Image: the last sight of many a commie.
Please pronounce his name wrong to make the title pun work better.
Anyway - Javier Milei, a caricature of a libertarian invented deep in the Hexbear Bit Factory, has won the Argentinian general election; and with a 12 point lead over Massa, it wasn't even particularly close. There are several analogies for this situation - Trump beating Hillary, Bolsonaro winning in 2018, or the alternate universe where Le Pen beat Macron. Massa is not a great guy. The last couple years have been difficult for Argentina, facing massive inflation and the same general economic downturns that are happening everywhere.
Milei is an... interesting person. To name just a couple things going on in his deeply bizarre life, he has a very special relationship with his sister, and an even more special relationship with his mastiff, Conan. When Conan died in 2017, he was so utterly distraught that he had him cloned into four new dogs, named Murray, Milton, Robert, and Lucas, for his economist idols. And he uses mediums to speak to his dead dog. This is probably the closest we're ever going to get to having a dog be president of a country.
Milei wants to essentially collapse the economy even harder. Playing off the general public sentiment of "dollar = good, peso = bad", he has vowed to make the national currency of Argentina the US dollar, thus eagerly giving a massive amount of control over the Argentinian economy directly to America. He wants to take a chainsaw to the status quo, cut off trade with communist countries like China, and demolish the Central Bank. Will Argentinian capitalists and the Senate let him do this? Probably not. What happens with their membership in BRICS+? Who knows. Where does Peronism go from here? Who can say.
But he still won, and will now be president. I suppose that every dog has its day.
Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
The Country of the Week is Argentina! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
This study from Tel Aviv university (PDF warning, 392KB) on the recent conflict has recently been released; I quote:
The survey was conducted in Hebrew and in Arabic by the iPanel research institute between October 23 and 28, 2023 among 609 respondents: 506 Jewish respondents and 103 Arab respondents. Calculations were adjusted so that the respondents would constitute a representative national sample of the adult population aged 18 and above. Maximum sampling error: +/- 4.2%
It is full of fascinating findings. For example:
57.5% of Nazi Germany citizens think the SS has been using "too little force" in Poland, and only 1.8% think it has used too much.
Stop being antisemitic the israeli workers are oppressed by Zionism too 😤
(Sarcasm)
No dont do it dont turn to the IMT side
Speaking of trostky did you see that cringe ass clip on twitter of some trot from IMT bringing up trostky at a rally for Palestine out of nowhere a couple years back 😭
🫣 no thankfully lmfao
Found it
Warning: you are liable to die of cringe from this clip if you go in unprepared
before opening the link, Fightback came to mind.
And ofc it's Fightback. They are known to insert themselves into other more mainstream social justice orgs to do recruiting. There was a story of how they tried to recruit people in a march in support of victims of SA. They also have yearly seminars (at 150$ cost) where the most unhinged people go to.
65%+ of Israelis don’t support a one state or two state solution. That only leaves them one final solution since they are blocking the others.
So essentially, the Israeli Jews are mostly in favor of a single state solution but not the kind that's peaceful coexistence with Arabs.
Most of them wouldn't be there if they weren't trying to create an ethnostate so I'm not surprised.
So ya well over 50% of Israeli Jews aren't happy to either give Palestinians equal rights or to give them a state. Pretty sure that just leaves fascism of one flavor or another. Only Democracy in the Middle East baby
Yeah it’s ridiculous that Palestinians get neither citizenship nor their own state. They are forced to be a stateless and rightless people, something no other group of 5 million people experiences. Everyone else either gets some form of autonomy or some form of citizenship
What if you just give them rights in the same state you live in?
"No"
Ok what if they have a separate state that they can have rights in...?
"Absolutely not"
So what do you propose...?
"..."
"Bombing hospitals mostly "
Interesting. I'm trying to find similar polling for South Africa, and apparently in 1970, about 80% of the population was in favor of apartheid for one reason or another. This is obviously before shit really kicked off with the sanctions in the 80s.