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.
How confident are you that other members of the group are familiar with the actual history of palestine? Are you putting the cart before the horse with the focus on the oct 7 attacks? If you are speaking with people who already understand the colonial history of Zionism from the 1920s through present (for example periods and rationale for UK, American support for the project, the partition vote in the UN in 47-48 and the nakba, settlement of the west bank, current apartheid status), then great. If not, consider broadening the focus of your talk beyond media criticism of oct 7 and the current active phase of genocide. To me, deaths by helicopter, the latest flimsy propaganda by the idf, Samson doctrine, Hannibal doctrine are important details but not necessary to understand the critical foundation that Israeli Zionism is fundamentally a settler colonial project.
Consider also describing it in explicitly colonial terms using academic definitions - this was a colonial project utilized by antisemites to make Jews that were unwanted in the UK/US the colonists at the expense of the native Palestinians (Terra nullius is bullshit and not a thing), where the service provided by the colony to the empire is a permanent base for military projection into the oil rich mid East/Suez canal and casus belli to go fuck around in the region (as opposed to say colonies in the americas that supplied commodity goods like sugar, furs, etc), and how Israel is now continually dependent on the west/the US as a colony (cite cumulative foreign aid to Israel, Egypt).
Anyway you know your audience better than I - if they already know all of the above then great but if not, focusing on the events of the last month may still be treating the symptoms and not the cause, so to speak.
I think I'm going to have to do a bit of both. These are people who take themselves to be reasonable, 'progressive,' and informed. They absolutely do not realize how radically propagandized and misinformed they are, though, and their first instinct is to immediately start rules-lawyering around international law instead of recognizing this as tantamount to a slave-revolt/colonized uprising. Instead they look at Hamas' Oct 7th operation as an "act of war" that triggers "Israel's right to self-defense." They're generally on board with defining Israel as an apartheid state, and I know they'll be familiar with the concept of a 'negative peace' vs a 'positive peace', I just think they're failing to connect the dots. Instead they're falling for the "both sides" trap and condemning Hamas' attacks on civilians but then also saying Israel has breached proportionality or other rules of Just-War theory.
I do want to undermine the uncritical presentation that Hamas killed 1400 people (many of whom were legitimate military targets, even on "rules based order" definitions). The figure has already been shifted down to 1200, and then the crossfire/Israelis killing their own changes the conception of blameworthiness even more. Who are the brutal terrorists? The ones who were seeking hostages? Or the ones blowing up anything that moved? Does an apartheide/Settler-colonial state even have a 'right of self-defense' from the population its ethnically cleansing/genociding? Isn't occupying contested land itself a form of violence, and thus settlers may in fact be seen as legitimate targets? (that last one might be a bridge too far, but we'll see)
Yeah I'd baby steps that one lol