• @[email protected]
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    1037 months ago

    Javier Milei is:

    • Against abortion (except when mother’s life is in danger)

    • Against sex-ed and wants to eliminate it (says it deforms people’s minds)

    • Denies climate change (says it’s an invention of socialism)

    • Anti-vax (But got vaxxed in Nov 2021 because otherwise he would not be able to work in other countries)

    • Wants to fuse the departments of Social Development, Health and Education into a single department of Human Capital.

    • In favor of Austrian school of economics - Wants to remove the central bank

    • Adopt the US dollar

    • Homosexuality is a personal choice and compares it to zoophilia

    • In favor of drug legalization and to opening up immigration as long as it doesn’t cost the State.

    • In favor of people paying for sex

    • In favor of gun ownership without governmental limitations

    • Wants to freeze relationships with China, Russia, Brazil because they’re communists.

    • Wants to align with the US, particularly Trump’s party.

    • Against the Pope because he represents evil on Earth, and because it promotes communism which goes against the holy scriptures.

    • In favor of animal cloning

    • In favor of organ selling

    Good luck Argentina

      • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ
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        97 months ago

        No, that sounds like traditional conservatism. Conservatism has no redeeming qualities, but they can buy good PR easily.

    • @[email protected]
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      417 months ago

      Me: wow most of these not surprising but yeah they’re fucked.

      Against the pope because communism is against scriptures: fucking lol what.

    • HobbitFoot
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      187 months ago

      The anti-abortion one is the one I don’t get. After all, why shouldn’t a landlord be able to kick out a non-paying tenant?

      • hh93
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        117 months ago

        If you cut a libertarian a fascist bleeds

        • @[email protected]
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          37 months ago

          I’ve seen more than a few libertarians who are only libertarian because they’re also misanthropic. They’d love heavy government control, but they don’t trust anybody enough to have power over them, so they choose libertarian ideals. It’s a strange chain of logic, but I guess it’s logical.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            Misanthropy doesn’t make much sense as an argument, either for regulation or against it. You can say people suck so they shouldn’t be in charge of regulating anything, but you can just as easily say people need to be regulated because they suck.

    • Infiltrated_ad8271
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      87 months ago

      Adopt the US dollar
      In favor of drug legalization and to opening up immigration as long as it doesn’t cost the State.
      In favor of people paying for sex
      In favor of animal cloning

      Good here? The rest is an interesting mix of outrageous and/or bizarre stuff.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 months ago

      Excuse me does he think zoophilia is a personal choice?

      And yeah good luck Argentina. I’m sure you’ll have positive results from this

      • @[email protected]
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        57 months ago

        I don’t think they mean that as in “is up to the person but overall okay” but more so as in “is something that isn’t determined by anything other than conscious decision making”

        • @[email protected]
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          47 months ago

          His actual quote (translated to the best of my ability) is:

          Homosexuality is fine, who am I to tell someone who can they have sex with? If they have consent I don’t care if they want to have sex with an elephant. Good luck proving they had consent, but if they do I can’t object.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          Actually no, he does mean it in a sense such as: “the government shouldn’t interfere in people’s life projects. If you want to be with a man or a woman that’s your right. Heck even if you wanted to be with an elefant that’s fine with me as long as you have the elefant’s consent”

          Here’s the actual source: https://youtube.com/shorts/FZp6zbQ-goE

          Even the video caption misrepresents his words imho. You can turn on translated captions.

          As I said in another post, Milei is in the bottom right quadrant of the political compass. It’s a big mistake to directly compare him to neo conservatism.

      • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ
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        27 months ago

        Ancaps are for selling children (doesn’t matter the reason). Non-human animals are already commodities for sale, so zoophilia wouldn’t be an issue.

    • @[email protected]
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      67 months ago

      What is the rationale behind switching to the US dollar? I sort of get why US libertarians are opposed to fiat currency (they don’t want the Fed to have the power to interfere in markets), but Milei just wants to switch to a fiat currency that someone else controls? What makes him think that would end well for Argentina?

      • @[email protected]
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        207 months ago

        Argentina’s runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government’s out of control spending). The rationale for dollarization is to remove the ability for the government to do this. It’s not an inherently crazy idea, since (i) there are smaller Latin American countries that use the dollar, and (ii) the dollar is already used de facto for many purposes in Argentina because of how debased the peso has been. But there are lots of practical problems; notably, Argentina simply does not own enough dollars in the entire country to keep the economy running normally if they switch (whatever “normally” means for an economy like theirs).

        • @[email protected]
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          77 months ago

          Argentina’s runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government’s out of control spending)

          Macroeconomists don’t really agree that that issuing money in and of itself causes inflation, but it certainly can lead to it in some cases. Instead, if you issue money you need to spend it on something that increases the productivity of your economy, otherwise it can lead to waste and inflation down the line. You can actually use money issuing to fight inflation if you spend the money you issued on addressing the problem at hand - for example, the supply side problems we faced following the pandemic that caused the inflation we’re at the tail end of right now.

          By adopting the US dollar, Argentina would effectively give up monetary autonomy to the US central bank (so, just another central bank outside of their control). In fact, the US central bank could decide to issue money in a positive way as mentioned above, without any of that having a similarly positive impact on the countries that depend on the US dollar.

          Money & Macro (PhD Joeri Schasfoort) has made multiple videos on the topic, but here are two (the first one short, the second one a deep dive) if you want to hear this side of the story told in greater depth:

          1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prF1aUeTzzM
          2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEZsgAgYDhw
          • @[email protected]
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            37 months ago

            You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.

            Governments often issue debt to fund various kinds of spending. And despite concerns about debt levels, they can have a pretty fuzzy relationship with inflation; Japan has public debt of over 200% of GDP, and an underinflation problem.

            But issuing money for the purposes of government spending – the monetization of fiscal policy – is almost always a bad idea, outside of wartime. The practice is behind every single episode of hyperinflation in economic history. And governments know this. Fiscal monetization is only resorted to by countries that have exhausted their ability to borrow; if cutting spending isn’t politically feasible, the remaining resort is monetization. That’s basically how you get to Argentina’s situation.

            As for giving up monetary autonomy, it is indeed a serious drawback to dollarization. But this is a second order problem compared to the kinds of problems facing Argentina, like findng a guy bleeding out after a road accident, and worrying about his obesity.

            • @[email protected]
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              27 months ago

              You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.

              Nope. Let me quote Joeri from his second video (19 minutes in):

              Let’s tackle the one that the internet loves the most first: money printing. To view money printing as the source of all price inflation actually has a very long tradition in economics. The most prominent economist to support this idea was Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman (11:49) who said that. […]

              Crucially, Friedman inspired economists often assume that velocity and production are roughly constant. Remember that clip from Peter Schiff arguing that stimulus checks for people at home would be inflationary? Crucially, he made the implicit assumption there that this didn’t prevent a further collapse of production.

              “Everything is getting more expensive. And if people think that is transitory, it is because they don’t understand the problem. In fact, they don’t even understand inflation or where it comes from because inflation is about money. You are inflating the money supply. That’s what’s being expanded and none of this is transitory because these deficits aren’t transitory. The money printing isn’t transitory. It’s here to stay. — and that means prices are going to continue to go up because we continue to destroy the value of the dollar as we expand the supply”

              Sounds pretty convincing right? However, the monetary theory of inflation has almost completely disappeared from universities. Why? Well, because the data doesn’t support this simple explanation in most economies. For example, check out this graph of the CPI for Europe and compare it to the graph of central bank printed M1 money supply… You can clearly see that the money supply has accelerated while price growth has slowed. To a less extend this disconnect also exists for the USA. But, if you really want to see this simple theory fail, you only need to look at Japan. Even if we take into account the more expansive M3 money supply measure, which include money created by private banks, and compare it to the CPI. You can clearly see that while M3 kept going up, the CPI had its ups and downs. What can explain this disconnect?

              • @[email protected]
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                37 months ago

                Pointing to Japanese money supply versus inflation is irrelevant because Japan doesn’t fund its fiscal deficit via monetization. It issues debt, just like every other non-basket case economy on Earth.

                The distinction is important. Debt is tied to a promise to repay later. Monetization has no such promise, so it’s functionally equivalent to issuing debt and then immediately defaulting. So long as lenders believe debt will be repaid, the effects are different from monetization.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          Which other countries use it in Latin America? There are places which have used it relatively successfully, and de facto usage at least gives people more confidence.

      • @[email protected]
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        97 months ago

        It’s because every time the argentinian government needs to pay something, and don’t have the cash to do that, they print some billions and pay it. By literally printing monopoly money in huge quantity, they’re devaluing their currency every time they print a batch.

        The rationale is that if they’re using the us dollar, the inflation will stop because it’s controlled externally

        But by using the us dollar, every time the argentinian government needs to pay something and doesn’t have the cash to do that, need to borrow some heavy debt (at insane interest rate given their history where they didn’t repay previous debts)

        And would need an huge quantity of them in a short time to exchange and dispose the pesos from people and banks

        If it was as easy as “just don’t print monopoly money” they would have solved it.

        Maybe it would be easier to just stop printing money than officially switching to a different currency

      • @[email protected]
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        67 months ago

        Politicians here don’t hesitate on printing money to pay for things. Always have, and probably always will. He wants to take that possibility from their hands.

      • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ
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        57 months ago

        that’s not really politics, it’s about his personal council of cloned dogs. Argentinians do not realize how fucked they are going to get.

      • Deconceptualist
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        7 months ago

        Nothing inherently. Nature even does it sometimes, although it’s rare with larger complex organisms.

        The problems with cloning arise when it happens in bulk. Instead of a single creature with a genetic abnormality or vulnerability to disease, you now have a whole population with those weaknesses. Look up monocultures or monocropping to read some horror stories. True cloning of e.g. livestock could take those issues to the extreme.

    • @[email protected]
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      37 months ago

      Wow that’s quite the spread of ideas!

      Some of those I’m on board for.

      Others make me wonder what stone he slimed out from under.

      Doesn’t matter. It’s all words until he’s I power and does / doesn’t do anything.

  • PugJesus
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    607 months ago

    I see Argentina decided they weren’t fucked enough.

  • @[email protected]
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    427 months ago

    Desperate people make poor but desperate choices. 150% inflation? Goddamn, people here are freaking out about 5%…

    There was a thread a couple days ago about how do you see the world ending. It’s stuff like this, situation will het worse and worse so people will turn to crazier and crazier solutions.

    We’re all in for an interesting next few decades.

  • @[email protected]
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    337 months ago

    I predict that Argentinians are going to like this even less in the long run than the stuff the Peronists have gotten up to

    • @[email protected]
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      97 months ago

      I can get the annoyance with how the economy has been… but jeez, what is the real solution here? I can’t see much of anything positive coming out of this.

      • Pxtl
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        167 months ago

        Elect normal-ass people instead of batcrap loonies like milei or the peronists.

        • @[email protected]
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          77 months ago

          What options are in Argentina currently? I have almost zero knowledge of the political system there.

          • @[email protected]
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            7 months ago

            Juan Schiaretti was the most normal dude of the runner ups, but besides him being like 70, nobody knew who he even was in the Political Spectrum, just this elections have made him visible enough that he got a good amount of votes and good reputation

            The others? Peronists (All the Blue colored Parties)

            A Lizardman known as “Larreta” who’s an Authoritarian and one of the most incompetent sons of bitches that has ever governed Buenos Aires and the other of his same Party “Patricia Bullrich” A LITERAL TERRORIST on the 70s and previously Security Minister, didnt do a great job, both of them in the Yellow Party

            Lastly there was Milei… so yeah

            • @[email protected]
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              37 months ago

              Let’s all agree that, even Schiaretti being the most presidential candidate, none except for Milei has a political platform, or a plan. Larreta literally said “I’ll comment on that once I’m president”. And Bullrich made a poor joke of herself in the debates.

              So yeah… Milei was the unlikely best candidate.

            • unhappy_grapefruit 2
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              7 months ago

              Prehaps something good and unexpected might come out of milei’s election even though he seems like an completely and utterly crackpot in my somewhat biased opinion having only read a few articles before hand then again he might end up “drowning” in his glow-in-the-dark swimming pool. You can’t predict the future. Plus it can always be worse. Milei might have some great plan’s in the work.he could be a good competent leader

      • @[email protected]
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        -17 months ago

        I think the only silver lining will (hopefully) be a whiplash reaction once the authoritarian populists fuck things up enough.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 months ago

          It’s been a slow one in the UK, at least the US had a four-year load of nonsense to deal with before finding reality again.

          • @[email protected]
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            For real - our electoral systems are utterly fucked, but sometimes yours makes ours look like a damn tea party

    • @[email protected]
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      67 months ago

      I assume that, just like with trump, they won’t admit that they were bamboozled and will just double down with the crazy.

  • @[email protected]
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    337 months ago

    Can someone explain me this? In Argentina, the majority of the workers are employed by government (crazy rate of employment by a government, I don’t think they actually need all those people), but then the majority of the voters elect someone that plans to cut spending a lot, meaning most of those workers that voted him will be laid off.

    • @[email protected]
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      167 months ago

      Make Argentina Great Again.

      Sad to see people fall for the same bullshit over and over.

    • @[email protected]
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      97 months ago

      Can we theorize a situation where an average Argentinian voter consciously chooses a short term crisis with the prospect of normalization over a lifetime stagnation and decay? Argentina’s economy was shit for a long time, and maybe people’s intent is to wreck things for a change?

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          I know they’re out there, but there can’t be a significant enough bloc of them to swing things. I’ve never encountered one outside of the internet, and even on the internet they mostly seem to be acting facetiously.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            I know tons of them IRL. They just said things like this country is already shit? What’s the worse thing that happens, Trump burns everything down? That’s what we need to happen anyway to move forward.

            I have heard that sentiment a lot.

      • @[email protected]
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        07 months ago

        Do you have any evidence that a significant number of voters have ever voted for short-term harm to enable some hypothetical future benefit?

        • @[email protected]
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          27 months ago

          2015 elections. Actually, 2015 elections are a better example than this. Argentina wasn’t half as bad as now. And people in the most important place (Conurban region) view for the change, because there was a solution that was not peronism. Unfortunately, Macri let everyone down with his gradualism strategy, instead of a shock strategy. That’s why the peronism came back.

          I’m simplifying a lot of stuff, there are other reasons for everything. Like Cristina’s legal issues, the kirchnerist party corruption, and the sort. In the same vein, Macri’s lack of boldness in some cases created a crisis of its own.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 months ago

      You really think the average and below person is going to be able go make that connection?

  • Pxtl
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    217 months ago

    Ugh. The way that generally centre-right economic policy wonks are celebrating Milei’s election is grotesque.

    I get that dollarization would probably be good for Argentina.

    Even as a leftist, I’m open to the possibility that an anti-Peronist economic policy could save the country - I doubt they could survive another Peronist.

    But Milei is the worst kind of MAGA wingnut. He’s a talk-radio shock jock. It’s like if they elected Tucker Carlson or Don Cherry into the casa rosada.

    His one possibly-good policy idea doesn’t overshadow that.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    It’ll be a miracle if in the next year alone he doesn’t completely obliterate what’s left of Argentina’s economy.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    Look I understand, I really do.

    When I was a kid, I was told to beware of clothes irons because they are hot.

    But one day, curiosity got the better of me, and I touched the damn thing to see if it was hot. Hurt like hell, still have the scar to this day. But I don’t touch hot surfaces anymore.

    Go on Argentina, touch the iron :)

  • @[email protected]
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    47 months ago

    Time to bankrupt a country to pay off venture capital debts!

    Worked out great for the last guy to acquiesce to American interests…

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    37 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Official results showed Milei with near 56% versus 44% for his rival, Peronist Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who conceded in a speech.

    His plans include shutting the central bank, ditching the peso, and slashing spending, potentially painful reforms that resonated with voters angry at the economic malaise.

    “Milei is the new thing, he’s a bit of an unknown and it is a little scary, but it’s time to turn over a new page,” said 31-year-old restaurant worker Cristian as he voted on Sunday.

    He will have to deal with the empty coffers of the government and central bank, a creaking $44 billion debt program with the International Monetary Fund, inflation nearing 150% and a dizzying array of capital controls.

    “The election marks a profound rupture in the system of political representation in Argentina,” said Julio Burdman, director of the consultancy Observatorio Electoral, ahead of the vote.

    Supporters of Massa, 51, an experienced political wheeler-dealer, had sought to appeal to voter fears about Milei’s volatile character and “chainsaw” plan to cut back the size of the state.


    The original article contains 629 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    37 months ago

    Maybe this time it will be different. (Inset some weird emoji that denotes is won’t with a mix of sadness, regret, and ennui)