Yes and no. Iran is still small compared to the US. It’s no China, Russia, India, or Brazil. The US will achieve an objective if it coups Iran. But it will not win in a direct conflict with a motivated opponent. It hopes that toppling Iran will make it more likely to win against a motivated opponent. But the US will still lose in the end.
The US is a paper tiger at scale. It’s obviously capable of killing millions. But killing millions isn’t the standard. The standard is winning a direct conflict from motivated actors. The US does not win direct conflicts against motivated actors, even small ones. The US wins against militaries that are tiny by comparison, and sometimes not even then.
Just think about the alternative. Protestors are marching demanding a change to their government, so the government chooses to open fire on them in the hopes to scare the protests into submission. This guy gets on television and then tries to lie about really specific details about a nonexistent operation to find nonexistent people doing things that no one is doing so that he can convince the rest of the population that the protestors are actually foreign agents.
Meanwhile, Mossad tweets that they’re on the ground in Iran next to protestors. Mossad was discovered operating entire war capabilities inside Iranian territory, even in populated areas, while they commites war crimes by killing specific targeted civilians. These are known facts.
I dunno. It’s hard to imagine that the Iranian regime would just be lying about things like this at the same time Israeli military intelligence is claiming that they’re doing things to attack Iran.
I agree somewhat. It’s hard because his tweets make some claims that are either editorial or unsourced and I have to dig further. And I know that my interlocutors won’t put in that much effort.
Yes, it shows the video with the watermark, but that’s not enough to establish the fact of what the video is of
I mean, I really appreciate what The Grayzone is trying to do…
But Max Blumenthal, the editor of The Grayzone, is one of the authors of this piece. And he writes many paragraphs that are followed by “sources”, which are actually just Tweets by… Max Blumenthal.
That is not a good look.
The JPost article about Mossad… gold.
The tracing of the NGOs… gold.
But I actually can’t share this with anyone because the editor approved himself citing himself…
These protests started on Dec 28th. That’s 17 days prior to their claims. They want us to believe that the Iranians are managing to kill almost 1k protestors per day when the Israeli occupation of Gaza was only killing 250 per day. It’s wild. And my lib friends are doing the AOC at the fences meme.
OK, I found the text of the instagram screenshot you posted here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B7O3AhSgecL/
The full text is:
#Iraq 🇮🇶 || Schools, particularly in displacement camps, are chronically understaffed and in many instances teachers are still not being paid. Classes are extremely overcrowded, there is often a shortage of teachers, and children missing civil documentation are denied the opportunity to receive an education altogether. .
The pictures associated with that post are just screenshots of text-only tweets by NRC MiddleEast. They don’t appear to be related in any way to the images being used in present-day reporting on Iran.
Edit: Also, the video you linked to on Instagram was posted 13h ago. For some reason, it has no title and no information about who posted it. I have no clue what this is a video of
The crossposted link is erroring. Very weird.
I’m trying to figure out how to tie the imgur video you posted to Iraq. I can’t find anything about it. I haven’t been able to get Tineye to find anything with the images.
Can you help?
The crossposted link is erroring. Very weird.
I’m trying to figure out how to tie the imgur video you posted to Iraq. I can’t find anything about it. I haven’t been able to get Tineye to find anything with the images.
Can you help?
Subscribing to the international law model is equivalent to inviting foreign capital in to invest in China - it’s using the opponent’s energy against it.
One thing that has been true for a while now is that while the US claims to be all about international law, it violates it constantly. But the US continues to use it justify sanctions and violence and rally many countries to common cause.
If China also subscribes to International Law and behaves better than the US, why would it be any different than say Luxembourg or Zimbabwe doing the same? Because of economics. As China ascends to the dominant economic position in the globe, and as it becomes capable of protecting other nations, more and more countries will be able to use International Law against the US.
We’re hoping the US is actually a paper tiger. If the US defeats one of its strongest opponents, it’s a signal that the US is much much stronger than we believed, and that has massive consequences
Also currently active in Somalia, Ukraine, Lebanon (via proxy, but not only), Syria, Iran (covert) and also threatening Colombia, Canada, China, Russia.
And yet, very very different. Kruschev’s liberalization and detante with America was an attempt to join the imperialist club and carve up the world as an ally to the US and ultimately resulted in the absolutely horrible inequality that developed in the final decades of the USSR.
Deng’s liberalization and detante with America was an attempt to get the US to fund the development of Chinese productive forces. That worked. It was not an attempt to join the imperialism club, and in fact China became less chauvinistic under Deng than under Mao. That shows correctness. And the resulting economics show continuous improvement of living and working conditions for Chinese workers when, at the same age, the USSR had already started to economically collapse.
Also, the other comments claiming that the USSR might not have collapsed without the split forget that China had almost nothing to offer the USSR at the time of the split. They were not an effective producer of anything. They were deeply impoverished. They were militarily weak. The split hurt China more than it hurt the USSR because it cost China access to technology, energy, military collaboration, etc.
I think the USSR probably would have dragged China down with it as it collapsed under the programming of the counter-revolutionaries. It’s not like China didn’t try. There were debates and discourse to attempt to analyze and convince the Kruschevites of the incorrectness of the path they were on. Not only was China right rhetorically, China was right materially, and history has proven this to us.
The kids are not alright
It’s honestly so infuriating
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say this is a lose-lose for the empire. Except that everything is lose-lose in a long enough time horizon.
First off, the ability to test systems and tactics against Venezuela’s defenses was valuable in its own right. Made more valuable by the fact that many of those systems are from larger adversaries of the US. That provides lots of valuable intelligence.
Second, the shock and awe factor is very valuable. A public execution of Maduro is definitely in the cards and doing so would ramp up the shock and awe. It will cause lots of reactions, lots of movement. A lot of that movement will be opportunity for the US to act again. Get one more shock and awe event out of that, and it would be very valuable.
Third, it shakes the relationship tree and reveals the ride-or-die allies versus the mere sycophants. It tightens the circle, it creates bonds of allegiance, and it allows the empire to do more terrible things faster.
The moderator of a Venezuelan community on Lemmy posted the most white supremacist shit I’ve seen and then when called out said not to talk down to them because they’re a real Venezuelan and no one else can know about the real story but people like them. Then they blocked me for being a Russian bot.
Your sense of the numbers are way off. $2Bn is a small price to pay for the largest known oil reserves in the world. Very very very small price compared to what the profits will be within a year. Venezuela in 2025 was already at a million barrels per day which is at least 2 billion USD in revenue monthly.
That could be the point. If things get ugly on the ground in Venezuela it just gives the US further context for escalation after escalation
Well, when you refuse to answer direct questions about what you mean, you’re going to see a lot of interpretation. You could try being less of an ass.