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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.

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.


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.

This week's update is here!

Your Thursday Briefing.

Your Friday Briefing.

Your Saturday Briefing.

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.


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  • 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.

      • 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.

    • 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

            • In this case though it was queer and trans POCs writing the criticism, so they were punching up and not down

              You aren't really countering the criticism though. PosadistInevitability said that the article was criticizing gays as a whole, not pointing out an issue inside the community. You can always demonstrate that the article did not do that, but claiming that it is correct to tarnish gays as reactionary because lesbians did it is just not good. Furthermore, you are behaving like this is about white cis men but there are black gay men too. There are all sorts of gay men, and not all of them are rich, white or even american.

              You talk about compradors as an analogy. But you wouldn't claim that all cubans are gusanos and argue that it's okay to say so as long as haitians do it because they are even less privileged than the cubans.

              It's the very basic difference between pointing out the influence of the israeli lobby within the context of how political and international lobbying works in the United States, and complaining about jews. There's no shortage of heroic jews out there opposing israeli apartheid, just as there's no shortage of gay men out there doing great things for lgbt+ people.

              • That's not the takeaway we took from the article at all.

                Reactionary can be relative and it's pretty well discussed that the Lesbian and Gay movements took reactionary positions against the Trans movement early on. Especially illustrated in all the fights the Gay Liberation Front and Leslie Feinberg have had to take against single issue Gay/Lesbian and Queer organizations.

                The middle class assimilationist strata of LGBTQ+ community is what's responsible for LGBTQ+ struggle being ripped away from Black Liberation and Anti-Imperialism, and that can't happen unless people overall in that strata have shown a tendency to gravitate toward integration with existing structures of oppression. That doesn't mean the people reading those facts are automatically included in that.

                It's like saying white people don't have a gravitational pull towards supporting white supremacy - the material incentives and relations are right there and it shouldn't be controversial to point that out or criticize it. That's also why there shouldn't be a reason for someone to take that discussion so personally or as an individual. One can just recognize that they don't have a stake in that and reject it, someone doesn't have to identify with the strata being criticized or feel the tendencies of others have a bearing on their own.

                You take a step back and read that criticism from a macro perspective.

                Yeah I see people with my own identity being shitty and racist towards people, I don't feel like I'm caught as collateral damage when people make those critiques, I'm pretty secure in not being one of them or at least take the steps that I can to be a good ally. I don't have to agonize about it because it's basically not not about me.

                Same reason why some white allies that I know don't flinch when they see articles like that, they don't identify with the people being criticized at all and see it as an observable macro reactionary tendency that doesn't inherently or necessarily have any bearing on their own character.

                • The middle class assimilationist strata of LGBTQ+ community is what's responsible for LGBTQ+ struggle being ripped away from Black Liberation and Anti-Imperialism, and that can't happen unless people overall in that strata have shown a tendency to gravitate toward integration with existing structures of oppression. That doesn't mean the people reading those facts are automatically included in that.

                  Yeah, none of that is controversial. The way racial politics and culture works in the United States and elsewhere, it's not a shocker that a white person who is gay happens to accept all the axioms of hierarchy embedded into their culture. That person doesn't need to take a conscious political stance on racial or gender issues either. They can just be themselves, limiting the struggle for liberation to themselves. I've met gay men with issues to work with, who do not wish to be seen as effeminate in any way shape or form. You can imagine what their opinions on trans issues are.

                  I do take exception to the idea of dissociation however. I don't think it's an argument that is good in itself. It's cool to say that your takeaway from the article isn't that it essentialized gay men as inherently reactionary. I'm willing to take you at your word, just as I'm willing to consider the opposite case. And given that you've taken the effort to write out an interesting post, I'm sure you can see how counterproductive it would be if you had simply accused me of being Reddit and stupid, or how bad it would have been if, instead of engaging with the issues at hand in the LGBTQ+ community you had instead simply talked about punching up and how class war is collective punishment.

                  • I do take exception to the idea of dissociation however. I don't think it's an argument that is good in itself. It's cool to say that your takeaway from the article isn't that it essentialized gay men as inherently reactionary. I'm willing to take you at your word, just as I'm willing to consider the opposite case. And given that you've taken the effort to write out an interesting post, I'm sure you can see how counterproductive it would be if you had simply accused me of being Reddit and stupid, or how bad it would have been if, instead of engaging with the issues at hand in the LGBTQ+ community you had instead simply talked about punching up and how class war is collective punishment.

                    "i'm glad you were one of the articulate ones and policed your tone appropriately for my approval. I'm willing to accept your view as equally valid as the stupidpol reactionary view."

                    • Yeah, none of that is controversial. The way racial politics and culture works in the United States and elsewhere, it's not a shocker that a white person who is gay happens to accept all the axioms of hierarchy embedded into their culture. That person doesn't need to take a conscious political stance on racial or gender issues either. They can just be themselves, limiting the struggle for liberation to themselves.

                      What is reactionary about this? Every single one of your posts has been an excuse to call me stupid, a reactionary, and to ignore everything I write. You are, in essence, completely at uninterested in the welfare of both this community and the LGBTQ+ community. You're not our ally, and the only thing you care about is name calling online.

                      • let me clarify terms for you since it seems like your are not following.

                        The "stupidpol reactionary view" I am describing is the one you expressed earlier, specifically that identity essentialism is always incorrect, and in fact 'reactionary'. This is why, to them, whites can be victims of racism and cis people are equally as oppressed and vulnerable as trans people. Because they live in a idealist world without context, that doesn't account for historical injustice or imbalances.

                        You are saying that grazing7264 presented an argument in a way that was more acceptable and palatable to you, that they stayed polite while doing so and didn't call you names like redditor or stupid. They made such a good argument that you are so magnanimously willing to consider their argument as equally valid as the stupidpol view of identity essentialism always being incorrect.

                        I love having to be lectured by your pedants and go through this tedious thing every single time, I'm glad there's people like grazing still patient enough to hold your hand through it so it doesn't prickle your sensibilities. Even then, you still aren't convinced though and chose to a fence-sitting position without having even read the article

                    • You're just a wrecker, aren't you?

              • PosadistInevitability said that the article was criticizing gays as a whole, not pointing out an issue inside the community.

                Then they clearly didn't read the article. Why should I argue the content of the article against a stupidpol reactionary who refuses to discuss the actual content they are whinging about? Read the article. It doesn't attack all gay men. It literally opens with an account of a conflict at a Pride March where more radical components of the LGBTQ+ movement were protesting and trying to get cops and corporations kicked out, and the overwhelmingly white cis gay men at the pride protest who jeered and attacked those protesters. How is this not about the LGBTQ+ movement internally? READ. I'M ASKING YOU ALL TO READ.

                • Why should I argue the content of the article

                  Because that's what you should have been doing from the first. Not imply that the article is correct because of who wrote it. That sort of essentialism is what 'stupid identity politics' supposedly means, even as you use that term as an insult against other people.

                  • You should talk about the contents of the article

                    Apparently it's "reactionary" according to mods and I'll get banned if I quote it, so the most I can do is paraphrase. Are you familiar with the subreddit community of stupidpol and their reactionary stances? I'm accusing the person I'm replying to of being one of them. You are trying to twist this into me being reactionary, but in fact I'm the one arguing on behalf of the POC and trans writers of the article who have a leftwing critique of a privileged group. It's PosadistInevitabiltiy and you being Reddit "not all white cis men" pedants.

            • Criticizing an oppressed minority is absurd and evil. It’s the difference between criticizing Zionists vs criticizing Jews as a race.

              • Criticizing an oppressed minority is absurd and evil

                An oppressed minority in one sense can be an oppressor in another (see: Kurds, White Women, Albanians, Croats, Poles, Sunni Muslims, Jews). You come off like white cis gay men can't be criticized by the less privileged components of LGBTQ+ movement for their overwhelming complicity in assimilationism. So can white feminists not be criticized by POC feminists anymore? This is where your logic leads to

                • You can criticize me for being white all day long. If you criticize me for being gay get ready for a fight because you might as well be a conservative from my viewpoint.

                  • They don't have an issue with the gayness, they have an issue with the reactionary privileged stances of cis and white men in the movement. Step back and log off, you are taking this too personally and it's creating a festering wound of reaction. You need a couple days to breath and get rid of that personal aggrievement feeling you have that fuels reaction and start to see the big systemic picture and power dynamics involved.

                    • I’m glad we can agree Cis white men are fine to criticize.

                      There’s not much else to say.

                      • You are acting like a stupidpol child and dare to call me the insulter? Go do you bullshit reddit "not all cis white men" shit somewhere else for fucks sake. Not one place one the western internet where we can escape you people.

                        All your confusion can be amended by first: you chilling out for a couple days to regain your senses and let your reactionary gut instincts die down a bit and second: re-reading the content of the article charitably. You will realize how childish and stupidpol you're being right now, like a reddit cracker

                      • you edited and changed the content of this comment completely btw. It used to say that I was making minorities feel unsafe by pointing out your stupidpol logic and then you change it after I respond? You're arguing in bad faith. I wouldn't be surprised if you go back and re-edit all your comments in this thread in these deceptive ways

                  • You can criticize me for being white all day long.

                    Except that's not even true, you took one ding to your whiteness today and CAME INTO MY FUCKING INBOX ON SOME HURT FEELINGS SHIT ABOUT IT. The undying audacity...

                    • I perceived you as being homophobic.

                      You're trying to cast me in a light that simply doesn't exist, and it's tiring.

                      • So this ain't you, right? You're gonna sit there and bullshit? Ion't gotta wheel my response to this out, right? What's really tiring is you peckerwoods playing every fuckboy game in the playbook to avoid doing ANY kind of introspection. I want you to think about how this looks to a Black queer, and stop talking until you've done any kind of meaningful self-crit already. "You can criticize me for being white all day long", tuh.

    • 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.

          what-the-hell

          • 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"

            pete-eat death-to-the-poor

            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.

            • The OP of that post straight up said I was lying about the police intimidating me in my home for being gay.

              Admins stepped in without me reporting anything, and you want to make that my fault because I pointed out that felt shitty.

              Denying my lived experience oppression is leftist? I’m not even bothering with this reactionary nonsense anymore.

              • So that comment(s) should be removed and presumably has already been removed

                Before the article and everyone else's discussions were nuked?

                If I'm looking at the comment the OP said "I don't want to hear it" presumably because he felt you were decentering his grievances and the collective experiences of POC and was that the place, or your place, to bring it up? When a POC queer person is in the middle of airing his own grievances and venting about their experiences?

                You don't have to take that space to say that you are also oppressed, or make it about yourself, and you definitely did not have the right to destroy that space entirely if presumably you and the other poster that replied to me were the ones to report it.

                If you didn't report it then why not reinstate it? The comment in question you're talking about has already been deleted.

                I'd like to reiterate that the discussion wasn't about you or the OP, I have no issues with you or your character. I didn't even expect you or the other user to reply to me - my issue is restoring that discussion and that space to for our other POC users to vent and to put my stake in the site's continued ability to be a safe space for racialized people and yourself.

                I remember in the first months of Hexbear the early exodus of BIPOC users when Black users were dogpiled for criticizing Asian immigrants for their place in oppression, Asian landlords and business owners that discriminated against BIPOC people. I made essentially the same argument that you made that "Non-BIPOC POC people also experience discrimination, you shouldn't attack them" and those users over time never returned.

                There's a time and place, and over the years it's made it so overtly obvious and painful to me that POC can so obviously and often also be racist and discriminatory to BIPOC that I regret ever mentioning it at all. It wasn't my place and wasn't the time.

                Just the same way that white Lesbians and Gays occupy a higher position in the social hierarchy than white transgender and POC+BIPOC LGBTQ+ people.

                Airing grievances doesn't invalidate your experience, nor do those grievances mean you are a bad person or that you haven't experienced discrimination.

              • Sounds like you're making this about yourself and not about the content of the article and you need to step back

          • 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?"

          • That’s not what reactionary is, and by that definition class war is reactionary

            • If the class war is against sexual minorities on the basis of their sexuality, I’m unsure how that could be a class war.

              Attacking reactionary elements of movements is fine and good. Lgbt capitalists shouldn’t be spared because they are lgbt.

              • What the fuck are you even talking about?

                POC LGBTQ people critique the privileged stances of the most privileged, rightwing/liberal part of their movement: Wow what are you RON DESANTIS DOING GENOCIDE?!?! NOT ALL CIS WHITE MEN!!!

                Seriously you are falling down the hole of stupidpol reaction right now. Stop yourself before it's too late and you start to resent black and trans people for "attacking" you

                • I agree, it’s fine critique right wing and liberal positions.

                  Unlimited genocide on the kkkrackers.

                  I got upset because someone told me I lied about being oppressed by armed thugs of the state. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

                  • I wasn't even in that thread btw and have no idea what grievances you're on about. I'm talking about the original comment of this thread's concerns, which are that the article was deleted for being "reactionary". It was not reactionary, regardless of OPs others comments (which I didn't even see). Those comments should have been removed and the article left up if the comments were in fact reactionary. The issue is the censoring of black/trans LGBTQ+ voices for the fragile sensibilities of white cis men arguing in a stupidpol fashion that it's unfair to critique them

      • Nothing reactionary about pointing out the oppressors and reactionary faction and their privileges

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