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.
link to The Intercept article - https://archive.ph/eL0yQ
Prefacing this by saying I am NOT anti-science, I am extremely PRO-science and I am myself a career scientist.
Academic journals are all TOTAL bullshit. And no, I'm not just talking about those 'predatory publishers' you hear about. I mean Springer Nature, Elsevier, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell-Wiley, the whole fucking lot. Why? Because the decision to publish an article depends entirely on the decision of (typically) one editor and two reviewers who are themselves just random academics (often not the most qualified and knowledgeable) and who are themselves biased, as all scientists are. The vast majority of articles published in journals are littered with errors in the data collection, analysis, and interpretation of findings. Peer review is necessary but completely inadequate at separating the wheat from the chaff. I am not exaggerating. In my (main) field, 9 out of 10 papers I read contain basic and obvious errors which should never have made it past peer review. It is astonishing. And I say this not with glee as some sort of antivaxx nutjob (I am extremely pro-vaccine), but as a dismayed and disheartened scientist who truly believes that science is the best method we have of understanding our world but at the same time it is so deeply fucked. The problem is not science itself, but that science is not performed by automata; it's performed by people, and even PhD academics can be absolutely blindly biased and/or pathetically stupid. I often refer to PhDs as trained idiots. You people would not believe the shit I see every single day. The average person seems to think scientists are all geniuses who never make mistakes. Most of them are morons and extremely tribal. Every field is like this; they will publish articles not to determine the truth objectively, but to advocate for a particular view they held a priori by manipulating the data in their favour. It drives me bananas.
If you were made science dictator how would you fix it?
Not OP, but I'd say we fix it (well, make the biggest step toward starting to fix it, really), by abolishing capitalism. The practicing of science is influenced by the material conditions and the surrounding institutions, like everything else. A great deal of funding (grants, investment, etc.) is directly tied to the profit motive, and a great deal of the rest of it is tied to liberal politics, which of course forms an indirect tie to profit since the liberal state subjugates itself to capital above all things other than its own existence. And, of course, whether a piece of work enjoys academic protections also has a great deal to do with liberal legalism. Everywhere you turn there are political (including economic) influences on the scientific process. A scientist expressing concern for the future of their career (as opposed to, say, the ethics of their actions) is directly expressing that they are acting not according to scientific principles, but political ones.
What do you think to those new policies of publishing the peer reviews with the article? It doesn't overcome the problem of not publishing rejected articles (or the peer reviews). It's hailed as a great change. I can't see it myself. Greater transparency is perhaps welcome. But it's unclear how it fixes any of the problems with academic publishing.
Have you read the article on the political economy of academic publishing?
I think transparent (publicly-available) peer review is another necessary but insufficient step toward fixing the publishing system. I think that 1) peer review should not 'end' once two reviews are in, and 2) two reviews is too few. I think one solution would be a preprint server that enables permanent, never ending peer review from as many academics who choose to review the article. Give anyone qualified, not just two invited reviewers, the opportunity to leave comments indefinitely.
Wall.
"Hi, I'm the editor of Harvard law review" gets your ticket punched literally anywhere, what the fuck are they talking about.
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