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.

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

    When are armies going to learn that you can't neutralise entrenched guerilla fighters through conventional warfare? The Viet Cong won in the end. The Mujaahideen defeated the USSR, and then the Taliban defeated the USA afterwards. Even Henry Kissinger realised this. The guerrillas fight a political war, not a conventional one. The early guerrilla fighters that were defeated in South Africa during the Anglo - Boer war/civil war, were only defeated by the British burning all the farmland and keeping innocents in the first concentration camps. That's the way to defeat an entrenched guerrilla force, the humanitarian cost has to be too great for the fighting to continue. However, no modern army will be able to do such a thing, as much as Israel will try and seige Gaza and try move the Palestinians into camps in the Sinai, it is just not viable.

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      reminds me of this by aimixin:

      It's a lot easier to win a war against a state than a war against a people. With wars like in Vietnam, the US was not merely fighting a state, but Eisenhower himself said over 80% of Vietnamese supported the communists. Guerrilla armies would constantly pop up and people would spontaneously fight back just because the South Vietnamese government was so overwhelmingly unpopular.

      The more Vietnamese the US killed, the more joined the communists, until the US resorted to using chemical weapons to try and destroy the food supply and starve them to death, and still couldn't win, or in Korea where the US destroyed every standing building to the point that they began dumping bombs in the ocean because the bombers couldn't find enough targets anymore and needed to lose the weight to land.

      The US could not have won the Vietnam war without actually nearly completing their genocide. Same with Korea, and even Afghanistan. The more they fought, the more people joined the other side to fight against the US because they just wanted an independent country and didn't want a foreign colonizer deciding for them.

      When the US overthrew the fascist Japanese state, and aided in overthrowing the fascist Nazi state, they replaced these states with new ones that they retained a lot of the original institutions and a lot of the original people in power. There was a change, but the change was not that fundamental, the US did not have to kill off most the Japanese population or the German population to make these changes, and their mass killings of civilians they did participate in was not necessary.

      The situation with Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Cambodia, this was entirely different. The US was not just trying to take control and make minor changes to the state. The US was trying to change the entire people, they wanted to purge communist and national liberation ideas from Vietnam, when these ideas gripped the masses. They had to fundamentally change the people themselves, which put the US at war with the people, which was a lot more difficult of a war to win than the war with Japan or Germany, even though Vietnam is a smaller, poorer country.

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I didn’t express this on this site because I’m not gonna be defeatist, but I had my concerns about this analysis applying to Gaza. Because Gaza isn’t Vietnam or Afghanistan. Due to both sheer size and terrain, those places have essentially unlimited numbers of entry/exit points. I’m geographic terms, Gaza is much more like a city (like Leningrad) and cities can be starved out.

      BUT… it really looks like the Palestinians are routing the IOF all over Gaza, and Israel is trying to find a way out before getting embarrassed even further. My takeaway now is that if Gaza can pull off victorious guerilla warfare, then anyone can. Because these resistance fighters are playing the game on Impossible Mode. They are of course up to the challenge (and the IOF has been exposed as a complete paper tiger), but the odds are so stacked against them even from a guerilla campaign standpoint. It gives me hope.