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.

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For anyone who missed it: last night there were riots in the city centre of Dublin following the stabbing of children outside of a school during the day. The far right assumed that the attacker was an immigrant and began burning buses, trams, police cars and destroying and looting shops. From what I could tell, it was loosely organised and was mostly oppurtunists and fascists looking for an opportunity to attack people. Supposedly the attacker was an immigrant, but had been made an Irish citizen 20 years ago. He was subdued by a Brazilian immigrant. Police were very slow to respond to the rioters, despite them always being organised and showing force whenever a left wing gathering is happening. Group chats were leaked (the veracity of them is unclear), with one particular group chat called "kill all immigrants", and a voice message sent by the owner of the group chat telling people to go out on the streets and kill any immigrants they see.
Supposedly no one was seriously injured during the riots. This shows the serious threat of the far right in Ireland which, while previously extremely small, has been growing rapidly over the past five years. The neoliberal parties in power, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have done nothing to oppose the growth of these fascists, and instead handed them a silver platter to base their anti-immigrant platform on, that being the housing crisis in Ireland. Fascists have grown more popular mainly due to their insistence that the housing shortage is because of immigrant invasions, white replacement etc, instead of pointing their fingers at the landlords and investors who hoard homes.
On a personal note, its been a kick in the backside for me to get back into organising. My mental health has been atrocious lately so I've been inactive in my org, but clearly no one has the luxury to take breaks anymore.
- Why has the far right been so small in Ireland until now? In other European countries it has been a major problem for decades. Is it a residual benefit from having a history of colonisation and national liberation struggle?
  The neoliberal parties in power, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have done nothing to oppose the growth of these fascists
  A story as old as time. You can't count on liberals to oppose fascism. At best you will get some feckless radlib identity politics that sucks the air out of the antifascist movement, at worst the liberals will appease the fascists or even adopt a "just as fascist as the fascists" line.
- thanks for the recap, I missed all of this

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