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. At least one tank has been destroyed.
Old preamble on Antarctica:
expand
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.
Kim Jong Un
“I express my support for the Palestinians, and Palestine is an issue not only for Arabs and Muslims only, but also a matter of freedom.”
never misses
Now they just need to send troops like they did in 1973.
My hatred of liberals and of western empire has been 100% re affirmed and re invigorated
A slave strikes their slave master with a fraction of a fraction of the violence the master has inflicted, and the liberal calls for complete destruction and unlimited violence against the slave
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton are beefing. Max apparently fired Ben for being critical of the Grayzone’s anti vax pivot. I stopped even bothering with the Grayzone after their anti vax and transphobic pivot.
Their transphobic slant (Jimmy Dore influenced) is completely devistating for them. It’s disgusting and for a group that really does research well, they play into the whole fear of the ignorant and parroting lines that Jimmy’s reich wing component “donors” spew. They got astroturfed hard with a few Large ones thrown their way to “motivate” them. I also blame the seriously unfunny Kurt Metzger “sidekick” Jimmy has now.
I can get some of the vaccine critisms when it comes to crapitalist enshittification and the potential short and long term damage that enshittification does. What I don’t get is how they try to wedge that into every damned
jerk off 
to own the libs.I feel real bad for Ron Placone and Graham Elwood who lost a decent audience platform with Jimmy. I wish more would check out those two’s channels because they stayed true to the cause.
Finally time to post my Lebanon-Syria trip report:
- Flew to Beirut, Lebanon with my wife, where I spent 3 days with my family there, staying with my Putin stan communist uncle. Mostly just caught up with random cousins in random cafés serving the most incredible food of all time. Ate a half meter shawarma. I was coincidentally in Burj Hammoud, an Armenian neighborhood, the day the Azeri war started. Witnessed a fist fight between two older Armenian men who were fighting over whether Pashinyan is a cuck or a victim.
- Took a cab to Damascus two weeks ago, which was pretty straightforward and I went in with my Lebanese passport so that no westerner knows I was there. Chilled in my mom’s family house in the Damascus suburbs and just took in the vibes. Ate amazing food every single day. Did the usual Damascus tourism stuff around the Umayyed Mosque, Souq Al Hamidiya and the rest of the old town. Went to the Sayyida Zainab shrine with my wife because she’s Shia and they like their shrines. She went back to Beirut after a few days, because her cousins from Iraq travelled to Beirut and she haven’t seen them in years. Signs of war aren’t really really there in Damascus, You can feel the insane poverty everywhere since the sanctions and disastrous financial policy has fucked the country, but Damascus is still a beautiful city with barely any destruction except in a few suburban residental areas.
- After chilling for a few days, I did a little heartbreaking tour with my cousin. We took his car from Damascus and just drove north on the main highway. We went through Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Most traumatic two days of my life with no competition. The Syrian countryside has just been destroyed, and it’s even worse in the cities. Everyone should be blamed for these tragedies that are present in almost every street in especially Homs and Aleppo. Schools and apartment buildings are just completely destroyed, I can’t even describe the sadness of walking into a bombed classroom with x/x/2011 still on the chalkboard and random books burnt on the ground. Families have been ruined by the war itself, but also from the unnecessarily vicious government oppression that let the war happen in the first place. Every American and Russian that has financed and supported this shit should be subjected to a bombing campaign.
- Went back to Damascus and stayed the last 2 days of the trip in a cousin’s farm around an hour outside of Damascus. Ate some amazing fruit there and was met with amazing hospitality by the rural folks. Sadly also felt the effects of the insane poverty there in the villages. Met a random Chinese delegation that was responsible for some project in a village, they were some really serious dudes and kept measuring the ground at a bunch of locations with some cool tech that I haven’t seen before. Smoked locally grown weed, which was weird and fun.
- Went back to Beirut with a cab again. Just chilled and let my thoughts about Syria play around a little in my head. My communist uncle took me to George Hawi’s grave again and kept calling Zelensky lots of homophobic things during the ride. Ate more amazing food. Trip ended there and I flew back yesterday.
The Palestinian resistance has me feeling resistant. Considering wearing a kuffiyeh to work right now just to be annoying and provocative.
I’m tired of reading the most insane dumb comments from western “leftists” who keep claiming that Hamas is a uniquely reactionary force that we as “leftists” shouldn’t support because of their religious fanaticism. Do these people honestly think that they know better than the different Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist Palestinian parties who not only just tolerate Hamas, but also fully cooperate with them on all matters. I don’t care anymore about these stupid ass labels that only the most unemployed and useless “leftists” in the world keep competing about on the internet, while the bravest committed marxists in the world are fighting a literal colonial state. No offense to all the good people here, but the western sense of entitlement and the dumb utopian mindset where nothing is good is just poisonous and is why literally nothing has been achieved for 50 years.
So we arrived at the second week of Hunkagate. Krisztian Ungvary, Hungarian liberal(?) historian, Timothy Snyder’s buddy, decided to write an op-ed on the biggest Hungarian liberal news site saying that just because someone volunteered for the Waffen-SS does not automatically make him a war criminal, and instead of judging people like Hunka, we should recognize their suffering, and we should be mindful not to believe Russian and/or Orbanist propaganda.
A new low for Hungarian liberals, truly disgusting.
It’s astounding to me that liberals pretend that communism and nazism are on par:
- according to VoC style Hungarian right wing propagandist organization 700 political prisoners* were executed in Hungary during the 45 years of Hungarian communism
- while the Hungarian nazis murdered 600 000 Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust in a couple of years
The difference is in the order of magnitude is THOUSAND! 1000x more victims even compared to inflated VoC numbers.
Anticommunism is basically holocaust denial.
edit, forgot to mention the obvious: many many of that 700 executed were nazis
imagine creating a military force designed explicitly to stop this exact thing from ever happening, pouring billions upon billions of dollars into it, pouring the hard work of Western scientists into it for decades, training much of your civilian base in that military force, and it gets rolled over by people you’ve oppressed in a massive concentration camp for years on end with drones dropping mortar rounds on your heads
the IDF has gone from the “second strongest army in the world” to the second strongest army in Israel
they’re reaching virgin cuck levels that are off the charts. we’ll need an entirely new category just for them
Getting real sick of all the winging liberal comments about “oh I dread what Israel will do to them after this.” The west has such a fetish for losing and inaction. They took a risk and thus far it’s been pretty successful, and ultimately we’re not making decisions for the Palestinians, ultimately our job is to support the Palestinians because ultimately they are right to attack Israel like this, and then condemn Israel when they inevitably do react. I mean what should they do instead? Sit around and get genocided as the US ensures they are increasingly isolated in the region and wait for the westerners to vote in the moderate wing of fascism who doesn’t even and has never supported Palestine?
Anyway, I’m gonna stay off Reddit for today. Even the pro-Palestine comments are insufferable
Also I hate to say it but it’s nice to have a conflict I can support. I was getting real sick of the “critical support” thing. I don’t like Russia and I hated having to agree with the objectively worst USians on anything. Nice to have both the libs and the fascists hating me once again.
I get your take, although the media perception we have of Palestine is all the bombing and violence committee by Israel in Gaza and once again since the start the Russians in Donbas also have 8 years of videos documenting the same type of violence too, shelling, missile strikes etc. The only reason one had to do “critical support” shit was to allow us to have a nuanced discussion with other socialists, it is not meant to be your real position when engaging with libs. I mean, who gives a shit about critical support when the year is 2023 and the liberals are bending backwards to defend the SS? They’re literally telling us to take our nuanced positions and shove it.
The only difference here IMO is we actually got coverage of these events in Gaza throughout the decades, in fact so much so to even deny Israel ever attacks Gaza is an extreme position.
But you go into a room with the same people and tell them “but the Ukrainians never attacked anyone in the Donbas region” and instead of being ridiculed you’d get nods and a round of applause. If I didn’t see it surely it must not have happened. As we saw the narrative they pushed was “unprovoked”, “innocent”. They claim that about Ukraine because Patrick Lancaster was an obscure YT channel not a cable news segment every day or week.
So yeah as I said I get where you’re coming from, but critical support is something we use to engage with other leftists, it should not be what makes you always go “Oh I support Russian side but [spends one hour describing the religious conservative hellscape after the fall of the USSR]”.
If you’re engaging with a lib I think it should go more like “yeah I support the Russian side, and you’re literally supporting Nazis, either get a grip of reality or go fuck yourself”. People post the no half measures meme, but really we’re so past the point of reasonable debate now.
@SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net wake the fuck up
I’m here, I have a sixth sense that activates whenever a bunch of settlers get what they deserve
when I’m in a supporting genocide competition and my opponent is a self proclaimed westoid anticolonialist
In almost unrelated news, Ben Norton has now moved to China
1h21m
how do people have time for this kind of rambling shit even at 1.5x speed
EDIT: upon reflection I guess I listen to podcasts that are that long but I’m doing other stuff concurrently, not watching a video. and I guess people who watch youtube use it as background a lot, I just can’t imagine doing that somehow. maybe because it’s not a converation but more of a monologue? I’m not really sure
His videos don’t rely on visuals enough, so they can be treated like podcasts. The only notable visuals here are a bunch of graphs and a few footage of random spots in Beijing that he filmed with his phone.
Don’t forget his beautiful eyes
Has there ever been a man who was more wrong?
making bold predictions that liberal capitalism is the endstage of humanity seems delusional even if you’re a diehard fan of neoliberalism. like, really? from now until the end of time, for thousands or millions of years into the future, this is the pinnacle of humanity’s civilizational development? hasn’t every system thought themselves to be that pinnacle?
even I can’t confidently assert that communism as we currently imagine it will be the endstage of humanity because there’s always the possibility of further contradictions arising that we can’t currently conceive of that need to be solved through further developments. how on god’s green earth a system like neoliberal capitalism, which relies on infinite growth and the exploitation of most of humanity and is drowning itself in its own waste products while it is causing a mass extinction, could be the endstage, I couldn’t even begin to comprehend even if I worshipped a statue of Milton Friedman every single day
https://nitter.net/HabibNasher/status/1710860949081690438
Supposedly african jews may have been helping the resistance
If this is true, lol rip bozo you fucking moron racist zionists of course the jews you oppress will unite with the oppressed Palestinians lol
Meanwhile in occupied Palestine:
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https://twitter.com/ib_reb/status/1710517976628113697 (CW: gunfire)
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https://twitter.com/ME_Observer_/status/1710507150743650376 (CW: gunfire)
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https://nitter.cz/Global_Mil_Info/status/1710511661533028629
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https://nitter.cz/BenFRubinstein/status/1710523072770441665 (CW: gunfire)
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https://nitter.cz/NewpressPs/status/1710515325060391279 (CW: gunfire)
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https://nitter.cz/Angelo4justice3/status/1710540693796696069
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