Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it's important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism's decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
It looks like Dems and Republicans are coming after Section 230. IIRC, this would basically make the internet platform liable for anything the users do on the platform. Posted by the official account of the Senate Judiciary Democrats;
Internet age verification bills passed the subcommittee yesterday as well. In one week, there will be a full committee vote.
Facebook, youtube, whatsapp etc. are huge in multiple BRICS countries. Hopefully shit like this will actively speed up the decoupling of the US empire from the rest of the world, as any potential existing/future platform operating outside the US would have a massive advantage in every region that isn't vassal enough to follow suit.
Americans take their soft power for granted, please keep playing jenga with it
Much more likely that everyone just copies the age verification stuff.
If they genuinely just repeal Section 230 the age verification would be the smallest issue. That'd open up online platforms to be liable for anything its users post on it, including all kinds of stuff you really don't want to be liable for, like hosting doxxings, hate speech, people mocking someone getting luigi'd and most of all, actual mountains of technically copyright infringing material. For users that would mean incredibly strict limits on what they can upload and for companies it'd mean thinking twice about whether this is even a business worth running.
Maybe it's just genuinely me being naive for taking tech companies at their word, but Section 230 has often been cited as a prerequisite for the rise of sites that mainly offer user generated content, including all of social media.
Hopefully so, but ugh, the Philippines is likely to either follow suit or something and I hate it, probably 0.1% people here KNOW of any alternatives (linux, fediverse, etc.) and I'm less sure if the left here can even oppose that and run alternatives, since the whole SIM Registration Act was passed and the opposition was barely there (except for Bayan, of course), and nowadays, you have to register your entire identity to a SIM card... Hopefully the movement has grown since then, but I'm not holding out on anything.
I remember being told that Al-Qaeda was attacking the US because "they hate our freedom." Projection like always, the political sphere hates any tiny amount of power the people might have.
Section 230 repeal is game over.
No more VPNs because they're liable for CSAM, terrorism, death threats, copyright abuse, etc. Even if they're off-shore and dare to thumb their noses at the US their domestic hosting partners will drop them out of liability concerns themselves. This is a terrifying unraveling of the internet as we knew it. Far more drastic than the death of blogs and forums and the rise of centralized social media. Far more drastic than even AI spam washing over everything and making real content hard to find.
There really are no alternatives waiting in the wings. You're not going to be able to torrent blurays over L2P or Tor. You're not going to be able to watch streaming videos with friends. For a while you'll be able to use Canadian servers, maybe Mexico (don't know what their laws are like) until they pass similar laws and tier one ISPs start throttling that type of traffic into/out of the US.
The boot is finally here, the death of the open internet will occur if that passes. Total narrative control. Social media companies seized by the throat by the US government, either cooperate in censoring what they want or they actually hold you accountable for everything your users do. Have good users? Here are some fed infiltrators and zionist intelligence companies who are going to spam you with illegal stuff and report it to us so you'll be done anyways.
It's strange that the tech companies are going along with this. Does YouTube and Facebook etc want to be liable for anything anyone says on their platform? Do they want age verification to throttle their user base? What the fuck is happening here?
There is probably an unspoken agreement behind the scenes with the big 5 tech companies and the government that they get to retain their monopolies if they strictly censor whatever the US government requests. They will go along with it because no upstart competition can ever happen, so their positions will be secure. This is corporatism and similar to what the fascists did going into WW2, pure private monopoly domination enforced in a top-down manner. The "free market" as it were, is no longer as much of a concern, just pure private profits and corruption.
They already censor whatever the US government requests! Now they'd be wide open to liability and they'd lose all their under-age traffic. I can see the competitive edge they'd have, maybe they'd see a minor boost from tiny irrelevant websites being forced to shut down. The losses and costs are considerable, though, and I don't see how they profit. They're killing the golden goose.
The only explanation that makes sense is if they think they can just use chatbots to cut the costs of content moderation. If Xitter can just use Grok to determine if something will offend the government then they don't have to pay armies of mods to patrol the website, and at the same time it inflates the perceived value of the chatbots even more in the eyes of the tech giants.
Not that it'll work. They'll still need expand human moderation teams or face lawsuits, either way the rate of profitability goes down.
Ok so they're already upholding their end of the bargain. Why would they be upset about the government making their monopolies permanent and official and upholding the governments end of the deal?
You're assuming the courts will entertain lawsuits or press charges against the big 5. Why not just give them de facto immunity like they already do with cops, military, banks, etc. where they don't really bother ever enforcing anything? Laws exist to bind one group of people and protect another group of people. The Big 5 will simply be in the protected category that is not subject to law.
Corporations break laws all the time, constantly. They're enforced maybe 1% of the time against them, and usually when another rich person is negatively impacted in some way. Look the the CFPB, they had hundreds of thousands of open cases of corporations breaking consumer protection laws that were all gutted and shut down by the Trump admin 1st term. Nobody is enforcing that stuff anymore. They laws still exist, they didn't go away.
Right now they just bring the hammer down whenever they (or the US government) notice a problem, but this would ostensibly require them to proactively moderate. That's a much more expensive and labor intensive form of moderation that would require patrolling their platforms at all times instead of just responding whenever a problem was brought to their attention.
Obviously if the courts decide that the laws don't apply to them this will be less expensive. They'll still take a hit from losing under-age traffic, but just letting Grok moderate Xitter will be good enough. It will be an additional expense but not prohibitive.
That doesn't mean it's free, either. The rate of profit still declines, even if the Courts try to shield the big 5 tech companies for what their users post. There will still be test cases, there will be costs to getting the many many lawsuits dismissed, and that eats into their margins. When cops go to court it's the city or state or union that pays for it, and obviously they rarely ever face real consequences, but when Facebook inevitably has to go to court the costs are coming from their own accounts.
They must be terrified of competition (or being broken up maybe?) if they're willing to kill the golden goose like this.
why? Or what? Like I said, laws are made up. They are ignored or arbitrarily and inconsistently applied all the time. Automated tools are getting more advanced, and they don't care about false positives really so they'll just crank the dial of the strictness of the modbots while looking back at the government for approval.
Or they face lawsuits, even if they get dismissed that still costs money.
i think the benefits of locked-in monopoly far outweighs any type of legal damages. All corporations yearn for the monopoly, it's a feature of late stage capitalism and we've seen the tendency time and time again.
I still think they're killing the golden goose: losing the under-age market, lawsuits, increased needs for moderation, and on top of all that this makes them less competitive outside the imperial core where countries aren't going to have age verification laws or comply with all US law. They must have gotten seriously spooked by either competition or regulation.