One year on. Hundreds of thousands are dying or dead, millions are displaced, the Middle East is undergoing its greatest changes in a generation, Iran has directly attacked Israel twice in one year, and Yemen has proven that the US Navy ain't worth shit. We are the closest we have been to nuclear war (discounting accidents) in decades, but also the fall of Israel.
Because one day, the prisoners of a concentration camp paraglided over a wall.
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.
PSL has its flaws but these are bullshit statements, an org doesn't have to go through a checklist every time they make an announcement just to prove to this dude that they're revolutionary, and the assumption that the protests were half assed is a spit on the face of everyone that has participated over the last years in the huge protests in the streets and universities at the risk of being beaten, arrested, or lied about by the media.
I'm not from the US, so take everything with a grain of salt. I don't believe PSL is an exemplary vanguard party, but it is one with genuine revolutionaries within it doing real work in the outside world and it succeeds at growing and gaining momentum, that is not negligible for a country with probably the most well guarded capitalist regime.
this is pal action US rebranded, I dont trust anything coming from that org, it used to be funded by fergie (and probably still is) fuck that guy and anything associated with him
I'm not super pro PSL but the thread makes unsubstantied claims like that they're lying about the number of people at their marches
I’m very suspicious of them, they go around committing vandalism and admitting it was them and never face consequences. Legit think it might be a psyop to lul left actionists into a false sense of security, that they can do those things too.
The “clean room” they breached in the UK is an example of this BS. It wasn’t a clean room. Clean rooms aren’t under 1 layer of shitty corrugated metal, they have advanced seals and filtration systems. It was just some shop floor. They pretended they shut down manufacturing for a year without any evidence and it’s most likely it was just like a 24 hour cleanup
i get the suspicion but iirc they got out of jail with a jury trial, i feel like that would be very hard to set up to fake. I'll leave whether what they're doing is effective or not up to others I don't feel like I know enough to weigh in on it
Nobody I know and work with in the radical left would say it’s a good idea to post on social media “look at this vandalism we did” but Pal Action does that. How do they consistently get away with ignoring opsec that every other left group has to follow or get instantly blown up by the feds?
I dont disagree it's weird, last time we had this discussion here people were speculating that they just do it because they live in the UK and they're hyper surveilled anyways but that just seems like defeatism anyways, there are ways to combat gait recognition and what not. I'm willing to buy they could be betting on people constantly doing jury nullification even if it's kinda dumb but directly fighting the state like that has historically led to them blowing your brains out when you're in your sleep yet I havent heard any news of mysterious activist deaths in britian, I can't work out what the deal is either because I also dont see a ton of copy cats so it's not like if this is a psyop that it seems to be working to get people to incriminate themselves much
Actually the only person with any sense pointed out that they broadcast occupations where the only way they’re removed is by force (arrest) and that those occupations aren’t the only actions they take. Zed just seems a bit psyop-happy
They just broadcasted their vandalism of the insurers of Elbit Systems where they broke glass and spray painted and nobody there was arrested. Why did they rat on themselves?
I’m not telling you to conclude they are feds, just to have a reasonable skepticism why they are treated differently and with kid gloves than literally every other group.
i get the suspicion but iirc they got out of jail with a jury trial, i feel like that would be very hard to set up to fake.
See I had the opposite impression. Jury nullification cases are exceedingly rare historically. The fact that a left vandal club is consistently getting jury nullification trials adds to my suspicion, it doesn’t detract from it. Another odd anomaly where this group is treated differently than every other leftist group for some inexplicable reason.
Usually imperialist nations are extremely serious when it comes to prosecuting anyone who gets in the way of wars. Sedition, treason, terrorism charges all get thrown around. For some reason though never for these folks.
Richard Medhurst was arrested in the UK for literally just posting news and commentary, and is being charged under terrorism laws. But the people actually breaking into MIC facilities get off Scott free? It’s weird
i think those just stop oil people also recently got off scott free but those people really set off my psyop alarms so that probably doesnt help pal action's case in the slightest lol
i hadnt heard about that but I also wasnt a communist at the time so I wasnt plugged into the socialist news enviroment (also, i actually have seen fed accusations being thrown at PSL on this very site before lol). regardless I dont actually think pal action are feds at this time, there's just some shift going on that I can't figure out, either they have picked up on a weakness of the british state that is easily exploitable or they are useful to the feds in some way and I think we need to watch closely to figure it out. or some other 3rd thing I havent thought of lol
The telegram I linked has a bunch of people doing vandalism without consequences. I’m talking funding, court cases, actual evidence of government backing. Because that “fact” is still vibes
I don't think it's a psyop because there are multiple Palestine Action affiliate branches for different countries unless you think every single one of those branches are also psyops, which isn't impossible but would be pretty hard to have multiple intelligence agencies coordinate like that instead of just having a different psyop run by one intelligence agency for each country.
I also don't think they're equivalent to XR/Just Stop Oil because Palestine Action actually cause property damage. XR threw dye at some public fountain and Just Stop Oil basically threw paint on glass and made a easily moppable floor dirty. They're minor inconveniences at best. That isn't the same as breaking into a factory and smashing drones.
And as a final point, I haven't seen any independent media raise suspicion about Palestine Action. For example, Blumenthal might be an antivaxxer crank/grifter, but he's usually good at sniffing out controlled opposition and compromised elements. If you think about all the controlled opps like Tulsi Gabbard or XR or that Breadtuber who trafficked eastern European women (Beau something), there were people who knew they were full of shit since Day 1, but I haven't seen anything from independent media about Palestine Action. The vast majority of them are supportive of Palestine Action if anything.
Having said that, their cavalier disregard for opsec never sat right with me. I mostly chalked it up to the UK being different from the US (which I supposed would make Palestine Action US a lot more sus since they're trying to copy Palestine Action UK), but who knows.
i dont want to get into everything but suffice it to say that fergie chambers has been well known as a wrecker for a long time and he was heavily involved with it back when the genocide started. i was unaware pal action US was still around in any form I thought it collapsed when he decided to move to tunisia, i guess this is what happened to them
oh apologies yeah I should have said his full name first, he's james "fergie" chambers, heir to Cox Enterprises who likes to LARP as a revolutionary but just wrecks shit instead
god it's kinda hard, so much of it is buried in twitter threads and what not, i know there have been articles that have been written about him in mainstream news but none of it really covers any of the communist drama he's been in. I can try to write you up a summary of it later from memory but I really really dont want to go digging for all the threads that have been made about him on twitter so you'd just have to trust me
No worries comrade I'm not making demands or anything! Any info is appreciated.
Aside from curiosity I ask because I know people that fall for every anti-PSL rant they have ever heard and it is always handy to at least know what they are talking about.
so, like I said fergie is the heir to the Cox family. I think this is all according to fergie, but supposedly if he never become a communist he would have inherited billions, but he negotiated some early payout with his family and now has 100s of millions (which sounds kind of crazy but what do I know?). now he could be lying and he will still inherit billions anyways, but that's beside the point, the dude is extremely wealthy. and he hasn't been afraid to use it. Unfortunately I dont know the exact timeline or even what his first activities were but I think it was roughly as follows:
kind of long so putting most of it in a spoiler
He became involved in organizing with small local groups somewhere in the new england area (iirc). caused many problems and became known there as a wrecker
tried to get involved with PSL. threw money at them, didn't climb very high in the local chapter (or didnt get in at all? something like this). created grudge against PSL for him, which is why he attacks them almost exclusively over like attacking CPUSA or FRSO.
decided to start his own group. decided best way to do it was set up a commune that involved a gym specifically dedicated to MMA training. supposedly very cult like environment. it was while he was here doing this thing he first started getting into beefs with some Indigenous socialists online and being racist while doing it. fedjacketed them among other things. at one point in this saga someone in the commune had a severe medical emergency that may have even led to death in the hospital later? cant remember if the person died or not.
throughout all of this he would just fund whatever got his attention. started helping fund stop cop city, which seems good and noble, but may have been done in a very dumb way that helped lead to the RICO charges that many of the protestors are currently facing. unsure how credible this accusation is.
he gets involved with starting Pal action USA in some way. I'm not sure if he was one of/the founder(s) of the USA chapter or if he just got involved very early on and wormed his way towards the top by waving around his cash. pal action USA did a lot of seemingly dumb operations meant to get themselves arrested that he seemed to have a hand in planning. what made them even dumber is that they were having to beg for a bail and legal fund, which for some reason fergie did not have prepared ahead of time.
eventually, fergie out of nowhere seemingly converted to Islam and moved to Tunisia. a lot of people speculated he did this to flee legal consequences, although he certainly is the type to bounce around from idea to idea (i mean like, how did he even become interested in marxism as an heir in the first place?). regardless, when this happened pal action USA stopped posting from what I remember, so I thought they had died without his direct funding and involvement. that was honestly the last I had heard of him until seeing this post, with the random vicious attack on PSL i am assuming he still involved behind the scenes in some way if not outright running the whole thing.
another important thing to note is his uh, questionable at best history with women. he's been married and divorced multiple times and has kids with at least 2 of his ex wives. More importantly however is that he was arrested for domestic abuse around a decade ago, although he was never prosecuted for it. this lead many to heavily scrutinize his interactions with a potentially very vulnerable young person named calla wash. call wash is a student activist who got doxed when she was only 18 by zionists. I am unsure when her involvement with fergie began, but at the time of October 7th she was 19 and he was 38 and they seemed to be very close in their observed interactions both online and in person, which for someone with fergie's history alarmed a lot of people. it only got worse when one of the public arrest things they did had them clinging to each other in pictures that while not always romantic raised even more concerns that potential grooming was going on. and like yeah as someone who already looked down on fergie's character, finding out he was divorced, had kids, was 38, and was acting like this? I still think he might have had intentions of grooming her before he fled to tunisia. regardless, even if no sexual predation was going on he still lead her into getting a permanent record for a dumb photo op, and potentially rico charges depending on if he was once again dumb with his funding or not.
again a lot of this is rumor and half-remembered twitter threads so I can't vouch for any accuracy for a lot of this stuff, other than I think it all fits his character very well from the online interactions I happened to witness first hand, the guy was (and 99% likely still is) a complete shithead
i dunno if you saw what i was saying but if this actually is what pal action US turned into then it's almost guaranteed to still be linked to fergie chamberswho has fucking hated PSL for forever
Just make your own encompasing statement along in solidarity. Don't know who this unity of fields is but eye roll. PSL is one of the few good ones. Very petty gripes.
Unity of Fields came out of the student protests of 2023. They mainly vandalize business entities that support Israel. Most recently they posted pictures of them contaminating a supposed "clean room" at a private military research contractor. I'm not sure what a clean room is, but they say it will take some time to restore.
I've also seen claimed footage of them trashing records rooms in similar facilities.
A "clean room" in tech terms is a sterile environment to prevent contamination of dust, oils, debris because when you make high percision say electronics or turbines any little speck could be a point of failure.
How you can make a meal out of a pretty banal statement like that sure is something. Gotta get those western left trve pure revolutionary brownie points somehow I guess