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.
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.
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.
We had a handful of people here that were claiming this wasn't true and that it was natural.
Might be worth working out who those were. I don't think all of them were feds but I am willing to bet real money that one of them was.
If there is something or someone particular you are concerned about please do the work to run it down and bring receipts to the mod team. Any receipts should demonstrate malice beyond just predicting wrong in the internet. This kind of vague posting and fedjacketing people is corrosive to the community.
So much search usage urrh.
Maybe.. Could be worth working out who is suspicious at the very least even if it won't fully prove anything.
I know it's corrosive but you have to understand I was personally permanently banned from the site due to a collaborating group where one user was an active US military troop. I know for a fact that there are people actively wrecking here and I don't believe it's gone away just because those accounts were caught.
One of the people supporting it was you??
spoiler
Random badjacketing for no reason??
What I'm saying there isn't that it didn't have CIA involvement. But that the discontent itself is natural. The "organised vanguard groups" is literally one of the ways the CIA coopts movements. CIA creates or uses an existing liberal group as vanguard of the movement. What I meant was like, "which" groups are the primary ones leading it all? At the time we didn't have much information. Only by identifying those groups can you then dig into them, their connections and sources, can you start then connecting them up to foreign influence.
My whole contention was that you cannot do a color revolution without a natural uprising. The US does not create color revolutions out of good conditions, it creates them out of revolutionary conditions which it co-opts. Analyzing the cause of any color revolution has to go well beyond just "the CIA did it" and ask "what conditions were creating so much popular rage that it was possible for the CIA to do it?"
yeah my position is the same. The thing was too big to be planned.
i will put the recent estimate here instead of separate comment since its not really news:
Official Estimated Damage in recent GenZ Protests: Total estimated Value: NRs. 84 Arba 45 Crores & 77 Lakhs (USD 583,636,244.79)
Me ? I don't post at all and even had to create account during the start of the protest to post since I lost my previous account to the domain shift.
I thought the protest was organic because the government killed a lot of children a day before and that protest was a reaction to it. But can totally see how a organized group can co-opt it by claiming to be Gen z's representive.
fell for it award gold medalists
We always get a few of them. This person in particular claimed to be Nepalese.
Yeah am real Nepali, don't doubt US and NED flowing in Nepal at all but that protest in particular was due to government fuckup.
Now people trained to use such opportunity to rise and take lead used that opportunity to get into leadership position was inevitable.
Hell even member from some free-tibet org was nearly give a minister position in the interim government.