Image is of the aftermath of an Israeli bombing of Beirut in 2006.
We are now almost one year into the war and genocide in Gaza. Despite profound hardship, the Gazan Resistance continues its battles against the enemy, entirely undeterred. Despite Israeli proclamations throughout 2024 that they have cleared out Hamas from various places throughout Gaza, we still see regular attacks and ambushes against Zionist forces. Just today (Monday), Al Qassam fighters ambushed and destroyed another convoy of Israeli vehicles. The predictions early on in the war were that Israel would defeat Hamas in mere months, needing only until December, then January, and so on. This has proven very much untrue. Israel is stuck in the mud; unable to destroy their enemy due to their lack of knowledge about the "Gaza Metro" and, of course, a lack of actual fighting skill, given how many times I've seen Zionists getting shot while they gaze wistfully out of windows.
The same quagmire will occur in Lebanon, only considerably worse. Both Nasrallah and Sinwar possess a similar strategy of luring Zionist forces onto known, friendly territory, replete with traps and ambushes, to bleed them dry of equipment, manpower, and the will to continue fighting. The scale of the invasion could fall anywhere on the spectrum from "very limited" - more of a series of raids on Hezbollah positions than truly trying to occupy land - to a total invasion which would seek to permanently take control of Southern Lebanon. Neither is likely to destroy, or even substantially diminish Hezbollah's fighting abilities. This is not wishful thinking: Hezbollah has convincingly defeated Israel twice before in its history, pushing them from their territory, and both times Hezbollah had almost no missiles and a limited supply of other equipment, relying on improvisation as often as not. The Hezbollah of 2024 is an entirely different organization to that of the early 2000s.
Attempts to drive wedges between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon are also unlikely to succeed. Hezbollah is not just a military force, it is extremely interlinked into various communities throughout Lebanon, drawing upon those communities to recruit soldiers. Throughout its history, it has provided education, healthcare, reconstruction, and dozens of other services one would attribute to a state. Amal Saad's recent suggestion of using "quasi-state actor" as a more respectful replacement for the typical "non-state actor" seems advisable. And the decentralized command structures, compartmented leadership, strong succession planning, and aforementioned community ties almost entirely neutralizes the effectiveness of assassinations. Hezbollah's Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem has confirmed that Hezbollah's path has been set by Nasrallah, and his martyrdom will not stop nor even pause their efforts. Additionally, he confirmed that despite the recent attacks by Israel which nominally focussed on destroying missile depots, Hezbollah's supply of weapons has not been degraded, and they are still only using the minimum of their capabilities.
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 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.
I hope to god that the Chineses will not make the same mistake that the russians and iranians did and entertain negotiations and peace talks with the west in condition of them backing off.
I used to think otherwise but as i've grown older i've come to understand that most of the time the only way that people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their fingers. China's going to need to get burned quite a few times, just like Russia and Iran, before they really understand who they're dealing with. Honestly the only country that has always understood exactly who the West is and how one must deal with them is the DPRK. Everyone else has to learn the hard way, sometimes many times over.
It’s not that easy when you have a country with a huge population and so much of your industries have been geared towards producing goods and services for Western consumers in exchange if their currency.
The only way China could have avoided this fate was to radically transition its economy towards a domestic consumption one back during 2009 global recession, but instead most of the stimulus money (8 trillion yuan) went into real estate speculation and infrastructure building because nobody wanted to invest in the real sector, and this is what we end up today with local governments running out of money and a property crisis dragging down the financial sector and local government finances.
It’s always a hard choice to make. Do you go with the short term pain for long term gain, or do you drag out your gains for as long as possible while praying that the inevitable pain will never come? Do you build a more sustained economic development or do you want quick poverty alleviation to improve the lives of many millions but with more risks down the road?
It’s not a switch you can just turn on and off. It takes many years of planning and restructuring your economy. The global economy especially that of US and China is simply far too intertwined to do anything fundamental. While the US relies on China for consumer goods, it also ties China deep into its own highly unstable capitalist structure.
I wonder if people just think "oh well the us has cheated and betrayed everyone else in history but i'm built different".
We need to just start mailing Xi a hundred print outs of Kwame Ture's " the united state's has no conscious" quote every day.
deleted by creator
Still too early to tell (with unforeseen blowbacks and all), but the most significant events over the past couple weeks outside of the Middle East, with the Fed lowering rate and China opening up its capital market to invite foreign investors to save its economy (the stock and property market, clearly the most important part of the economy), I think the US-China front will be stable for a while.
Meanwhile, the US will absolutely use this brief opportunity to screw the Middle East.
deleted by creator
You are getting a bit too comfortable with your own doomerism and you end up commenting straight up anti-china clickbait YT video thumbnails.
Over the most meek QE of all time thats just designed to make financial actors and the upper quintile a bit more comfortable temporarily and numberinos to further up by like +0.5% YoY in 2024 Q3 and 2025 Q1 and Q2 . In order absorb some of the negative side effects of the economic restructuring and deleveraging.
If they didnt do nothing and GDP growth came at like 4.2% instead of 5% and consumption growth was meek for a couple of years (because consumption in China is still heavily affected by the sentiment and economic activity of the property owning and market investing upper ~15%, and that will a while to change) you would also doom. Idk you are Michael Pettis pilled and you want the CPC to just throw people money in direct stimulus which will have horrible multipliers that will largely go directly into savings in the current enviromernt
lol I don’t follow any of this Western “China watcher” bullshit.
I have made clear before that my analysis is primarily influenced by 贾根良 and 左大培, both prominent Marxist economists in the Chinese academia who have written about this subject for at least two decades. I trust their analyses more than any of the lib discourse I see on Chinese economic forums.
I have also made it very clear that this approach of combining Marx (capital formation and class struggle) + MMT (finance) + List (global trade) pioneered by 贾根良 has appeared to work very well in my own analysis. Not saying it is perfect but they cover each other’s blind spots very well. I’m not saying I’m an expert or anything, but at least I try to learn from the people (actual Marxist economists) who know what they’re doing.
Could you link me of any commentary on the recent QE and chinese moves by said chinese Marxist academia or anyone that shares your influences and views that even remotely reaches a conclusion of "this is China opening up its capital market to invite foreign investors to save its economy" .Official CN gov or central bank statements of anything related to finance and any market move or intervention they make has literally been the exact same language and buzzwords wise for the last 30 years. It means less than nothing on its own and has basicaly no correlation to the actual goals, motivatiions, trends and dynamics in Chinese politics, regulations and finance
I assume you can read Chinese?
Jia Genliang called it back in February (quoting his own articles from 2018 and 2019 during the initial waves of Trump’s trade war!) that the true objective of imposing tariffs on China was to force China to open up its capital markets for foreign capital to flood into. Chinese libs fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Also, you shouldn’t need to read about “expert” commentaries once you have learned the tools, you should be able to perform your own analysis. I’m not an expert or anything but I have more confidence in my own than anything I read on Twitter/Western social media. The only good thing about these commentaries is that sometimes they have interesting data that are not readily available to us.
I dont read chinese but google translate is surprisingly competent nowadays so the article is perfectly understandable.
Its an interesting and coherent perspective but im not gonna lie, you have basicaly repeated or paraphrased almost every single part of this article multiple times in your comments in the last few months. So if i thought that these general opinions and analysis you hold cover me and are convincing enough to substansiate these conclusions you throw around over this particular round of specific Chinese financial policies i wouldnt have asked what i asked in my previous comment. Either way i think i have been pretty specific in my comments in the last few days on the particular motivations and context of these measures and how at the end of the day they are much less concerned with foreign capital and investments and much more so reactive countermeasures to a delicate economic balance of domestic financial investment, consumption and prices during a period of dangerous deleveraging and restructuring that would have happened no matter US posture and strategies.
The connection of the article to all that boils down to: "Does the obvious 50 year constant that Wall street and western finance wants China to open up its capital markets and finance (a lot) more mean that China can never ever use even mild QE or take any measures that have that as a secondary superficial effect without it being "China falling into the trap and strategy of the US and its over" ? Can it never just be the arguably correct temporary tool in the hand of the Central bank and chinese regulators given a partciular domestic situation? Even if it helps China better navigate a period and challenge the US would wish it wouldnt
also interested
I responded here but it’s in Chinese, so if you can read that’s fine, if not I’m too lazy to translate atm
ty for sharing, appreciate it comrade
Jia Genliang
Is this one of the economists you're referring to?
Yes, excellent primer. He was also the first to translate Michael Hudson’s work into Chinese years ago.
A lot of the Chinese liberal economic framework today is based on Justin Lin Yifu’s New Structural Economics, and its fingerprints are everywhere in recent policies.