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.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
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.