Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
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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.
re: twitch banning israel
~~Twitch must have a (corporate) good reason for the ban. They almost certainly didn't do it out of a moral responsibility. (prove me wrong twitch, i dare you)~~
~~I think it's likely because they've recognized a significant algorithm abuse (bot/shill) campaign, which could constitute as fraud or laundering due to the monetized nature of the platform. Spotify has had a lot of issues over the years which you can read about. If there was a campaign and a large part of it was coming from a specific subset of IPs, it would be a crude but potentially effective strategy to just pull the plug on them.~~
~~It sounds like existing users are still allowed, though, which pretty clearly indicates that they wanted to recognize a legitimate pre-existing israeli userbase (and which will likely prevent major retention loss after a few months of protests).~~
~~If that's the case it's kind of funny blowback. But I worry about what it means if a bot/shill campaign reached twitch's threshold for concern right now. Psyops tend to shortly precede physical ops, and if I'm not mistaken the whole world is waiting for Israel's next move.~~
~~edit: some people are saying this policy has been around for several months now so take that into consideration with my last paragraph~~
I take it back! I take it all back.
u/sewer_rat_420 reports that the policy has been active since 10/7/23. Like many others, I saw the big reaction and believed the comments saying it was new. Because that would make sense, right? Too much sense apparently. This is a clown world after all.
I'm filing this one under "lessons learned." Sorry for propagating misinfo.
And since I totally, definitely learned my lesson, here is a source for it being an old policy and more details about it: https://xcancel.com/TwitchSupport/status/1848191418377830708
It's funny because Ethan Klein for a few days has been in the middle of a campaign to label twitch has an anti-semitic platform for, among other things, not banning hasan or frogan
Bezos going full anti-Zionist sure would be a twist
I posted my comment after getting a good laugh at a subreddit having a meltdown. They were saying the same thing - twitch is anti-semitic, hasan this asmon that, etc. It just sounds so outlandish that twitch would take a political stance that it makes me think something is forcing their hand. Like, surely they weighed the cost of the guaranteed backlash, right?
edit: the policy was old. i was judging it from the wrong context. parent comment edited
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I think its just a pre-emptive moderation move. zionist love their hate speech, Palestinians need to show the world what is really happening to them (atrocities) idf love showing off their war crimes. Easer to just block them all than try to moderate.
It definitely could be, it just seems abnormal to me from what (little) I know of their moderation practices.
edit: looks like you were right about it being pre-emptive, although they actually did it last year and people just rediscovered it
Have we considered that there is a separate reason the entity doesnt want anyone from the region creating new accounts to stream video? Palestinians share the same pool of IPs
I doubt it's some kind of 400IQ play, but it is weird that this has apparently been the case for about a year and no one has said anything about it until today.
Yeah thats another thing. Its weird that this would have flown under the radar since at least May?
My 👁️ senses are making me suspicious that this is a coordinated effort with the Ethan Klein bullshit/descent into madness that is going on right now. The "simpler" scenario is that this just getting brought up again because of the H3 thing and has more traction, but given that this is also a direct attempt to deplatform Hasan and anyone seen as pro-Palestine on Twitch, I can't rule out actual hasbara being involved. Then you have the involvement of Destiny, who was in Israel and was representing the Israeli side in a "debate" with Norm Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani.
Definitely it is just getting brought up again at this point because of ethan. Meamwhile ethan is still losing his shit over Fr0gan (right now because she said she hopes veterans get ptsd lmao) and doesnt give a shit about the vile islamophobic hatred going her way - even though this whole thing supposedly started with ethan receiving targeted antisemitic harassment
I had not really considered that but why now?
However, I had not heard that this policy (according to another comment) existed for several months until just now. That will probably change my outlook at least somewhat, but for now I haven't had time to really process it.
edit: It was actually a year old so that changes things even more lol
Twitch now claims that they have had this same policy since oct 7 2023
You know that does sound vaguely familiar. Thanks for the info!
Lathe idea: Bezos has been getting into the manosphere and watching Andrew Tate, and now he’s getting swole, converting to Islam and banning Israel from all his products
I had no idea Tate converted to Islam.
It's really interesting and full of twists and spins and all that, but I think I'd like off this rollercoaster now. Please and thank you.
Is there any proof they actually did this? Didn’t just one or two people get an error screen? Has there been any announcement from Twitch?
I switched my VPN to a server in Tel Aviv and it wouldn't let me make a new account on Twitch. Switched to Ireland and it would lol.
EDIT: Apparently it also blocked new users from Palestinian IPs :(
My first guess is Palestine's internet is routed through/controlled by israel like every other utility
I think most internet providers in Palestine is routed through Israel? Probably only some of them are routed through Jordan and Egypt.
I would assume they have to be
I saw so many people in the reddit thread acting like it was a really ironic thing that Palestinian IPs were getting blocked too, as if the point of doing this was to help Palestinians somehow? Also, in the gamer mind being blocked from the hate speech live porn platform is comparable to being burned alive apparently.
The thread on the LivestreamFails sub or whatever? What a display of bad faith rhetoric that was.
And yeah that was one of the big strategies, to pretend this was supposed to support Palestine somehow. It's fucking twitch - they don't care about supporting anything except themselves lol
I don't think there is proof exactly, but several users have said they're blocked from signups when VPNing through Israel (I haven't tried), and a supposed screenshot exists of twitch support confirming one person's ineligibility over email. That seems like pretty convincing anecdotal evidence to me but you can judge it for yourself.
Wise of you to ask.
edit: apparently it was not at all new and signups weren't totally restricted (according to twitch it had something to do with email verifications? the link is in the parent comment). there was a lot of confusion around it and, again, it was wise of you to question the accuracy