Image is from this article on the excellent Canadian environmental journalism outlet, The Narwhal.
The Giant Mine just outside of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada is one of the country’s largest recognized environmental liabilities. The mine’s 100 plus year history illustrates the continuity between resource colonialism in the late 19th/early 20th century and neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium.
There were several gold rushes in northern Canada/US in the late 19th century, such as the Klondike. The Giant gold strike on was first discovered by settlers about the same time as the Klondike, but as Giant is on Great Slave Lake (named for an Anglicization of the name of local peoples, not after slavery) instead of the Pacific Ocean, it is much less accessible and didn’t take off like the Klondike. Parallel with displacement of local Yellowknives Dene people https://ykdene.com/, the town of Yellowknife sprung up around small mining operations through the 30s. It wasn’t until after WW2 that the mine was developed at a large scale. Starting operation in 1948, Giant was owned by a Canadian mining conglomerate through the 80s, then some Australians, and for the last ten years of its operating life, by Americans, who went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 1999. The Canadian federal government is responsible for the site and its remediation now, similar to the way the EPA has Superfund sites in the USA.
The project is infamous for poisoning the people and environment of the surrounding area through arsenic poisoning. The ore at giant is arsenopyrite, an arsenic sulphide mineral that often contains gold. Roasting it in large furnaces or kilns releases the gold as well as fine arsenic trioxide dust. The most infamous arsenic poisoning incident was in 1951 when a Yellowknives Dene toddler in died after eating contaminated snow in the fallout area, 2 kilometers from the processing mill’s smokestack. Over the years, improvements to the mill reduced the amount of toxic dust released to the environment. This is better than blasting it into the air wildly, but meant that the site accumulated hundreds of thousands of tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust that they chucked in empty mine workings underground. Unfortunately, arsenic trioxide dissolves in water as easily as sugar and so represents a tremendous risk to groundwater and waterbodies nearby, like Great Slave Lake and Yellowknife’s water supply.
Arsenic issues contributed to labour disputes as well. In 1991 the union workers of the plant went on strike, refusing management’s demand to reduce their salary and wanting better safety measures for workers . The company brought in Pinkertons and strikebreakers, backed by RCMP thugs. The situation escalated, culminating in a bomb planted on a train track deep in the mine. When it was triggered, it killed 6 scabs and 3 Pinkertons. For the next year, the RCMP interrogated mine workers, their family and community without determining who did it, supporting the company in their refusal to sign a new contract until an arrest was made. Finally a worker named Roger Warren confessed to doing it alone and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2014 and died in 2017.
Since 1999, the site has been the responsibility of the Canadian federal government and is being every so gradually remediated. Operated through what are effectively private-public partnership contracts, environmental engineering companies are attempting to clean up and isolate the huge amounts of arsenic trioxide dust. The concept is move the dust into specially ventilated chambers of the underground mine, where it is frozen in place and thus prevented from leaching into groundwater. Active remediation is supposed to be finished in about 15 years at a cost of $1 billion CAD, but will surely take longer and cost more than this. Also, freezing material in place will definitely work because the climate isn’t changing, and the Canadian north is definitely not seeing extreme levels of temperature rise.
After active works are complete, the site will require perpetual care.
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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 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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
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.
Great post. The average American is so replete in contradictory positions that it’s hard to nail down exactly how many more votes Harris would have gotten if she had done XYZ but seeing people (including Hasan, whose electoral coverage I watched over the night to keep me awake if anything else) point out that the issues that the media finds important are NOT the same as the ones that people find important was an eye-opener for me. Like with his example that Harris’ initial policy of punishing grocery store price-gouging was very popular and only became MORE popular despite the Republicans and right-leaning Democrats pumping out propaganda about how the mildest price caps so poor people can afford to eat would be 1984 communist Venezuela Soviet totalitarianism China dictatorship hyperinflation.
I’ve expressed over the years my “observation” (which probably unknowingly draws from some French philosophers that I haven’t gotten around to reading) that Western and especially American politics is this cultural miasma that is disconnected from the rest of the world and material reality, with Atlas carrying this abstracted-away propaganda reality on his shoulders, which explains why despite bettering of material conditions ought to poll well (and often does), a massive minority or perhaps even majority of Americans just cannot be persuaded to give a shit. It’s like the political version of how the stock market literally does not reflect anything anymore, every single oil refinery on the planet could implode in one hour and the oil markets would budge by like, 5%, and then correct themselves and go back to normal. Japan had a massive single-day crash semi-recently and then it just got back up if as nothing happened because it wasn’t connected to anything, it was just a psychological thing or some rich guys trying to make money or whatever happened there.
But now I’m beginning to think that actually, I’m the idiot and this political disconnection never truly existed and I was being propagandized and brainwashed by the media to think that Americans just don’t give a shit, when clearly, millions really do! Biden being this absolute dogshit candidate even back in 2020 getting the most votes ever while campaigning on “nothing will fundamentally change” broke my brain and I believed the media when they said that those two facts were connected, when it doesn’t actually seem to have been because Harris was even more “nothing will fundamentally change” and now the Republicans won the fucking popular vote! So I’m glad you’ve more eloquently expressed this nascent thought. I really ought to have connected the dots better because I go on and on about how Day’s hypothesis of brainwashing not being real but for some reason it was a huge blind spot for me. The spectacle of the voteball consumed my critical thinking; the owl of minerva flies at dusk.
I mean nothing will fundamentally change was said behind closed doors to donors, it was not popular talking point promoted by him, he campaigned on soul of democracy and build back better and 15 dollar minimum wage
he didn’t literally say it but when a democrat starts talking about how we need to fellate institutions merely for being institutions, instead of talking about how food prices need to go back to how they were before, then that’s essentially campaigning on “nothing will fundamentally change”, whether it’s said outright or behind closed doors. that was the point I was trying to make, not that I thought Biden was literally going behind a podium and saying “well, we’ve got nothing to really improve here from Trump, we’re gonna do the same stuff he did” (even if that was indeed his actual policies), of course he was going to lie about policies
I mean he did do his stuff with infrastructure bill but then decided to not disburse any fucking money, cause mckinsey would lose consultancy fees. If this were trump (or any craven politician), there would be training courses for 500k (which is like 50 bln) workers with hard hats (each of which said biden) in the first 3 months, who would go around fixing potholes. he did try to ram some progressive stuff, but then folded at the first manchin, lost 15 bucks minimum wage (which alone would have won harris campaign), and decided to become grandmaster of the great game in the last 2 years.
He didn’t lie, he just didn’t fight for something he didn’t care about, he cared about war and being prepared for another war (with chips act).
that’s all he knows how to do (that and moving weapons to terrible people)