Image is from this article on the excellent Canadian environmental journalism outlet, The Narwhal.
The Giant Mine just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada is one of the country's largest recognized environmental liabilities. The mine's 100 plus year history illustrates the continuity between resource colonialism in the late 19th/early 20th century and neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium.
There were several gold rushes in northern Canada/US in the late 19th century, such as the Klondike. The Giant gold strike on was first discovered by settlers about the same time as the Klondike, but as Giant is on Great Slave Lake (named for an Anglicization of the name of local peoples, not after slavery) instead of the Pacific Ocean, it is much less accessible and didn't take off like the Klondike. Parallel with displacement of local Yellowknives Dene people https://ykdene.com/, the town of Yellowknife sprung up around small mining operations through the 30s. It wasn't until after WW2 that the mine was developed at a large scale. Starting operation in 1948, Giant was owned by a Canadian mining conglomerate through the 80s, then some Australians, and for the last ten years of its operating life, by Americans, who went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 1999. The Canadian federal government is responsible for the site and its remediation now, similar to the way the EPA has Superfund sites in the USA.
The project is infamous for poisoning the people and environment of the surrounding area through arsenic poisoning. The ore at giant is arsenopyrite, an arsenic sulphide mineral that often contains gold. Roasting it in large furnaces or kilns releases the gold as well as fine arsenic trioxide dust. The most infamous arsenic poisoning incident was in 1951 when a Yellowknives Dene toddler in died after eating contaminated snow in the fallout area, 2 kilometers from the processing mill's smokestack. Over the years, improvements to the mill reduced the amount of toxic dust released to the environment. This is better than blasting it into the air wildly, but meant that the site accumulated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust that they chucked in empty mine workings underground. Unfortunately, arsenic trioxide dissolves in water as easily as sugar and so represents a tremendous risk to groundwater and waterbodies nearby, like Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife's water supply.
Arsenic issues contributed to labour disputes as well. In 1991 the union workers of the plant went on strike, refusing management's demand to reduce their salary and wanting better safety measures for workers . The company brought in Pinkertons and strikebreakers, backed by RCMP thugs. The situation escalated, culminating in a bomb planted on a train track deep in the mine. When it was triggered, it killed 6 scabs and 3 Pinkertons. For the next year, the RCMP interrogated mine workers, their family and community without determining who did it, supporting the company in their refusal to sign a new contract until an arrest was made. Finally a worker named Roger Warren confessed to doing it alone and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2014 and died in 2017.
Since 1999, the site has been the responsibility of the Canadian federal government and is being every so gradually remediated. Operated through what are effectively private-public partnership contracts, environmental engineering companies are attempting to clean up and isolate the huge amounts of arsenic trioxide dust. The concept is move the dust into specially ventilated chambers of the underground mine, where it is frozen in place and thus prevented from leaching into groundwater. Active remediation is supposed to be finished in about 15 years at a cost of $1 billion CAD, but will surely take longer and cost more than this. Also, freezing material in place will definitely work because the climate isn't changing, and the Canadian north is definitely not seeing extreme levels of temperature rise.
After active works are complete, the site will require perpetual care.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA 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.
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.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
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 Telegram Channels:
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.
Area (and especially volume) are one of those numbers where it's really easy to see a big number and go "oh shit" but then you look for comparisons and realize that we're talking about nothing.
For a comparison every true newshead will understand: Israel has so far taken an area half the size of Mariupol on a front that is about 80 kilometers (50 miles) long, against a force that isn't even designed to hold territory in a conventional sense (trenches and dragon's teeth and such).
As Hezbollah have stated (there's a comment elsewhere in the thread about this), in previous wars Israel was basically unstoppable in terms of territorial advancement, taking towns and villages miles and miles into Lebanon within hours and days, but now Hezbollah is strong enough to stop them taking border villages after a month. So when I was talking a couple months ago how we shouldn't panic if Israel makes rapid gains because it's just part of how guerrilla warfare is, and that Hezbollah is orders of magnitude stronger now than they were back then, I was still underestimating Hezbollah's strength.
They are cowards from the top down ("their cowardice is legendary") so they don't have the gusto to make a big push, take losses and go deep.
the IOF is performing poorly even by territorial metrics but territory is not a priority in asymmetric warfare. you let your enemies gain ground to hit them from the rear and extend their supply lines and make them vulnerable
The issue with this is that there is nothing being left to the rear. Israel are completely razing the towns and villages they do take and displacing the residents.
I don't personally know the distribution of Hezbollah's tunnels but I imagine we'd see a Gaza-esque situation where it doesn't matter militarily what happens to the buildings above ground, and if anything destroyed buildings are a more chaotic and difficult environment for anti-guerrilla urban warfare
and it's obvious that Israel has learned and internalized nothing from their warfare in Gaza or they'd have, y'know, results
it's good that they aren't taking much territory, I just didn't want us to succumb to the map brain we saw so much with Ukraine. the Army of God is going to fuck them up
🥲💛🤲🚀
and has been fucking them up.
That's less than an 18 hole golf course every day, for any asset managers or developers in the thread.
Show yourselves
If I said what I want Israeli landowners to do I'd be banned from the site.
Luckily we have a selection of emotes for that
Even combos work
God at this rate Israel's The Villages is going to take forever to build
Ok now someone needs to calculate the cost per m²
"Israel" Ukraine
Not being able to break contact line
Looking forward to the IDF running out of missiles
I'm looking forward to the IDF running out of IDF.
This is less than 1% of the area of Lebanon!
Getting alot of cognitive dissonance here, didn't russia do the same thing thing to grind down their enemy and stall until the election?
The difference is that Ukraine is waging conventional warfare in the defense while Hezbollah is a guerrilla force. Ukraine won't even retreat to more defensible locations, it will throw reserves into poorly fortified areas and even go on the offensive. Hezbollah fights from mountains, holds back platoons with only a few fighters and then fires rockets at Israeli troop concentrations. Hezbollah has been a partner in resisting the Gaza Genocide for a year now, but never committed to something like the Kursk Offensive.
This is not to say the Israelis will necessarily lose and Hezbollah will necessarily win. It's just that the actual war isn't about Israel creating a cauldron around all of Hezbollah. It's about how much genocide the Israelis can inflict on the lebanese while being attritioned by Hezbollah, and how many casualties the risk averse settlers are willing to take.
Russia is fighting a conventional army. It’s expected for there to be static frontlines and entrenchments.
Israel is fighting a guerrilla militia and still failing to take territory.
Israel wants to ethnically cleanse its frontiers though
And you'd eventually have to move your troops in to do this.
Which Hezbollah knows, which is why their strategy relies on artillery resistant defence
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