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.
It's talking about the liberal discourse centered around the hostages that Hamas took and how they seem to be showing signs of being treated humanely—even pretty decently—while in captivity. This includes videos of them being turned over to the Red Cross, an account by a released Thai worker (or her sister?), and of course that older interview with the elderly woman who was released a week or two ago (rather than in the context of the current ceasefire and prisoner exchange).
Liberals seem to be extremely shocked and unbelieving that Hamas' prisoners seem not to have been beaten, tortured, starved, and deprived of their basic needs. (Projection....)
For sure, anyone with thinking skills is eventually going to figure out there is zero practical incentive to be inhumane to hostages. Outside of inflicting terror and other evil shit I guess.
The video looked hopeful, not even a scratch on any of them and not exactly traumatized. Didn’t notice any of that thousand island stare.
It really shows the difference in humanity between how the sides operate.
Yeah. That's if they take the time and energy to actually do that thinking. LOL.
And, TBF, I'm sure that being taken and held prisoner is going to be traumatic to people no matter how "well" they are treated while living under the condition of not being able to leave under violent threat (however implicit or explicit). I'd have to remain a a prison abolitionist even if all prisons were like that supposed Finnish prison where the murderers live in apartments on an island and do yoga or whatever. But there's a huge difference between the baseline shitty condition of being anyone's hostage/prisoner/kidnappee and, say, the kind of treatment that Israel and the U.S. prison-industrial complexes have been very thoroughly documented as subjecting their own victims to. (Not to imply hostage-taking can never be justified, especially by people who are themselves prisoners; just that I doubt anyone can go through it without suffering some kind of trauma.)
I think that Stockholm Syndrome really is just taking one overarching and surface level "symptom" of a captive or subjugated person having "sympathy" for the one holding them captive or subservient, and just ascribing one monolithic brain prank to the whole thing when theres actually rather direct material reasons why it might happen in each individual case.
With hostage taking theres obviously the matter of the police/military threatening the hostages by not negotiating and instead using lethal force, with intimate partner abuse the person being abused often has no other way to provide for the basics of existence and has to rely on their abuser, who they presumably at one point did love and is now stuck with, thats more complicated than a short term hostage taking but the reasons largely dont particularly overlap.
Or like looking at cults which is another occurence of this, where you now actually have a communal occurence of abuse and often a complete ideological and cultural isolation from the outside world, this again is very complex and the overlap isnt that huge with the other cases. To suggest that all of this is fundamentally the same brain prank seems reductive at best and IMO it just comes off like people are holding on to an "established" conclusion and refusing to let it go.
It would be a serious stroke of luck for an obvious police discrediting campaign against a woman they endangered and left to die to actually have by happenstance revealed a fundamental cornerstone of psychology that actually is extremely valid and useful for every situation except the one it was invented for, that being short term hostage situations.
Yeah. Well said.