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.
Small ray of "hope": Milei is having trouble building a cabinet, and there are already signs of internal conflicts even though he takes charge on the 10th of December. Here's the thing: Milei made an alliance with former president and insane neoliberal Mauricio Macri, the guy who pretty much runs the standard right wing anti-peronist coalition. He did that to pretty much have a clear shot at winning the election, and he did win so it worked out.., kinda. Now this shows two things: One is that Milei is a fucking amateur who puts all his eggs in a single basket and his goals are very short sighted and the other is that he sold his soul to an absolute ghoul, the demon, and now he must pay the price.
Now Macri is no employee of anybody, he likes to be the boss, now Milei must returns some favours. Macri-aligned people are slowly beginning to displace Milei's people to fill in the vacant spots in his cabinet, and might have to concede more and more. He lost the Ministry of Economy, a very strong ministry indeed, to one of Macri's employees, and that's a big hit. Former candidate for Governor of the Buenos Aires Province for the Ancaps was removed from her post as the head of Social Security, I wouldn't be surprised if she gets replaced by someone close to Macri. This is all very bad, and it can get worse considering he doesn't have majority in the Chamber of Deputies or in the Senate, he'll have to negotiate A LOT with the Juntos por el Cambio people. He's kinda fucked, at least for now.
Reality is slowly beginning to settle in for the ancaps. Their victory is indeed bad, and of course Macri gaining a lot of influence within the government is terrible news, but they're slowly realizing that their victory also comes at a high price, leading to internal strife. Their political instincts are like really bad, they could have gotten second place in the elections, lose to Massa but also claim a "moral victory", because they could have gotten a high number of votes without having to make suicidal alliances, probably selling the idea of "look how many people follow our ideals even though we lost". This could have made them build a lot of power for the future, directly challenging the standard opposition for the right wing votes and Peronism for the working class vote.
We have to see him in action as well. He's very honest about his ideals, he truly believes in what he says. But there are no economic, political or social bases for anarchocapitalism in this country, material reality always plays a huge role in the application of political and economic programs, here and everywhere. There's a chance that he'll get immediately frustrated at not being able to carry out his program, then he might lose an internal power struggle with Macri and he'll be the actual man in charge. Or perhaps Macri winning influence might provoke an institutional collapse, some people truly believe Milei is completely unfit to be president and he wont last 4 full years. But this is just my guess.
Nothing have started yet and he's failing already.