Image is of Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro walking together at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas in 2022, sourced from this article.
Ordinarily, I avoid straying into the American domestic situation, but the government shutdown appears to be continuing into increasingly harmful territory. If the situation is not resolved, soon tens of millions of Americans will lose food assistance, and already millions of federal employees are furloughed or are working without pay. To those not in the know, this situation has essentially stemmed from the Democrats refusing to sign off on the Republicans’ plan to substantially shrink Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which would eventually result in tens of millions losing healthcare coverage and tens if not hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
To be clear, though, the Democrats have not exactly been paragons of healthcare: they not only oppose plans to make affordable healthcare a right (in defiance of wide popular opinion), but also do their part to maximize suffering. Biden’s policies during the pandemic ensured at least one million people died, and millions of children lost public healthcare coverage. We may never know the true toll, as the US decided that simply ceasing to report on a problem means that the problem no longer exists.
In other news, over the last couple weeks, the US has expanded their hostility against Venezuela by also including Colombia in their ire, and particularly the left-leaning leader, Petro. Both countries are now experiencing major economic and covert pressure by the US to try and cause regime change. The US has deployed an aircraft carrier to the waters near Venezuela and is conducting a military training operation with Trinidad and Tobago, which Venezuela has warned may be the prelude to the long-awaited attack.
Additionally, the US is attempting to combat Chinese geopolitical interest in central America and the Caribbean by carrying out digital attacks and launching pressure campaigns against Chinese and pro-Chinese countries and organizations. Given China’s enormous economic weight, if central America were to break all ties with China, it would be a catastrophe for them; such decisions would only be made by outright compradors, and the resulting economic problems would make their reigns unpopular and, hopefully, brief.
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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 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.
Its a downhill spiral from here
Unpopular opinion, but I want the US to explode into civil war so it fucking dies faster.
May the world finally know peace from the death and destruction the US inflicts on us.
There has to be two sides for there to be a civil war. Liberals are sitting around waiting for someone to save them, and they have eschewed guns, anyways. There is no meaningful left in the US, and I’m pretty sure we would tear ourselves apart deciding who to support if there were an officers coup/mutiny against Trump. It’s going to look more like Nazi Germany than a civil war.
The two sides would be tech oligarchs and Christian nationalists. 🫠
It seems like they are on the same side at the moment. Not sure what the split would be.
One fault line I’ve seen is that the Christian nationalists want to severely limit work visas and foreign student programs, and that’s bad for tech. They’re united as long as the economy shambles along, but eventually the need for skilled tech workers will conflict with the ethnic cleansing campaign.
The tech people are the same people complaining about non-white men stealing the spots in college that are “rightfully theirs” due to DEI. There’s no distance between them and the only people that care about work visas in the US are the ones where someone needs to be in US office, which, outside of servicing something physical, is increasingly less important. None of these tech guys care about whether the work gets done by an Indian engineer in San Francisco or Hyberbad, as long as the work gets done and they pay as little as possible for it.
What about a race war then?
I mean the whites started it
I’m not opposed to it outside of the whole “I live here and will fundamentally have my life altered in significant ways” but the nuclear stockpile alone is enough to worry me. There are thousands of them all around the country and I have no idea what would happen in the event of a collapse
Also, the primary American facility for building and maintaining nuclear weapons is Pantex in Texas.
Maybe it’s possible anyone who knows how to actually use, unlock, etc. them gets killed or purged by Trumpist fascists in the civil war.
I’ve always thought about what the Second American Civil War would look like right now, especially since I’ve been heavily playing HOI4 and The Fire Rises Mod, which starts it around 2022 after either Biden or Trump wins.
In an actual realistic scenario, as well as with 2025 context, and since Biden won in our timeline, in 2020, and the whole country didn’t really explode because of COVID and no ‘Saudi Civil War’, I’ve been thinking if nothing else happens except just general US collapsing in on itself, won’t NATO intervene? The U.N…? Depending on how the frontlines solidify or who gets the nukes, the chaos is probably not going to be in our (leftist) favour, since in this hypothetical, ‘militias’ would start forming, and they’d likely strike first, getting them the advantage. Then the whole ‘who’s leading the liberals?’ question as well, they could join with us out of necessity but we need to either radicalize them or eventually have to push back on their insistence on capitalism, maybe it’s just me or something but SocDems (DSA, remnants of Democrats) vs. Far-Left Radicals (MLs, Anarchists, etc.) is a likely contentious area maybe after it’s all done.
IDK, I’m just speaking without any research in the area, I thought it was a fun hypothetical.
Chaos is chaos. There’s no saying what things could look like after the end of a protracted struggle
The Fire Rises mod creators think red guard of texas arent all just feds lol
Yeah there needs to be like a dedicated marxist on their team to fact-checking if it even makes remotely amount of sense the factions they put (at least the leftist ones). For the rightist ones, my opinion is that you’ll probably like to fight off more than just like the libs or establishment conservatives and those weird alt-right factions that cropped up (the NSM, PF, Atomwaffen, Confeferate Movement, etc.) are more interesting. Though I’ve heard that they’re more ‘biased’ to glorifying the right-wing paths and are more neutral on leftist paths, though it’s just a reddit post, and I haven’t touched any right-wing (at least, not fascist) paths to confirm this.
I find a bit close to slander the way TNO and fires rises “modifies” aka misrepresents actual existing people. But anyway I doubt they really wanted to do a realistic scenario, and more a memey war box simulator, so “whack” beliefs are usually more popular, and those whack beliefs are more common on the far right, the far left usually only gets le evil red-brown tankie and wholesome succdem fairy godmother.
True, it’s picking and choosing what vaguely exists in real life and fitting them to the scenario, even if it doesn’t make sense. For example: The PatSoc path involving Caleb. We all know they’re like, not that much popular, coherent or if push comes to shove, cooperative with other leftists. But in the game, you can do the ‘Jacobin’ path and somehow none of the other parties (PSL, CPUSA - DSA, Anarchists) have anything to say about it and you can just… lobby their support or rally left unity and they’ll totally support the government even though there’s fundamental difference in, for example, how everyone else view social issues like LGBTQIA+ rights compared to them.
So, in that game, the available (for now) communist American paths boil down to:
“Jacobins” or PatSocs led by Caleb and the CPI/ACP “Octoberists” or MLs led by Riva and the PSL “Neosocialists” or SocDems led by Salazar and the radical elements of the DSA “Anarchists” or AnComs ‘led’ by Bray
I think only the PSL makes sense here. CPUSA should be represented here somewhere (even as part of a coalition with the DSA, since in the paths they’re supposed to be the 'Bill of rights socialism type). I’m not sure if the leaders for the SocDems or AnComs make sense, and their portrayal in certain aspects is… well… I was going to write it down but I think y’all should just see the wiki and scroll down to the ‘country paths’ to see how they’ll portray the PSL or the DSA in how they do ‘communism’.
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