Image is from this article, of protestors in Mexico tearing down a steel fence.
While military, economic, and covert pressure on Venezuela and nearby countries in South America proper continues to mount, a similar process is occurring against Mexico, currently under the leadership of the very popular Sheinbaum, who has generally followed the footsteps of AMLO in terms of policies.
While figures in the Trump administration have made statements to the effect of wishing to bomb Mexican territory, internal pressure within Mexico is rather hard to generate when the government is doing generally positive things for people. As such, protests - comically denoted “Gen Z protests” despite young people being a vanishingly small proportion - have arisen in Mexico, very obviously astroturfed by pro-US and anti-Sheinbaum interests. The first protest, on November 15th, gathered less than 20,000 people, while the second, on November 20th, gathered perhaps 200. Article headlines suggesting that Mexico was “on the verge of collapse” have proven rather sensational and wishcast-y.
While it’s easy to poke fun at these farces (I certainly am), it’s important to keep in mind that soft coups have long been part of the American strategy in Latin America, and with unlimited money and many resources to throw at a project, even incompetent forces can eventually create enough chaos that it can make the ruling president or party feel forced to resign. Such eventualities are certainly not inevitable, and even weak states can provide enough resistance to force the US to try a hard coup instead, with outright bombing campaigns and covert military operations. Cuba has provided perhaps the best example in the western hemisphere of how such plots can be subverted with enough national support (e.g. the hundreds of times the CIA tried to kill/maim Castro, plus the Bay of Pigs debacle), but you do have to be willing to take extraordinary measures to do this - the sorts of measures figures like Chile’s Allende did not take in the 1970s, and the measures Venezuela’s Maduro appears to be taking right now. We shall see what path Sheinbaum takes.
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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.
Translated through Google.
https://t.me/TEFI_Russia/34976
It’s a clear sign that internet bringing the world together isn’t what it has been touted to be. Together with the US regionalizing its own TikTok platform, we are going to be seeing more siloing of internet content rather than widespread dissemination. Neoliberal globalization in its current form is coming to an end, with the US leading the way for decoupling, although there are still many countries (looking at the BRICS) that still want the status quo to remain and not realizing that the current era will be over soon.
On the other hand, this is going to cause a significant ad revenue loss for the Russian content creators. Say what you want about Youtube and Google, they still pay the ad revenue much better than the other platforms. It’s also a reason why most popular Chinese content creators in bilibili also have separate channels on Youtube, because bilibili pays like shit for their content creators, so you can have millions of views in mainland China but still earn a fraction of what you get for a couple hundred thousand views on Youtube (Taiwan/HK/overseas Chinese audience), and that’s not accounting for the dollar exchange rate yet.
So some of the Russian creators are probably going to have a second channel on Youtube like their Chinese counterparts do, but how they can get the payment under sanction, I’m not sure. There are still many Russian content creators who have their Youtube channels, so they must be getting paid in one way or another. Others have switched to crypto/bitcoin and I don’t blame them a bit.
Meanwhile, rutube is really not that good yet compared to Youtube in terms of functionality, but maybe this will incentivize them to improve.
I thought that demonetization of Russian YouTube channels happened already as part of the initial response to the invasion of ukraine in 2022.
https://support.google.com/youtubecreatorstudio/answer/1311392?hl=en-GB
Yes, I’m pretty sure the accounts are registered outside Russia.
There’s apparently a pretty simple way to sideline the sanctions. You can have a channel that’s owned by an entity outside of Russia but whose actual content is made by someone in Russia. Then the entity that owns the channel just passes the payment to the Russian creator. Youtube allows people to do this in a way that gives the actual creator control over the channel (even though they don’t own it), and because there’s no overhead the entity outside of Russia doesn’t take a cut. I know of at least 1 gaming youtube channel that operates this way, MAGEFIST. The downside is that, if one of the channels owned by the company gets banned, they all get banned. So it’s like a shared Netflix account where you just gotta hope everyone is cool.
Excellent decision, and a necessary one. Libs will cry that Russia is “censoring western views,” but history has proven that letting the west have a monopoly on the information sphere will result in them using it to undermine every single one of its targets.
Another benefit is that it effectively acts a internet tariff which will allow domestic companies to gain usershare when they would just be dominated by multinational internet firms.
This should be a playbook repeated in every global south nation.
Absolutely. Establishing soveriegnty over critical infrastructure, rather than letting the west dominate, is an excellent way to escape the trap of underdevelopment and imperialism.
Russian media is literally BANNED in Europe. Putin regularly has BBC journalists in his press releases, can you imagine a Russia Today journalist at the European Parliament or the White House?
Of course, the irony will be lost on them. They willingly license themselves to not really see these things, justifying it by saying their enemy is pure evil and thus it’s fine.
Baxk in early 2025, ZelensKKKy in South Africa in a futile attempt to diminish Russia’s role on the continent, hyperventilating over seeing a RT microphone and repeatedly attempting to dispose of it, then being scolded like a petulent child because South Africa isn’t the West anymore and RT is not blocked.
deleted by creator
Ahhh man, RIP all the grillpilled channels I watch of guys in far Northern Russia fishing and hanging out with their dogs smh.
Probably is the right move in general though.
A bit ago someone made a post of good VPNs that don’t steal your data and give it to pissrael and the like. Wish I’d find it again.
I think mullvad is the current standard, run by the same people who do the pirate bay iirc
Somehow I hadn’t heard of that one, thank you.
Air VPN is good too
Would definitely be interested in that if it can be found again but no pressure obviously
For watching Russian content I would rather recommend getting a self-hosted VPN, in the Rusalia blog I think there are some recommendations.
Suddenly everyone under the age of 40 in Russia will have a VPN
I expect there’ll also be, in the great Russian tradition of internet piracy, a whole lot of just reuploading youtube videos to their domestic platforms
I’ve definitely seen stuff like that on bilibili, with the videos also usually having Chinese subtitles added on (and occasionally on youtube for that matter, in various languages, but a lot of this was from back in the olden days when subtitles weren’t yet integrated in the video player and so the only way to localize something was to just bake them in directly, I assume these days stuff like that would get copyright-struck)
Rutracker, but the video streaming version.
Every VPN company having a “sell shovels during a gold rush” moment every couple of years as the internet is cut up into spheres of national influence.
The future of the Internet will be each has its own, while the rest of the west will have broken AI slop galore leading to the grandest expression of surrealist incomprehensible non-reality.
based
Probably good for Russia in the long term but also likely means I’ll have even more trouble finding cool Russian music in the future
I mean, I don’t think them locking Western platforms out necessarily means locking their own platforms in - they could well be available to non-Russian users, just as many Chinese websites are. VK and ok.ru are accessible, although I’m not sure how easy it is to actually make an account as an outside user, each time I’ve looked at the login menu and it asked me for a phone number I’ve just given up.
the Iron Firecurtain