Bulletins and News Discussion from November 20th to November 26th, 2023 - Let Sleeping Dogs Milei - COTW: Argentina
Bulletins and News Discussion from November 20th to November 26th, 2023 - Let Sleeping Dogs Milei - COTW: Argentina
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.
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Geert Wilders is going to be the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Another victory for the far right in Europe.
I'm not informed about Dutch politics, have wealthy neoliberals let everything get worse for decades like in every other western country?
nah nah we had labour in the coalition that one time, that went real well or something
...yeah sounds vaguely familiar actually
also for those who don't know about Dutch Labour, a story in two parts:
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I mean he also is ass tbf
asscher
Didnt she write "If I could turn back farts"
Until the failed Ukraine project is abandoned, whatever party opposes sending more funds and arms to Ukraine if going to have great success. Mostly that's right-wing groups like Hungary, but occasionally it's leftwing like in Slovakia. Geert Wilders is anti-EU and anti-Ukraine, which is a winning platform. Unfortunately until eurocommies figures this out they are going to be left in the dust as the lackeys of Liberals and imperialist Succs.
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Look at the GOP currently. People are absolutely voting on Ukraine. They are sick of billions of dollars being slurped away in order to bomb their own pipelines. They are sick of losing their sovereignty to the EU and to the Anglo-Americans.
It just so happens the correct revolutionary defeatist stance aligns with a now popular stance. This shouldn't even be a question. It's a failure of the western left that they have not had the correct stance on Ukraine and have acted chauvinistically and are now caught on the backfoot by right-populists.
It's wild that after the 2014 Maidan coup renowned Marxists like Samir Amin were saying that the policy of Russia and Putin to resist the colonisation of Ukraine must be supported, and the Baltics states' experience should not be repeated at all costs. And that was just completely ignored...
No one is voting for Republicans lol, what are you talking about? No one in the US is getting elected because of their position on Ukraine. No one cares about Ukraine.
the GOP in the US house (the most pseudo-democratic thing we've got, more democratic than the senate or supreme court or presidency at least) has basically destroyed the functioning of the government over Ukraine and that's a popular position that's not losing them any votes
There's no huge anti-Ukraine lobby, in fact the opposite is true. All establishment pressure from the blob is to support Ukraine. So why are so many US house reps challenging the MIC and blob and being so obstinate about it (shutting the government down, never before seen speaker antics)? It must be a popular position otherwise there's no explanation for their behavior (unless you think they are in the pocket of Putin lmao)
I think there is more than a little opportunism here though. I think it's easy for republican politicians to be against the war in Ukraine because it's "Biden's War" and anything he does is a commie globalist conspiracy. They were pissed at Biden for cutting our losses in Afghanistan too, because he was the one doing it, doesn't matter that it was also a colossal drain on our resources. I personally know conservatives who consider themselves anti war because they oppose the war in Ukraine but are vehemently opposed to any reluctance to give Israel more weapons.
If it were a war they started or that was being overseen by their candidate I'm not convinced chuds would care at all.
I think there is more than a little opportunism here though. I think it's easy for republican politicians to be against the war in Ukraine because it's "Biden's War" and anything he does is a commie globalist conspiracy.
Why is it "opportunist" though unless being anti-Ukraine is legitimately popular? That's the point. My point isn't that Republicans are good wholesome people who we should support, drop you moralism. My point is an analytical one, that being anti-Ukraine War is a popular stance that people care about, hence why Republicans chose this issue to grandstand on and not a different one. It just so happens to be the correct stance as well, so there should be no excuses about it the path ahead is clear.
Think about it, why wouldn't they pick an easy winner among the GOP base like "more money to the southern border to stop migrants and muslamic style individuals"? It's safer for them, doesn't upset anyone in the MIC and they still get to opportunistically grandstand and shut down the government and all that fun stuff. They stuck their neck out to oppose Ukrainian War funding because there's a lot of people who it's important to
I think people who are motivated by Ukraine are often doing so as an expression of their partisan identity (evil ruzzians colluding in our elections/sleepy joe turning us communist), not as a consistent position you could leverage into a long running project. I might be wrong about that but no conservative I've heard on this topic has a position that makes sense outside of partisan teamsmanship. Except maybe like Mearshimer, but he's not representative of the base or a popular upswell in sensible realpolitik calculation among suburban white people.
If the issue is popular among right wingers because they want to lurch further right I'm not sure how you coopt that. You could coopt genuine antiwar sentiment. Can you do the same for "NATO is (((the globalists))) trying to weaken us so the Chinese can take over"?
It's amazing how hard you westoids squirm to avoid being anti-war. The correct communist stance is anti-Ukraine War funds. It's that simple. It's a failure of the western left that they don't have this stance, both a failure of revolutionary duty AND a strategic blunder. They will not face success until they fix the internal issues of chauvinism that led them here as they will just be incorrect again on the next major issue.
No I agree, funding the war in Ukraine is pointlessly killing thousands of people over US geopolitical interests that are bad for the world. I personally oppose that.
I just am not sure I could get anywhere with Gaetz trying to argue that we share a political program and leveraging that into ending the war. Or convincing people who like Gaetz that they could meet their goals better through collective class struggle. I'm not sure these people are actually anti war. I think they're against Joe's war.
Unless you have actually lived here, you have zero conception of what it is like to live in the U.S. nor the absolutely overwhelming social and psychological pressure that is involved. We are absolutely buried under propoganda 24/7, and it is also considered a virtue for the most credulous people on earth to assert their opinions constantly at meetings.
You could try to organize on an anti-war front here as it would be the right thing to do, but you would instantly lose all the libs because 'Ukriane is wholesome 100% uwu', and then you would lose the conservatives because 'taxation should be illegal and the roads should be privatized the way God intended.'
The distinct distance of the average American from reality is staggering if you haven't lived among it for years.
They seem to care in rural areas where they complain about it every other month
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Austria is going to vote for their parliament next year and Germany votes for theirs the year after so 2025.
Switzerland already did theirs and there was a right wing shift but:
-They gained back the seats they lost to the greens last election -It was a way smaller shift than that.