Image is of a protest in San Diego against ICE.
On January 7th, 37-year-old Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. While a considerable amount of the discussion online has been about the direction her wheels were turning and things like that, truthfully, I think it’s just fundamentally bad to shoot a person to death with a gun if you happen to be a state mercenary enforcing an incredibly racist federal policy, regardless of the circumstances.
The murder has since prompted a wave of vigils and protests, not only in Minneapolis, but also in virtually every major city in the country. The demands are justice for Good in particular, and the abolition of ICE in general, to avenge its many victims. The Trump administration has done all they can to inflame the situation, designating Good a “domestic terrorist” and saying that the agent who shot her will be immune from prosecution.
Protests and resistance to this administration’s policies have, encouragingly, had an element of international solidarity - not only are flags from countries throughout Latin America (and also Palestine) present, but speakers in protests have even been actively condemning the recent imperialist actions against Venezuela. For it is, of course, one joint struggle. The imperial boomerang always returns - and in the modern day, it returns rapidly.
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 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.
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.
The internet is still shut down in Iran, over 120 hours now. So it is very difficult to say what’s happening in Iran right now.
Source.
An interesting artifact of the Iranian internet shutdown has been the tenfold decline in engagement and views on Reza Pahlavi’s (exiled crown prince/Shah, main opposition figure) social media profiles (Instagram, Twitter/X, etc). On Instagram, his videos have gone from receiving 30-50 million views (with a peak of 90 million on his pinned video), to 3-5 million. Likes have similarly decreased, from 2-3 million likes per video, to 200-300 thousand likes. Twitter/X shows similar figure, his January 6th video has 8 million views, his latest video around 800 thousand. This shows that the vast majority of his engagement (90%), was from Iranians within Iran itself. Also shows that support for monarchist figures has been severely underestimated. I absolutely did not expect such a decline in engagement due to the Iranian internet shutdown, I thought monarchist/Shah support was mainly an Iranian diaspora phenomenon.
This is suggesting like half the population of Iran is logging into twitter to check in on the Shah, I don’t buy it
Nah this is false. His numbers were artificially inflated and then at the start of this shut down they stopped inflating his numbers. It’s an op.
I’m surprised to see that they are competent enough to do this op (reducing numbers after internet shutdown). But yea I agree with Awoo.
In a lot of protest videos (even ones shared by Western outlets) there were like 300 people in view protesting and at most 2 chanting “Javid Shah, Javid Shah, Javid Shahhhh”.
It’s a very clever way to manufacture consent. Also means that they can do this with any accounts and figures online, which means they’re probably doing it with figures/accounts they’re boosting because it aligns with their goals.
Several years back I believed this was happening with vaush but couldn’t give you evidence. Just a tinfoil theory i had back then.
I’d believe it. Sometimes our intuition about stuff is just right. Like if a surge of attention or engagement feels inorganic it’s because we’re subconsciously picking up on weird patterns that we can’t fully describe
The thing we can’t fully describe is why tf would anyone listen to vaush
Yeah that’s how it felt back then. When we gave pushback in the form of reddit bots and visible opposition to him the growth dropped off a cliff like they gave up on the strat or something. He then went back to something that looked more natural.
I also felt this way recently during the height of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, H3H3’s content was unnaturally higher than it was beforehand which gave it a boosted feeling.
Specific periods of certain influencer’s history give off this vibe, like Ben Shapiro doesn’t feel unnatural these days but there was definitely a period of time where I think he may have been boosted unnaturally.
It’s been funny watching how bad Ben Shapiro’s viewership numbers have gotten after all the boosting has gone away.
I don’t like vibes-based analysis.
I like evidence-based reasoning.
Here the evidence is that only a small percentage of protestors in the country say his name. That ralliers failed to get others to do so.
Selection bias? What if people are too afraid?
Counter-Evidence: many crowds are chanting death to the dictator, and the fact that they are protesting already contravenes the fear argument.
Think of all the vibes MAGA people get about how things are and how things will happen. They are reactionary and idealist.
We should try to disprove or prove our claims.
You can use vibes to help you identify areas to investigate, but you shouldn’t use them to make conclusions.
When time or resources are lacking and you have to operate on vibes, you should make a note in the back of your head of which things were vibes and what things were derived from that.
Yes you’re right I definitely overstated it. I should have said that intuition is something to listen to as an indicator of what might be worth suspecting / being careful of. I do think that if you have spent a long time tracking sentiment in an area, you gain a feel for the patterns of the flow of information and influence and if something feels inorganic it can trigger the spidey senses. But it shouldn’t be treated as definitive
If I post something and it doesnt have a source then ask me for a source. I try to set example
Sounds good.
Scroll down on his timeline. His current engagement on his most recent posts is in-line with his engagement from 1+ months ago. It seems that his posts either got more exposure or botted over the past month and then that stopped for whatever reason, be it he’s not getting reposted/shared by the right people, or a bot farm was shutdown.
2 weeks ago, 3.9M views
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSxk9Bmib4h
4 weeks ago, 4.2M views
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSNgoDkDSCa
5 weeks ago, 4.1M views
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DR7mfQRjZmZ
This “fact” brought to you by Langley…
At the beginning of shutoff his posts still had millions of engagement and internet pointed it out so they probably turned the bot farm off.
90 million views to 3 million views, Iran has a population of 92 million people, this makes 0 sense, is 97% of all Iranians watching Pahlavi on instagram what the fuck
During the 2022 riots
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/09/29/690060/Julia-Kassem-Twitter-army-terror-squads-Iran-revolution-true-colors
#BoliviaNoHayGolpe
Even the IRGC, all monarchists
22 million Iranians under 14 watching skibidi Pahlavi
There’s veen an Israeli psyop for the last few years has been to spread rumours of the IRGC taking over.
1 in 10 Iranians is an iPad kid watching everything Pahlavi puts out 10 times every day. They turned the internet off so now they’ve moved on to playing Angry Birds.
Agreed, absurdly irresponsible to be acting like this is somehow conclusive. @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net, give a time line with views and likes over time with the dates of the internet outages and shutdown of starlink to get a full picture. I’ll believe it once I see that. But these 2 static numbers at 2 separate times do not make a good argument.
Where are you getting this from? Second time in less than a week repeating these psyops about Islamic Republic. Its very irresponsible
In general, I like having Marmite’s analyses over the years. But I notice that their sources are primarily western.
Even for something as simple as internet tracking, I use CloudFlare - which is a western company.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/ir
However, our friend here uses NETBLOCKS Mapping Internet FREEDOM bald eagle caws in the background.
Your knowledge on technical capabilities is quite something. But I’m sorry to say, I have been taking any conclusions you have reached over the last few years I’ve heard from you with a massive grain of salt. Like a spoonful.
To be clear, this is because I don’t trust your inputs, no problem with you.
They are our resident Iran doomposter just like our other resident China doomposter
i dont think you can draw any absolute conclusions from this, couldnt it just be that cia was running bot farms in Iran to try and make this activity look more legit ?
Pro:
That would be possible, you just need some spare computers and a place to put them in. Energy is cheap in Iran. And we’ve seen their drone plants inside Iran activated during the 12 day war.
Counterpoint:
But that would be irresponsible and silly. And despite the possibility, I strongly strongly doubt it.
And the fact of the matter is, some of these “bots” are human beings with many accounts. Namely the MEK operating out of Albania.
Also it should never be discounted that we know as an absolute fact that platforms, especially Meta owned ones, work hand in hand with Western intelligence on regime change in unfriendly states and preventing it in friendly ones. Their capabilities were already advanced way back during the Arab Spring, and I’m sure it’s even easier now.
I don’t think this is necessarily true: engagement does not equal support, plenty of anti-monarchists(those in the ‘opposition’ and otherwise) and supporters of the current state, or those who at the least oppose whatever grassroots movement really exists(I don’t disagree there is some level of real Shah/anti-current-state support, just that I don’t think those engagement numbers can be used to directly infer how much there is) and/or the US backed colour revolution attempt built around it, would want to watch what the ‘opposition’ leaders have to say.
May not be the best analogy but take a look at the front page of hexbear: the amount of posts of content from fash/libs and other right-wingers being dunked on/discussed by users often significantly outnumbers the amount of content posted from leftists that our userbase generally agrees with