Image is from the Britannica article on CECOT, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center in English.
This megathread’s topic is inspired by our lovely news regular, @[email protected], who talks often about the conditions inside El Salvador and gives nuanced and informative takes.
As the Trump administration continues to make foreign policy blunders that would make even the staunchest anti-imperialist accelerationist blush - and we are barely three months in! - it’s interesting to compare and contrast his policies of incompetent imperialist and domestic management to the dictators in other countries.
Bukele is somewhat unique among fascists, in that he seems to not hide - and seems to even admit to - his evil, self-describing as the world’s “coolest dictator”. El Salvador has no particular shortage of prominent fascists in their history, but one major example is Maximiliano Martínez, who led the country over much of the 1930s and the early 1940s. He was responsible the deaths of many thousands of communists and indigneous people, and yet joined World War 2 on the side of the Allies and against the Nazis.
The comparisons between Martínez and Bukele - and, indeed, between Bukele and Trump - in terms of their impact on minority groups are slowly growing as world attention is being drawn to the country. The recent meeting between Bukele and Trump has shifted a spotlight onto El Salvador’s crime policy; the internal conditions of El Salvador’s prisons are genuinely monstrous. One gets a similar feeling as when reading descriptions of the conditions of Holocaust victims in German concentration camps. Trump has made statements to the effect that he want a similar crime crackdown inside the United States, and I certainly believe that he wants this (ICE is already just kidnapping people off the streets into vans), but his administration has been so chaotic and mismanaged that it’s difficult to determine whether this will be an interest he rapidly drops in favor of some other hair-brained scheme.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
dow nearly where the liberation started, and yield fallen to 4.6 from 4.9 on 30 years treasuries, another nothing ever happens gang W.
Yea, local currency bond yields were never a good measure. On the other hand, exchange rates are. DXY hasn’t recovered much.
There will always be demand for US Treasuries domestically as long as the US State is functional. It has no risk of involuntary default and is basically money (even long term ones to some extent). Short term treasuries are considered “cash equivalents” in accounting.
Hedge funds and money managers love Treasuries. It’s the easiest way to store money. Reserve accounts at the Fed are only accessible to eligible financial institutions, Treausries are accessible to public.
If you are a money manager, you can store money in a commercial bank and earn interest. Even if there were no default risk and all deposits were guaranteed by Gov, the deposits are still a liability of the commercial bank, not the Government.
That is not the case with treasuries, these are direct libablities of the Gov.
I believe - and I think there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that supports me - that the stock market is “efficient” in the sense that all information is processed nearly instantly (that doesn’t mean stock markets lead to efficient allocation of capital, that’s a very different thing). So that begs the question, the market is NOT pricing in an economic crash. Why?
It’s reasonable to conclude that market makers are not on the Trump Train and don’t actually believe he will restart American manufacturing or bring in hundreds of billions in tariff revenue.
OK, so that means the market thinks the tariffs won’t have much of an impact. Given the broad consensus among economists of all stripes about tariffs, it’s also reasonable to conclude that it’s not that the market anticipates there will be no impact from tariffs.
Thus, I think that right now the market assumes these tariffs won’t stick, and that they’ll actually disappear fairly soon. Market makers are not blind acolytes of capitalism, though. They have a laser focus on making money. So IMO, I think they have reliable inside information that the tariffs won’t stick. Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bessent is begging China to just give Trump the most nominal, pointless win so he can fold. And the market - looking back on the past - thinks China will end up being the rational grown-up and will spare any economic pain for giving Trump is cookie.
And… they might be right. Or at least, I see why this is the response from bourgeois capitalists. But I think if the market ever gets the notion that the tariffs might actually stick then I think you will see the market crash hard and fast. Maybe not as bad as 1929 because I think the market will hold out hope that the tariffs will be lifted (and why would anyone destroy the economy on purpose?) if things get really bad.
market is inefficient plenty of times, it might just be external hedge funds have unloaded onto trump simps, the volume will then thin out, every retail trader will leverage out, and then it will crash a second time with margin calls on retail traders after disappointing q2
or you might be right.
the market has volume, price and depth of volume at the price (which is unknowable until price is reached), maybe someone dumping 200 billion will go unnoticed, maybe it will crash the whole thing, because deep pockets think different from you, but don’t care to short (but also won’t care to buy), and just wait on sidelines (like buffet). crashing dollar is very impossible proposition for example, no one has pockets deep enough against money printer, so they can’t pull off asian/pound crash even if they plausibly wanted to, forex markets aren’t that deep on that scale.
like examples of shadowy albatrosses everyone ignores inside america: saudis are cash negative already at 65 dollars, what they’ll do with that; india/pakistan is absolutely not priced in, despite modi being second bibi; oil inside usa is not, strictly speaking, very cash money as well at 65 (i think some wells are at 40$ cost, while some at 55, which is already bordering on non-profitable); lumber/steel shocks in construction, truck deliveries missing plausibly a month at this point; dropshippers not getting ad revenue, which also fucks google/meta; farmers getting boned inside usa with usaid pull out; ai not fucking working (tech companies do be swimming in cash to afford it, but their evaluation implies much more); construction work inside cities suddenly getting labor prices of non-migrant workers as well.
We have stopped all trade with the largest market in the world and stocks are the same. Money is so fucking fake man
it’s vibes-based, supply chains aren’t in crisis yet