5-6 km Russian breakthrough southwest of Kostiantynivka, per https://t.me/s/kalibrated
Some initial reports that Russia may have also begun assault operations on Pokrovsk. A few soldiers were apparently geolocated within the city.
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Bulletins and News Discussion from April 28th to May 4th, 2025 - Competent Fascism? - COTW: El Salvador
(hexbear.net)
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, @Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net, 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.
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.
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.
It always cracks me up the lines being drawn farm-field-to-field like control areas follow alambrados. Like imagine a farmer waking up and checking this fucking thread and going "aw shit I can't sow the east field today, the frontline shifted 10 hectares"
House Judiciary Committee votes to allow deportation (read: expulsion) of American Citizens
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJFfYzFvD8g/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJFbXnqS6uK/
Will the explicit (i.e. congressional consent for) lack of due process in the mass deportations further radicalize the libs or at least make it easier to convince my parents that the dems are not on their side?
Sounds like they all need to be impeached as they violate the constiution and bill of rights.,..,then again how the fuck is the PATRIOT ACT constiutional?
It might radicalize libs but it’s funny they care now after making it clear they had no problem sending undocumented trump supporters and their families
Okay now for the serious and consequential analysis that I know hexbear.net is famous for:
will this make talking to my extremely liberal and moderately intellectually lazy parents easier, harder, or a mix?
My lib friends are fixing on libs saying stern words right now so probably not, like the one who did the filibuster, etc. The only one who they've been excited for that I had to give credit to is Pritzker, who probably sucks because he's a Dem billionaire, but someone told me he advocated for loud protesting to never give the Republicans a moment of peace and a general strike, which is the kind of shit I'm talking about when I tell my lib friends that we need organizations to harness the power of the people, so I couldn't exactly sound hypocritical by saying "oh, but not from him".
"Look we agree it's bad but we dont know what we're supposed to do about it, let's talk about a more happy subject"
This one hurts so much inside because when I respond with "doing that for the past 20 years is how we got here! how do you not see this?!" I'm the bad guy
Sarcasm aside, depends. I don’t know your parents and the severity of their brainworms. If it’s as bad as a Reddit lib then probably not. If anything it’ll make them see those in support as bad apples as they continue making the point that Trump is doing the deportations to CECOT.
How true are all those stories of American hacking savants hacking into North Korea? I’m admittedly tech illiterate so all that stuff is foreign to me.
Where are you seeing stories of American hackers compromising the Dprk? I passively keep up with cybersecurity, and Dprk hackers working remote jobs and stealing crypto are the stories I see
It’s one of those things that would get passed by word of mouth that I’d hear over the years. There was one in 2022 shortly after the ballistic tests had gone through.
https://www.wired.com/story/p4x-north-korea-internet-hacker-identity-reveal/
Article is from last year but the guy himself did what he did in 2022.
I finally decided to do a dig deeper and found almost nothing. It seems like most of those stories I heard growing up were exaggerated or really nothing all that impressive. They were the equivalent of playground rumors and I lacked the knowledge on tech to even understand what they were talking about.
So thank you newsheads for giving me the much needed push to actually look into this.
what a fucking vomit inducing puff piece they wrote on this guy, this journalist "andy greenberg" deserves insert 
here
same, really think this needs to be sourced in some way, even if just saying they saw it on a telegram channel or whatever
I didn’t add a source because they were rumors I heard over the years. Think of them as being like playground rumors. A lot of stories get passed around about the NATO countries because we see a lot of things the global north doesn’t. Some of these rumors end up being true like the Americans being tortured in Guatemalan jails. Other times they’re made up or exaggerated.
Dianna Ortiz is the most prolific American tortured here. You’ll find a number of sources on her just by looking her name up.
im still a little confused if you were/are hearing this more in person or in online communities. it's fine to post something you've heard rumors about, i just think you should make where you were hearing these rumors clear when it's a top level comment.
Love the username, but yeah I agree. It's well agreed that DPRK hackers are some of the best in the world. They've robbed literally billions of dollars of crypto, and even publications like the Economist have admitted that DPRK hackers are top tier.
North Korea has several strengths. One is talent. This could appear counterintuitive: the country is desperately poor and ordinary citizens have severely restricted access to the internet or even computers. But “North Korea can take the best minds and tell them what to do,” says Kim Seung-joo of the school of cybersecurity at Korea University in Seoul. “They don’t have to worry about them going to work at Samsung.” At the International Collegiate Programming Contest in 2019, a team from a North Korean university came eighth, beating those from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford.
Per https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/03/19/why-are-north-korean-hackers-such-good-crypto-thieves
"we interviewed someone who will go to prison under Occupied Korea's national security law if he says anything positive about the DPRK. would you like to know how he couched his comments in tired brainwashing tropes to avoid this?" —the serious journalists at The Economist
Love the username
losurdo is my goat. why no losurdo emotes btw 
Points for kills: How Ukraine is using video game incentives to slay more Russians
The program — called Army of Drones bonus — rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It will soon be integrated with a new online marketplace called Brave 1 Market, which will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment for their units.
The program assigns points for each type of kill: 20 points for damaging and 40 for destroying a tank; up to 50 points for destroying a mobile rocket system, depending on the caliber; and six points for killing an enemy soldier.
Units will soon be able to use the special digital points they’ve been getting since last year by trading them in for new weapons. A Vampire drone, for example, costs 43 points. The drone, nicknamed Baba Yaga, or witch, is a large multi-rotor drone able to carry a 15-kilogram warhead. The Ukrainian government will pay for the drones that are ordered and will deliver them to the front-line unit within a week.
The scheme is aimed at directing more equipment to the most effective units.
Soldiers will be able to leave reviews on the site to guide future purchases.
“For example, we have increased the number of points for infantry elimination from two to six, and that has doubled the number of destroyed enemies in one month,” Fedorov said. “This is not just a system of motivation, this is a mechanism that changes the rules of war.”
For example, we have increased the number of points for infantry elimination from two to six, and that has doubled the number of destroyed enemies in one month
Why don’t they set the points to one bazillion and win the war instantly?
The most neoliberal brainrot shit ive ever seen applied to warfare. starving your worst fronts of equipment will do absolute wonders for holding back any army that isnt dogass.
No Troop Left Behind logic.
They could go farther though. The point costs are set arbitrarily by some central planning bureaucrat, why not have everyone bid on their equipment in an auction system?
And of course, just because someone is more talented at killing, doesn't mean they value their survival more highly, so it only makes sense to have an exchange where points can be bought and sold. And over time financial infrastructure can develop, to price these points more efficiently, through derivatives and options trading. Exciting opportunities in this space!
UberAzov independent contractor demanding I get out my phone and leave a 5-star review as I asphyxiate from a lung wound
This was a literal plot point from Half Life 2 they dropped because it seemed too silly
jesus fucking christ, this ender's game ass bullshit
HUH? 
We finally discovered the true value of a human life: 6 points
Or 12% of a tank
I hate this world
You get a tactical nuke if you get a killstreak of 25
I came across a popular Tik Tok clip of Dan Bilzerian "Prince of Grifters" dismantling Zionist talking points during an interview on the Patrick Bet-David podcast; and I got to say the western left is utterly devoid of skilled orators
The rock solid confidence Bilzerian displayed while he shut down the typical "do you condemn Hamas" line of questioning left the interviewer stuttering and visibly taken aback
It's a social effect I haven't seen anywhere else, not Hasan, not Sam Seder, Finkelstein occasionally approaches this skill but even then he falls slightly short.
It's deeply frustrating that a dipshit influencer can instantly create a memorable clip like that while a legion of left-wing podcasters and commenters can barely match its punch even after 18 months of trying
Link??
Right-wingers are usually more confident in a way that is often just arrogance and have no problem saying things that leftists would find too problematic. This makes them come across as “based” to the average person watching those TikTok’s.
The problem with Bilzerian is that he's straight up antisemitic. In that he is very prejudice towards Jewish people. So he doesn't care about being bigoted towards Jews, which is why he speaks like that.
Exactly and that adds to my frustration, but we can't afford to let racists and bigots monopolize the concept of confidence in political spaces
We need more leftists who can harness Badempanada energy, but without the basement gremlin aesthetic
Exactly this. You not only have to have confidence, but also be witty and have a bit of bravado ideally. You also have to treat fascists as fucking fascists, don't be charitable whatsoever, initiate the name calling and openly mock them whilst being cool headed and above the situation itself. Many leftist instead engage in debates where they let the fascist speak, express his views etc. You need to call a spade a spade immediately, not fuck around for the sake of liberal civility.
Yeah unfortunately every leftist influencer is hyper aware of coming off anti semitic. But its self defeating, they will call you antisemitic anyway. And it opens the door for actual antisemites like bilzerian or klandace Owens to gain traction.
I have that skill. I just don't have the platform.
In a very predictable turn of events, National security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, have now been fired from the Trump administration. This comes after Waltz took responsibility for the "signal leaks" on military operations in Yemen to an Atlantic journalist, and Laura Loomer led a social media campaign to get Waltz and Wong fired, including an in person meeting with Trump.
Update: Trump is sending Waltz to the UN (essentially giving him a "soft landing" instead of being kicked to the curb), Marco Rubio will dual hat as both the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, similar to Henry Kissinger from 1973-1975. Some were portraying this as a win for the "pro peace/negotiations with Iran faction", but given Rubio's appointment and subsequent statements, that is not the case. With Musk and Waltz now gone or relegated to background characters, Rubio has consolidated a ton of power, as I've said he's in the same position as Henry Kissinger was. In fact, Rubio has even more power than Kissinger did, with USAID under State Department control.
Little Marco is Big Marco now
bay of pigs 2 will be an even bigger flop than the first one
It's more a consolidation of Marco Rubio's power. See the update.
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