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.
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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.
The best question was, do they even have some goal in mind with all those investments or are they completely irrationally investing trillions, hoping something will just stick. The AMD lady then just went full word salad, meaning it’s definitely the latter…
I think its primarily for defense purposes. They have massive amounts of spy-data (ring, flock, prsm, etc.) That has to be tagged to be searchable and they simply can't do it all manually.
But if you create a way to search by certain sounds or images, suddenly the NSA's surveillance cataloge becomes searchable.
I'd say several broadly speaking about the bourgeoisie, corporations, the US state:
spoiler
AI controlled robot armies that never disobey the bourgeoisie and imperialist state and can be called upon to put down any insurrection guaranteeing perpetual rule and ability to inflict anything they want on the population
Removing the power of the proletariat's labor. If humans aren't working they can't strike, robots won't strike. They envision that they can just fire most of the population, get rid of them somehow and just use this to continue to profit and live at the top backed by their robot armies and police. They don't have a Marxist understanding of profit and are the generation who swallowed the lies their grandfathers made up for the common people and believe in them themselves. Problem for us is by the time their rate of profit collapses and they all start eating each other good chance at least half of us are dead via social or not so social murder.
Even if they don't believe that fever dream it is at the very least a labor discipline tool. They can use the threat of automation to discipline labor into lower wages, less benefits, no unions, etc. They very much want to discipline labor right now with the state of the world as their little capitalist world hegemony is showing cracks. They want to nip a new rise of socialism in the bud and are very attuned to polls showing the popularity of populist leftist policies and openness to the word socialism.
Deranged greed that sees it as an infinite profit generation engine that can genuinely out-think and out-perform human labor and will send their quarterly lines up up up up!
A belief it will lead to AGI or something big (some sort of automated unstoppable hacking tool for instance that they salivate deploying on the rest of the world) and that if they let China beat them on this it's game over forever for capitalism and the western bourgeoisie so it's a cost to bear in that war against China
An odd-ball plot to stockpile tons of chips and computer parts ahead of a war with China that causes supply from China and province of China Taiwan to be cut off to the west. The bubble pops, the war goes off, and oh look warehouses full of supplies to fill our needs while we desperately spin up production in the US, India, etc. Enough anyways for business needs as John and Sarah who want new laptops can go ahead and pay $3500 for something that was $600 before the war as far as they care so long as business can be kept running. One could say this is an interesting idea. Because if they do go ahead and build all the power plants they're talking about there is your power right there for some war-time re-industrialization to fight China as well.
For these things the bourgeoisie are willing to sacrifice much. I still think it's probably a bubble because they won't get near their goals anytime soon and someone big is going to call it and the confidence of the whole thing will be shaken and collapse (AI won't collapse and will continue to be developed and invested in as a promising thing for those aforementioned but many of the big companies will go belly up and it won't be this whole frenzy that distorts every power market and RAM and memory and so on).
Of course this person is the last person anyone should listen to on this as they're the late-comer shovel-seller at a gold rush so of course they're going to say it's still on no matter what and don't particularly care about lofty larger goals or necessarily understand them as they'll tell you their product is magic if it'll make it sell more.