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.

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.

This week's update is here!

Your Thursday Briefing.

Your Friday Briefing.

Your Saturday Briefing.

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.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Israel is so busy lecturing the world about how to behave they forgot to listen to their own women.

    archive.today • Over a Year Before October 7, Israel's Army Had Insight Into Hamas' Plan to Attack Israeli Towns, IDF Bases - Israel News

    The group began preparing its onslaught from Gaza years ago, but Israel's analysis remained faulty. Two months before the assault, an NCO warned that the nightmare scenario could now happen, but she was ignored,

    [...]

    There were also the warnings by the army's women spotters on the Gaza border, and the nightly consultations in the army and Shin Bet that didn’t produce the right adjustments and enabled Hamas to kill around 1,200 Israelis and take around 240 hostages on October 7.

    [...]

    [The NCO is an] experienced, professional noncommissioned officer in Unit 8200 specializing in the enemy’s military doctrine. Her warnings jibe with the many warnings that the women spotters in the Gaza Division raised. Over a period of months before the war, she wrote three documents warning her superiors about Hamas' intentions. A few months ago, she reported that Hamas in Gaza had completed exercises simulating an invasion of kibbutzim and border-fence posts.

    In July, she reported that the group had completed even more exercises. In one document she added a horrifying statement revealing Hamas' intention to severely harm residents of the kibbutzim. She concluded that Hamas had completed its preparations; part of her evidence was a visit by senior Hamas officials to watch the exercises – an event that the spotters also reported. Like them, she was ignored, even if she wasn't degraded or threatened as the spotters were by some of their commanders.

    The NCO’s warning was passed on to senior officers in her unit and to field intelligence. A senior intelligence officer responded to her by email; he praised her work but added: “It seems imaginary to me.” The NCO stood her ground. It’s not imaginary, she responded. It wasn’t for show but an example of what Hamas could do. According to her, Hamas' level of detail and scenarios it practiced showed this.

    An older NCO, her commander, sided with her. He wrote that he had 30 years of experience and concluded that the exercise was for real, not for show. She added: We're marking 50 years since the Yom Kippur War. You can’t say it’s imaginary. The NCO’s last warning arrived in August in a document distributed to a number of senior staffers in the unit and field intelligence. She felt that this was the right group to receive this information. She detailed the plan as she understood it and the exercises that Hamas had held.

    Her conclusions closely conform to events less than two months later. She warned that starting then, the negative scenario could happen. A third veteran NCO joined her in her warnings. Weeks before October 7, a senior officer visited the southern base where the intelligence had been collected and the warnings were drawn up.

    He was shown the intelligence, but it seems the top officers at the unit and at Military Intelligence didn't give the statements sufficient weight. The veteran but lower-level professional got the impression that the senior command wasn’t taking the warnings seriously.

    • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I'm always tempted to be a bit skeptical of these Panopticon-style "we see and know everything, actually, and nobody can hide any activities from us, ever, but we just didn't feel like acting on it" takes. Like, it's difficult to reconcile them with the fact that—despite all the ridiculous amounts of policing power the U.S. state has given itself—the FBI still, I believe, has never provably thwarted a single terrorist attack, and even had to go so far as to manufacture its own in order to entrap people and feel like it was accomplishing something. Are we supposed to believe that they just give their victims so much benefit-of-the-doubt that they've passed up every single opportunity to thwart such an attack and just let it proceed instead?

      At least this one sounds slightly more plausible than the extremely vague insinuations that U.S. or Egyptian intelligence warned Israel this one time and doesn't produce plenty of other false-positive reports of the same sort that would make it just part of the noise. This could still be the same thing but internal, of course, but at least there's some detail in this story. 🤷

      • GinAndJucheM
        ·
        1 year ago

        Skepticism is the correct take. It’s Israel ffs. Notably honest and bad at propaganda.

        This is perfectly designed to appeal to the white liberals who want girl boss concentration camp guards to be the plucky hero’s of the story.