Image is allegedly of the note Trump wrote while editing a speech while on the way back from the G20 summit.
The top Russian-Chinese agent, Donald Trump, has decided that the pace of dedollarization and the decline of American financial hegemony is going too slowly. He has therefore decided to put tariffs on everybody; from America’s largest trading partners to uninhabited islands. In the process, he is trying to create an autarkic America. Jokes aside, interpretation and analysis of this has ranged across a wide spectrum. I think we can broadly agree that the most idiotic are the “true believers”; those that actually believe Trump’s every word, and that this will somehow bring back American manufacturing and whatever other inane promises he has made.
However, there is a much more interesting debate. The first camp are those who believe Trump is acting as an inadvertent accelerationist due to his lack of understanding about how the world economy and dollar hegemony functions (and that this will subsequently ensure that countries flock to China instead). The second camp are those who believe that Trump does know what he’s doing, at least to a certain extent, and that the effective result of this period of madness will be countries kowtowing to the United States; renegotiating trade deals to be even more in favor of the US in order to get tariffs reduced. There’s even a yet more cynical camp who believes that in fact, this entire trade war is just theater for further national wealth redistributions from poor to rich; that all these monumental international trade wars are more of a sideshow. To quote the linked article: “[…] out of the mountain of tariffs that threaten to turn into a global trade war will emerge the mouse of further tax cuts.”
I’m not embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea which one of these is the closest model to reality. We’re in new economic and political ground, and even if the tariffs are quickly renegotiated and/or dropped, the impacts will continue to reverberate around the world for years. I’m sure we’ll debate this for months to come here, though!
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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.
https://x.com/gbrew24/status/1909236629081911627
https://xcancel.com/gbrew24/status/1909236629081911627
the style of military campaign that we invested hundreds of billions of dollars into and made our main focus due to its relative inability to be directly countered by insurgent forces is no longer working
let’s instead try the style of military campaign which we have repeatedly and embarrassingly eaten shit doing every single time we try it, up to and including the present day
we have to do this instead of not dropping thousands of tons of bombs onto literal infants, we have literally no other choice
Why the fuck do they think this will work? The last “ground offensive” ended when Yemen blew up some Saudi oil processing facilities and the Saudis realised their infinite money machine was now threatened. Since then (2019), Yemen’s missile and drone capabilities have gotten so good that they’ve unilaterally shut down the Red Sea for shipping. What the fuck do they think will happen when they turn that machine back to Saudi oil targets???
It is 2015. The air offensive against Ansarallah backed by the US war machine is failing.
It is 2025. The air offensive against Ansarallah backed by the US war machine is failing.
Ah, so the old Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq style of warfare. Cool cool cool. We’ve had such great success in the last 20 years with that.
Literally another countries with lots of mountains and an organized group.
Lmfao now this would be a fucking mess
The initial plan, according to the CNN article linked in the tweet, is to just take over the port city of Hodeidah, not to overthrow Ansarallah itself.
The CNN article sounds a bit outdated compared to the latest developments on the ground though. Last ballistic missiles launched at Israel was over a week ago.
Outdated info or not, the US does not have a good track record when it comes to “limited engagements”
I don’t think there’ll be any US boots on the ground aside from forward observers for airstrikes and spies, (who likely are already on the ground now), but yes, the idea of a limited engagement is silly.
I assumed the spies and spotters were the same informants, but agreed
this will ultimately collapse the Aden govt. do they have the will to convince their devastated civilian class into becoming yet more cannon fodder for the KSA?
Unless they do it themselves, it’s doomed to fail. Even if AnsarAllah is “defeated” in Hodeidah, and the Red Sea campaign enters the past tense, the US is openly declaring it has not learned from countless proxy campaigns in West Asia.
lol, gulf state puppets resume that and they can say good bye to their oil refineries like last time.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/drone-attack-saudi-arabia-yemen-houthis-1.5283837
If They’re smart they’ll save one of those drone attacks for the Jeddah Corniche GP circuit a few days before F1 lands. That would kill their chance at hosting the one sporting event that the KSA has effectively owned for years.
They did that already in 2022. Fire was visible from the Jeddah circuit during a Formula One practice session. Saudi Arabian Grand Prix is still happening despite that.
Trump’s two month “deadline” for Iran also coincidentally covers the two Grand Prixs taking place in the Middle East, Bahrain this weekend, and Saudi Arabia next weekend on April 20th. So I would expect that any escalation from the USA would come only after April 20.
the 2022 attack didn’t impact the race because the drivers were assured that the refinery strike wasn’t targeting them, or at least some other guarantee of their safety. MBS probably gave some personal promises to that effect too.
If the Houthis even did a symbolic encroachment on the airspace of the Jeddah rather than a refinery nearby, it would be enough to spook at least one or two drivers into refusing. The driver’s union (GPDA, which isn’t technically a union but works the same way in practice) should be stubborn enough to kill the whole event if a threat was timed right.