Image (source here) is of a section of the Yarlung Zangbo river, which forms the deepest canyon on the planet.
The idea of doing any sort of general preamble for China is a little absurd given how ubiquitous they are in economics and politics, so I'm just going to hop right in to a recent news item of interest: China is working on the construction of an enormous new hydropower project in Tibet (@Metabola@hexbear.net had brought this up just before the last news mega ended).
This project (consisting of, I believe, five dams) will be overall three times larger than the Three Gorges Dam, will cost $167 billion, and will supply 70 GW (by itself more power than several significant countries generate). There are, of course, meaningful concerns regarding concerning environmental damage, but helping to avert catastrophic climate change seems worth it. The news coming out of the clean energy sector of China has getting only more encouraging over the last few years, even as the fully neoliberalized Europe and America descend into climate skepticism and refuse to adequately fund projects that could avert the worst of climate change.
Geopolitically, given recent India-China tensions (for example, sending Pakistan the equipment to shoot down Indian jets, as well as run-of-the-mill border tensions) one expects India to not receive the news very well, as the river upon which the dam is being constructed proceeds to flow into Arunachal Pradesh. But from what I understand of the Indian hydrological situation (which is, admittedly, not much), I don't think enough of the water in India comes from the river for China to hypothetically cause any kind of water shortages in India - the monsoons seem to supply plenty of freshwater all by themselves. Nonetheless, as with all Chinese news, wild fearmongering abounds.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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.
Apparently the EU has just rolled out new "protection of minors" laws that prescribe online age verification for...a lot of things.
I've read anecdotes from people who couldn't get on their Discord servers, and a lot of X users are complaining that they are unable to see "mature content" (which seems to include things like calling your local prime minister a dumb idiot and whatnot). First I read stories like these from the UK and though "oh I hope that's just a bri'ish thing, they need a loicense for that now huh gov'na" but no, apparently it's EU-wide. No warnings about that either, it just so happened. Seems very much like something the EU would do, their idiotic GDPR is ruining browsing since 2018 with those stupid cookie settings.
My X doesn't have any issues so far. I wonder if that's because my chinese phone is set to the US default lol. Any EU citizens here experiencing any problems?
Yes, let's give the government a database of everyone's sexual preferences. Nothing can go wrong about that.
I am convinced this is only the first step. It's going to start with "age verification" for adult content, who doesn't want to protect the children? The children, the children, think about the children! And then they're going to take slice after slice off the salami, until they have achieved their dream scenario where online anonymity is de facto illegal and the police state is able to effectively and brutally clamp down on "disinformation". We're going to get the liberal dream of freeze peach: the right to be a racist prick and nothing else.
The western experiment with allowing civilians certain degrees of political freedom is coming to an end. It has long outlived it's purpose since the destruction of the USSR and now even the token freedoms given after WWII are becoming too risky for the ruling elite.
Things are only to get rougher and tougher in the west as climate change worsens, western imperialism declines and the neoliberal rot continues to degrade western societies. The rolling elite is preparing themselves, they are stoking racism, expanding border regimes, expanding the reach of the security state, and they are preparing to control public opinion.
I think Gaza has scared them. They lost control of the narrative, despite generations of islamophopia and despite the best efforts of the most sophisticated propaganda machine in human history. They are not going to let that happen again.
5 countries are testing the laws before they apply to whole EU
The testing countries are France, Spain, Italy Denmark and Greece.
EU is working on a digital passport for age verification. Scary stuff and also very much underreported by the media.
Oh well, I was able to enjoy about 15 years or so of the untamed "free" internet. Until around 2019, when the whole monetization shit started to become pretty much unbearable. (Personally I still believe 2012-2015 was pretty much the high point of internet culture, who with me on that?)
Looks like I'll spend the rest of my life trying to excape from the electronic clutches of the new EU-regulated internet that will get forced on you any way possible.
No, things started going to shit around 2010 when Facebook went mainstream. forums started disappearing. And Obama started going after torrenting sites.
Digg
I can't access twitter NSFW stuff in portugal either, and I saw that people in beligum and somwhere in eastern europe can't either so whatever happened it's affecting people EU-wide.
Out of nowhere, since there was no debate about this at the national level anywhere, just shows how technocratic eu governance has gotten
Maybe twitter and other big companies are applying the rules for all eu?
Jesus even the EU isn’t safe in this regard
Can you at least access nsfw subreddits?
I'm in the EU with some family and yeah I can't access some stuff on X I could see before while it's "verifying my age" however it's gonna do that. My phone is from China with chinese settings so it's good so far, it's been mostly on my laptot from what I noticed.
Apparently you have to verify with a credit card micro payment or something. Read speculations about video passport verification, that would be my personal 10nth layer of hell.
Ah, the blessings of living in the self-proclaimed "regulatory superpower"!
where are those "mark of the beast" christians when you need them