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.
I think the decision to remove a recent article posted by one of our comrades which criticized white gay males should be reconsidered because I don't think it was reactionary
It included the segment from a gay white male perspective on why intersectionality is still important, and the article specifically mentions the Gay Liberation Front, the org named after the National Liberation front of Vietnam, where Leslie Feinberg spent so much energy fighting rival assimilationist orgs and assimilationist currents motivated by gay white male individuals who always had the liberty to jettison anti-racism and anti-imperialism if they wanted to (and successfully did so, e.g considering the current state of Pride© and queer struggle today, the tendency of many queer spaces to end up almost exclusively white, and among these spaces even as irrelevant but visible and memed about "leftist" discords being 100% white anti-authoritarian chauvinists etc etc)
The article goes into intersectionalist and assimilationist currents, I think many respondents did not read the article before writing
And like it or not, it's a common sentiment among queer people who aren't gay white cismen, especially POC queers. The gay white cismen can either interrogate why this is so and actually take steps to combat this trend or they can join the rest of the mayo clown fiesta in shutting their ears over criticism because their white fragility can't handle light criticism.
Seems like they're going with this one and bolstering the ranks of the stupidpol redditor choir
That's always their move, and then they turn around and wonder why they get disfellowshipped immediately after. You can't just show your ass as a total settler and expect to still have a seat at the table.
The fact that Hexbear blows up whenever whiteness is criticized makes the critique self-evident and self-directed re-education is required.
I keep having to bring it up and my basic point is that moderation/moderation strategy needs to maintain BIPOC leadership and the site culture needs to be defined by BIPOC leadership i.e leadership from the most deeply marginalized communities to ensure a safe space for everyone.
I don't want myself, @zed_proclaimer@hexbear.net or anyone else to be mentally exhausted from these confrontations.
I just want Hexbear to be a digital space for BIPOC and POC people to be able to exist and speak freely without having to self-police or code switch, and don't want to continue the chilling effect on BIPOC/POC people. Especially when racialized users get dogpiled.
I thought the post to just be reinstated because I didn't understand why it was removed to begin with, not several hours of agonizing discussions that will drive people away or increase the chilling effect on BIPOC/POC.
Nobody hates you, I remember several posters that went down on this spiral and all I've had to think about them is that I wish they stopped, figured their shit out and came back to continue posting about their pets or their plants or whatever.
Hey I enjoy being lectured at that I need to be more articulate and careful about my tone, that I don't make any arguments that make them uncomfortable but go about it in the "correct" way. Being dragged into their resentments and old drama when I'm just pointing out the article isn't reactionary and shouldn't have been removed
Yeah I saw that and it's fucked, getting tone policed on a post about tone policing is
I also didn't want to spend the last several hours exhausting myself on this, this sucks
My friend wanted you to see this but didn't want to get flamed:
The article was not an issue. It’s important to promote intersectionality.
Doing so in a reactionary way is not good, which is why it got canned.
Doesn't seem like the other commenters on the post saw it that way, so why have a forum called anti-cishet aktion with the radical aesthetics if you're expected to watch your tone when criticizing cis men for being a reactionary force?
Criticizing gay men as a whole for being a reactionary force is wrong, full stop.
Direct attacks on a minority is wrong.
The non-reactionary way would be to criticize the cis identity, not the gay one.
In this case though it was queer and trans POCs writing the criticism, so they were punching up and not down, and their main demand was that cops and corporations get kicked out of pride and that the assimilationists lose their place at the head of LGBTQ+ movements. All seems reasonable to me. Saying we can’t criticize a minority is absurd, especially when they are acting as a reactionary force like say the Iraqi Kurds. Israeli Zionists are a minority. The bourgeoise are a minority. Class war is collective punishment. Minority groups often work as compradors or are otherwise complicit in genocide and imperialism and deserve criticism for that
The article wasn't an issue. Trying to fight reaction with reaction is.
What was reactionary about it? The tone?
Should there be an expectation on Hexbear to preface with "Not all white gay males" before venting in /c/anticishetaktion?
Sorry but I've heard that criticism before and reads to me as fragility than a material analysis of reaction, might as well have the expectation to preface with "not all cishets" on /c/anticishetaktion or "all lives matter" on a BLM forum.
Explicitly holding entire minority groups accountable for the political actions of some members of their minority is reactionary behavior.
Sounds like you need an intersectional education on the spectrum of privileges if that's your reaction and takeaway
The friends that brought this to my attention are gay white men and had no issue with what was being said, either with the post, the user, or the outpouring of conversations about their struggles as POC and transgender people in white and middle class gay/lesbian spaces.
Very funny that this keeps happening to the 5-10 POC posters on Hexbear whenever one of us doesn't police ourselves
50 comments between the handful of POC posters venting with allies, a handful of negative comments from you 2 and the entire post gets nuked and again the two of you manage to find my comment and reply to it after being one of the like 3-4? posters that took issue with the conversations we were having and get it taken down for all of us.
For a site that has Leslie Feinberg as its posterchild its pretty embarrassing to tone police or to expect people to self-police on a statement as simple and uncontroversial as "the most privileged members of a community have been the most reactionary"
As if saying or even complaining that white middle class gay and lesbians backstabbing transgender and POC members of the LGBTQ coalition is controversial or reactionary?
Who are you to decide that the conversation that everyone else was having should be shut down?
Maybe replace the pride roller with a ballot box and Feinberg with Buttigieg as the mascot because I think only one of those two people would take issue with what was said, and only one would feel satisfied about reprimanding BIPOC peoples' space and right to vent on a "safe space" ostensibly designed for them.
Gay white cismen are the weakest link in the LGBT community just like white women are the weakest link among women and Cuban/Vietnamese/Iranian diaspora are the weakest link among POC. This shouldn't be controversial at all. Me calling out a Karen (per the original AAE definition of the word of a racist suburban soccer mom who calls the pigs because a Black dude is wearing a hoodie) for being a racist piece of shit doesn't make me a reactionary because she as a woman belongs to a marginalized community.
As you seriously going "not all gay white cismen?"
Super jarring to just finish a big LGBTQ+ project that talked about exactly this phenomenon and then to see it happen in real time after being called to try to get one Lemmygrad user's post reinstated just because we noticed signs that a lot of Hexbear's POC posters were using it as a good space, and that removing it would send the wrong message.
Seriously I would expect Hexbear to be the last place to see this happen so blatantly (and for it to happen repeatedly) with everything about Leslie Feinberg and TransComrade69 that's supposed to define the community's culture.
That’s not what reactionary is, and by that definition class war is reactionary
Is that what the takeaway is? Not all (gay) cis white men?
Nothing reactionary about pointing out the oppressors and reactionary faction and their privileges