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.
Guardian taking down the Bin Laden letter seems like just such obvious propagandist incompetence that Im wondering like who the fuck they have working there making these decisions.
Like on just the fundamental level, if the issue is individual tiktokers with a large reach creating a narrative around Bin Laden that is overly clean due to only focusing on the rational justifications for attacking America, removing the letter will not stop that. You've only made it so random people can't read the parts where he says that Jews control western economy because of usury, or how its wrong that America makes its own laws instead of following the law of god, which to an average person would be discrediting the other arguments by association.
And the thing is that almost every argument he makes such as the 1.5 million Iraqi children dead from sanctions, already has a readymade western "debunking" or dismissal, they could have fact checked Bin Laden, make his reasoning bunk by saying that he is lying about all the atrocities so therefore there is nothing for American voters to be held accountable for. Except now you've made the narrative that you are threatened by what the letter says, and if you fact check it now its like, ok you're still scared and trying to suppress it.
Like this just seems like it wouldnt be that advanced to consider and think about? Its just very basic stuff that Im saying IMO.
Seeing people interpret naked "Jewish cabal" style antisemitism as "dunking on capitalism" is genuinely concerning though, even if as a joke.
Hopefully there are marxist figures who can provide an actual leftist fact check and explanation of the letters accuracies as well as its bigotry.
The reason it spread is that liberalism can not stop conspiracy theorists, you can bring a paragraph from any writing by Lenin and replace capitalists with [desirable group of people to hate] and liberals can't debunk it logically, they can't say "Imperialism hasn't emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of Judaism in general." because that would imply another group is doing that, and they can't say "this is all false" because that implies they're lying and (((the racial group controlling the world))) is paying them to call them out.
note incase my speech problems fucks me up again
I don't believe that jews or whatever group is controlling the world obviously I am not a naziInteresting. I never much reflected on why Western nazis and liberal-nazis propagate this myth. Unsurprisingly these people revert to anti-materialist myths that hide the relationship between capital and history (and their relationshipto it). But if someone in imperialist country compares Arabs & Africans, who have nothing to gain from nazism, with nazis then I don't know what to tell them 😭🫠
However you may find this interesting. The second half of this article was weird but this stuck out to me. The wahhabis (Bin Laden included) really messed up (Sunni) Islamic thought and Arab imagination generally.
The secret of American and Western support for " Israel”
"Unfortunately, the majority of Arab intellectuals interpreted this step by the west, through the wrong understanding of the nature of the relationship with the Zionist entity, where many of our intellectuals, thinkers, and analysts still insist that Jewish lobby groups in the West are shaping and determining Western and American policy, and that these groups have a great ability to influence elections Western and American; hence, determining the policy of endorsement and support of the entity.
These studies base their analyses on the organization and the means used by the Zionist lobby to exert pressure on the decision-making process, but omit the way in which pro-Zionist attitudes permeate Western and American culture, to make Western and American politics adapt to Zionist requirements([5]).
"Thus, the generous and continuous American support for Israel becomes something that is done, against the will of the United States and against its will, and this tyrannical superpower becomes just a victim of Jewish influence and a plaything in the hands of the invincible Zionism. It improves its image in front of its Arab customers " ([6]).
Hence, the Arab regimes benefit from the myth of the Jewish and Zionist lobby. It justifies the Arab defeat by making it predictable.""
Antisemitism is the socialism of fools or whatever
Also some really unapologetic misogyny on display.
Osama bin Laden do be a little problematic wit it tho