A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is from this Bloomberg article, depicting world oil inventories plunging towards the operational floor at which pipelines and refineries cease operating, which is expected to occur in September at current rates.

A pretty short preamble below, in spoiler tags.

summary

The conflict continues to be kept at a relatively low level despite Iran’s fiery encounters with US destroyers. I think it’s only becoming increasingly obvious that the US is trying to cobble together some major clandestine operation mixing special forces, the air force, and naval destroyers to either seize Iranian uranium, take control of Iranian seaports, or both. Given a) how the Istafan op went, b) further Iranian preparations around sensitive sites, and c) a seeming strengthening of Iranian air defense around the Persian Gulf (multiple drones and manned aircraft have squawked emergency codes and potentially been shot down over the last few weeks), I find it difficult to imagine this operation fulfilling its objective, and even if did somehow work, why the removal of uranium would necessitate Iran ending the blockade and the war. On that note, I’ve seen reports that Iran is saying that if the US attacks their oil tankers again, they will resume firing on US military bases.

Additionally, Aragchi has stated that not only has Iran’s missile/launcher stockpiles not gone down from pre-conflict, it has actually increased by 20%. This is unsurprising given the total war that Iran is now in; all resources within reason must now be funnelling towards drone and missile production.

Atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are continuing. The toll that FPV drones are taking on the common Zionist soldiery are quickly becoming apparent, as we are receiving ever-increasing amounts of footage of vehicles and gatherings of soldiers being struck by Hezbollah’s drones. The casualty situation is, as expected, being hidden, but any kind of serious occupation of even the border villages of southern Lebanon (let alone up to the Litani) seems unsustainable.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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 the Zionists’ 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.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

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.

  • Tervell [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    85·
    18 days ago

    https://xcancel.com/AnalyticaCamil1/status/2054344629521097101

    NYT reporting on classified U.S. intelligence assessments of Iranian missile capacity reiterates that they maintained 70% of their missiles and launchers but adds that 90% of their underground storage and launch facilities are also still active. Iran had designed is missile program with the acknowledgement of not being able to protect its airspace and relied on hardened underground “missile cities” to compensate. U.S. and Israeli attacks apparently disabled the entrances to some of these facilities and hit surface buildings. But as many observed at the time the attacks were failing to actually penetrate the underground facilities where the operations were carried out and missiles kept in storage. Most problematically for a renewed campaign the missile complexes near Hormuz are almost all still active according to the assessment. If the U.S. intel assessment is accurate it also explains why Iran was able to maintain a steady rate of missile fire until the end of the war, and also suggests that the U.S. and Israel simply wasted a lot of top-tier standoff munitions firing at rock complexes that it failed to penetrate.

    IMO, the funniest part of this entire war is when an OSINTer found a livestreaming camera that captured the region of sky just above one of Iran’s launch silos, and they watched it get bombed, fire off a missile, get bombed again, fire off another missile, and so on and so forth. https://xcancel.com/kimhvik2/status/2030352482640240668

    Iran launched a ballistic missile from a site in Isfahan that has been bombed several times by the US and likely Israel. This just shows how long this is going to take. Just look at Hezbollah aswell that many thought were completely destroyed.

    https://xcancel.com/JerkPup/status/2054359679590150297

    I think that was from here? Eleven above-ground structures backed up by two vaults with six entrances, with one vault still under construction. Suppressing this site fully would require quite a bit of ordnance.

    https://xcancel.com/ilmalfalcon/status/2054351268676526296

    yk this is kind of worse than how most wargames went, at least the US had a chance to degrade iranian capabilities, rn, its basically done nothing💀. Everything bombed can be repaired in a week with chinese concrete, everything can be dug up in a day. Killed the entire government basically, and still nothing happened, its even funnier that all the US had to do was just wait it out, now any chance of any instability is instantly dead, IRGC gets to be as draconian as theyd like and theyd always have popular support. How do you even win this, how do you fuck up so bad?

    And btw, even this comment about how the US underestimated Iran itself underestimates Iran, with the mention of “chinese concrete” - not only does Iran have its own concrete industry (I mean, obviously? what do people think Iranian cities are made out of, mudbrick?), but it’s literally a major innovator in developing new kinds of more resilient concrete! (Iran develops ultra-high-performance quartz-infused concrete) They don’t need to import shit, they’re actually ahead of most of the world in this regard soleimani-amused

    • Weydemeyer@lemmy.mlEnglish
      47·
      18 days ago

      The idea that anyone would import concrete is ludicrous. Concrete has an extremely low price to weight ratio. I don’t know about other countries, but in the US it used to be that much beyond 40 miles or so, it became economically inefficient to haul concrete from a plant to a site. That concrete in Iran is almost certainly locally sourced (locally as in from the immediate area, not just from inside the country), no way it came from outside the country and that would probably be true for most countries, not just Iran.

    • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      33·
      18 days ago

      They don’t need to import shit, they’re actually ahead of most of the world in this regard

      I keep thinking about Terminus from Asimov’s Foundation works. An isolated group of scientists and engineers and technicians, surrounded by dangerous adversaries, having to get really clever with what limited resources they had.

    • culpritus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      18 days ago

      Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC), which contains powdered quartz

      Iran’s concrete has new-age crystal powers.

      It perhaps says something about Iran’s capabilities in concrete manufacturing that the DTRA has begun to examine other ways of dealing with bunkers rather than blowing them up. Ideas include electromagnetic pulses and robotic snakes equipped with warheads.

      The mages of the western dogs are scrambling to find effective spells and curses against these sophisticated warding magicks.