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to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed.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.
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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.
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Read this from a Russian communist channel and the first thought that came to my mind was, I bet half of the news mega users had done something similar:
Now it’s a shame to remember what an idiot I was just a year and a half ago:(((. I went, for example, to wash in the bathroom, turned on the news broadcast at full volume and left the door open - what if I missed the news about the final liberation of Marinka?? Then it seemed that this is a matter of, if not several hours, then several days. Until the Donetsk comrades explained and showed what a modern fortified area is.
Most people are just starting to learn what modern warfare really is in the past 2 years, and why it is almost suicidal to try to rush deeply fortified defense positions.
literally going back to WW1
But with drones
If there's one thing that the Ukraine War coverage taught me, it's to not pay too close attention to conflicts. Day-to-day is completely unnecessary. Week-to-week is only really needed if you're somebody with a military background studying the war, or if your "thing" is covering it. Month-to-month is sufficient for newsheads. When I revisit the megathreads around the time of Mariupol and Azovstal, I'm struck by how... not unimportant, but how granular it all really feels in retrospect. Like, there was no real reason to care about the progress of Bakhmut until it was over in late May, and my time and energy could have been much better spent doing basically anything else. At least the counteroffensive was tense, even exciting (in a very morbid way) for the first few weeks, but by mid-July I realized that in the absolute best case scenario it might only reach the outskirts of Tokmak, and definitely not Melitopol or the Crimean border. And it was then that I realized that caring in a granular sense in the war just wasn't worth it, which is why I'm totally disengaged from Avdiivka or whatever is happening now.
This is all broadly true for the ongoing Palestine conflict as well, though the active genocide of civilians does add another layer of empathy and urgency that was a little harder to extend to Ukraine, where the civilian death toll is fairly minimal and like, if you were over 50 km from the front line for the first 6 months, you wouldn't even know there was a war going on (no real missile/drone strikes on infrastructure, etc) beside people getting drafted around you. For Gaza, by the third week after October 7th, I realized that I was falling into the same "granularity trap" and so made a conscious effort to disengage, at least a little, from it all. And, to be honest, by the 20th video of charred bodies being dragged out of bombed buildings, I didn't really wanna see all that anymore. Doomscrolling and powerlessness is a hell of a depressing combination, and I decided to at least not do the former.
Day-to-day is completely unnecessary. Week-to-week is only really needed if you're somebody with a military background studying the war, or if your "thing" is covering it. Month-to-month is sufficient for newsheads.
Yeah for the international audience strategic level info is pretty much all you need, since field grade details is more for the people on the ground
What do you mean? I was refreshing Twitter and Telegram every 5 minutes as though I were the commander on the ground! I demand hourly sitreps so that I can follow the course of action in real time in a battle that I have no influence over.
Real Ukraine-Russia war field officers use discord
Ah I see. Someone booked the authentic NAFO experience.