Image is of rescue efforts at a damaged residential complex in Caracas on June 25th.
Weekly preamble in spoiler tags below.
preamble
The situation regarding both Iran and global oil markets is getting even more complicated, and that's without even including the regular injections of disinformation from people like Barak Ravid and Trump himself. In my current estimation, the negotiations are proceeding as if both sides would rather see a deal than not. At the very least, there have certainly been enough blatant violations of the MoU articles that Iran would be fully justified to end negotiations altogether, and yet they are not, which must mean that they really do want a deal. Until a few days ago, these were mainly issues that Iran has been prepared to show... "flexibility" on (others might say "cowardice"), such as Zionist aggression against southern Lebanon. Both at the start of the April ceasefire and at the start of the MoU, they made Lebanon out to be a red line issue, but ultimately seemed convinced by the US saying to them, via backchannels, that they'll yank the leash back on their mangy, rabid dog. Therefore, it's safe to conclude that Iran, in practice, either only symbolically cares about Lebanon as the number of buildings destroyed by the Zionists is now climbing into the tens of thousands, or is confident in Hezbollah's ability to withstand assaults and eventually push back the Zionists to the border.
However, very recently, the fighting has once again come closer to home for Iran, with renewed, albeit limited, exchanges of fire in the general area of Hormuz. This all stems from an unfortunate contradiction that Iran has wandered into with regard to Oman. In short: their legal argument for why they should be able to extract tolls/service fees from shipping through Hormuz relies on the concept of Hormuz being part of their territorial waters and not international waters, which is literally true. However, it is also possible to transit Hormuz entirely through Oman's territorial waters too, and, critically, Oman has not shown any serious interest in charging a toll, and is letting shipping pass freely. Oman is also much less able to seriously withstand foreign assaults than Iran, meaning their position is precarious - side with Iran, and risk a Western military assault that destroys them; side with the US, and risk Hormuz never truly reopening because the IRGC will not tolerate ships bypassing their authority. So, Iran is now legally stuck: to have a toll, it must find a way to argue that territorial waters are important when it applies to them, but aren't important when it applies to Oman. Or, of course, to somehow convince Oman to set up their own toll, in face of the dangers.
So far, the result of this has been Iran asserting, both verbally and through drones and missiles, that transit through the Oman channels is, at least during the period of the MoU, illegitimate. This has squashed hopes by many analysts that Hormuz flows would return to normal very soon - after a very brief peak, these numbers now seem to be descending to near-wartime levels. This is happening as the US's reserves continue to drain at a frightening rate. That being said, Iranian oil tankers are getting out in large numbers and reaching foreign markets, so it's not as if Iran is solely being disadvantaged by the current situation. It's even possible that Iran is waiting for enough of these ships to reach Eastern Asia before they plan to restart the war. I'm unsure if this is actually likely, but I've seen several others suggest it, and it does make sense to at least make the most of the current lack of blockade while you figure out if the US is actually going to give in to any of your demands.
Over in Ukraine, the situation seems to be slowly heating up. It's always hard for me personally to figure out the seriousness of the statements of the Ukrainians and the Russians - you'll look back on a year of exaggerated threats and bold statements and promises of grand offensives and threats of nuclear war and yet, on the battlefield, all you see is fairly standard attrition and positional warfare. Anyway: there's been much ado about Ukrainian attacks into Russia proper over the last few months and whether it's having an impact on their economy (not particularly), wartime production (not at all), and social fabric (kinda). However, the rumors of Belarus getting more directly involved in the war - whether they want to or not - are increasing in intensity, with Ukraine threatening that they'll fire on Belarusian border military equipment if it isn't withdrawn. Also, the Russian hardliners seem to really want to start attacking European military production supplying Ukraine, though Putin appears to have squashed those desires. But at the end of the day, the attrition and territorial advancements continue to convincingly favor Russia.
And lastly, the numbers of the aftermath of the recent earthquakes in Venezuela are rolling in, with ~1500 dead, ~750 buildings damaged and collapsed, and many thousands of people affected and being assisted by the government. From the footage I've seen, it's quite disturbing, and obviously not coming at a great time for Venezuela geopolitically either.
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
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.
https://qz.com/playstation-physical-disc-production-ending-2028-070126
Boil All Gaming Executives
You will own nothing and be happy.
Really does blow my mind how anti-communist
are. It's an industry where the public can easily see how openly rotten and anti-worker and anti-consumer it all is, and yet, these guys are always mad about a wamen touching their gaems, not about any of the actual fucked up shit going on that actively makes their games worse.
It comes down to class, right? Gaming has always been a kind of expensive hobby, and to be a True Gamer you have to be willing to shell out a ton of cash and need a ton of free time to play with your toys. That's going to skew the hobby towards treatlerites, and as it gets more expensive the True Gamer club just becomes more exclusive.
Eh it depends. Gamers are not a monolith, as always the ones we see the most and the ones most represented in media tend to be the richest of the gamers the kind you see on reddit talking exclusively about building the best PC.
However, there are also a lot of people in the global south who play video games, it just is experienced way less as an individual hobby and more as a collective one. Take for example the Tekken scene in Pakistan, or the SF scene in the Dominican republic. You can even go back to the lan cafe culture in many countries where people were and are playing CS, War3 etc.
In these countries as owning individually your console or PC or having a solid internet connection at home is not always accessible, people tend to build centers and clubs where they pool resources to buy consoles or can pay by the hour and play together. Obviously you rarely then encounter them on the western web or even in tournaments on the esport side.
Look at Arslan Ash in Tekken, who was unknown and was only able to travel and become one of the top player in the scene because he got a sponsorship for EVO. He even says he's not currently the best in his country it's just that most of the players will never get the money to go out of their countries and sometimes even if they can, they are unable to obtain visas as their country's passport does not allow them to easily get visas to the countries in the imperial core where tournaments are held.
So I would say that rather than gaming skewing toward treatlerites, it's more big public English speaking forums/videos skewing, towards treatlerites so we only ever are aware of a specific slice of the gaming community.
They're not a monolith, but I think it's fair to say there's a tendency within the gamer cohort towards higher incomes and leisure time.
And so among that cohort the tendency is going to be away from class solidarity with the workers and towards treatlerism.
Yes I think that is fair, as I guess the left leaning communities are smaller at lest in the imperial core.
If I take my personal experience in a country of the imperial core, I will say the FGC is skewed toward poorer and black and brown people, is very left leaning and noone ever bate an eye when they learn I'm a communist.
However when I move in whiter spaces like the CS community or PC building community it gets way more racist and right leaning and in my country these communities seem bigger
It's 100% because of arcades. The FGC was born in arcades, which were gaming third spaces. The original motivation towards gitting gud, which the FGC would spring from, was to spend less quarters and save money. If you were a scrub, you would wait in line until it was your turn, insert your quarters, play for like 5 minutes before taking the L from your better opponent, and get back in line. If you were gud, you could play hours on the arcades owning scrubs while spending only two quarters.
On the flip side, PC g*ming in the West is filled with ostentatious displays of wealth. People brag about spending 4 digits on GPUs all for the sake of playing forgettable AAA slop. For all the talking point about saving money by taking advantage of Steam sales, PC g*ming is still a hobby for people with means.
So it should come as no surprise that the NA FGC is filled with Black and brown people while the NA scene of every esports is filled with pasty white and Asian nerds lol
I can't speak personally for NA as I don't live there, but that's what I heard as well . Where I live we actually had no arcade, but there was always one friend who had SF2 on SNES or later Tekken 3 on PS1 etc and we'd spend the afternoons or weekends there trash talking each other and having fun, but its basically the same reasoning, not a lot of money meant you had to play with people somewhere, because owning a console and the games was expensive as fuck.
And yeah completely agree on the take about PC gaming in the west.
They had to stop making physical discs so women would stop frisbeeing them at men's heads. Nintendo tried to save men, and thus all of gaming, with the soft-edge Wii U discs, before having to give up and switch to tiny cartridges that still kinda' hurt.
And they taste WAY worse than the discs now too. What do I snack on now?
Under communism, you won’t even own your toothbrush.
I'm glad I mostly stopped caring about modern games.
And my interest in retro games is mostly down to my interest in retro computing. (Enough I made my own DIY Z80 computer.)