Image is from this article, showing a march by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela Youth. The preamble's information came from a few sources, such as here, here, and here.
Over the last few weeks, pressure on Venezuela from the US has mounted as their newest proxy, Gonzalez, lost the election to Maduro. The Trump administration now alleges that Maduro is the mastermind behind the "Cartel of Suns," raised the bounty on Maduro's head from $25 million to $50 million, and is working to deploy troops and naval assets to the region.
While I would not consider myself an expert, I believe an explicit boots-on-the-ground campaign by the US in Venezuela would be, at best, implausible, though the administration has not explicitly denied it (and even if it did deny it, denials by the US are merely confirmations that are being delayed). What seems much more likely is an intensification of a subversive campaign against Venezuela which seeks to further isolate it, with intelligence from the US given to whatever groups and individuals exist inside the country. There are certainly some parallels in regard to recent US belligerence towards Mexico, with both countries being implicitly or explicitly threatened with military force under the guise of "preventing drug trafficking" - and, of course, spreading drugs is one of America's greatest specialities.
Will this work? I don't know, though I am optimistic about Venezuela's chances. The Venezuelan government does seem to be taking this threat with a refreshing degree of seriousness - with over 4 million militia members being activated across the country as of August 18th, as well as a call from Maduro to the armed forces to be on high alert. The socialist youth of Venezuela are being mobilized in defense of the revolution.
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Israel's Genocide of Palestine
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 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.
an interesting thread about how focus on special forces causes the regular infantry to decline in quality https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1964131097899393419
This is armchair warlord, a guy that gets things wrong so often that there are accounts that actively keep track of everything wrong that he says. The same guy that said that the US didn't actually bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, they just lobbed cruise missiles to make a mark on the desert. The same guy that said that Russia had destroyed 4+ Patriot batteries, and as evidence of such, posted videos of a bunch of systems with omnidirectional radars, and blocked and hid the replies of everyone that pointed this out. The same guy that said there were no North Koreans in Kursk, and that anyone who thought otherwise had a "room temperature IQ" while North Korean artillery was arriving on train after train. The same guy that said that the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian bombers amounted to nothing (he called it operation Steinbock), a few hours before the videos came out showing multiple destroyed Tu-95s. It's actually impressive how much he got wrong. Look, he might be right about this, but his record is poor.
His underlying reason for this post, quoting himself, saying "Nobody came away from Afghanistan thinking the US Army had world-beating infantry even in elite units." also falls quite flat. The US military had around 2 500 KIA in Afghanistan over 20 years of war and occupation. The Soviets, by comparison, had 6-10 times the KIA over half the time, in other words a 12-20 times higher casualty rate. More Soviet troops died of disease and incidents in Afghanistan than US troops died total. Obviously war is not a videogame and a "K/D ratio" does not decide who wins a war, and both the US and Soviets failed to accomplish further objectives and had to leave. But I don't understand the underlying point. Trying to extrapolate Afganistan to anything resembling a peer war is quite a limited exercise, and it's not like other nations have performed better against insurgencies.
You really can’t compare the US and Soviet Afghanistan wars. One was a proxy conflict, the other was a local resistance.
The US was heavily arming the Taliban during the Soviet war.
If China had been dumping huge amounts of weapons into Al Qaeda’s hands during the US invasion, casualties would have been massively higher.
Okay, replying in a separate reply since we've both ended up editing the original posts and it's getting kind of confusing, sorry.
Okay, that was kind of dumb, but it's interpreting satellite footage which is hard to do. I don't see this as that much different from your insistence that Israeli planes were flying directly over Tehran based on a pixelated photo of something that maybe kind of looks like a JDAM-style bomb if you interpret the pixels one way, but may well be some kind of missile if you interpret them differently, a possibility which you dismissed outright.
Okay, so... bad timing. If we're going to use that as discrediting, we might as well close the megathread, as we were basically all thinking Russia wasn't going to invade back in 2022, and thus shouldn't be trusted on anything.
I'm not aware of this one, but even if that specific incident may have been wrong, can we really reasonably claim that Russia has not depleted Ukrainian air defense? Like, where are these Patriots which haven't been destroyed as Kiev is getting hammered? I guess maybe they've simply depleted their ammunition rather than having actually destroyed the batteries?
Literally just a moment ago I came across this obituary for a guy from a unit operating a Patriot (https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1964292864642519250). Oh, so "his crew downed several ballistic missiles, one of which was falling directly onto the system’s position. A fire broke out, and the officer personally rushed to save the equipment. At that moment, the warhead of the downed missile detonated", yeah dude, sure, given the Ukrainian government's record, this totally sounds trustworthy. They downed a missile which just so happened to land right next to them, and then it just so happened to detonate after a delay right as this guy walked up to it, Doesn't at all sound like them covering for a battery being struck. This was from December last year btw - it's only being revealed now since a relative is asking for him to be given a posthumous medal
Maybe Armchair Warlord was right for the wrong reasons, dunno. God knows Twitter can fry a man's brain. If we're going to be dismissing people for blocking responses, then the guy you got the list of Iranian losses during the 12-day war from is also out.
The Soviet-supported government lasted for over 3 years after Soviet withdrawal (February 1989 to April 1992, so it actually even outlasted the Union itself). The American-supported lasted a couple of months after the start of the withdrawal, and in fact fell before the originally planned final pull-out in September, moving the US's timeline up a bit. There are differing degrees of failure, and the American failure is clearly more severe.
Did you even read the post? Okay, I'm not sure what's going on, I don't want to come off as hostile, but already twice in the last couple of days you've responded with an argument that was already covered in the article I was posting, and now you're just blatantly misreading the post! (which isn't even that long, those articles were at least decently bulky) "Nobody came away from Afghanistan thinking the US Army had world-beating infantry even in elite units" isn't in my post, it's a separate tweet that he used as a jumping-off point, but the actual content of the post is about the impact of moving lots of guys to special forces units on the quality of regular infantry men. This is an argument that you have not even remotely engaged with! It has nothing to do with this or that war, but simply with the idea that drawing the best men away from the regular infantry has consequences, which I find hard to disagree with.
And even for the Afghan war argument, you're still not really engaging with it! This is about infantry - did American infantry perform well during the war? Yes, the American air-force and artillery performed well, the capacity to provide fire support very rapidly and accurately is certainly impressive. But did the infantry show itself as particularly more competent than other countries' infantries? Did a squad of fancy Seals not get domed by an insurgent force that, according to the actual credible intel and contrary to the ridiculous number proposed by Luttrell, didn't even have numerical superiority?
The overall performance of a military can still be good even with the infantry being of lower quality, thanks to all those other assets. There's nothing contradictory about that. But we're evaluating the infantry, not the precision fires.
To be honest, that isn't a result of American military competence but instead a consequence of the adoption of the CIA doctrine of MICE (Money. Ideology. Coercion. Ego)
The US for twenty years quite literally bribed large swathes of Afghan society not to fight, same in Iraq, the minute it failed the US retreated before casualties could be inflicted, otherwise both the Iraq and Afghan wars would've been defined by monthly Fallujahs
Okay, and? He's also been right and had insightful analysis many other times. What part of this analysis do you actually disagree with? Don't wanna be a debate-bro, but... ad hominem. I'm not posting some massive treatise here, which would require a genuine investment of time to read and understand, and if you already know the author has a spotty record you may wisely choose to not bother - it's a twitter post, you can read it in a few minutes and come to your own conclusions easily enough. Plus, interpreting footage of bombings is one area, infantry capabilities are another, being wrong in one area says nothing about one's knowledge of the other one.
Not aware of these accounts, but what examples do you actually have beyond those? This hardly qualifies as "actually impressive how much he got wrong" in my view.
The same goes the other way, a bunch of the stuff you posted on Iran was sourced from pro-Ukrainian propagandists like OSINTTechnical, who've had their fair share of stupid takes. Should we dismiss all that because of the people posting it?
I don't think pointing out his strained relationship with the truth with regards to the war in Ukraine and other conflicts an ad homoniem, as I think that's quite central to judging the points made. Ad hominem would be an attack on something else not central or important to that. I know people like his analysis because it's pro Russia and anti NATO/USA/the west, but I don't really find defaulting to that insightful. For example, back when Ukraine did the Kherson counteroffensive (which retook the city of Kherson and forced Russia to withdraw from it and all positions on the right bank of the Dnieper), armchair warlord said that the offensive was a hopeless counterattack. When Russia posted footage of themselves carpet bombing Mariupol with Tu-22 bombers and unguided gravity bombs in a scene out of WW2 or Vietnam, apparently the destruction there was exaggerated because the power was back on quickly according to him. Then there's saying that there were no North Koreans in Kursk, implied Zelensky is not a real Jew, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
This is an argument about the quality of American infantry - Ukraine or Iran have nothing to do with it, so bringing this up is, indeed, "not central" to that point.
I disagree that this is "defaulting" to such analysis - does every anti-NATO take need to be accompanied by an equal pro-NATO take? Defaulting to "US/NATO actually good" isn't insightful either. In my view, the information available shows the Russian military as performing quite well, and Western militaries as... not doing that.
Firstly, was that claim made at a time when Korean troops were actually deployed? From what we know, this seems to have happened towards the end of 2024, but there were Ukrainian claims about the North Koreans from earlier than that. Additionally, the Ukrainian claims were patently ridiculous, falling back on classic orientalist propaganda of human-wave attacks (which, given the released casualty numbers by the DPRK, clearly did not happen), claims of Korean soldiers outside of Kursk (which is the only place they could be deployed, as per the Russia-DPRK agreement on strategic partnership), and really flimsly evidence like just dragging Asian-looking guys who weren't actually Korean but from various Central Asian republics and presenting them as Korean soldiers.
Sure, denying the Koreans being there was incorrect, but it's a boy-who-cried-wolf situation - if the pro-Ukrainian space hadn't completely discredited themselves with outright clownish behavior, people may have taken those claims more seriously.
I wasn't following him that early on in the war, so okay, fair enough, I defer to you on those takes and they do seem dumb. But during the period that I have followed him, his takes have seemed mostly reasonable and well thought-out, with some exceptions. I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss someone based on earlier misjudgements that they have perhaps matured from - and as I mentioned in another comment, such logic would dismiss most of us posting in these megathreads, as we've also had many wrongful assumptions, especially about this war starting in the first place.
As for Kherson specifically - the Ukrainians succeeded because the Russians recognized they were overextended and retreated, Ukraine didn't actually fight the whole Russian force and defeat it in open battle. And Ukrainian forces took very heavy, disproportionate casualties. That view of the counter-offensive was wrong, but "forced Russia to withdraw" doesn't strike me as the correct interpretation either - Russia may well have been able to hold, but they made a strategic decision to not do that and retreat to better positions, inflicting great casualties on the Ukrainians in the process. Here, again, if we're talking about "defaulting" to certain views - aren't we defaulting to the Ukrainian narrative?
And again, the topic we're currently talking about - the idea that too many guys in special forces lowers the quality of the regular infantry - has nothing to do with any of this. I don't see him somehow playing down US/NATO performance here because of his pro-Russian bias - it's a simple argument about distribution of talent within an organization.