Image is a snapshot taken from the recent Hezbollah video “Our Mountains, Our Treasures”, showcasing their extensive underground fortifications, supply lines, and weaponry.

iran can’t keep doing this to me, they’ve gotta respond soon, right? I’m gonna run out of analysis about countries soon, oh god

The COTW (Child of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific child every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied children. If you’ve wanted to talk about the child 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 child.

The Child of the Week is Hassan LargePenis! He is chad-and-cuck rater and general commenter @LargePenis@hexbear.net’s son, born over a month ago. @Greenleaf@hexbear.net recommended I have him as the COTW for a week and I finally got around to it.

Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli 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 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.

  • destroyamericaEnglish
    73·
    28 days ago

    reporting in from twitter: ton of fighting over the dnc protests going on there, opinions ranging from them being “useless fed-work” to “keeping protests inclusive for everyone”. curious what newsmegaheads think about the protests. me? more just depressed than anything, we american communists have been fighting about this shit for decades and still haven’t figured it out? points to an extreme lack of knowledge being passed down from older marxists to newer marxists. maybe we need to establish a neutral marxist academy or something idk lol

    • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      62·
      28 days ago

      Protesting is most effective as something more akin to a military parade of labor. It’s what you do when you have done all of the other organizing and power building to be an actual threat and you want to show everyone else that you are to be taken seriously. They should be used to threaten an action, not be the action in and of itself.

      EDIT: Roderic Day actually had a good tweet thread today based off the follow thread I will condense below:

      summary

      The protest as we know it is a kind of zombie tactic. The Red Scare and Cold War destruction of the Left created a knowledge gap, and activists who emerged afterward could only recreate the appearance of organizing without the content. We’ve been marching and losing ever since.

      In many other countries they still use the word “demonstration,” not “protest” because a march or rally is supposed to demonstrate that the people are organized and willing to take action (typically strike, but also riot or take up arms) to get what they want.

      The implied threat is the whole point, it’s what gives the protest power. Politicians or bosses who think the threat is real may give in to demands to avoid greater disruption. But if they know there’s no threat they can and do simply ignore it and let the cops clear the streets.

      Some might suggest that a protest is demonstrating anger and the threat is to lose voters, but Democrats know that’s an empty threat after so many cycles of “vote blue no matter who.”

      If the point is to create so much disruption that it’s more costly to ignore or fight you than it is to meet your demands-which can actually be effective!-then protests at expected places and times, against expected targets, and that quickly fall to police aren’t strategic.

      If you want to see tactics that work look to the labor movement. The labor movement has been the strongest continuously organized force of working people in the US, which means it has been able to preserve much of the knowledge that the Left otherwise lost.

      Whether labor organizing is your priority or not, check out union organizing trainings that are being offered by many unions. There are concrete skills that can deliver measurable results. We don’t have to be sloppy and base our plans on hopes and prayers.

      Labor movement skills like structure tests, power analysis, escalation plans, and even just how to talk to someone you don’t know about organizing are all skills that are regularly taught in union trainings. Don’t let the protest treadmill grind you down, organize!

      • destroyamericaEnglish
        29·
        28 days ago

        yeah there was a twitter thread where someone made the point that a lot of time in other countries it’s not a “protest” but a “demonstration”, as in they’re demonstrating their will and resolve to strike or even take up arms

        • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          27·
          28 days ago

          I actually just added that into my comment lol. I have talked here before about how protests should be like military parades, but I thought the point the account added about how it should be threatening action instead of being the action was very poignant.

          Something I have been thinking about today is organizing UAW members in Michigan to put pressure Shawn Fain for endorsing Kamala and speaking at the DNC without saying a single fucking word about Palestine.

      • destroyamericaEnglish
        25·
        28 days ago

        ah yeah the roderic day thread is how I got alerted to all the infighting, I went looking around the other communist accounts I follow when I saw that and that’s when I found out everyone was fighting each other about these protests lol. I try not to mention roderic day after the couple of huge hate threads here on hexbear lol (also some freak accused me of being a roderic day sockpuppet which was annoying)

        • miz [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          24·
          28 days ago

          I post his work a bunch because I think it’s good and I don’t seem to get any crap for it… don’t let a couple stray shots get you too jumpy

              • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                17·
                28 days ago

                My assumption: He’s super irreverent when he disagrees. He states his position as fact and challenges others to present critiques to his works at that level. It’s arrogant to do when your work is worthless, and people have little idea of what to do when someone’s work is valuable AND they take the position associated with that arrogance. It seems to me that he is just taking himself and his positions with the sincerity and seriousness needed if we ever want to apply this to truly make a worthwhile communist party and movement. We’re just so used to everyone accepting differences of opinion without trying to work towards better positions through critique. He places his work in front of people who have a different position with a claim like “I think your position is wrong and wrote about it here,” and tries to get people to engage by reading the article and then responding. People hate to be told to read an article instead of a short tweet

                What was literally said in DMs: He decides his position and finds a way to rationalize it afterwards instead of the other way. Also he starts beef with leftists unnecessarily.

                As a response to that I asked for an example because I hadn’t noticed this trend of rationalization. I was called a fanboy and puppet and debatebro for it. To be fair, I also started out saying that their critique seemed to fail on its own merits because they also baselessly (with no example or reference to his work) argued that he lacked any basis for his positions and that I won’t take their critique seriously without seeing a reference to a case. That wasn’t the nicest way to start the convo. Still think I was right though, based on the avoidance that came afterwards. That person just never read a single article on redsails.

          • destroyamericaEnglish
            10·
            28 days ago

            i mean i just posted the masses rebels and elites essay at someone the other day, it’s more so if I have to mention his name like saying im linking to a twitter thread by him or something. but yeah i should just block anyone who’s annoying about him ur right

        • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          12·
          28 days ago

          I think technically I saw it because Q. Anthony Ali retweeted it, but I’ve more or less held these views about protest for a while. I do support the protests at the DNC and the fact that they didn’t let a Palestinian American speak is proof enough that there’s no point in polite protest. I don’t think we should be yelling at anyone there for anything that happens at the protest, but I think the left as a whole needs to take a step back and see that this isn’t working the way it should, and it because we aren’t doing it the way we should.

          • destroyamericaEnglish
            11·
            28 days ago

            i mean i do think these people who are yelling at the dnc protestors are trying to do that. I’m sympathetic that maybe being so aggressive to them is harmful to actually convincing anyone but I’ll say I really have come to agree with Day more and more that we need to stop giving people passes for being “beautiful souls” who have their hearts in the right place but ultimately damage the movement with their actions

            • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              14·
              28 days ago

              Instead of worrying about who to give passes to, we should take a bias towards action and start working on organizing. I agree that these protests aren’t nearly as effective as they could be. Hopping on to Twitter to spend all day calling them stupid is just a derivative of the same action being critiqued, though.

              • destroyamericaEnglish
                8·
                28 days ago

                i disagree. I still think our theoretical understanding among the american “left” is still extremely poor and we need to rectify that before we put the bias towards action. the bias towards action has been what we’ve been trying since at least the iraq war protests, no?

                  • destroyamericaEnglish
                    1·
                    28 days ago

                    i think the disconnect here is that I think “posting” is “doing” in the modern age. I mean, lenin was fucking exiled just writing to a newspaper (which would have been their equivalent of “posting” in early 20th century) for how long before the revolution? Not to say any of us are the modern day lenin, but I’m not sure what kind of criticism you can lay against “posting” that you couldn’t have laid against lenin back then.

                  • destroyamericaEnglish
                    3·
                    28 days ago

                    I think mao said they fell down from a coconut tree or something

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      46·
      28 days ago

      I don’t think the protests will accomplish much in the end. Protests in the US largely serve as networking opportunities for various groups. This isn’t a totally bad thing (someone who doesn’t know what org to join can always go to a protest and see which org they vibe with the best).

      The problem for protests in the US is that:

      1. They are not very militant.

      2. They do not have broad support.

      You can see how pigs feel about protests. They actually don’t hate protests. In fact, they absolutely love that shit because they get overtime pay on top of beating the shit out of some protestors.

      The only exception is the George Floyd uprising. The protests then were far more militant and had far more broad support. Remember, the majority of USians polled actually though that precinct deserved to be burned to the ground. That’s when the pigs started quitting because that overtime pay was no longer worth the bullshit they had to face. And I’m not talking about most of the George Floyd uprising which was neutered by effective counterinsurgency from the Democrats. I’m talking about the earlier stages when they burned that police precinct to the ground. I remember seeing footage on Day 3 of someone opening fire on pigmobiles as in someone took out their pistol and opened fire on pigmobiles passing by. That was how militant the protests were. Before the Democrats completely doused the flames, people were burning police precincts and were already started to inch towards taking up arms.

      Now the George Floyd uprising in the end failed to accomplish any of its political aims. The proliferation of Cop City and increase in police funding are a testament to its failure. But my question is if an uprising as militant and with as broad support as the George Floyd uprising failed in its political aims, what makes you think these protests will do anything?

      • destroyamericaEnglish
        28·
        28 days ago

        I don’t think these protests will do anything. If I’m being 100% fair to PSL and FRSO types, it seems to be more like these protests are meant to build up their bases of support more. But like… is there any evidence this will work? that’s my hesitation anyways

      • SaniFlush [any, any]@hexbear.net
        English
        9·
        28 days ago

        I’m still convinced that actual change will only come from a coalition of American minorities, led only by minorities. The self-declared whites are too complacent/complicit.

    • newmou [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      29·
      28 days ago

      In the time I was there, one speaker did harp really hard on the path forward being to vote except not for democrats or republicans. That 1/3 of people who didn’t vote could be galvanized to vote for some unidentified third party candidate provided that we all table, organize, talk to neighbors, etc. That certainly gave me pause. The other speakers were great though, especially this Jewish leader who threw absolute banger after banger about the US military complex driving both parities to support genocide because its profitable

      • destroyamericaEnglish
        20·
        28 days ago

        I actually don’t hate psl for running a presidential campaign (i assume that’s who the speaker is referring to lol) but to bring it up at the protest does seem misguided to me to say the least lol. glad to hear that the protest was kept firmly anti democrat at the very least

        • newmou [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          15·
          28 days ago

          I don’t think this person was referring to the psl at all to be honest. I think I would have picked up on that. It was honestly too vague for that

          • destroyamericaEnglish
            14·
            28 days ago

            that’s kind of surprising, I’ve even seen a couple trot groups insisting on voting for PSL as critical support lol. I’m wondering what they were referring to then?

            • newmou [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              13·
              28 days ago

              Yeah idk, there were definitely trots out at the protest. It seemed almost like a misguided radlib speaking, it was weird

              • destroyamericaEnglish
                11·
                28 days ago

                the amerikkkan mind is an enigma to all so who knows really…

      • destroyamericaEnglish
        15·
        28 days ago

        hm never heard of them, glad to see someone is out there trying to put in that work. Do you have any good reviews of them? the donation drive to cuba at the top of the page makes me feel better about them at the very least lol

        • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          28 days ago

          They’re in the same network as Tricontinental, PSL, and the various media arms like Breakthrough News. They are a perfectly fine place to send folks.

      • destroyamericaEnglish
        10·
        28 days ago

        i fundamentally disagree that not being at the protest makes it to where your opinion “doesn’t matter”. it’s american anti-intellectualism at it’s finest to insist you have to be at the protest to criticize it for some reason. as far as stuff at the protest, I saw people who were there getting upset about the anarchobrat flag, and supposedly maybe there were anarchists trying to fight the police at one point or something like that? take that with a heavy grain of salt though the people i saw tweeting about it were doing it under layers of irony

          • destroyamericaEnglish
            7·
            28 days ago

            I specifically said communists for a reason - it’s not just that it’s “leftists” who are arguing, I’m seeing accounts who normally are in lockstep dunking on CPUSA and DSA and democrat (but I repeat myself) “leftists” arguing about these protests. It’s why I don’t think this is just “bickering”. With respect to whether the protests are useful themselves, my position is once again more of a wait and see (and most of all depression that we still seem so split about the answer) but like we had absolutely huge protests against the iraq war in 2003, against wall street in 2011, and against police brutality in 2020 (just to name a few!), and nothing really came of them. what makes these protests against the genocide any different? no one from PSL or FRSO, who are the 2 main drivers behind these protests, especially this DNC protest, has actually been able to well articulate how they will use this differently than the mass protests of the past.

              • destroyamericaEnglish
                4·
                28 days ago

                When you are living in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with such a tight grip on power, all you can do is plant seeds now that you may never live to see sprout. The material conditions in which we are living precisely limit our horizons.

                I get this, my opinion more is that I have no faith that FRSO and PSL know what they are doing. will they actually do anything with these seeds? that is what I personally am questioning more than anything.

                But I had to do something

                to be clear I wasn’t even in kindergarten in 2003, but in 20 years how much did you and everyone else actually accomplish? not to shit on you but it doesnt feel like much of anything. amerikkka still invaded iraq and continued the invasion of afghanistan for 20 years. they still bombed libya. They still bombed syria. Like, it feels like succdem bernie did more to convert people to the “left” than anything actual communists have ever done since the black panthers. that is incredibly demoralzing to me. I dont think the situation is hopeless, but our current groups make me feel hopeless if that makes any sense…

          • SeekTheDeletion [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            28 days ago

            the protest organizers apparently called the cops over to help them keep the protest on the approved route as some more radical people were trying to approach the fence of the convention. sounds sus as fuck, and the democrats there were cheering when the protests turned away and didn’t approach. I don’t see that as a victory, I see that as symbolic of fecklessness