Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.
Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world’s top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world’s largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.
A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.
On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company’s mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.
First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.
The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada’s role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.
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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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
How did these people ever think they’d win an attrition war against Russia? The levels of delusion in the western liberal press zeitgeist are insanely high.
These people don’t think. They regurgitate what the CIA and pentagon sources tell them. CIA and pentagon knows better, they’re manipulating the public to get more money flowing to them.
There’s two types of neocons in the US. The smart/cynical kind and the stupid/idealistic kind. Pentagon/CIA are the former, media spokespeople are the latter
Maybe people here are too young to remember, but if you had lived through the 1991 Gulf War, you’d have seen that Soviet equipments were complete trash.
The imagery of thousands of burning Soviet-built tanks contrasted with only a handful of US equipment losses, combined with the collapse of the USSR months afterwards, gave the US the biggest confidence boost in all of its existence. Their greatest adversary had turned out to be a paper tiger.
America has won. Democracy has won. In fact, we won so fuckin hard that our military industrial contractors worried about no longer being able to secure government contracts. Thus began the era of deindustrialization of conventional military equipments and the rise of grifters era that promised luxury items that look super cool but never really practical on the battlefield.
But Iraq did not use modern Soviet equipment during the gulf war. The tanks used by Iraq (T-72M) were early export models of the T-72A, which lacked the armour, targeting computers and optics of the T-72B tanks in use in the Soviet Union at the time. The T-72B had 30% thicker armour than the T-72A. On top of that, the Iraqi T-72Ms had even further reduced frontal armour vs the standard T-72A. They also did not use reactive armour. The armour protection of Iraqi T-72s was worse than that of upgraded T-62 tanks! Iraq had a downgrade of an already downgraded tank. They also did not use modern anti tank ammunition and instead used older Soviet stockpiles. All of this was because the main opponents in the region were outdated Centurion and Patton tanks, and even a severely downgraded T-72 was overkill vs that.
Further evidence of this is what happened during the reunification of Germany, when they fired on an East German T-72M equipped with reactive armour, using TOW ll missiles and the Leopard II tank, which uses the same gun in the M1 Abrams. And they could not penetrate the hull or turret of the East German T-72M with the reactive armour. And remember, the T-72M had worse armour than the T-72B in use by the USSR at the time.
This is why in many ways, the Gulf War was not an accurate representation of how an actual peer war between the best that the west had vs the best the USSR had, would have worked. Of course a modern at the time, domestic M1 Abrams tank would destroy the severely downgraded Iraqi T-72Ms, which had worse armour protection then upgraded T-62s. A lot of the kills against the Iraqi T-72Ms were achieved via air superiority as well, with the A-10 Warthog aircraft destroying most of the tanks, 900 of them were destroyed by the A-10 aircraft, along with thousands of other vehicles. A fight between M1 Abrams tanks and Soviet T-72Bs, along with US warplanes vs Soviet air defense systems and their interception aircraft, would’ve played out very differently.
Iraq also spend 8 years warring with Iran from 1980 to 1988. Surely, this would have a very noticeable effect in the state of Iraqi military equipment in 1991.
Omg, tankie much?
(it’s actually really interesting details)
not to mention the CIA paid off most of the Iraqi military leadership not to fight
Iraq had old, export-model editions that were not well maintained or utilized. They had terrible discipline and logistics and communications. They had a corrupt, hollowed out army of cronies after years of rightwing dictatorship. It does not in any way compare to the USSR before its collapse, which could have wiped NATO in conventional battle easily.
We need to compile a database of these. Anytime a lib cites one of these bonehead stenographers as a source we should call them morons for trusting someone who obviously has no brain.
My man put out that first headline a month into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, when indications were generally showing that it wasn’t going to get anywhere? If it was November 2022 or something, I’d at least understand where he was coming from.
funny thing is, Russia was always winning this conflict at every point of it since february 2022. There was no point at which Ukraine had better than 50% odds. They seriously just deluded themselves collectively into believing a fantasy, a fantasy which allowed them to shove 500,000 Ukrainian lives into a meatgrinder and not feel bad about it
not even five months lol
Take away Russia - for Putin is finished and his country may collapse
Where can I get paid for writing new goalposting articles?