this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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New preamble:

Palestinian resistance groups have launched an operation in and around Gaza to fight the genocidal settler state oppressing them. Thousands of rockets have been launched towards the so-called state of Israel, overwhelming the Iron Dome. Settlers and the troops protecting them are being killed in the settlements surrounding Gaza, with many caught by surprise in the first few hours of the operation.

Palestinians are taking many Israeli settlers and soldiers hostage and bringing them back to Gaza. An Israeli general, Nimrod Aloni, has been confirmed captured. Palestinians are also taking military and civilian equipment back. Drones and MANPADS appear to be in use, and a number of Merkava tanks have been destroyed/disabled and their occupants removed and taken hostage. Palestinian forces appear to be heading in two main directions so far: southeast in the direction of Be'er Sheva, and along the coast in the direction of Ashkelon, but settlements all around Gaza have been assaulted and taken. It is obviously unknown how far they intend to go, or what their intermediate goals are.

Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip with aircraft, destroying buildings. It appears that their intelligence on the location of Palestinian forces outside of Gaza is very poor, and haven't been able to meaningfully strike them. Netanyahu has given a statement declaring that Israel is in a state of war. Iran has issued statements in support of the uprising, and Israel has responded with hostility to those comments. In all, the IDF appears to still be in a shockingly bad state hours after the assault began.


Old preamble on Antarctica:

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Much of the information for this news post, including both the images in the preamble, came from this article at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which has been circulating in the media lately.

Image has been taken from this article.


Antarctica has had a uniquely bad year.

While the sea ice extent in the last 50 years or so has been very gradually declining, it has done so very slowly on average - by 0.1% per decade. This began to change in 2016:

Even so, this year is different, showing a remarkable decrease in the maximum sea ice extent. It is unconfirmed (I think) but this year may be the first in which the maximum extent fails to reach 17 million square kilometers - and is more than one million square kilometers lower than the previous record low maximum in 1986.

The fall in sea ice has been linked by some researchers to warming in the uppermost ocean layer caused by lateral and upward mixing of warmer water. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, and has been absorbing much of the excess heat that humanity has generated via the greenhouse effect. But put enough heat into a heat sink and it will eventually fill up.

These changes in sea ice extent is no mere abstract climate worry or scientific curiosity. It is having a direct, catastrophic impact on the Antarctic's ecosystem. Emperor penguin colonies have had trouble breeding, so much so that:

...there is high probability that no chicks had survived last year in four of the five known emperor penguin colonies in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea. This was because the sea ice had melted well before chicks would have developed waterproof feathers. ... Today's report says about one-third of the 62 known emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica were affected by partial or total sea ice loss between 2018 and 2022.

And, last year, scientists conducted a study on the two plants that are able to grow near Antarctica, looking at a single Antarctic island for simplicity, and found that the populations of these plants had exploded in the last decade - growing as much in the last decade as they had in the last 50 years - due to rising air temperatures. It was warm enough for the scientists to wear shorts and remove their shirts.


The Country of the Week is Syria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.


Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The weekly update is here!

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.


(page 6) 50 comments
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[–] thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

BRICS: An Anti-Imperialist Fantasy and Sub-Imperialist Reality? – Patrick Bond

Well, the most important thing is that you've found a way to keep the pristine and pure Marxist anti-imperialist tendency untainted by minor things like "reality" and "praxis" and - gasp - "difficult questions".

I see this a lot from my Trotskyist sources, like the WSWS and Green Left. They can scarcely go a week without a headline popping up on my feed along the lines of "Sure, the United States is imperialist, but BRICS is no better!" and I do wonder if they just don't understand the absurd mismatch between the mountain and the molehill, or if they have some personal problem with China and they're just trying to insert a bunch of terminology to make the argument appear more cerebral. Either way, very frustrating.

Anyway, moving on to Yves's preamble:

Yours truly has voiced some doubts about the BRICS project, and they have not been well received by those who are understandably keen to have a counterweight to the US geopolitical order. The first is that BRICS is being expanded before having much in the way of governance and institutional structures and its members have not much in common geographically or economically. In the much more homogeneous EU, which also built its institutional framework over time, the UK despite its very good deal though the EU was too demanding, and the EU has separately found it difficult to integrate Eastern European members (oh, a UK pet project to dilute France-German influence). If the EU has centrifugal tendencies, how are the inherently more divergent BRICS members going to find common ground?

I've heard this point a lot before (usually from Naked Capitalism) and I'm increasingly thinking it's not really a good comparison. The EU is an organization designed to funnel wealth from the poorer countries to the richer ones - namely Germany, France, and the UK. It may pretend to be a merely political project of unity and blahblahblah, but it's just a microcosm of global imperialism. If - if - China can maintain its focus on genuinely improving the conditions of foreign countries via the BRI and various banks and so on, then I see no particular reason why BRICS would necessarily have to fracture and fall apart. The contradiction between the interests of poorer and richer countries in the EU don't necessarily have to exist in BRICS+. It might anyway if other contradictions arise, but "The EU's dysfunction suggests BRICS will be too" doesn't seem like a strong argument to me.

Second has been the overhyping of de-dollarization. Many of the parties who want to slip the US sanctions noose are taking the critical step of increasing bi-lateral trade and settling through their own currencies rather than the dollar. However, only 3%-5% of all foreign exchange transactions are trade related. The rest are investment related. And contrary to hype, big foreign investors are not moving out of the dollar in a big way. For instance, China foreign exchange authority has been lightening up on Treasuries…to buy higher-yielding Agency securities. Similarly, even though Saudi Arabia’s SAMA has reduced its dollar holdings, its sovereign wealth fund has increased them significantly.

This is the actual point; nonetheless I still believe that this whole thing is going to be a case of "Before the revolution, it appears impossible; after the revolution, it appears inevitable."

"Of course China can't reduce their dollar dependency meaningfully! Of course the dollar can't be dethroned! Anybody who believes that the current situation could possibly be otherwise needs to read more economics books, because I've explained numerous times all these factors that make the transition virtually imposs-- huh. Well, actually, here's the top ten reasons why the dollar was obviously doomed to failure from the get-go. What a weak currency it was in hindsight!"

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[–] TheGamingLuddite@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Thinking about those videos of Buckingham Palace guards kicking a 3 year old for getting in their way during some kind of ceremony. The UK has some of the most thoroughly entrenched class domination of any nation on earth.

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[–] Othello@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

i found this video of cool queer chinese zoomers on tumblr and im not sure where to post it. https://www.tumblr.com/rongzhi/729914373666160640?source=share help me pick a comm. could be, fashion, sino, anticisackion ect. all i know is yall will like it.

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[–] mkultrawide@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Fuck it, I'm pro Sikh separatism now. Does Gunther have any good India maps?

EDIT: Found a good one.

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[–] Parzivus@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] JuryNullification@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Take a two day break from news and (1039 new)

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[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Somebody, presumably Hezbollah, launched a drone across the Lebanese border towards Israel - it was intercepted (or at least the interception was attempted) via a Patriot missile. Various small incidents on the Lebanon-Israel border but so far, no serious attempt by either side to start battle.

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[–] CredibleBattery@hexbear.net 46 points 1 year ago

DEATH TO THE GENOCIDAL STATE OF ISRAEL

palestine-heart

[–] nat_turner_overdrive@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So lemmy.ml has a Ukraine comm, and it appears that there's just one single user spamming a huge volume of un-commented-on news posts: https://hexbear.net/c/ukraine@lemmy.ml

It's very funny

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[–] pillow@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

in spectacle news, the opedsphere is going full national sanctimony mode over john kelly "confirming" rumors that our wettest president hates the troops

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

extremely rare trump W tbh. it reminds me of when he ordered troops out of northern syria and msnbc made a whole meal out of his disrespect for the advice of the olive-drab american heroes across the potomac powercry-1

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[–] VILenin@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

back-to-me something something decades weeks

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[–] ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml 45 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Man this decade has been fucking nuts: global pandemic, Russian vs. Nato proxy war, several coups in Africa, and now what is looking to be Palestine’s largest act of resistance ever (and maybe the last one ever if they don’t succeed)

[–] Aru@lemmygrad.ml 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If they succeed it'll be the last one too

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Blue state republicans are the absolute worst NIMBYs. These small towns and villages are doing everything they can in upstate New York to block green energy projects. All these made up zoning and code regulations that we have to fight in court. Not to mention these local officials are all flunkies who don't know how to write laws so we end up winning after burning a pile of money.

[–] CredibleBattery@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)
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[–] mkultrawide@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We were like a couple weeks away from my doomsday WW3 scenario of a NK conflict that draws in Iran and Turkey and Israel-Palestine popping off at the same time, but I guess there is still time.

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[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 45 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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