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.
https://apnews.com/article/hawaii-army-base-lockdown-handgun-f947383ef2505197e16f5d18c7bf4187 Okay there was a “shooting” at the Schofield military base in hawaii, where the guy pistol whipped his lieutenant after getting caught trying to steal weapons and then ran around the military base. The base was locked down, everyone kept in their buildings. The guy almost caught once by MPs at the food court. Got Away. They were looking for him on the base for 3 hours before lifting the lockdown.
The thing the article tries to hide is this: The shooting is on the island where I live, Oahu. Everything is on the island of oahu, pearl harbor, honolulu, all of it. Multiple bases, airfields, police stations, state security offices etc.
He was found in Molokai
A whole other Island
The man pistol whipped his lieutenant, sent an entire US military base on a wild goose chase while it was locked down, escaped, then somehow (while still having a gun) got a plane ride to whole other fucking island.
The man wasn’t fit either, but somehow outran a US military base and got a plane flight to a whole other island.
Reminds me of the soldier who defected to North Korea recently. Got arrested for assault, was getting escorted at the airport, somehow managed to escape and take a cab to the border, and jumped over the desks dividing the countries and everyone thought it was just a funny prank
“Ukr 8 mil dead; Warsaw exclusion zone radiation threat; Rus prepares 2028 carpet bombing campaign; Blinken signals conflict freeze”
2035: Maryinka on the verge of capture, Ugledar soon to follow
2035
optimistic
Br*tain made three contributions to the world:
Colonization
Genocide, which is deeply tied to colonization
And the word “tankie”
That’s it, that’s all they did. Now sink already, wretched place.
don’t forget they also contributed bad cuisine to the world so that we can understand the duality between good and bad
Britain is truly the Japan of the occident.
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Japan does have its own distinct cuisine. Its development was mostly driven by, y’know, not having a massive fuckton of land to grow shit on, plus the centuries of self-imposed isolation. It’s a distinct cuisine and comparing it to the wide range of Chinese cuisine isn’t really fair.
So we arrived at the second week of Hunkagate. Krisztian Ungvary, Hungarian liberal(?) historian, Timothy Snyder’s buddy, decided to write an op-ed on the biggest Hungarian liberal news site saying that just because someone volunteered for the Waffen-SS does not automatically make him a war criminal, and instead of judging people like Hunka, we should recognize their suffering, and we should be mindful not to believe Russian and/or Orbanist propaganda.
A new low for Hungarian liberals, truly disgusting.
It’s astounding to me that liberals pretend that communism and nazism are on par:
- according to VoC style Hungarian right wing propagandist organization 700 political prisoners* were executed in Hungary during the 45 years of Hungarian communism
- while the Hungarian nazis murdered 600 000 Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust in a couple of years
The difference is in the order of magnitude is THOUSAND! 1000x more victims even compared to inflated VoC numbers.
Anticommunism is basically holocaust denial.
edit, forgot to mention the obvious: many many of that 700 executed were nazis
Doesn’t Hungary have a shitload of “WW2 tyranny” museums that are just combining the Soviets and Nazis and conflating them/whitewashing fascism? Like a bunch of countries do it, but iirc Hungary has it down to a science
That’s exactly where I got the “700 political prisoners executed by communists” number. So you can be sure that 700 is inflated*. And even that 700 is 1/1000 of the Holocaust without counting the White Terror and war crimes committed by the Hungarian army.
*well it depends what one means by inflated. If you count the Hungarian nazi war criminals as victims of communism then 700 is probably right.
The infamous “House of Terror” in Budapest is definitely the kind of thing you are describing. It’s been a while since I went, but I recall it as like one room with Hungarian Nazi uniforms and then an endless labyrinth of tv screens showing teary-eyed accounts of how the kulaks were beaten by the soviets… BEATEN!
Liberals really did do a “propaganda of the deed” by clapping for literal SS members.
Because the West can make no mistake, SS are good now.
Honestly thats par for the course for Hungarian libs lol
Krisztian Ungvary should be turned into tank tracks grease
listen to nazi voices everyone
The coach of the Swedish national handball team has been convicted for making a joke at the Copenhagen airport about having a bomb in his bag. In an attempt to get an acquittal or a reduced sentence, his defense council tried to argue that the man was clearly joking and that the joke would not be perceived as a real threat. One of the arguments he gave in favour of this was that the coach “didn’t look Arab or looked like someone from the Middle East where terrorists usually comes from”.
Before making the statement the defence counsel specified that he “didn’t want to sound racist”.
You can see why the Nordic states represent an aspirational goal for the American liberal left - all the perks of imperialism combined with a thinking man’s racism
Before making the statement the defence counsel specified that he “didn’t want to sound racist”.
“I don’t want to sound racist but white people are never the bad guys”
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Finally time to post my Lebanon-Syria trip report:
- Flew to Beirut, Lebanon with my wife, where I spent 3 days with my family there, staying with my Putin stan communist uncle. Mostly just caught up with random cousins in random cafés serving the most incredible food of all time. Ate a half meter shawarma. I was coincidentally in Burj Hammoud, an Armenian neighborhood, the day the Azeri war started. Witnessed a fist fight between two older Armenian men who were fighting over whether Pashinyan is a cuck or a victim.
- Took a cab to Damascus two weeks ago, which was pretty straightforward and I went in with my Lebanese passport so that no westerner knows I was there. Chilled in my mom’s family house in the Damascus suburbs and just took in the vibes. Ate amazing food every single day. Did the usual Damascus tourism stuff around the Umayyed Mosque, Souq Al Hamidiya and the rest of the old town. Went to the Sayyida Zainab shrine with my wife because she’s Shia and they like their shrines. She went back to Beirut after a few days, because her cousins from Iraq travelled to Beirut and she haven’t seen them in years. Signs of war aren’t really really there in Damascus, You can feel the insane poverty everywhere since the sanctions and disastrous financial policy has fucked the country, but Damascus is still a beautiful city with barely any destruction except in a few suburban residental areas.
- After chilling for a few days, I did a little heartbreaking tour with my cousin. We took his car from Damascus and just drove north on the main highway. We went through Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Most traumatic two days of my life with no competition. The Syrian countryside has just been destroyed, and it’s even worse in the cities. Everyone should be blamed for these tragedies that are present in almost every street in especially Homs and Aleppo. Schools and apartment buildings are just completely destroyed, I can’t even describe the sadness of walking into a bombed classroom with x/x/2011 still on the chalkboard and random books burnt on the ground. Families have been ruined by the war itself, but also from the unnecessarily vicious government oppression that let the war happen in the first place. Every American and Russian that has financed and supported this shit should be subjected to a bombing campaign.
- Went back to Damascus and stayed the last 2 days of the trip in a cousin’s farm around an hour outside of Damascus. Ate some amazing fruit there and was met with amazing hospitality by the rural folks. Sadly also felt the effects of the insane poverty there in the villages. Met a random Chinese delegation that was responsible for some project in a village, they were some really serious dudes and kept measuring the ground at a bunch of locations with some cool tech that I haven’t seen before. Smoked locally grown weed, which was weird and fun.
- Went back to Beirut with a cab again. Just chilled and let my thoughts about Syria play around a little in my head. My communist uncle took me to George Hawi’s grave again and kept calling Zelensky lots of homophobic things during the ride. Ate more amazing food. Trip ended there and I flew back yesterday.
Thanks for your thoughts here comrade, glad you enjoyed the trip traumatic misery tour notwithstanding.Assad is very bad. It is interesting how he survived as long as he did. I hope you are alright after all the tragedy you saw.
https://www.indianpunchline.com/putin-orders-regrouping-of-wagner-for-combat-missions/
Mk on activity in Libya, the sahel, leftovers from Wagner
The coup in Niger with its pronounced anti-western slant may have rejuvenated Russian interest in Libya, which holds attraction for Moscow in strategic terms. The web of international entanglements in Libya has changed lately and leading protagonists — Turkey as well as key Arab and European powers — are showing signs of retrenchment. For Europe too, anything that stabilises Libya and curbs the migration wave will be deemed a positive development. Thus, Moscow likely senses that it has a relatively free hand.
In a widely condemned televised speech, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has said his people should accept the prospect of going hungry as the price of the country’s success. In the remarks on Saturday, Sisi also called his opponents “liars, saboteurs and wicked”, as critics questioned the billions spent on infrastructure projects that he has undertaken as many Egyptians struggle to make ends meet.
“Don’t you Egyptians dare say you would rather eat than build and progress,” Sisi said. “If the price of the nation’s progress and prosperity is to go hungry and thirsty, then let us not eat or drink,” he added. “Don’t undermine the cause of our nation and make us the world’s laughing stock. Stand fast and transform the cruel circumstances we are going through into a gift. The harder you stand fast, the sooner it [the economic crises] will pass."
In a meandering and times informal dialogue, the Egyptian president suggested ways in which he could “destroy” Egypt, if he were so inclined, by distributing pills to foster chaos in the country. Sisi said that he spoke with the Supreme Judicial Council regarding how easy the country would be to destroy and had concluded that giving 100,000 people in “difficult circumstances” tramadol, a strong opioid, would do the trick at a cost of no more than $30m.
…
Analysts have predicted that Egypt is the country second most at risk of a debt crisis, coming just after war-torn Ukraine.
Can’t ever forget Sisi’s army mowing down Muslim brotherhood supporters after Morsi’s ouster it was like over 400 people in a day, absolutely brutal response 😳 western press was like, well Obama says it’s OK 👍, so…
I hate that this feels impossible to stop from where we’re standing. Fucking imperialism.
the Egyptian president suggested ways in which he could “destroy” Egypt, if he were so inclined, by distributing pills to foster chaos in the country. Sisi said that he spoke with the Supreme Judicial Council regarding how easy the country would be to destroy and had concluded that giving 100,000 people in “difficult circumstances” tramadol, a strong opioid, would do the trick at a cost of no more than $30m.
uh, excuse me? how do you say “Aktion T4” in Egyptian Arabic
The CIA taught him well.
I knew Sisi was bad, but not this bad. I don’t know much about Egyptian politics, other than they have been controlled by our guys for a while
He was the US patsy sent to coup their nascent democracy and strangle it in the crib.
Anyone capable of that is a monster of the worst degree.
Let them eat asphalt
Yasha Levine on ukrainian nationalism. I hadn’t seen the meme patch he refers to
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/yasha-levine-reconstruction-ukrainian-nationalism
The end of Soviet Ukraine and the collapse of Soviet ideology created an identity vacuum. The only alternative identity that was organized enough and developed enough to offer a solution in the midst of post-Soviet identity confusion and crisis was one that was was developed by Ukrainian nationalists. They had fashioned it for themselves and “their” country while in exile in the US and Canada and Europe. It was a national mythology that celebrated and honoured all the old fascist heroes and movements and parties and symbols, but erased everything unpleasant or off-putting about them.
The Nazi collaboration, the genocidal history, the murder of Poles and Jews, the Ukrainian Fuhrer stuff—everything that was off-putting and offensive in their new post-WWII environment in Canada and US—got spliced out. It was replaced by things that were in high demand: ideas about democracy, liberation from communism, self-determination, anti-authoritarianism.
Glad you can block comms now.
Such a hard spamming
That’s just sad
That only shows the number of Hexbear subscribers to that community. If you go to the its home page, you can see they have 1.43k subscribers. Also, I believe that communities from other instances will only show up on our “all” page if one of our users subscribes to the community. Probably 1 person subscribed to a whole bunch of lemmy communities including this one in order to boost connectivity.
Can we not see the people engaging? Because from what I see maybe one or two people interact with that comm on any given post. Unless they’re all invisible that’s pathetic engagement for as many users are supposedly following it.
For most posts from other instances we don’t see a lot of engagement because either the users have been individually banned for being reactionary or their instance is not federated with us. However, in this case /c/ukraine is just a dead community with a lot of subscribers that don’t pay attention to it.
It sucks because there can actually be good comments from people you ARE federated with, but you’ll never see it if someone you’re not federated with commented further up in that chain of the thread. [
I commented here on one of those c/ukraine posts talking about the inevitability of Russia about to lose. I checked in later with a hexbear account and realized no one here would see it because I was responding to a sh.itjust.works dumbass. From hexbear it shows “0 comments.”
Anyway, to answer Doubledee, there can be LOTS of stuff you’re not seeing and you would never know it. There are sometimes posts with over a thousand comments but if I’m logged in with hexbear, I will only see like 20, mostly because fucking lemmy.world has so many people. There are also times I won’t see posts or comments with one instance but I can with another but I can’t figure out why, because they’re all federated with each other.
Goddamn lol:
Ouyang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told its official Science Times newspaper that “the landing site of the Chandrayaan-3 was not at the moon’s south pole, not in the polar region of the moon’s south pole, nor was it ‘near the Antarctic polar region’”.
Ouyang Degrasse Tyson over here
He’s simultaneously not right and not wrong? I feel like something got lost in translation. He’s not wrong because they didn’t land at the pole, but he’s not right because Modi’s official claim was only that they got close-ish.
It’s only American media that’s really said otherwise:
[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-chandrayaan-3-landing-moon-south-pole-rcna101296](India makes historic uncrewed landing on the moon’s south pole) - NBC
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2023/08/23/india-becomes-fourth-nation-to-land-on-the-moon-and-first-to-south-pole/](India Becomes Fourth Nation To Land On The Moon—And First To South Pole) - Forbes
[https://www.voanews.com/a/india-to-land-craft-on-moon-s-unexplored-south-pole/7235133.html](India to Land Craft on Moon’s Unexplored South Pole) - VOA
[https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/08/23/india-becomes-the-first-country-to-successfully-land-on-the-moons-south-pole.html](India becomes the first country to successfully land on the moon’s south pole) - CNBC
