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.


  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Are there good and efficient ways of communicating how a free Palestine from the river to the sea and the destruction of the zionist entity in its current form means equal rights for Jews and Muslims, not the eradication or expulsion of all Jews living in Palestine?

    Racism makes the typical westerner assume that given the chance Palestinian Arabs will do to zionist Jews what they did to them. Decades of zionist propaganda has made the claim that opposing the existence of the zionist entity is the same as opposing the existence of Jews. Getting the message across that principled support for Palestinian liberation is not some sort of reverse Zionism can be really hard.

    • mkultrawide [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Jews lived in Palestine in relative peace (especially compared to Europe) before there even was an Israel. The whole idea that a free Palestine means no Jews is incredibly disingenuous and ahistorical.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Not to mention there are Jews in Palestine right now! And as far as I can tell, Israel commits the same violence against them as they do Palestinian Muslims, so why wouldn't the liberation of the Palestinian people be inclusive of Jews?

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I'd reject the framing entirely, drawing parallels to the rhetoric of American slavers and later, segregationists to dismiss it. Ask if Palestinians deserve equal rights. Ask if they deserve reparations for the land theft and ethnic cleansing. Then ask why anybody has the right to use violence to prevent those things from happening. The option for peace is RIGHT THERE, but Israel would rather see obliteration than cease being a genocidal apartheid regime. A large number of Israelis would sooner leave the country than live as equals with their Palestinian neighbors.

    • Wertheimer [any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Ask them if South African apartheid ended with the complete massacre of every white person in the country.

      Racism makes the typical westerner assume that given the chance Palestinian Arabs will do to zionist Jews what they did to them.

      I think it's even more basic than racism, and perhaps even harder to combat. Most people have a problem trusting people whom they themselves have wronged. From Pericles's funeral oration (Thucydides 2.63):

      And do not imagine that what we are fighting for is simply the question of freedom or slavery: there is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it. Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do.

      Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

      And yet Athens, despite its fears, was not destroyed at the end of the Peloponnesian War, no matter how brutal and complete their massacres of the people of Scione and Melos.

    • notceps [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Focus more on Israel, tell them that Israel doesn't have the right to defend themselves just as not every country has a right to defend themselves if it comes at an immeasurable cost to human life. If Israel can only exist by killing thousands of babies then Israel has no right to exist. The reason why politicians keep saying that Israel has a right to defend themselves and exist is because it precisely doesn't. It doesn't have a right to exist to oppresses people, it doesn't have a right to exist as an ethno-nationalist state, it doesn't have a right to exist as a state that is running concentration camps, it doesn't have a right to exist as an apartheid state, and because it doesn't have that right it doesn't have a right to defend themselves.

      Israel cannot reform themselves out this and so Israel shouldn't be allowed to exist just as any incredibly unjust state has no right to exist, surely they don't think that Nazi Germany had a right to exist.

    • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      As an anarchist I'd start with, "States have no right to exist or defend themselves. The state is a spook. Only people have rights," and watch them turn purple and start to do the angry x7 speed whiteboard thing. But YMMV.

    • ThomasMuentzner [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      my great idea was always to use busstops , because everyboy stand on his busstop and if you put a Poster on every Busstop , you theoreticlly should cover the critical mass of the hole town.

      What should they do instead of reading your poster ? they are waiting .. so maybe Put shit on a Busstop , Trainstation .. where people wait anyway..