You're not missing a ton. I reposted the important stuff. RT tends to be pro-zionist in the way they voice/write these articles so it's not like they have super great coverage. Though credit where it's due they do platform in their opinion sections anti-zionist voices at times.

If IRGC purged those people they'd also purge communists. They'd purge women's rights types who just want the freedom to not cover their hair. They would receive spectacular backlash among a young population that doesn't like these backwards reactionary rules and create the forces that would destroy Iran for the imperialists because it would be so unpopular. They need to give up the religious hardline stuff and then purge the people who remain who push for western style democracy. But even they are just ill informed and not necessarily bad people, they murdered the communists who might have educated them with class consciousness.

Yet another war crime by the zionist regime, but this does serve as strong confirmation that Iran still doesn't have dominance/control of their airspace and puts more doubt in my mind on the claims of shooting down f-35s. Most likely I feel the zionists have pretty good ability to operate and bomb what they want in Iran while Iran has some ability to hit back with whatever stock of advanced missiles they have that can bypass defenses of the zionists. Most likely Iran doesn't have enough of an arsenal to actually really meaningfully degrade the zionist military and is mostly doing a combination of show strikes to intimidate and frighten the zionists who are used to their interceptors mostly working and hitting actual vital infrastructure in response to the zionists doing the same. But I don't believe they actually have enough stock to severely damage the zionist military machine via extensive targeted strikes or say hit the zionists with a constant barrage of strikes.

What this means is when the US enters the picture they won't be able to do a damn thing other than inflict some pain on the gulf states for a while that will yes hurt global oil markets and gas prices for a while, maybe 6-12 months but that isn't the end-all-be-all if Iran is defeated. If Iran is defeated the US will have guaranteed great oil prices going forward for decades while China will be in extreme danger of very bad oil prices if not outright being denied oil in compliance with planned future US sanctions as part of an isolate, blockade, encircle, and destroy plot by the US. And China being wholly reliant on Russia who is a fair-weather friend is not good and Russia can mainly supply nat-gas anyways and if China has no other sources the prices will be increased a bit.

I think the plan is more decapitating strikes, they have assets either witting or simply fools who they can manipulate who they want to be in power in Iran after they kill off those above them. They killed off the IRGC intelligence head for a reason. If you can kill people like that and the head of the IRGC and 14 nuclear scientists it shows you can kill whoever you want and that you are methodically working your way through a chart of heads of leadership until you have eliminated enough to destabilize and plunge your target into chaos (same as Hezbollah) and at that point they throw in ISIS fighters, MEK, other groups that are western proxies and you use them and more smuggled drones for assassinations until the government has effectively collapsed or been taken over by one of your guys.

I don't think they'd be doing this and certainly the US won't join if they don't have a concrete plan for removing the current government entirely or mostly and having a more pliant one arise. Most likely the zionist intelligence penetration is as I've said before to an extreme level. They've hacked everything plus have human-int assets that means they know where all of the important figures are at least some of the time if not possibly most of the time and can kill them at their leisure.

In other words things could get very bad shortly. I hope the leadership does move to very, very, very deep bunkers like those their nuclear facilities are in and that they have good hardlines for command and control out of those which are buried DEEP as well.

Israel's primary concern is that a nuclear Iran would provide dirty bombs to Hezbollah or other militants and bypass the iron dome.

That's propaganda. Their concern is the same as any unhinged settler nuclear power. Namely they want the right and power to destroy with nuclear weapons their enemies at a time of their choosing without those enemies being able to hit them back. It's the oldest want in warfare and empires: to be able to hit an enemy in a way they cannot hit you back. As genocidal settlers they know deep down the wrong they work and how the region is full of people who rightfully hate them and they fear those people and need nuclear weapons to deter and intimidate them. It's the samson option, the bluff that they can and will take out everyone around them if they fall.

Honestly they didn't live in the type of functional surveillance states that we live in. More than just technologies and techniques which have vastly improved as well as coordination the ability to hunt down enemies of the state there's also the fact the states they were in were not as shall we say functional or solid as ours. They were weakened states in some internal disarray.

For this reason I think unfortunately revolution is pretty much hopeless and impossible in the imperial core until external conditions such as the collapse of imperialism and the US dollars and an overall weakening of the US state takes place and weaken these systems of surveillance and control and oppression. Until that happens, until they start rotting, things no longer working and not being repaired for weeks type of situation they're just too strong. That or we'd need way more than the 10-20% of society that usually sides with a revolution, like 50% and at least 30% willing to take violent and coordinated action and I don't see that in the US near-term so I think rot is the more likely to come and weaken and blind them and eventually in that decay room for things happening is found.

Everyone's upset and we should be but this is a mistake. This is the kind of unpopular escalation that if repeated gets spread around in raw videos online and turns more people on the side-lines against them.

As Malcolm X said, those chickens are going to eventually come home to roost.

Imagine being upset by this, LARPers. Imagine not understanding why this is a problem and even in terms of ill-advised adventurism was badly done with bad targets. This was not a planned act of some disciplined person, this was an individualistic act of despair and anger likely made with very minimal planning and highly emotional thinking. Movements cannot afford that kind of thing. Demcent exists for a reason.

If you care about something you owe it to that cause to be rational, to think clearly through your actions and their consequences and what they can and cannot achieve. Ask yourself are you doing this out of a selfish desire to be a martyr in the easiest way possible? Or are you trying to maximize the good you can do, the effect you can have. I think arguably if this person had gone to California and spent the next 6 months harassing Google employees for their company's participation in genocide they would have had a bigger impact. But that's not grandiose, that's not satisfying to the ego and martyrdom drive. It's not dramatic enough.

I really, really hope this person wasn't at any point a member. I really hope that they haven't been organizing with ANSWER lately. I hope they dropped out entirely because the zionists will use any excuse however tenuous to enable a harsher crackdown on what is very much a BDS movement not based around violence but economic and social pressure.

Too soon to tell. Also not sure what their plan is and what success means there.

It's quite possible they intend to do the whole small yard, high fence thing they've been pushing with Democrats for a long time but really kick it into gear. This has the benefit of crashing quality of life and increasing expenses for the working class which increases their desperation and the potential for exploitation of enlarged underclasses of people who've slipped under from all of this and are only barely not drowning.

It would also involve (attempting) reshoring from China, beating corporations until they comply like with Russia, allowing a few carve-outs (as with Russia), then stoking a war over Taiwan, using the resulting propaganda storm to force heavy sanctions and decoupling (with again some carve-outs for valuable corporations that can't or refuse to pull out right away). That plus the rising reaction in the US and Europe bodes ill for those in the imperial core. What they do next in such a scenario is up for debate. I personally think naked resource grabs like what Trump talks about, just taking Greenland, openly invading/couping nations in Africa and Latin America, completely dropping the mask and seizing as much as they can to pull into their "small yard" behind their high fence and put up as much of a wall around China/Russia and as much of a squeeze on the two of them as they can by using what power they can to deny them as many markets as possible and to maximally disrupt their supply chains (Trump's talk of taking the Panama canal for instance would be potentially part of the US shoring up its naval control of the world, it has only sea-power not land-power potential so must maximize control of choke-points to dominate and enforce embargoes and sanctions). They'd try to combine this with continued operations to foster terrorism and instability in key regions to block the belt and road as well as resource extraction for China's manufacturing.

It's also possible they do something else.

So I think it's possible it's an attempt to use the power of their hegemony before it slips further to shape and direct the world into a shape they believe they can exploit to maintain a dominant position.

Their validity as a colonial project, their excuse for their colonization, apartheid, genocide in Palestine is that they are the ONLY safe place for Jews, that they HAVE to be there, that they have this special right to this particular place.

In this they have long shared the interests of the anti-semites including the original Nazis who after all it must be remembered hoped at first to simply encourage all the Jews to emigrate out of Europe which absolutely worked for the interests of the zionists. Their interests to this day are making Jews anywhere outside of their project feel unsafe. It is a boon to them, their legitimacy, their strength to have anti-semites take power, for Jews to flee to them as the more they have the more they can cry that they truly represent all Jews and any opposition to zionism or the illegal occupation state known as "israel" and its policies is in fact anti-semitism. More than that though as all ethno-nationalist movements they desire to draw all the "chosen" people to them to create what they imagine will be a "pure" utopia.

The whole zionist project has a need to seize control of the mantle of Judaism, to completely conflate the two, to absorb the diaspora religious identity into the fascistic political movement.

I don't get why people think this. They'll just ban RISCV or at least any productions of it from outside western aligned foundries. If national security claims aren't sufficient they'll claim that all Chinese foundries are staffed by child slaves and beaten monkeys and no one else and slap bans on their use anywhere in the west. What this all accomplishes is creating a bifurcated tech world.

As these lay out you'll have three types of countries:

1. Imperial core loyal, can only use and allowed to use western tech, patents, chips, etc, restricted from sales to 2, 3
2. Chinese/Russian core and their periphery of most loyal customers who choose to endure blistering western blockade on import of any western tech and other coercive measures against them and thus are able to use whether they like it or not only Chinese/Russian chips, brands, tech.
3. Non-aligned just like the first cold war, nations that the US allows some sales to but puts restrictions on them, prevents re-export to countries under 2, and they can't get the very best stuff western because they haven't agreed to exclude Chinese/Russian tech and adopt western "clean network"

It's all part of a larger coercive paradigm to build a tall fence around the western controlled yard and drag as many countries as they can to within that, isolate China and Russia and crank up the heat on trade war, embargo basic materials, cut off exchange of scientific knowledge and figure they come out on top. As it stands the US navy and NATO navy are much stronger than Russia and China's combined fleets, the Chinese in particular have entirely structured themselves around near defense of their coastal waters with very limited long-range capabilities which means the US can interdict off the coast of say Africa or South America to enforce blockades, to do piracy and hampers and harass Chinese and Russian development. Eventually the Russians and Chinese will have to respond but they're very hesitant to react and keep on flinching which is why the west is confident in continuing this strategy and in the near-term it certainly looks like it will bring the west benefits in terms of delaying the decline of their hegemony somewhat and in fact increasing the level of coercion. They believe the best time to strike is now while they still have dollar hegemony, while they still have SWIFT, while they still have the upper hand in many areas and they're not wrong. The only reason they aren't moving faster on this is they are beholden to not totally wrecking their own capitalist/corporate interests and need to give companies time to wind down and change supply chains which takes years. The west let's not forget has a stronger starting position and hand thanks to centuries of colonialism and plunder, thanks to a century of successfully waged cold war which they won, thanks to extensive experience and prep-work for stay-behind, for destabilization, for funding militants, for control of cyber-space from their commanding heights of control of the major internet companies which are all western based and control discourse and online life for much of the globe. (Also why they want to ban tiktok, they will not accept any cracks in their total dominance of the internet and the web)

The US may not succeed in pulling as many countries into their orbit and their tall fence small yard as they wish, then again they may. They ousted Assad after a decade, they've had their proxy crush Iranian influence in the middle east, they have many more color revolutions, islamist proxies, etc to throw in the fire. Nothing is certain other than that trade barriers are going up and the ability of those in the west to access tech not completely compromised by the NSA/eyes is decreasing rapidly as the boot comes down, as the progressive veneer drops, as companies drop even the pretense of caring about trans people, about LGBTQ rights, about racial justice, etc. They need to keep a lid on their own populations as well as maintain hegemony and turn up the pressure to isolate, cook, and destroy China/Russia or at least build their own independent kingdom and some outlying regions they subject to neo-colonialism to sustain capitalism in a different form.

Less rainbow imperialism. More of the mask slipping. More and more difficulty for the west to use "human rights" rhetoric as a cudgel without looking oh so two-faced to the entire global south and even many in the core.

I'm not sure if he actually does it though. If he does it's for his base and some of his wack advisors as he absolutely 100% does not give a shit about trans people one way or the other. His focus has always been anti-immigrant racism.

Nah. Lots of liberals like using words like imperialism and will call Russia imperialist. There's a liberal anti-warism that's for Ukraine, for Palestine but also regularly duped into supporting color revolutions like Hong Kong and calling Chinese efforts to prevent color revolutions "imperialism" because they live in this moment to moment vacuum devoid of historical context or understanding of material and historical forces.