Bulletins and News Discussion from September 4th to September 10th, 2023 - You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Supply Chains - COTW: Libya

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.

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COTW Libya:
Okay, I've finished Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - About 180 pages of actual writing and not in small font so I was able to get through it pretty quickly even while making notes. It's an interesting and approachable book on Libya under Qaddafi, and basically the premise of the book is how the experiences of everyday people matched the wider national and geopolitical circumstances, which isn't a terribly surprising observation but it might dispel lib ideas that Libyans were living in some big isolated time chamber for 40 years, unknowing of what was going on around them due to Qaddafi's propaganda. Not explicitly leftist, but it does explicitly and repeatedly warn against analyzing and interpreting the country as "Socialist Totalitarian Literally 1984 Poverty-ridden No iPhone No Food Hellscape #42942." Mentions the real gains made by the Libyan working class but also the country's gradual decline in the 1990s and 2000s and how the revolutionary old guard, and Qaddafi's large adult sons, did not really help things despite the blame being mostly on all the sanctions and war supported by the West. The book revolves around interviews that the author had with Libyans living abroad in Italy and the UK after 2011- of course, the fact that they are living abroad will mean they have some different opinions from the people still living there, but I can't exactly blame the author for not wanting to go to Libya as the country currently stands and start asking people questions about whether they liked Qaddafi or not. I give it a 7/10.
What was probably more important is that it gave me a basic understanding of the Jamahiriya, and the knowledge of where to start looking for more concrete material via the references.
In retrospect, I probably should have started at ProleWiki rather than diving into a random book, which has this page on the Jamahiriya, this page on Qaddafi, and this page on Libya as a country. The first one is the most developed and detailed of the three so it's the one most worth checking out. Going into the notable sources, there is this collection of information in the Libya 360 Archives, though several of the links they reference are now dead. Also of note is this post on marxists.org, written in 1984, about the Libyan economy and how it has developed.
As for the literature about Libya, as we try to construct a general geopolitical reading list. I haven't read any of these yet so these aren't recommendations - if anybody has read them then I would appreciate your thoughts, as well as recommendations for other books.
There are many, many other books written on Libya, looking back from 2011, as people switched from "this is an authoritarian regime and resistance is impossible" to "this was actually a weak regime and revolution was inevitable if you just saw all the signs" and attempted to understood the country. One such book is Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi by Allison Pargeter, but the description of the book gives me bad vibes.
Published in 2020: Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, on the Italian colonial period.
Published in 1987: Libya: Qadhafi's Revolution and the Modern State by Lillian Craig Harris. 240 pages.
Published in 2013: Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution by Francis A. Boyle. 212 pages.
Published in 2012: Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa, by Maximilian C. Forte. 352 pages.
Depending on how good the coverage is of 1990s and 2000s Libya in Boyle's and Forte's books, these resources might take us from the colonial period to 2011 without any major gaps (Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya does talk about those times, but not in sufficient detail for my liking - and a precise historical coverage of the era isn't really the point of the book anyway) The WW2 campaigns and the monarchy period are a notable gap, though.
What's possibly the most important thing to us on the news mega is the events of the last decade up to the present day, which I am struggling to find comprehensive resources for from basic google searches. One book that is apparent is Understanding Libya Since Gaddafi by Ulf Laessing, published in 2020, but I suspect brainworms are present here (better than nothing I suppose). Obviously the books covering the events of the last few years haven't been written yet so we're down to articles and essays. This time period is what I'll be focussing on for the rest of the week, alongside work on the weekly update.

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