New preamble:
Palestinian resistance groups have launched an operation in and around Gaza to fight the genocidal settler state oppressing them. Thousands of rockets have been launched towards the so-called state of Israel, overwhelming the Iron Dome. Settlers and the troops protecting them are being killed in the settlements surrounding Gaza, with many caught by surprise in the first few hours of the operation.
Palestinians are taking many Israeli settlers and soldiers hostage and bringing them back to Gaza. An Israeli general, Nimrod Aloni, has been confirmed captured. Palestinians are also taking military and civilian equipment back. Drones and MANPADS appear to be in use, and a number of Merkava tanks have been destroyed/disabled and their occupants removed and taken hostage. Palestinian forces appear to be heading in two main directions so far: southeast in the direction of Be'er Sheva, and along the coast in the direction of Ashkelon, but settlements all around Gaza have been assaulted and taken. It is obviously unknown how far they intend to go, or what their intermediate goals are.
Israel is bombing the Gaza Strip with aircraft, destroying buildings. It appears that their intelligence on the location of Palestinian forces outside of Gaza is very poor, and haven't been able to meaningfully strike them. Netanyahu has given a statement declaring that Israel is in a state of war. Iran has issued statements in support of the uprising, and Israel has responded with hostility to those comments. In all, the IDF appears to still be in a shockingly bad state hours after the assault began.
Old preamble on Antarctica:
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Much of the information for this news post, including both the images in the preamble, came from this article at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which has been circulating in the media lately.
Image has been taken from this article.
Antarctica has had a uniquely bad year.
While the sea ice extent in the last 50 years or so has been very gradually declining, it has done so very slowly on average - by 0.1% per decade. This began to change in 2016:
Even so, this year is different, showing a remarkable decrease in the maximum sea ice extent. It is unconfirmed (I think) but this year may be the first in which the maximum extent fails to reach 17 million square kilometers - and is more than one million square kilometers lower than the previous record low maximum in 1986.
The fall in sea ice has been linked by some researchers to warming in the uppermost ocean layer caused by lateral and upward mixing of warmer water. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, and has been absorbing much of the excess heat that humanity has generated via the greenhouse effect. But put enough heat into a heat sink and it will eventually fill up.
These changes in sea ice extent is no mere abstract climate worry or scientific curiosity. It is having a direct, catastrophic impact on the Antarctic's ecosystem. Emperor penguin colonies have had trouble breeding, so much so that:
...there is high probability that no chicks had survived last year in four of the five known emperor penguin colonies in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea. This was because the sea ice had melted well before chicks would have developed waterproof feathers. ... Today's report says about one-third of the 62 known emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica were affected by partial or total sea ice loss between 2018 and 2022.
And, last year, scientists conducted a study on the two plants that are able to grow near Antarctica, looking at a single Antarctic island for simplicity, and found that the populations of these plants had exploded in the last decade - growing as much in the last decade as they had in the last 50 years - due to rising air temperatures. It was warm enough for the scientists to wear shorts and remove their shirts.
The Country of the Week is Syria! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update is here!
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.
what specifically is incorrect? do you have examples?
Comments comparing work culture have clearly not worked for a Chinese tech company (or really, any Chinese company lol).
Comments comparing the freedom of elections are missing details about how the CCP actually functions in government.
Comments talking about inequality aren't accurate because China does have significant income inequality not only between urban/rural populations and "core"/"autonomous region" but also between tier 2/3 cities and tier 1 cities.
Comments claiming that China's research community has caught up (and using citations as the relevant data point) miss how China's academic system is somehow even more fucked than the Western system in terms of incentive structure and that citations are intentionally inflated.
These aren't perspectives I've seen from everyone, but they're common enough that it's worth commenting on. Western media gets far more wrong about China, so as a whole Hexbear is doing pretty great. It just seems to me that most people on here have never been to China, lived in China, or worked for a Chinese company and are viewing China through a lens that glosses over some of the very real issues that exist.
If you have I’d love to read your thoughts on some of these things. I’m especially interested in the work culture in Chinese tech companies. As long as you don’t doxx yourself of course.
I do feel that on the academic achievements front there seems to be a kind of triumphalism that maybe doesn’t quite capture the reality of the situation. That said, I would need a lot more solid data to form an opinion on the matter. Maybe the incentives are worse when it comes to publishing and citations, but how much? What is the size of this effect compared to the west? Any sources on this I can check out?
The key outlier is the expectation of working hours (colloquially "996" indicating 9am-9pm 6 days a week). That's obviously a violation of Chinese labour law, but it's the expected standard in a lot of big tech companies.
There's a lot of politicking in in terms of recognition for your work, which isn't a great vibe (but not a killer). There's this concept of seniority and relationships that often overshadows contribution at some of the "older" companies and it doesn't make your contributions feel as valued as they otherwise should be.
Some of the better things are that hierarchy feels very fluid at the companies I've worked at: there's a casualness in the Chinese tech industry and the bureaucratic processes don't really inhibit raising concerns with people multiple levels above you... This seems contradictory with the prior point, but it's an interestingly fine line.
It's a poorly kept secret in Chinese academic circles that citation circles exist and are commonly used, and also that people take specific interest in submitting manuscripts to places where they have friends as editors and likely reviewers. Part of this is because promotions are heavily dependent on quantitative measures like papers and citations which aren't that difficult to game, rather than the nebulous term of "impact" that's far more challenging to evaluated. There's this culture where the author list (which should be a reflection of how much work you've done) sometimes becomes more of a reflection of how much your PI likes you. This culture translates to a decent chunk of Chinese PIs at American universities as well. It's difficult to evaluate the degree at which this occurs quantitatively, but it's not exactly a secret if you know the right people.
Compared to the West, I honestly wouldn't say it's THAT much worse, but I feel like the culture in the Western research groups I've worked in have been far more open to exploration of novel ideas for impact rather than a dead-on focus on publishing as many papers as quickly as possible. Western academic promotion committees seem to be more holistic (which has its own set of problems, of course), and many Western researchers are more idealistic and hold academic integrity to a higher bar.