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.
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.
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/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/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.
The government and a broad majority of the parties in the Folketing agree to post additional billions of kroner in the so-called Ukraine fund.
The extra boost for the fund this year amounts to DKK 2.3 billion.
In addition, an additional boost to the fund in the period 2025-27 must be DKK 23.5 billion.
The Ministry of Defense writes this in a press release .
In March, a broad majority in the Danish Parliament agreed on an agreement on the Ukraine Fund. At the time, it was said that the fund would consist of seven billion kroner this year.
We do not know how long the war in Ukraine will continue, but we know that donations are crucial for Ukraine to continue the fight against Russia, says Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) in the press release.
Throughout the war, Denmark has been a faithful supporter of Ukraine, and when we now strengthen our support, both in 2023 and especially by also allocating significant funds in 2025-2027, we are sending a clear signal that the Ukrainians in the long term term can count on Danish support, it goes on to say.
The Ukraine Foundation aims to support Ukraine militarily with, for example, weapons and training efforts. In addition, it supports civilian purposes such as emergency humanitarian efforts and longer-term reconstruction projects.
The fund finally supports business efforts where Danish companies can help with the reconstruction of the country.
(emphasis mine)
At a press conference, the Minister of Defense has just put more words into the latest decision to add additional kroner to the fund.
This means that Denmark will be one of the countries that contributes the most per capita in relation to military donations compared to other countries, Troels Lund Poulsen.
At the same time, he emphasizes that it is not inconceivable that even more money will be added in the future.
Should there be further challenges in relation to Ukraine in the coming years, well then we will have to look at it.
With the extra money for the Ukraine Fund, the calculation now reads that 10.5 billion kroner will be donated in 2025, 7.4 billion kroner in 2026 and 5.6 billion kroner in 2027.
According to Troels Lund Poulsen, the fund needed additional funds this year. And more may be needed.
The Ukraine fund is almost empty for this year. We are down to about half a billion left, he said at the press conference.
In the agreement just concluded, it is stated that "about 96 percent of the allocated framework for military support in 2023 has been implemented."
Behind the decision to add the funds is the current government (liberals, succccccdems and the "Moderates" (grifters)) as well as SF/Green Left [had no idea they changed their english name] (succdems pretending to be socialists), the Danish Democrats (fash), the Liberal Alliance (liberal fash), the Conservative People's Party, the Social Liberals (radlibs) the Danish People's Party (fash) and New Right (fash).