Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they're in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn't substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it's a complex pattern).
With Corbyn's defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don't Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel's genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
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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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
I don’t think the news mega has ever successfully predicted a major event, we’re like the Jim Cramer of world affairs
We predicted that Russia will win the war slowly via attrition, they have. We predicted they would take Mariupol and Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and they have. We predicted that Armenia would keep losing chunks of its territory to the western-aligned Azeris, but for some reason that's Russia's fault. We predicted that Ukraine/CIA did Nordstream, and they did. We predicted that Crocus attack in Moscow was likely Ukrainian intel or CIA backed, and it is coming out now that the terrorists have all kinds of financial and organizational ties to Ukraine. We predicted that there would be ISIS and Al Qaeda sore losers from Syria fighting in Ukraine alongside their Nazi brother-in-arms, and there are.
So do you mean we don't predict acute random events (like the time and place of a terrorist attack)? Because we generally predict history quite accurately in the big picture.
I mean, that’s all stuff that anyone with half a functioning brain should be able to predict (so, not liberals).
Predicting when and if a regional war or WWIII and the nuclear holocaust will begin is a bit more involved, and basically every other week we all go “it’s happening any day now, for sure this time!”
I beg to differ. I remember a few of us spending a lot of time during the first 6-9 months of the war reassuring people that no, Russia isn’t going collapse, no, Russia’s economy is not failing, no, Russia isn’t losing just because they are retreating from Kharkiv etc. just so people can see the outcome today as we were predicting then, all based on materialist analysis.
I think Hexbear in general really came around to the current position that most are holding today, after about 9 months or so when it became clear that Russia wasn’t failing, just as people have been predicting on the news mega.
My lesson from all of this is that propaganda works on all of us (no matter how resilient you think you are to it), and when you find your faith shaken (which happened to me numerous times), only with theory and methodically applying them can one start to have a clearer understanding of what the heck is actually going on, and through that, see a path forward without falling for the propaganda like many others. It is a scientific approach to seeing the world.
'we all go' ?
I see like 2 or 3 doomers saying it, hardly a representative sample. If anything, I doom in the other direction, opining that China and Iran get walked all over and are too obsequious and won't ever do anything cool
I used “we” as I am guilty of doing this once or twice. The dangers of optimism
The world has to be lucky every single time to avoid nuclear war. We only have to guess luckily once
Iran tends to work behind the scenes. Western media spin this to say that Iran is a paper tiger that relies on so-called proxies to do its dirty work. This reminds me of how the Dutch IT technician who released Stuxnet died from an "accident" two weeks later after immediately fleeing from Iran. It's pretty obvious Iranian intelligence hunted the dude down and made an example of him.
Overall, it makes little sense for Iran to strike when the US and Israel are in a state of readiness for an Iranian retaliatory strike. Better to wait until they let their guard down.
Slapping a big red button on my soundboard that makes an awoooga sound and screaming "Ansarallah is a buy! Buy buy buy buy!" as confetti falls around me
On that Nate Silver grindset