Bulletins and News Discussion from November 13th to November 19th, 2023 - Much To My Chagrindavik - COTW: Iceland
Bulletins and News Discussion from November 13th to November 19th, 2023 - Much To My Chagrindavik - COTW: Iceland
Image is of the Herðubreið tuya in northeast Iceland, formed when ice sheets covered Iceland thousands of years ago. It's not really relevant to the Grindavik situation but I think they look neat. The title also doesn't make much sense but I saw the pun and took it.
Off in Iceland, different kinds of tunnels are causing problems. Underneath the town of Grindavik in southwestern Iceland, not far from the capital of Reykjavik, tens of thousands of earthquakes are portending the movement of magma in tunnels underneath the peninsula, which could breach the surface and cause an eruption. The 4000 residents of the town have been evacuated as the magma has risen to less than a kilometer below the surface.TRG
Icelandic volcanism is pretty fascinating, with the country sitting on the mid-Atlantic ridge, the birthing line of new oceanic crustal rock running right down the Atlantic ocean for many thousands of kilometers, as well as a hotspot, an upwelling of mantle material of debated origin which also feeds otherwise-inexplicable volcanism in the middle of tectonic plates, like Yellowstone and Hawaii.
An additional factor here is the presence of glaciers. When a volcano erupts underneath a glacier, the melting water cools the lava rapidly, causing features usually seen in volcanoes that erupt under the sea like pillow basalts, but also unique features like tuyas, which are steep-sided but flat-topped volcanoes. The rapid melting of water can also cause glacial floods called jökulhlaups.
Icelandic volcanoes have had significant regional and even global impacts in the past. In 2010, the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which was a volcano covered by an ice cap, erupted and the ash cloud spread across Europe, causing airline disruption for about a month which caused nearly $2 billion in total losses for airline companies - though this seems pretty quaint compared to the pandemic's impact on airlines in retrospect. Back in the 1780s, the Laki volcano killed a quarter of the Icelandic population due to sulphur dioxide causing massive crop failure and cattle death. This eruption's impacts spread to Europe and beyond, causing notable worldwide temperature drops and thus crop failures and may well have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the French Revolution, which obviously heralded the death of the feudal order and the eventual primacy of capitalism in its place. That being said, any eruption at Grindavik is very probably not going to have any significant worldwide impacts - there are over a hundred volcanoes already in Iceland, and regular climate change is doing a great job at causing mayhem right now anyway. It's also still possible that there won't be an eruption at all, at least not in the short to medium term.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is Iceland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
This week's update is here!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
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Now that you all are coming around to recognizing Ansarallah it's time to learn about their land reform policies and agrarian revolution.
Yemen under the Ansarallah is a country where the power and wealth of landowners are actively diminished in an almost Marxist-adjacent fashion. In May of 2022, the third phase of the agricultural revolution was initiated by the Higher Agricultural Committee, which resulted in the expropriation of farmland across the entire country. In Yemen’s western Tihama region, 104 thousand hectares of land was expropriated for farming. And while this is just one example of Ansarallah’s economic plan, the same story is unfolding in regions such as Dhamar, Saadah, and elsewhere.
The agrarian revolution has also led to a revival of Yemen’s 600-year-old coffee culture. “The Coffee Revolution” is an initiative directly linked to the wider agrarian renaissance that aims to boost coffee cultivation through proper education of farmers and general oversight of farms and markets. A stimulant such as Qat, native to Yemen for decades, is slowly being phased out and replaced with coffee crops. An announcement was made back in February of 2022 by the Governor of Saadah Muhammad Jaber Awad and Shura Council member Abdullah Al-Qasimi, that all qat trees are to be replaced with coffee and almonds, a project that is still actively ongoing today.
On Qat specifically, Zaid Ali Basha within his research argues that the stimulant grew across Yemen’s population much in favor of Saleh’s kleptocratic dictatorship and what he calls “qatlords”, the landlords reaping profits from Qat cultivation. Qat usage and misusage were not mitigated because they created a “politically disengaged citizenry” that had surrendered to the state. An opioid for the masses if there ever was one. So long as the people were “happy” due to an active and daily consumption of a psychoactive stimulant, the state was able to repress, oppress and exploit the people for decades to little opposition.
The dire conditions that have been imposed upon Yemen have forced the Yemeni people to rely solely and squarely on national and local produce instead of an economy over-reliant on foreign imports that have proven unsustainable and have become weaponized by the enemies of the country: “woe to a nation that eats what it does not plant, and wears what it does not weave” is a common Arabic saying that beautifully ties together what Ansarallah’s economic plan is all about.
What Ansarallah has managed to establish while facing war, starvation, and a crippling blockade, is a system that could best be described as akin to Yugoslavian worker self-management but without the overtly socialist aesthetic and tone. In fact, this system was what Ibrahim Al-Hamdi was trying to establish with his five-year plan but never realized before his death in 1977. The state in Sana’a does not control farmland, nor does it dictate the output of agrarian produce. Farmland and output are controlled by the cooperatives, which are wholly owned and administered by Yemen’s peasantry.
just listened to this Deprogram episode where Hakim gives an overview of Yemen's history, figured I'll post it for anyone else interested in Yemen
The Deprogram Episode 27: When Life Gives You Yemen, Give Yemen Aid
👏
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
land reform really is like the one simple trick to legitimize your government, yet somehow its institutional memory is always destroyed over the course of a polity's lifetime
wonder who might be responsible for such things happening
Wow they're doing cool stuff, it reminds me of the DPRK.
South Yemen was Marxist-Leninist until the collapse of Soviet union in 1990. Al Qaeda and Saudi backed Saleh killed hundreds of socialist officials in the 1990's and so a lot of them joined the Believing Youth movement founded by Hussein al-Houthi.
Although Ansarallah is in northern Yemen its politics were influenced by the inclusion of the Marxist Leninists of the previously existing Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen.
Meaning some portion of Ansarallah's political cadres would be Marxists who converted to Shia Islam.
Unforuntately most of this website is gone now as it only exists on the archive web.