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.
Your Friday Briefing
NATO's European logistics chief is calling for the establishment of a "military Schengen zone" - a reference to the zone which allows essentially free movement of citizens between most EU countries - to allow troops and equipment to quickly move in the event of war with Russia. Moving large quantities of equipment and ammo currently requires special permits and advance notice and there is insufficient transport capacity to enable rapid movement of forces, some countries have different railway gauges, some roads and bridges in Poland and Romania cannot support the weight of European tanks, and the Deutsche Bahn can only move one and a half armored brigades at any one time.
There have been riots by far-right anti-immigrant protestors in Dublin after a knife attack left five people, including three young children, injured. Riot police were deployed. edit: Good summary of the situation here by @Moss@hexbear.net.
Italy and Germany want to construct a hydrogen pipeline across the Alps from Bavaria to Tunisia, expanding the existing South Central Corridor to create a European hydrogen network.
Escalating strikes in Sweden by a group of unions - including car mechanics, car dealers, dockworkers, and postal workers - has been called "insane" by Elon Musk, after Tesla denied their request for collective bargaining.
The Russian Ambassador-at-Large, Miroshnik, has said that Russia cannot co-exist with the Ukrainian regime.
Beijing has, for the seventh time in a row, ranked first in the global science city rankings, which tracks the authorship of articles in high-quality research journals. Beijing is followed by New York, Shanghai, Boston, and San Francisco. Chinese cities comprise 10 of the top 20, while American cities comprise 6.
Northern China is experiencing a large outbreak of respiratory illnesses in children, including influenza, pneumonia, RSV, and coronavirus.
The foreign ministers of China, Japan, and US-occupied Korea are meeting on Sunday for the first time in 4 years.
The leader of Niger, General Abdourahamane Tiani, has met with the leader of Mali, Assimi Goita, in his first international visit since the coup earlier this year - thanking him for the support. He will next visit Burkina Faso.
A town, Mweso, in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has apparently been seized by the M23 rebel group after several days of fighting with the government. This town is 100 kilometers from the North Kivu provincial capital of Goma.
According to an internal document, Milei's VP, Victoria Villarruel, and economist and likely chancellor Diana Mondino, have made discreet contacts with Brazil to affirm that their relations are of central importance, despite Milei calling Lula a radical communist with which he wanted no official state business done with.
Donald Trump is to meet with Milei in Buenos Aires. The meeting was facilitated by one of Bolsonaro's large adult sons. On social media, Trump said: "Congratulations to Javier Milei for a great election as the President of Argentina. The whole world was watching you! I'm very proud of you. You will turn your country around and make Argentina great again!"
Ecuador's new president, Daniel Noboa, has been sworn in after winning the election last month. He is the youngest ever leader of Ecuador.
Finnish fascists have decided to put the asulym seekers crossing the Eastern border into a camp for "processing". Will post a link in English if one becomes available.