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.
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What a fucking moron
I'm starting to become convinced that America is in the bad spot it is because there are just to many zionist running everything.
The hubris puts hrc to shame
It would literally be the same without Israel. The "Zionists running everything" are equivalent to the freedom-fry munching Islamophobes of Bush-era America, the Red Scare McCarthyites of the Cold War, etc. Come on, this is Marxism 101 not Conspiracy 101.
Bush era had a bunch of zionist.
It's not a conspiracy
The western elite is overwhelmingly zionist but there is no big Jewish conspiracy, they just know what serves their interests. The zionist project was promoted to be an outpost of the evil empire in a strategically important region and that's why they love it.
Zionism is not Judaism. If you can't separate the two than 🤷
They're Zionists because they're bullies. They're bullies because they're bourgeois. The Zionism did not cause them to be like this. You have it the wrong way around, otherwise American society would have been peachy before Israel was created (it was not)
That fails to explain prole and lumpen Zionists, because the contradiction between the occupiers and the occupied is what creates Zionists.
That's just a combination of settler colonists defending their own and living in a society where capitalists are the ruling class and their ideology is hegemonic. Otherwise all working class Americans would be communists.
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The Zionists certainly don't help. But there's also oil barons, tech billionaires, landlords, bankers, Wall Street investors, cops*, etc. There's some overlap, of course, but they are distinct groups with some distinct interests despite the most harmful common interests they share.
Even in Nazi Germany there were capitalists (those in light industry) who weren't completely onboard with the fascism, even though they rolled over easily enough once the steam built up.
* - I include cops because they often dictate how politicians do things, and it turns out they have a lot of interest in things like the illicit drug industry (and, of course, prisons, etc.). Gangster Capitalism is a good read....
...a lot of the people I grew up with would argue that you are just repeating the word zionist with different flavors
Sure. They're wrong, though, and a lot of that is (actual) anti-Semitic conspiracies rattling around in those people's heads (with Zionism and Judaism often—and quite deliberately—conflated with one another). There's plenty of industry that doesn't give a rat's ass what happens in Palestine. Those industries' owners aren't going to put their bodies on the line to save Palestinians, and they contribute to the general systemic repression, racism, etc. which empowers Zionists generally, of coruse, but they definitely have their own bourgeois interests which are independent of Zionism.
Police will never charge conservatives for this sort of shit unless public outcry demands it.
Cops are just there to defend the elite and capital.