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.
Is a democratic capitalist society not a contradiction?
The entire principle of democracy is the notion of 1 person=1 voice, but the entire principle of capitalism is that capital motivates everyone and some people will have more capital than others.
I think the liberal assumption is basically "having more capital doesn't make that person have more power than other people" and when that reasoning very quickly breaks under the weight of overwhelming and undeniable evidence, they a) say "actually, it's good that those people have more power then, this is a republic not a democracy"; b) shrug their shoulders and think about what pizza they're having for dinner that day instead of tricky things like politics, or c), say "having more capital shouldn't make that person have more power than other people" and then the argument just shifts to how we stop those people having more power, and tada, we've recreated the entire idiotic "liberal vs conservative" debate
it helps that liberalism and liberals in general are perfectly willing to put up with entirely contradictory views - I would assert that basically every view that a liberal has is contradicted by another view that they also have, in fact - because it's not about having a consistent political ideology and never was, it's about the superstructure justifying the base (imperialism, war, slavery, famines, etc) so that people can feel better psychologically about all the fucked up shit that has to be done to support their shitty lifestyles.
the path towards wanting a consistent political ideology inevitably leads you to communism because it is definitionally the state of humanity which possesses no contradictions. every other ideology just leads you down the garden path towards the general template of "The world would be better if it wasn't for THESE people (who did not choose to be who they are) and we must exploit/enslave/murder them" whether that's the liberals' Russians, Chinese, Iranians, poor people, homeless people, etc or the fascists' Jews, Muslims, LGBT people, etc.
I refuse to subscribe to the notion that liberals are irrational at their core. It's just not a good argument because it ignores the fact that there are so many liberals in the world and they can't all be irrational, right?
Is it just negligence on behalf of large swathes of the Western population?
they're perfectly rational, they're acting in their material interests by, one way or another, being in favor of imperialism. all the talk about human rights and the international rules-based order and all that is just frosting on a giant cake made of fermented shit. for those whom this imperialism isn't really in their favor, or would stand to benefit if the system was ended and something more equitable put in its place - that is, poor people - find it very difficult to resist as they are overworked to achieve even basic survival, and western states have incredible amounts of resources put into policing and surveillance to further tilt them away from doing anything.
Lying to themselves to protect their treats from their conscience.
Not to dogpile, but to add to @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net's point, the key is to distinguish between the ideology and the person practicing the ideology.
Liberalism, as an ideology, is irrational precisely because it places a huge emphasis on the 'rationing' of systems and resources. Now why it does this is in order to promote 'efficiency', 'reduce waste' and 'reward expertise in commodity production'. According to them, that is why we can't just 'give away resources' and why everything must have a cost. It doesn't bother them for a second that we are somehow able to provide cheap access of health care to the poor through the state but the second someone actually starts to make any money they have to go through private insurance. After all, the 'health insurance industry are experts being rewarded for their expertise'.
Now transfer this entire logic to every nearly every single system in the U.S. and Europe and that is why everything is completely fucked. In rejecting even the notion of Marxist analysis and even a simple idea of commodity fetishization (valuing the money generated from the commodity more than the commodity itself), liberalism has completely distanced itself from very basic reality.
As for people, what this has inevitably created is generations of people who are essentially nihilist egoists, who post-hoc rationalize whatever they need to rationalize for themselves to get through the day or climb their status ladder. It doesn't matter if I lie about knowing about something or being able to produce something, what matters is that I am an expert at getting money.
It's not about authenticity, honesty, or truth. Those are simply luxuries for the very poor or the very rich. My point is, even to the degree people claim to be 'liberals' they do not even practice 'liberalism'.
Yes, it's a contradiction. It doesn't matter whether each person gets some vote over some small aspect of society. In the workplace non-capitalists are wage slaves, and there's absolutely nothing democratic about that. And even the "political" part has to be constructed to preserve that wage slavery and keep it immune to any potentially democratic elements.