Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.

In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.

Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.

It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Okay, look, I got a little carried away. Monday’s update usually covers the preceding Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but I went ahead and did all of last week. If people like a more weekly structure then I might try that instead, if not, then I’ll go back to the Mon-Wed-Fri schedule.

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.

    • MoreAmphibians [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      36·
      1 year ago

      I’ll repost something about Orwell earlier. This was in reponse to somebody feeling bad about using “Eastasia has always been our enemy”

      Orwell had an excellent understanding of what living in a modern empire was like; He was a colonial cop in occupied India after all. He saw and participated in the British oppression of India and, like all good liberals, he took the things he saw there and sublimated it onto The Enemy. When he was writing, The Enemy was the Soviet Union but he could have just as easily written it about France, Germany, Japan, America, or any other state that the British propaganda apparatus was designating as The Enemy when he was writing his book.

      Don’t feel bad about quoting Orwell to describe the sort of state he lived in. That’s what he was taking inspiration from, even if he didn’t realize it. He certainly wasn’t inspired by the Soviet Union, how could he be? He had never even been there, he had only had it described to him.

      • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        32·
        1 year ago

        100-com

        At one point during the federation battles on other instances I was talking about this, and said that all these works of fiction that were clearly meant to depict the Soviet Union don’t actually really say anything at all about the innerworkings of the Soviet Union, but instead reveal something else: “What did writers who lived in the Cold War think about the Soviet Union? How did American propaganda affect them and their writings?”

        I think this is generally true of all fiction authors. You aren’t learning about how the world actually works, you’re learning about how that author thinks the world works. They could be totally delusional, but they might also have a unique perspective to share, so fiction isn’t totally useless, but it’s mostly a sort of “soft” persuasive power; “Shouldn’t the world be like this? Wouldn’t it be better if it was?” or vice versa if it depicts a Bad World, and not the harder form of persuasion of “This is how the world works, here’s the facts and figures, here’s the literature.”

        Treating 1984 or other similar works as the latter and drilling his ideas about how totalitarian states function into your ideology as core parts of it, especially in lieu of actual knowledge of how governments that may or may not be repressive function, doesn’t really make any sense. But realizing where Orwell comes from, his history and his ideas and what he observed, and then realizing that he was pointing his finger at the wrong country when he wrote his book - that’s more useful.