Image is from this article, of protestors in Mexico tearing down a steel fence.
While military, economic, and covert pressure on Venezuela and nearby countries in South America proper continues to mount, a similar process is occurring against Mexico, currently under the leadership of the very popular Sheinbaum, who has generally followed the footsteps of AMLO in terms of policies.
While figures in the Trump administration have made statements to the effect of wishing to bomb Mexican territory, internal pressure within Mexico is rather hard to generate when the government is doing generally positive things for people. As such, protests - comically denoted "Gen Z protests" despite young people being a vanishingly small proportion - have arisen in Mexico, very obviously astroturfed by pro-US and anti-Sheinbaum interests. The first protest, on November 15th, gathered less than 20,000 people, while the second, on November 20th, gathered perhaps 200. Article headlines suggesting that Mexico was "on the verge of collapse" have proven rather sensational and wishcast-y.
While it's easy to poke fun at these farces (I certainly am), it's important to keep in mind that soft coups have long been part of the American strategy in Latin America, and with unlimited money and many resources to throw at a project, even incompetent forces can eventually create enough chaos that it can make the ruling president or party feel forced to resign. Such eventualities are certainly not inevitable, and even weak states can provide enough resistance to force the US to try a hard coup instead, with outright bombing campaigns and covert military operations. Cuba has provided perhaps the best example in the western hemisphere of how such plots can be subverted with enough national support (e.g. the hundreds of times the CIA tried to kill/maim Castro, plus the Bay of Pigs debacle), but you do have to be willing to take extraordinary measures to do this - the sorts of measures figures like Chile's Allende did not take in the 1970s, and the measures Venezuela's Maduro appears to be taking right now. We shall see what path Sheinbaum takes.
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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 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.
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.
World Socialist Web Site to launch Socialism AI
Yup I'm sure these guys have definitely solved the problem with LLMs and it won't just end up leaving people with an even more confused idea of socialist theory!
hear me out an LLM that praises trotsky the same way grok praises elon could be funny
trotsky was a world class piss drinker
Until he took a piss axe to the head.
"trotsky actually lived, trotsky had the thickest and most communist skull in the world so the ice piss axe got lodged in his skull and then the assasin fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness. trostky was a true humanist though and forced the ice pick through the rest of his own skull so that the poor lost stalinist and his entire family wouldnt be executed for his failure. trostky then rose from the dead after 24 hours."
This is how we got to have Kommunist Fried Chicken.
why yes! Trotsky's life of overcoming hardship would make him world champion at the insufferable idiot competition. Just replace Elon's "near-bankruptcies" and "rocket explosions" with "moral bankruptcies" and "party explosions"
No thanks, i don't need a Trotskyist bot compulsively complaining about Stalinists and the Stalinist bureaucracy in every piece of writing no matter how unrelated the topic.
But what if it also complained about Marcyites?
Have a house mate who does this anyway, I don't need to burn the Amazon to do so as well, thank you very much
Reminds me of the bit where someone proposed splitting up das kapital to a twitter thread in order to be more engaging and dynamic.
In this fast paced economy, don't you want to learn how the value of your labor is being taken from you by an anthropomorphic blob that answers to no one?
Honestly this is fine. Sometimes I just want a quick look up on why something is good or bad. I just did it for why I should dislike Camus, so I read most of a jacobin article, but I would've been ok with an llm answer that reads all of jacobin and just tells me how much of a pied-noir he was
That's the one, their article on camus was great
The Jacobin article was written by a human being who did research (it's Jacobin, so probably a hitlerite, but still an actual human). The Trotskyist AI response may or may not be a hallucination.
Other objections aside, that implies it can and will actually do that
oh they automated their pedo apology with a slop machine then?
Instead of the grok South African white genocide thing, every answer pivots into going off about how Harvey Weinstein did nothing wrong