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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Thread of pro-Palestinian activism in Taiwan: https://nitter.cz/aurorachaang/status/1725245240989077807
Funny part of the thread:
and then the mandarin speaking pro-palestine community seemed dominated by taiwanese people who lean pro-china and pro-unification - analogous to western tankies.
Tankies right yet again.
the mainstream taiwanese human rights ngo circle, which is traditionally progressive and pro-independence (what i consider 臺派), and has working relationships with politicians such as freddy lim, fan yun, and hung sun-han etc. has not been as active on this issue on an organisational level, especially as compared to how they rallied for ukraine.
I think it very strange how a separatist movement that has roots in Japanese fascist collaboration would be sympathetic towards other fascists. And it's also extraordinarily cringe for them to use 臺 when 台 is fine. 台 is simplified, but it's simplified that everyone in Taiwan uses. 臺 is only used on government documents or to prove a point about how "I'm not Chinese, I'm Taiwanese." Seriously, if you search for 臺灣 on Youtube, you just get a bunch of videos about Taiwan with 台灣 lol (Simplified is 台湾)
this means that almost all of the political and educational events on palestine have been organised by groups which are outside of this mainstream ngo bubble - namely, explicitly leftist/socialist groups. of these groups, new bloom is an outlier in that it is historically and vocally pro-independence (i’m part of new bloom, i won't deny that there's going to be bias here), where the others either focus predominantly on labour issues without having a china stance, or have developed a pro-china, pro-unification slant. at the very least, they include high profile individuals who have a history of being pro-unification.
NGOs just doing what their Western masters tell them to do and whining about getting out-organized by the evil campists.
I would be really annoyed if I was a Taiwanese student having to learn the harder version of Chinese just for nationalism's sake
It's not really that much harder and traditional follows the principles of Chinese orthography better. People in the mainland have to learn both anyways. I personally prefer traditional and the real annoying thing is getting lumped in with liberals and seperatists online.
People in the mainland have to learn both anyways.
I could’ve sworn it was only simplified that was required. Otherwise it would defeat the purpose of having simplified at all. Do you mean calligraphy classes?
I guess legally and officially only simplified is required, but the differences between the two are greatly exaggerated. Traditional is still used in random places in the mainland. Like I legitimately don't think it's possible to be an adult native speaker of Chinese who can only read simplified and not traditional the same way I don't think it's possible to only be able to read American English and not British English. I'm mostly joking about Traditional users not being able to read Simplified. Also If you take any sort of high school level history class then you're required to read the primary documents, which will be presented in traditional.
If you're a non-native speaker learning how to read/write then it might be different, but honestly I don't think it matters which one you learn first.
I’m just going off what the Beijing cabbie told me; he can mostly understand traditional characters, sometimes using context clues, but if you isolated them he would need a dictionary for a few.
My impression is that it’s still used decoratively and in religious/very formal contexts like in signatures and gravestones I think, and whoever is left of the pre-1950s generation that was lucky enough to be literate.
Yeah you're more or less correct. The list of differences between traditional and simplified is about 1 page long and appended to the end of dictionaries. Most people don't bother to actually look at it but you just kinda pick up most of them eventually. Like I don't think most people are gonna recognize "hiccough" or "phial" or "furore" without context clues but "colour" isn't going to give anyone trouble.
By random places I meant like one time I bought a notebook that was made in the mainland in the 2000s and all the appendices were in traditional for no particular reason. Or sometimes people will still use the traditional character for things and not even notice. I could've sworn that was when I was a kid and was being taught to read in simplified I was taught 魚 and not 鱼 for example.
Some simplified characters just look like ass, especially in print. Chad 魚 vs virgin 鱼.
bring back 舊字体 in print too lmao.
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