Image is from this article, of a Chilean copper quarry.
Title is a reference to Trump's social media post about copper, which was, as usual, mostly deranged.
Trying to follow Trump's administration is pretty difficult, but as of right now, he is threatening 30% tariffs on Mexico and the EU starting on August 1st, as well as new tariff announcements on a bunch of other countries (including, bizarrely, a 50% tariff on Brazil), and also apparently a 50% tariff on copper, which the US imports half its supply of and is, of course, a very important metal in many applications.
I'm not sure what the plan is to bring back domestic copper production beyond hoping that it just sorta works out, but prominent copper producers, such as Chile and Canada, seem both concerned and confused. Reuters had a line that made me chuckle:
Boric said he was awaiting official communication from the U.S. government, including whether the tariffs would include copper cathodes, and questioned "whether this will actually be implemented or not."
Big mood, Boric.
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-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 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.
At no point did I assert that no Israeli planes were ever over Iran, in fact the bulk of my post was arguing that there definitely could have been, just via a different route. It was specifically about the June 16th attack that I questioned the planes. We don't know if the attacks portrayed on that video are the same attacks that the Fars report is about.
And ballistic missiles being used doesn't imply that literally every strike was ballistic missiles. It could have been a combination of missiles and bombs - it's the proportion which matters. Again, I'm not denying that there were bombs dropped, but every strike being an F-35 flying directly overhead is a very different thing from, say, 60% being that and the rest being missiles, or some other ratio.
See, this is my problem, which I brought up in my original comment - "trying to guess vague bomb or missile shapes based on grainy footage doesn't exactly seem like sound analysis to me"! The evidence in question?
The conclusion of this being a JDAM or SPICE is by the OSINTer in question (and I feel like the whole past several years should have really taught us to take these guys with a grain of salt). But I'm not really seeing the frontal fins or little rear wings of a SPICE (but depending on the angle, we wouldn't see the wings anyway, and the fins might well be not visible at this resolution...):
A GBU-31 seems more likely, there seemingly is the wider central portion, but again, at this video resolution, actually determining the exact shape of the projectile is iffy - compression can throw of shapes depending on what the algorithm decided to color in a pixel as (and there could also just not be enough detail in the original video either, where again a pixel being chosen as one color over another could throw things off)
Telling the size is also pretty difficult, we don't have any sort of distance estimation from the video to the projectile with which to figure that out.
So, why couldn't this be some kind of missile? Here's a LORA for example, this is during its ascent so we can see the exhaust, but on its descent there wouldn't necessarily be anything visible:
Modern cruise missiles generally have less bomb-like, more rectangular shapes, and more uniquely-shaped noses, but again, at this video quality, telling the precise shape is difficult. Here's an Icebreaker for example - as with the SPICE, we wouldn't necessarily be able to see the wings depending on the angle, and the nose is the the most smudged-up part of the Iran image, so we can't tell the precise shape of it either.
The other bit of evidence seemingly doesn't feature any strikes, but their aftermath. The higher-detail video (with the guy cheering the strikes for whatever reason) has several explosions going off, but I wasn't able to see any actual projectile in the footage, so I assume it was just traveling too fast to be picked up? So again, what are we basing our conclusion on what munitions were used there, that these were bunker busters specifically? The amount of debris kicked up can help us estimate the power of the explosion, but that's hardly a foolproof method - an explosion could kick up a lot of dust without necessarily doing that much damage. Additionally, strikes going off in the mountain doesn't have to mean they were using bunker busters specifically, couldn't they have used more conventional munitions to strike just entrances?
I've seen you post these two several times, and I assumed that you had many more images and these were just the ones you picked for illustrative purposes, but you keep coming up with just these two. I tried looking up what else you had posted, but I can't navigate Hexbear search results very well, so I may have missed stuff, but I didn't find that much more footage of strikes over Tehran, and especially not much from which we could accurately judge what munitions were used.
What about the past few years has given any indication that Western countries actually make rational decisions, weighing the long-term impacts of their ammunition expenditure? There's European countries with barely any artillery left at this point. The Israelis may well have used a dangerously large amount of their stockpile, confident that the US will make up for their losses with later military aid.
The Russians also do use ballistics pretty extensively, including to target Ukrainian vehicles like missile launchers. They're not doing daily attacks because they're engaged in a years-long attritional conflict - the Israel-Iran war was barely two weeks. It could well be that the Israelis were just about to finish their stockpiles as the ceasefire was signed. It's speculation, sure, but that's a lot about this war.
Why is "Israeli planes managed to fly over a large swath of territory and completely avoid Iranian air defense" a more likely explanation than "Azerbaijan, a comprador state with open military ties to Turkey and Israel, and essentially the only Muslim country to support Israel during the Gaza genocide, aided Israel"?
You've also repeatedly downplayed the damage Israel itself has sustained (which we cannot accurately judge on account of censorship, and yet you confidently assert that they must not have lost anything important), and have also uncritically reported literal IDF propaganda (https://hexbear.net/comment/6271486 - not sure how many people actually opened up the link instead of assuming that the "Over 50 aircraft" was your own analysis, but it's a direct citation of a statement by the IDF). I guess we can trust their propaganda, even though we confidently dismiss Iranian/Resistance propaganda about the damage inflicted on Israel?
Your estimation on Iranian equipment losses is based on an Oryx-style list by a pro-Ukrainian propagandist - have you audited that list to make sure there's no duplicate footage being passed off as different strikes, as Oryx did? This user has admitted to blocking those who question his numbers - now, he's of course framing it as if they must have all been trolling assholes, but this is a classic online tactic: use the trolls as justification to silence people who might actually damage your narrative.
When it comes to damage assessments for Iran, you confidently assert that the real numbers are likely higher than what's on the list, but when it comes to damage assessments for Israel, you confidently state that the limited footage we have available is painting a complete picture and nothing else was blown up.
I've asked this question in another thread already, but I'll ask it again - if Israel was ostensibly performing so well, easily bombing targets all over Iran while sustaining minimal damage themselves, why did they accept a ceasefire?