Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada
Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada
Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.
Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world's top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.
A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.
On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company's mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.
First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.
The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada's role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.
The weekly update is here on the website.
Your Tuesday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Thursday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Friday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
Your Saturday Briefing is here in the comments and here on the website.
The Country of the Week is Canada! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 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.
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.
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.
You're viewing a single thread.
Denmark recently passed a law banning the burnings / desecrations of the Quran, in response to noted Danish lunatic and far right activist Rasmus Paludan, who somehow managed to fuck up the swedish NATO ascension by burning a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy. Pretty much anything Paludan does in Sweden is considered an international embarassment, and he has now declared that he intends on forming a street theater group in order to get around the ban on burning Qurans. See, the law includes a 2nd section, which allows you to burn/desecrate a Quran if it is as part of a "broader artistic work". Of course the law does not define what those words actually mean, meaning that Erdogan might get another chance to do a pro-gamer move to the Swedes in about 3 months. Something that Paludan did that massively complicated matters is that he somehow managed to obtain citizenship in Sweden about 10 years ago, and has been a dual citizen of Denmark and Sweden ever since, which means that Sweden is prohibited from banning him from the country, which he has taken advantage of, by going to either Stockholm or Malmö and burning Qurans to his heart's content.
Also his supposed street theater group plans on having their performance solely in front of the Turkish embassy, which I hope Turkey will take as an opportunity for a little extra-judicial assasination, since very few people in Denmark will miss him.
Permanently Deleted
It is also funny how seriously the media takes it. All the "adults in the room" are having their own version of the
whinefest going on TV and talking about how concerned they are for the exalted principles of freeze peach.I saw an amazing headline the other day: "This is what the Quran law means for you" and it covered a live chat where people could ask extremely stupid and butthurt questions to a judge and a professor of human rights law. Questions like "do I have to hand in my worn out bible to the police now that it's illegal to throw it in the trash?"
Another funny thing is how ashamed the government is of having had to pass a law that makes it a little harder to do racism. None of the parties who proposed the law wanted to say a single word in its defense when it was passed.
Remember when Turkish security forces just beat up a bunch of Kurdish protesters in DC and absolutely nothing happened?
I totally forgot about that haha thank you for unlocking that memory
I simultaneously hope that
- Paludan manages to fuck up NATO relations with Turkey
- Paludan get in trouble with the law and have a really bad time
- Turkey does some "street theatre" themselves to Paludan
If SNL had any moxie at all - they'd create an American version as a skit. The congress passes a "antisemitic, anti-Islamophobia, etc" law and seconds later right-wingers gleefully start tweeting that they have formed street theater groups for the sole purpose of getting around the bans such as burning Qurans. And then the performances (the performance art?) would be shown happening in a few American cities.
They'd never do a skit even 1/10th as bold. If they did that skit - their core audience would be enraged and yelling and then viewership might tank as people virtue signal by proudly not watching for a while or saying they'll never watch again.
I'm just not sure it would hit culturally though, TBH. I think the explicit fascists in America wouldn't do street theater because it'd be "too gay" (maybe even "too gay" for gay fascies like Milo Yiannolohoweveryouspellhisnamealous). So the joke might just kinda fall flat, or all the shit about "free speech" would just get lost in the, "Ha ha! Look how funny it would be for fascists to do something they think is only for gay people!" kind of sophisticated American "joke".