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.
It's amazing to me that the Yemenis can just yoink ships in the Red Sea. Djibouti is right there. The American fleet is right there. Are the Americans just doing nothing, or are the Yemenis just running circles around them? Aren't the Israelis screaming at the Americans for not securing the sea routes? Those articles about American paralysis in the middle east - with attack after attack against American bases in Iraq and elsewhere - come to mind. But it's just so hard to fit that into my head. It's like the Hegemon just bricked all of a sudden and Ansarallah helped turn Gaza into a Suez Moment.
The empire no longer has hooting hogs for citizens. Any escalation is going to play horrible back in the states. No one wants this. Everyone is broke. People are being denied their treats and circus. The usa attaking yemen to protect billionaire zionist is going to go over like a shit in a pool.
Or like that lady going viral. A piss in the airplane aisle.
The possibility of Iran's involvement also makes war a risky proposition for the US. They're already fighting a 2-front proxy war and neither is going particularly well.
Folks who were there say it all went down on a flight from somewhere in Florida to Philadelphia ... and one passenger is accusing the woman of threatening to kill another person onboard.
A battle of Titans that must be. Florida vs Philly.
I saw some Arabs thank Zelensky on Twitter for pretty much taking all their artillery for the last 2 years. That plays a role a think. The US is giving its reserves to Israel rn. I think most arms are depleted.
idk. Could be as simple as it takes time to scramble a ship with marines and helicopters and all the other stuff they need to do a naval boarding action.
plus there are Yemeni anti-shipping missiles to consider. Idk what the stakes are, but they may have to worry about the Yemenis firing anti-shipping missiles at them from the decks of seized ships, something like that.
according to people from the area, there was a lot of rockets, counter-rockets, drones flying over when that was happening, so much so that some somalians thought the war with ethiopia was starting back up again
i think the war with the saudis just made them really good at using drone for counter battery and stuff