing is, on the scale of my nightmares and anxiety inducing dreams, that one didn't even register lmao
Its all fucked, situation is excellent.
to be fair when Mao said that he had a red army but i dont see any of those yet
Here's the answer in the chorus
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: