What the fuck was the US expecting? You murder their head of state, his immediate family (Khamenei’s daughter, grandson, and son-in-law all died too btw), a significant portion of the senior leadership, at least hundreds of civilians including an elementary girl’s school full of children that were blown up as morning classes started and NOW you expect mercy and concession from the Iranians?

That isn’t gunboat diplomacy, that’s a fucking gunboat massacre. The Yankees have gotten so high off bullying/ extorting/ terrorizing/ killing so many smaller, weaker, poorer nations without any repercussions in the last 40 years they thought they could just easily waltz into Iran and take what they want by force.

I hope the Great Satan gets absolutely humiliated in this war and the amount of pain it has inflicted on Iran gets flung back to the mainland one hundred fold when the empire inevitably collapses.

I don’t really see how that strategy is achieved by attacking a vessel that is known for carrying Iranian oil AND is already sanctioned by the US. If it’s to spite the UAE where the logistics company is based in ok sure, but that still doesn’t explain the reason to attack this tanker in particular. Would this not create an effect of other logistics companies not wanting to work with Iran anymore because they will now be afraid of their vessels being attacked regardless of how much they aid Iran economically?

You have to remember that Iran also needs the strait to export its oil and gas (of which China is a major buyer), and closing the strait for everyone would impact their economy significantly as well.

To recap, Iranian state media have confirmed the killing of the following state officials in the last 24 hours:

• Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader

• Ali Shamkhani, Khamenei’s security adviser

• General Abdul Rahim Mousavi, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff

• Aziz Nasirzadeh, defence minister

• Mohammad Pakpour, IRGC commander-in-chief

The Islamic Republic News Agency have stated more commanders of the armed forces have also been killed and that their names will be announced later.

As to how Iran has handled the command structure since Khamenei’s martyrdom, there is currently a three-member temporary leadership council chosen by the Expediency Discernment Council (who in turn were all appointed by the Supreme Leader as a sort of supreme advisory council) that have been granted the legal powers of the Supreme Leader to govern the country.

The three members of said leadership council are:

• Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, a Cleric that is also part of the Guardian Council, which is another council that oversees the legislature and the electoral system.
• President Masoud Pezeshkian (yes, he’s still alive lol)
• Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, another Cleric who is also the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Iran. He is also reportedly a hardliner.

As for how the next Supreme Leader will be chosen, this duty officially lies with the Assembly of Experts, yet another powerful council that advises the Supreme Leader and whose members were approved by the Guardian Council, and the Supreme Leader, AND chosen by direct elections every 8 years.

Don’t ask me how this works and which branch/ council has more power than the other, the entire political system of the Islamic Republic is quite confusing for me and I’m still learning.

Was the tanker carrying Iranian oil at the time of attack? If so, why attack it? Which port did the ship originate from? Which port was it headed to? Did the Iranian military warn the tanker not to cross the strait before striking it?

Most importantly, if this was an intentional strike, why not just officially announce the closure of the entire strait instead of leaving it ambiguous where any commercial ship can still pass through?

There are more questions than answers raised by this event.

Short of Russia or China giving some to them overnight, I guess there really isn’t an option to procure nukes completely undetected. They probably have or are in the process of building new nuclear enrichment sites that haven’t been detected yet since the last ones got bombed, but it’s only a matter of time before US/ Israeli Intel picks up on it. Having access to better air defences, again by collaborating more closely with Russia and China, would help deter most attacks on the site except the most advanced stealth bombers.

So it will essentially be a race to get nukes before the US can sniff out where the production sites are and decide to bomb them. They can’t openly say they are building nukes because that would just give the US and Israel full justification to attack them as they are right now. Instead, Iran can help stall time by trying to enter negotiations again while feigning their commitment to no nuclear enrichment by secretly building the weapons under some mountain (severing ties with the IAEA gives them an advantage), but that requires the political will of the Iranian leadership to lie about their intentions. Hopefully the death of Ayatollah Khamenei and the repeated failures of Pezeshkian to secure a lasting peace will motivate the government in this direction.

Honestly after Trump shredded the original nuclear deal in his first term would’ve been the perfect time to start building nukes, and I strongly believe they could have done so largely undetected during the last decade, but the main problem was and still is the political will to do so.

Here’s hoping Iran finally wises up and gets nukes, and will also start more closely collaborating with China and Russia (which was mostly the fault of the Iranian leadership wanting to suck up to the West for the last 2 decades).

Iranian Foreign Minister claims he’s still alive. Schrodinger’s Khamenei I guess.

Edit: Cat Box opened, Khamenei found dead RIP.

Even if this isn’t true, we’ve already seen video evidence of ordinary people on the ground cheering US bases being bombed. The Arab people definitely don’t mind the US being humbled.

I remember many years ago when I was a young naive lib, I was one day walking down the street in my neighbourhood when an Asian woman handed me a Shen Yun Pamphlet, telling me to check out the show and how it shows “authentic Chinese culture”.

Me being the naive lib who at the time thought the evil CPC destroyed ‘real’ Chinese culture which orgs like Falun Gong preserved, accepted the pamphlet happily and later on in the day went to visit my Chinese grandmother to tell her about this cool Chinese theatre play.

She immediately shut me down and told me that Shen Yun is a cult that you shouldn’t trust whatsoever. I didn’t become a communist until years later, but that day taught me to rethink my position on Falun Gong and to not blindly trust reactionary religious organizations.

Thanks grandma.

According to the Fars news agency, Iran has targeted:

• Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar
• Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait
• Al-Dhafra Air Base in the UAE
• The US Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain

Not an exhaustive list ofc, but this is what’s been officially reported from Iranian media.

Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency has also reported that an Israeli strike hit an elementary girl’s school in Minab, a city in southern Iran, killing at least 5.

At least two Iraqi Hashid Shaabi fighters were killed and three others seriously wounded after at least four explosions occurred following air strikes in Jurf al-Sakhar, south of Baghdad, according to a Popular Mobilization Forces spokesperson.

Let’s see that first carrier sink Iran

They don’t call America the Great Satan for nothing!

It’s hard to call it a betrayal when a little research into AOC’s past makes it pretty obvious she was always a careerist and never cared about socialist ideals. The whole “down to earth working class waitress” image she runs her campaigns on is a complete facade, she tried to be an entrepreneur after college and ran a startup private firm that failed after a year before deciding to go into politics by learning to grift as a radlib.

Most people don’t know this because AOC has completely erased this inconvenient part of her history from official biographies, and I imagine Mike doesn’t either, but I bet he’ll still defend her even if he found out anyway because he’s just another socdem in my eyes.

I do agree with Mike on his last point, she consistently has the best record of promoting US imperialism, supporting genocide, and deflating revolutionary sentiments.

Stuff like this is why bourgeois electoralism will never get you Socialism. Marx and Engels first observed this two centuries ago and have been proven right time and time again ever since.

You need a left that is willing to actually purge all the right opposition in the legislature, in the military, and in the civil service, so you can starve any opportunity for the bourgeoisie to undermine you once you’re in power. Free Peru is a supposedly “Marxist” party, but they simply don’t understand this for some reason. Even certain rightists do; I guarantee if Keiko Fujimori were President the first thing she would do is ban all the socialist/ communist aligned parties.

By occupied Korea’s logic, Ivanka Trump has been chosen as Donald Trump’s heir because of how often she has appeared in high profile public events with him and how she is also allowed to wear designer clothes that are out of reach for most Americans.

Hell, Hillary fucking Clinton was meant to be the chosen heir to the Presidency after Bush Jr. but was snubbed twice partly due to America’s entrenched traditional gender roles lmao.

China cannot do any international power projection until they deal with the Taiwan issue first. As long as reunification is not complete, America can keep using that island as a wedge against China, both in geopolitical manoeuvring and economic trade/ warfare.

And even in the case of Taiwan where China actually DOES do power projection, they would rather resort to peaceful means of getting what they want (soft power through economic integration, diplomatic warming, cultural exchanges, and buying out Taiwanese politicians, military officers, and businesspeople) than the American brute force method of using military invasion, gunboat diplomacy, and sanctions.

Of course, this could change as the so-called Davidson window closes next year and China finally reaches military parity with the USA, but they still have to deal with the empire being on their doorstep before doing anything more to help countries like Cuba.

Oh, I don’t disagree with that, I’m more peeved at all the Western leftists that continue to uphold someone who has always held a complete and utter distain towards AES in the same vein Slavoj Zizek does.

I won’t deny he made significant contributions to the field of linguistics, although his rationalist position on the Human language is debatable, but in regard to geopolitics and socioeconomics? My guy, Michael Parenti’s works and lectures are right there. Hell, there are a plethora of Western Marxist thinkers in the last century that have far better input on how Base and Superstructure operates than Chomsky ever did. Even fucking Einstein had better takes on Socialism than he did.

Just because Chomsky is more popular and his works are cited more by liberals, doesn’t mean he should be lauded by anyone on the left as an arbiter of ‘socialist’ thought. Especially when his views on AES have always been downright reactionary and orientalist (no, not “in his late years” but for decades), calling states like the DPRK “the most horrible regime in Human history” and China “a very brutal society, a brutal government. I don’t feel any particular interest in improving relations with it.”.

As someone who descended from a family who came from that “very brutal society” I do not have any qualms denouncing someone like Chomsky who peddles bigoted views against non-western societies.

Also, I think simply calling him a “pedophile sympathizer” is minimizing his complicity don’t you think? You’re acting as if he just questioned age of consent laws or expressed sympathy to Epstein when what he really did was actively collaborate with and defend a Billionaire paedophile that he was VERY close with. He even received tens of thousands of dollars from Epstein to fund his linguistic academic pursuits lmao. Even if you ignore the whole pedo ring, he was still an active class collaborator with the American bourgeoisie (which honestly, explains his anti-communist views a lot). He may be an intellectual, but an ally of the socialist left he is not.