Image is of the Cuban flag and the Pride flag on the Havana Health Ministry building.
Inspired by a highly upvoted recommendation by @Commiejones@hexbear.net:
We need to kill the Mega Posting Wars meme. It wasn't very funny to start with and now I get the feeling some people are taking it way too seriously. Clogging up the news thread with bullshit just to try to out post the trans mega is just dumb and annoying.
The News Megathread is now under trans martial law:
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Loving trans people on this site and elsewhere is strictly mandatory.
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Posting about the "comment wars" between the trans and news megathreads is now strongly discouraged inside the news megathread. No shame in it - I also recently made jokes about it - but though they were almost always just jokes, it was unrelated to current events and was beginning to feel more like padding the comment count instead of trying to improve the quality of the thread. If you want to boost comments and engagement here, then post articles and analysis!
The COTW (Chemical of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific chemical every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied chemicals. If you've wanted to talk about the chemical or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Chemicals of the Week are Estrogen and Testosterone! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 see a theory of victory for the axis.
Economic collapse doesn’t end Israel.
And maybe they’re suffering “heavy” casualties but heavy means uncomfortable rather than unsustainable. They can sustain these losses.
The closest I can see is that Israel becomes a pariah like South Africa but if they have the US and the EU behind them, they survive.
Tell me how I’m wrong?
Like, their economy retracts by 40% or something crazy and then what happens?
I don’t see Israel defeating the axis but I don’t see how the situation changes from what it is now.
Economic collapse alone might not. Beyond the state of Israel, if there were a unified response by all the resistance factions the US/NATO would certainly come to Israel's defense and a greater regional war would be the result. The resistance must keep their responses below the threshold of western intervention and slowly bleed the entity dry, damaging their economy is just one part of that. You can't have a nation if the people who run your government (the actual bureaucrats) fuck off back to Europe and the nations you rely on for necessary imports refuse to do business with you. The US can't keep the entire nation afloat if the nation stops being functional.
Regarding caasualties, Israel absolutely can't sustain losses like this for another year. Their hospitals are full of casualties, something like one in four casualties are amputees. Much like Ukraine, the combination of people fleeing the conflict to Europe and the US and the massive toll on their active duty military sets them up for extremely hard times.
Check out this lecture Al_Sham posted, she goes into detail about this strategy: https://hexbear.net/comment/5343509
The video is accurate so far as this all benefits Iran but I just don’t buy this argument that Israel is gonna be like “oh shit we lost a lot of money and lost of sense of invincibility, pack it up.”
I don’t see that as the dialectic. Rather I see Israel going joker mode and refounding its national myth on a divine battle for existence.
Like, the attritional costs are real but they just don’t seem existential.
Look at Ukraine. Their economy can crater and they can keep fighting, their manpower pool can reach the point of functional exhaustion and they can keep fighting, half the population can flee and they can keep fighting. And the threat perceived by Ukraine was never as existential as the threat perceived by Israel.
Ethno-nationalist populations convinced they’re in a fight for survival simply don’t throw in the towel. Instead they double down, harden up, accept heavier losses, impose military rule, and start directing the militarily significant parts of the economy.
Ultimately Iran benefits from boiling the frog, that much is true. But it just seems like a leap of hopeful faith to think this is actually an existential threat to Israel meanwhile Israel will perceive it as an existential threat and harden up, double down, and stop counting losses.
Like… they’re more ideologically committed to Israel than Ukraine is to the Donbas and so why posit they’ll surrender more easily?
Something else needs to be in play to make this a dialectic of existential collapse rather than a dialectic of militarized ethno-nationalist fascism.
Like the arguments in the lecture… sure all of these do benefit Iran but are they truly existential for Israel?
Population collapse. This leaves a more committed or optionless core behind and the diaspora will still be pro-Israel.
Economic collapse. This will hurt for sure but existential? They’ll start centrally directing militarily important parts of the economy and the recent diaspora will support them with remittances. The US will lend-lease them what they need to not collapse. Worst case here their economy starts to look like Lebanon but Lebanon isn’t armed by the US.
Asymmetric cost of war. No doubt Israel can’t sustain the cost of iron dome and Patriot missiles but they’ll adapt. Even the US at the height of its power couldn’t bomb a population into submission. Why will Israel prove different? They’ll start just taking the hits and save the interceptors for important targets and likely they will find a way to make cheaper defense systems and close the asymmetry.
Economic blockade. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are de facto allies and dogs of the US empire so Israel is not blockaded.
This all weakens Israel dramatically vis a vis Iran but they still overpower the nearby enemies and Israel adjusts to losses and becomes less loss averse, descends into military government.
Like, the existential collapse argument seems to be “their economy implodes, their mythology becomes unmoored, yada yada yada, everyone leaves” and it seems like a leap of faith.
This feels a little strange when history is littered with the corpses of settler-colonial states that were backed by major imperial powers - which were actually STRONGER back then than they are today.
Like, let's go down the checklist here:
Can Israel be invaded and conquered from a neighbouring country? No, almost certainly not, without some dramatic changes in the stances of those countries (a political collapse in Egypt and Jordan). Hezbollah does have forces that are designed to infiltrate and invade Israel but even with 100,000+ men, it isn't enough to hold the entire country, including the cities; only a substantial part of the north. Therefore, Israel will not end via a tank parade through Tel Aviv.
Can Israel be blockaded into collapse? Yes. Yemen has demonstrated that naval blockades are relatively easy to establish even against the most powerful navy on the planet. Hezbollah also has anti-ship capabilities. Israel can still be supplied via road, which would be trickier to disrupt, but road transportation is insufficient to supply a country the size of Israel with anything but the barest essentials. Civilian airports and the planes that would carry goods in are prime targets and could be disrupted to the point of uselessness. Ending Israel this way is therefore plausible, but will mean a regional war which would kill hundreds of thousands of people and so should be avoided if better options are available, or unless Israel starts that war itself.
Can Israel be engineered into an internal political collapse? It seems probable. Even without a full blockade, Israeli society is economically suffering greatly, and internal refugees from the north will put increasing pressure on the resources and social cohesion of the country. A lack of results in the war and external pressure, as well as the fleeing of settlers who have foreign citizenship, could eventually boil over into sufficient anger to topple the state, whether from a group of disaffected Israelis, or something more like a palace coup. We've already seen massive protests in Israel and government disunity. The issue is, of course, that most Israelis are genocidal fascists who don't disagree with the government on what to do (brutally murder every Muslim within a thousand miles), merely how to do it. But we have seen this pattern before - one example is Algeria, in which the OAS became angry at the French government for not fighting Algeria well enough, and tried to assassinate De Gaulle and others because of it. Algeria still achieved independence.