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.
Radlibs love doing this, creating “new” and niche worldviews and positions from idealistic first principles. They don’t actually know anything about the facts of the matter, the “numbers don’t matter” to them and are “just useful rhetorically” because to these people rhetoric is all there is. There’s a nihilistic solipsism and narcissism underlying this outlook, deep down they don’t even know if Israel and Palestine are real places or thought experiments
Yes! This is a concept I keep trying to chisel away at (there's probably some philosopher I haven't gotten around to reading yet on my ever-growing list that perfectly describes all of this lmao, it'll probably be Foucault or something), where liberals, especially western liberals, are totally detached from reality. It's akin to the obfuscation of capitalist social relations of production but for everything in life. To draw upon my once-liberal thought process, because all of these things aren't really experienced by the people discussing them - and there's not even any familial experience of this kind of oppression much of the time - it all becomes this very hypothetical, wishy-washy, cloudy, idealist fantasy land bullshit.
The only reason why anti-landlord sentiments are a remotely popular thing among Gen Z is because of their direct exposure to its criminality, so even if there's some high-minded, educated, economics-y explanation as to why you shouldn't be mad that your landlord is a piece of shit ("he had to take risks! he also has a mortgage to pay, you know! he's actually a prole too!"), when you look at your rent, you just feel your raw material interests unburdened by all the inane fluff and go "actually, no, this fucking sucks." It's similar (but obviously much worse) for when people directly experienced economic collapses like the Russian shock therapy or even bombing raids - you can be told all the information in the world about how, actually, the shock therapy was necessary because this and that indicator were much too high, and actually that bombing campaign was necessary because sometimes there are terrorists and you have to do hard things, but your material interests are just like "No. Fuck you. I lost my relatives because of it. It wasn't necessary and everybody behind it should be locked in jail for the rest of their lives."
But if you have no experience of those events (and I freely admit I do not), and can't even really feel any empathy with people undergoing those experiences, then the propaganda can be convincing and the "logic" seems pretty tight, and you're just lost in an idealistic fantasy world, disconnected from reality in the most literal sense. This is why, if the American empire does violently collapse in my lifetime, it's going to some mixture of fascinating and horrifying to watch these people adapt to much harder conditions, with severe economic turmoil which would make 2008 look like a fun picnic. Or even bombing/missile campaigns, if nuclear war is the result. Even with conservative prepper types, I get the sense that their plan in the event of a societal collapse is basically "Get into their bunkers, very quickly become bored because you're not used to not having television blasted into your eyes and ears every minute of every day, try and impulsively check Facebook and get angry that the networks are down, the family kills each other before day 2 - and if not, they get murked by trying to be an epic action hero shooting at people from their rooftops before getting owned and their supplies stolen by a co-ordinated group of survivors."
I think ‘society of the spectacle’ or post-modernism more broadly touches on what you are discussing, but not exactly.
I definitely think materialism is true for determining class interests and predicting the actions of broad swathes of a population of millions, but on an individual levels there definitely exists a coddled western middle-class that has no conception of class warfare, who are free to play in dreamlands with wild and fantastical thought experiments.
The poor know viscerally that they are getting exploited, and the owning class meticulously watch over their kingdom and know how it functions and how to keep it running with class violence. Those in the middle though have been insulated from either zero sum conflict and to them it’s all just a theoretical game. As they spend more time inside, more time socially alienated, more layers of abstraction added between social communication, information narratives become more fractured, eventually you have everyone living in bespoke isolated information bubbles with absolutely no correlation to reality
It goes the other way too. When Stalin, Mao, or whoever else fucked up it needs to be closely analyzed and not repeated cause it's gonna create a bunch of liberals when people get pissed off at you. Do your best not to make enemies it of your allies.
It's also funny because liberals usually don't have a concept of all that material framework. Nobody cares that Castro evicted the plantation owners dude, that pissed off like 5 percent of the population, and they were sent packing anyway. People in socialist countries often have grievances with their governments, but that doesn't mean they're liberals who want to return to the pre revolutionary status or something.