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.
Does anyone have any recent stats as far as Jewish American support of Israel? I keep seeing on here and some other spots that Israel is extremely controversial among American Jews and a large proportion don't support it, but that doesn't track with my own anecdotal experience. Every Jewish person that I know is ardently supportive of Israel and the Zionist project, talk about wanting to move there, etc. I am not Jewish so apologies if this comes off as disrespectful, not the intent.
Support for Israel is higher among Jews than the overall population, but it’s by no means unanimous. I believe the polling I saw had 65-75% of Jewish-Americans supporting Biden’s actions after October 7th.
Part of this is the extreme pressure and hatred leveled at non-Zionist Jews, called “self hating” and “anti-semitic traitors” they are attacked by Zionists viciously. Many fall silent or give in to pressure
The funniest/saddest thing is when Zionist Jews go full-Christian and call for excommunication. Seen it on /r/judaism where one (upvoted) person was saying that as a convert they believe they were present at Sinai, but that anti-Zionist Jews' souls were not
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I have several very close Jewish friends and they seem to swing from, birthright is disgusting propaganda meant to increases the amount of Jewish people, to. Where will we all live. All with in the same convo and minutes apart.
The closes analogy in my life i can think of was how shattering the child rape news about the Catholic Church was to me when i was younger. But i don't think that even really comes close.
The older my Jewish friends the more weird no historical context other than the Holocaust takes they have. Id say that is basically any Jewish person over 35+ To be very blunt. Many older Jews do think they are extremely special for being Jewish and that they are basically above everyone else because of it. I've had their Boomer parents tell me straight to my face that. But i think it's more of i have to be prideful because history has shown that everyone hates us type deal.
Any one under 40 seems to be just torn apart about it. Any one under 30 is leaning hard Israel is a genocide state.
As a former Catholic i was never under the impression that the Vatican and going to mass made my ethnicity. So it was easy for me to discard and if i do believe in God i know that God would agree with my feeling of disgust at the church.
But to be Jewish, especially American Jewish, seems to be more about the culture and ethnicity than about the religion at all. It's about being Jewish and for 50+years now to be Jewish is to be Israeli and to Believe that the jews must have a home land. Their is really no religious basis. So to discard Israel is to discard being Jewish. All my Jewish friends seem to have had their little bubble poped. And many wish to just create a new one instead of dealing with reality. Especially the older they are.
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Probably. The children of my Jewish friends are all saying they where lied to. They are early 20s. So all the childhood propaganda is fresh. Unlike all the 40+ year olds.
From what I've gathered listening and watching. Being jewish as a ethnicity has a direct connection to zionism.
quadruple post combo!???
I'm sorry, I saw four copies of your comment but it must have been a bug. when I reloaded your reply the others are gone
Thought i was about to get accused of having convos with my self through multiple accounts
You're on dangerous ground here. It does not. Zionists drown out anti-Zionist Jewish voices. And, frankly - Lots of people just sit this out. Zionism is not a Jewish problem and Jewish people have no especial obligation to focus more attention on fighting Zionism than any other social or political problem.
When you're weighing this - On one side is the Israeli state, the Israeli state's well known citizen-staffed online propaganda program, most of the US government, Most major media institutions (not because they're run by The Jews, but because Israel is an important part of western Imperialism), Evangelical Christian Fascists, and a lot of other random reactionaries and assorted scum. On the other hand are literally a handful of millions, because remember the worldwide Jewish population is very small, it's one of the smaller ethnic groups in the world, of people who have no particular connection to this except that they share an ethnic background and sometimes a religion with Jewish zionists. Unless they're part of Jewish Voice for Peace or a similar org they're not organized politically around fighting Zionism. They're just random people living their lives. You've got on one hand a massive empire for which Zionism is an important strategic consideration regarding it's goals of dominating the Middle East, and on the other hand a couple of million random people who really don't have much to do with this.
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Nah. Idk how the numbers look but there are a lot of older Jewish people who have been fighting this the whole time. Finklestein has been posted on here a lot and he's hardly alone.
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The large pro-Palestinian protests that have been happening in the U.S. over the past two months have largely been organized and led by (especially young) Jewish people, and by Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). This, of course, doesn't say anything about general trends among the overall population, but it does help reveal the strong and vocal anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian-liberation movement among Jewish people in the U.S..
While those groups have been very important, especially in NYC, in most of the country it's Palestinians, especially PYM, and PSL organizing these actions.
Unless you're young, Israel isn't controversial. A survey from November 5-9 by Jewish Electorate Institute of 800 registered Jewish voters in the US suggests American Jews overwhelmingly approve of how Biden is handling the "Israel-Hamas War" but only a slim majority of 18-35 year-olds do.
Other stats include:
There weren't any questions about the war itself disconnected from Biden, and no questions about the existence of Israel or Palestine or Palestinian rights, etc.
Now for anecdotes: I live in a neighborhood that's about one-third Jewish. Not sure what the breakdown by denomination would be but there's definitely both lots of reform and orthodox Jews. I'm also a member of a Reform synagogue in the area (Well, currently I guess not. I'm supposed to renew membership fees but I've been putting it off). From my observations, the community here is super Zionist. Aaaand my rabbi even went to the Israel rally in D.C. It sucks so much. I used to go to synagogue with my family occasionally as a kid, then stopped for a while, then more recently my partner has been interested in Judaism and I needed more of a social life so I decided what the heck let's go back to synagogue, and then the war pops off reminding me of the bleak state of Jewish politics post-WW2. Bundism is dead. IDK how to process this.
Every Jewish person I know is straight up rooting for Hamas. Annecdotes aren't data.