Image is of Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute a week or so ago.
I didn't really want to keep spotlighting American domestic events as I had assumed that shit would calm down pretty quickly, but it appears that the Trump administration, including Musk, are determined to bring down the empire from the inside.
One of the most important lessons of ruling a country - and especially an empire - is to never, ever believe your own propaganda; and yet now we have neo-Nazi failsons disrupting parts of the imperial apparatus and causing general government mayhem because they actually seem to believe in libertarianism; that the state and the capitalists are somehow in opposition, rather than working in lockstep to maximise profit and boost American hegemony around the world.
I'm not so optimistic as to believe that a national collapse is FOUR DAYS AWAY, like those weird anti-China cranks often speculate - the US has at least a decade or two left even under these conditions. But consider the damage being inflicted in these past couple weeks, and extrapolate that over the next four years. Does any living American political figure possess the competency to halt - or even meaningfully slow - the already ongoing decline? And could they achieve power (or even be allowed to do so) after Trump's term is done?
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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.
The US is so fucked. Here are 7 posts I made in c/news in just the last ~30 minutes.
A Trump megadonor wants the Supreme Court to overturn the landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan which protects the media's ability to aggressively cover public officials.
Trump has plans for “imminent mass layoffs” for up to as many as 200,000 employees hired within the last two years.
Republicans planning ‘deep cuts’ to Medicaid [See body text]
Senate Republicans' opaque budget resolution points in troubling direction. It hides how hides how the $342 billion spending increase (mass deportations etc) would be paid for.
Hospitals could be Congress’ next target as GOP looks to extend Trump’s tax cuts
Trump Tax Cuts Would Cost Between 5 and 11 Trillion Dollars
Senate GOP Proposes $350 Billion for Mass Deportations
We're going to see some Soviet Union style collapse in life expectancy
Covid is already doing that so he's just adding a multiplier bonus
Oh just wait for the bird flu. Good thing the healthcare system recovered from Covid and has plenty of founding! It doesnt? Oh well
I hate this round of Balatro.
Well it looks like milei indeed had some impact on US internal policy
Most influential Argentinian of the 21st century?
He destroyed his country so that he could destroy the US
He is playing 500D tesseract chess to create the Argentine People's Republic
interesting that the efficiency bros want to do this but have no interest in cutting the notoriously overbloated military and police budgets. Almost like this is class warfare or something
Tariffs alone were gonna be bad enough before he pumped the breaks on em. He gets even a fraction of these things off
It's time to do a goddamn revolution in this country
Boris Yeltsin level of gutting via speedrun literally.
I'm going to have to google for synonyms for my go-to words like batshit and insane. This Trump stuff is at least five times as bad and it's getting worse and worse.
Not going to bother to actually do the math and research, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is enough to end world hunger, make the infrastructural changes needed to get M4A off the ground, and put every single unhoused person in the U.S. into social housing (all combined).
End world hunger:
-$37 billion a year until 2030 (https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/how-much-money-would-it-take-to-end-world-hunger/)
House all homeless:
No idea how to estimate the M4A claim but yeah easily enough money to do your other two claims. Ridiculous sum of money spent on nothing other than suffering.
Estimates for M4A we're around 120B/year I think, but subtracting the cost of the current system from that would put it at almost zero because the money the government does pay just goes to the right people and not to insurance execs.
we better hope the accelerationists are correct because he's following that ideology pretty strictly