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.

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.


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.


  • plinky [he/him]
    ·
    10 months ago

    Germany doing clean wermacht, and saying hamas is worse than them, because they don't feel regret. What do they even study in history, i'll never know.

    Just bad vibes from hitler corrupted pure german souls, and now they did a growth that killing jews is bad. Nothing else happened in ww2, all lessons learned.

    So italy got meloni, japan never repented and germany now approaching same levels of discoourse, the gang is ready.

    • VILenin [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      The idea of a German state needs to be expunged from the Earth for all eternity.

      Death to Germany. Death to Germany. Death to Germany.

      German “remorse” has always been total bullshit steeped in eurocolonialist rhetoric. Their takeaway was that they genocided the wrong people.

      Then these fucking barbarians have the gall to turn around and act like they’re the foremost authority on genocide because their grandpappy Hans the Jewslayer murdered thousands of Jewish children.

      Stalin’s greatest mistake was allowing a “Germany” to continue to exist.

      Germany must perish. Germany must perish. Germany must perish.

      • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        10 months ago

        Germania delenda est. Spin it off into dozens of little states, like God intended. I want Hanover back. I want to visit the Kingdom of Württemberg. Restore the free city of Lübeck. The only caveat is that Prussia should absolutely not come back, instead turn it into Greater Pomerania, whilst the area around Berlin turns into a Herero protectorate.

        • star_wraith [he/him]
          ·
          10 months ago

          The only caveat is that Prussia should absolutely not come back, instead turn it into Greater Pomerania

          Or… hear me out… GDR-emblem

        • Alaskaball [comrade/them]M
          ·
          10 months ago

          The only caveat is that Prussia should absolutely not come back, instead turn it into Greater Pomerania, whilst the area around Berlin turns into a Herero protectorate

          I'd propose simply letting the Poles have it so they can get their little dog syndrome out of their system

      • Monk3brain3 [any, he/him]
        ·
        10 months ago

        German “remorse” has always been total bullshit steeped in eurocolonialist rhetoric. Their takeaway was that they genocided the wrong people.

        Could you elaborate on this. Like who would have been the right people from their perspective

        • Rojo27 [he/him]
          ·
          10 months ago

          Probably all the other people that the West barely mentions (Roma, queer, Slavs, etc).

          • Monk3brain3 [any, he/him]
            ·
            10 months ago

            That makes sense. Like for example, you know the west hates Russians for the audacity of challenging capitalism and the western neoliberal global order

    • the_kid
      ·
      10 months ago

      It is a definite obligation which the world owes to those who struggled and died against the German yesterday, and to those who are fighting him again today, as it is the bounden duty of the present generation to those yet unborn, to make certain that the vicious fangs of the German serpent shall never strike again. And since the venom of those fangs derives its fatal poison not from within the body, but from the war-soul of the German, nothing else would assure humanity safety and security but that that war-soul be forever expunged, and the diseased carcass which harbors it forever removed from this world. There is no longer any alternative:

      Germany Must Perish!

      This war, with its harrowing miseries, its indescribable German devastations, its unutterable German atrocities, is born of the war-soul of those barbarians of whom Machiavelli, writing over four hundred years ago, observed:

      German towns are at little or no expense in any thing, but in laying up military stores and making good their fortifications ... on holidays instead of other diversion, the Germans are taught the use of weapons.

      History repeats itself

      theory-gary

    • Maoo [none/use name]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Germany is exhibit A on the people that adopt the position that the only thing wrong with the Holocaust is that it happened to Jewish people. This is the propaganda of internalizing a very selective angle on what Never Again means, conveniently tolerating and even supporting plenty of subsequent genocides.

      In this case, it does double duty, as it's "the Jewish state" doing the genocide, so it must be defended.

      This is a trope exactly as old as the Holocaust itself, as Zionists have been leveraging it since the 1940s.