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Bulletins and News Discussion from November 4th to November 10th, 2024 - This is a Giant Problem

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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1.3K comments

  • Megathread activity has dropped from moving the megas into a single holding thread, the extra click it takes to get here matters and people can't see how many new comments are in the thread at a glance from the main page.

  • This US election outcome seems to be testing the resolve of a lot of leftists who were earlier discussing how both parties served the same masters and change wouldn’t be that different under either one. A lot of them have quickly turned to doomerism after years of seemingly expecting this outcome.

    In Guatemala it’s more of a shoulder shrug. We weren’t expecting much from Kamala and Trump didn’t really have any major impact on us. No more than every other President that’s been increasingly anti-immigrant

  • The events in Amsterdam were totally like the Kristallnacht!

    ... except that it was a gang of fascist hooligan tourists and not a persecuted minority that got beat up.

    ... and except that the people who got beat up were not innocent but had spent their entire time there provoking locals and starting fights.

    ... and except that no buildings were burned down and nobody was killed.

    ... and except that the authorities were attempting to stop it from happening instead of actively participating.

    But other than that, it was totally like the Kristallnacht.

  • BRICS need to start pushing de-dollarisation urgently given the current geopolitical situation. They had a golden opportunity in 2022-2023, and decided not to. That decison could bite us in the ass...

    Hopefully Trump winning will kill the liberal delusion that we in the global south can reconciliate and negotiate with the imperial triad of the USA, Western Europe and Japan. Especially the USA of course. Fear of Trump seems to mobilise the liberals in situations where they'd otherwise stay quiet.

  • I hope this won't run afoul the containment of burgerland-election-related posts, but this is more an observation/analysis of the media and the bourgeoisie's response to it in relation to foreign policy...

    I have heard my whole life, and in the news mega, that burgerland-subjects don't actually care about foreign policy and that it had no effect on the election. And although I think there were plenty of other considerations, I think the fallout from this particular election has really solidified in my mind that that meme is another product of the empire's superstructure imparting its own ideological conformity onto the minds of its subjects. In almost every swing-state, over 30% of voters said they would have been more likely to vote for Harris if she had put an arms embargo on Israel (without a correspondingly high number of people saying it would make them less likely to vote for her). Harris also didn't really run a primary, and objectively ran on platform very similar to Trump's 2016 platform sans the performative talk about abortion. 16 million fewer people voted for Harris than Biden in 2020, which suggests a deep disaffection with the Democrats themselves. Other evidence is that the two politicians who were for an arms embargo against the apartheid state won handily in districts Harris loss. And Muslim voters voting in large percentages for Stein and Trump (I think this isn't a shift to the right, but people playing the logic of the two-party system, punish Harris by not only withholding your vote but giving her "only" opponent a vote too.)

    I really think we are witnessing in real time the invention of reality about the election, and how the media perpetuates this meme that burger-landers don't care about the outside world. Pundits are saying the Harris ran a "flawless" campaign (she only ran for a few months), that she was defeated due to racism and misogyny alone, with the most sanctioned "outsider" opinions (Sanders) being that 22% inflation and no plan to help struggling people may have led to her defeat. (by "coming from" Sanders this serves a dual purpose of marginalizing the idea that the DNC ignored working-class issues and also allows the DNC to forcefully object to it without acknowledging the movement on the left which has been making a much stronger case for this, all along, than Sanders who is essentially part of the DNC and campaigned for Harris) So now we see articles talking about the "secret gen-z men who hate women and are MAGA" which I think is a real thing, but isn't a particularly significant phenomenon, but plays into the ruling-classes desire to reproduce the ideological conflicts of previous generations in the young-- to make that particular thing more prevelant via the Baader-Meinhof illusion. -- My point isn't to dive deep into the election itself, but I think we can all see the willful ignorance that foreign policy played in spoiling Harris' image, tying her to Biden's unpopularity, and making a lot of people sit the election out (why vote if the outcome is the same either way?). I think this is a ruling-class meme that reinforces itself, because if there is no democratic choice on foreign policy, then people who play the voting game have no need to pay attention to or consider foreign policy. There is no social pressure to educate yourself or create a moral red-line about murdering people abroad because everyone in the media says nobody gives a shit about it and you are stupid if you give a shit about it too.

    So even though the media will replicate this idea that burgerland-subjects, particularly young men, are actually becoming more right-wing, that they don't care about Gaza or the outside world, I think what you are actually seeing is the aspirations of the ruling class in finding an analysis that will uphold the status quo and placate as many people as possible. They don't want to acknowledge that there has been a mass movement for Palestinian liberation, and when leftists repeat that yankees don't give a fuck about foreign policy I think it plays right into the hands of the ruling class.

  • https://x.com/WVanwagenen/status/1855366838437150767

    YNet says Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir are waiting for the hostages to die. The issue of the hostages in Gaza will be solved 'naturally and tragically.'

    They will then use these deaths as further pretext to permanently occupy and establish Jewish settlements in Gaza, YNet says.

    Netanyahu's cabinet has always wanted the hostages dead after the plan to kill them all with helicopters before they reached Gaza on 7 October was not entirely successful.

  • My Copium analysis:

    Harris losing 15m votes since biden (trump losing 3m votes) shows that american people are moving to the left in general. The only issue is the democratic party itself is moving farther to the right.

    Harris offered nothing but more genocide; wouldn't even hammer on abortion and offer a plan to reinstate roe v wade. Democrat voters just stayed home.

  • Israeli tourist arrested for racially insulting a worker on Boipeba Island, Brazil. The tourist called the porter a “monkey” and was arrested by the Military Police on Tuesday.

    An Israeli tourist was arrested on Tuesday (05) on the island of Boipeba for racially insulting a local worker. According to initial reports, the foreigner had offended a man carrying suitcases on the island by calling him a “monkey”, which caused outrage among the people present. Military police officers were called and took the tourist to Boipeba police station, where he will be charged with the crime.

    Racial insult has been considered a non-bailable and imprescriptible crime in Brazil since January 2023, when President Lula sanctioned new legislation equating racial insult with the crime of racism. The penalty for racial insult ranges from two to five years in prison and includes a fine. According to the legislation, any action that causes embarrassment, humiliation or undue exposure on the grounds of color, ethnicity, religion or origin is characterized as racial insult, especially when the discriminatory treatment is not meted out to other groups.

    They come to South America (Specially Bolivia and Peru), commit crimes and are surprised when local police or population arrest/attack them.

  • The Ukraine War is Lost. Three Options Remain

    1. WW3
    2. Ukraine as a failed state
    3. Negotiate

    Beebe says the West has an erroneous idea as to the very nature of the conflict. The US and the Europeans defined the Russian invasion as a “deterrence model problem” rather than a “spiral model problem”. In the former, the adversary is a kind of Hitler that must be stopped at all costs.

    “We have internalised that model as a universal truth in international relations. We believe every problem that we’re facing is that deterrence model problem and we can’t possibly negotiate.”

    In reality, Beebe says, the conflict conforms to what Robert Jervis defined back in the 1970s as a “spiral model problem” – where you have one state that attempts to enhance its own security by taking measures (for example, Ukraine joining NATO) that another state (Russia) believes are threatening. You get into a dynamic of action and reaction that can spiral to the point where you get into a conflict.

    “When you attempt to deal with a spiral problem by refusing to negotiate, you make the problem worse on both sides. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire,” Beebe says.

    The former head of the CIA’s Russia desk argues that if we are to think our way out of the disaster that is Ukraine, the West needs to rediscover diplomacy and the ability to negotiate with geostrategic opponents. US triumphalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall led, he says, to the US feeling it could abandon statecraft.

    “We no longer felt that we had to engage in normal diplomatic give-and-take, attempting to balance interests as well as balance power – the kinds of things that statecraft has involved for thousands of years. We thought that wasn’t necessary. Number one: we know we’re right.

    And number two: US power was just so disproportionately greater than any other country’s power, we could simply impose our views, whether they liked it or not.”

    The Ukrainians face a terrible dilemma. Most seem to realize the war is lost. Any attempt at negotiation with the Russians, however, would unleash internal pressures inside Ukraine that could lead to a coup, assassinations or other upheaval. The US won’t want the war to end before President Biden leaves office in January 2025 – and may prolong the agony, loss of life and the ceding of yet more territory to Russia for US domestic reasons rather than the best interests of Ukraine. Where is all this leading?

    George Beebe sees three options. NATO escalates and becomes directly involved in the fighting – action that could have unspeakable consequences. More likely, Ukraine could suffer a collapse – a combination of military and political failure as the ability to put an effective army in the field is lost.

    “If I am wearing my analyst hat, I would say the more likely scenario is Ukraine collapses and becomes some sort of dysfunctional ward of the West. We then have more or less a security black hole in the middle of Europe that causes real problems.”

    Absent an agreed framework, other hot spots could flare at any time – including Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Kaliningrad.

    The third option, and clearly the preferable one for Beebe, is that the West changes course and “picks up the phone”, ending its refusal to negotiate.

    “The West has got to recognize that it is important for us to find a negotiated settlement,” Beebe says.

    “We can’t simply say to the Russians, let’s freeze the conflict in Ukraine, and someday we’ll get down to talking about broader European security – ‘trust us’. That’s not going to work. We’re going to have to indicate that we understand that these issues are important and that it is in our self-interest to address them in a way that accommodates Russia’s core security interests. The Russians are not going to get everything they want out of this. Neither will we. Both sides are going to have to get their most vital interests protected in all of this. That’s a truism in diplomatic agreements.”

    And that is how grown-ups talk.

  • I've seen people suggest that the failed zionist hooligan riot in Amsterdam was not just horrible people being horrible but was a deliberate false flag operation carried out by the illegal zionist entity. What do people in this site think about that theory? Some points made in support of the theory:

    • Prior news reports stated that operatives of the terrorist organisation Mossad would be sent to Amsterdam to protect the hooligans
    • The incidents happened on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, the best time for this to happen from the viewpoint of zionist propagandists
    • Amsterdam's green party mayor has a history of being more permissive towards anti-genocide and pro-liberation protests than the zionist entity and the far-right Duty regime likes. The entity is petty enough to ger her blamed for "antisemitic pogroms" as revenge.
    • The western consent manufacturing machine was in full swing right away, with every mainstream media outlet and professional opinion-haver parroting the same lines about "antisemitic" violence.

    Against this theory speaks:

    • Zionist hooligans are this horrible.
    • Nobody could have predicted that the locals would defend themselves this decisively. There would have been no media outrage if the hooligans had just done their racist violence unopposed.
    • The zionist entity does not control scheduling of European football matches, UEFA does. Although UEFA is corrupt and liberal I somehow feel that the idea of the terrorist organisation Mossad dictating the match schedule to be too conspiratorial to seem plausible.
    • Western liberals do not need a conspiracy to be racist against Arabs and assume the worst about their intentions. They will uncritically believe any zionist claim of "antisemitism" as they have done every time until now.

  • Western news media is pushing the angle of “anti-Semitic attacks” in Amsterdam, leaving out the actual truth.

    This narrative in this situation is so dangerous for fomenting actual anti-semitism. Long before this match, soccer fans in Europe knew that one Tel Aviv club and their supporters are total fascists, they have an infamous reputation. Anyone with a phone can see the videos of them disrespecting the Spanish flood victims and all the violence they initiated. The fact that the Israeli fans are in no way “victims” is obvious to everyone, including those who haven’t really followed what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank over the last year.

    So, what happens to your average European soccer fan who’s disinterested in politics and world events, when they see what happened last night and then see how the media in their country is covering it? They can see who the actual perpetrators are and who the actual victims are, and then see that their news media and governments are spinning it the other way. All it takes then is for these same people to get exposed to the actually anti-Semitic “Jews control the media and Western governments” ideas and down the neo-Nazi pipeline they go…

1254 comments