I fear I'm about to lose my country

The view from the trenches

I’d say it seems like some dirty tricks have been in play (the travel situation) but yeah, no violent ones. Yet. May it continue to be so. Thanks for the updates, and here’s hoping that the scale causes those in government to reconsider their positions in a beneficial way - not in the “better put a foot on the back of their necks pronto!” sort of way.

Back home safe and sound, I have the feeling we’ll have to do this many many times before it’s over.

People singing the national anthem in the march
https://imgur.com/gallery/baTYV2W

Glad it went off well and suspect that you’re right.

– did your mother go?

Yes, and one of my sisters too, Everything went well for them too fortunately.

Why did so many people vote him in?

In a nutshell, same reason a lot of USAian people are going to vote for trump. Maybe enough to put him in. They’ve been lied to and are angry.

This and because the economy really sucked, so a lot of people thought a change was needed, we told them that a change would not necessarily be for the better but they didn’t believe us.
Now the economy sucks way harder but many still hope it’s temporary, our only hope is that enough people realize that is not the case in time to do something about it.

I have often said that you should never run from anything. If things are bad, you should run to something different.

When you run from, any of 360 different directions is “from”. Most of which will be worse. Instead, identify what will (most likely) be better and run to it.

Decent advice for a personal life, and even better advice for a country since repairing damage is soo much harder and so many more innocents get harmed along the way.

When I read this yesterday I thought you’d said “CNN” not “C5N” hehehe, I understand your comment about learning spanish better now.
May be you saw me? I was the fat bald man with a Rohan T-shirt and a “Portico - Convención de Ciencia Ficcion” hat. :laughing:

Discussion of the “omnibus” bill, who got out of committee the day before yesterday*, but voting on it has been postponed to next Tuesday, probably because the administration still doesn’t have the votes for it.
I’d like to believe that yesterday’s demonstration helped with that.

*Apparently in such a dumbass and/or corrupt way that at least 2 different versions of the bill were “approved” , with representatives signing a white sheet of paper because it was not yet ready, a mockery of decent legislative process all in all.

Minister of infrastructure Guillermo Ferraro was intempestively fired yesterday by our stable genius president apparently for leaking that in a cabinet reunion that same stable genius threatened not to send a single peso to the provinces unless their representatives voted for his omnibus law and literally said “Los voy a fundir a todos!” (“I’m going to make all of them go broke!”).
Sounds familiar?.
This is the first time that a minister that took his post when a president is inaugurated lasts less than 4 scaramuccis. (others lasted even less but they assumed their posts later in a presidential term and usually in the middle of a crisis)

There is a Quino political cartoon showing an impressively dressed and high self-regard dignitary cutting the cord at an opening ceremony. An expectant crowd is gathered to watch. The cord loops around some machinery and is attached to a heavy weight, poised to drop on the dignitary once the cord has been cut. A brilliant cartoon, which words cannot do justice. Yet one may hope.

The “omnibus” bill is being treated in the chamber of representatives right now, it has been losing articles left and right for weeks now but it seems about to pass, the worst part of it : delegation of powers to the executive is still on.

it maaay be stopped in the Senate, but it doesn’t look good.

Police of several branches outside congress trying to supress a small demonstration by leftist groups, one of the cops has a gadsen flag patch in his uniform… :man_facepalming:

Session adjourned because apparently… they didn’t have the final text of the bill ready :man_facepalming: :man_facepalming: :man_facepalming: :man_facepalming: :man_facepalming:

We’ll see what happens today.

Update: they still haven’t passed the bill, the final text has apparently just appeared about an hour ago, not sure they’ll be able to do it today.
Meanwhile outside congress police is repressing demonstrators with a brutality not seen since, well, since Patricia Bullrich was minister of security about 4 years ago.

Dammit, none of your reports of the last 48 hours have pointed in any good direction.

In more news about under-reporting about this, I just saw a CNN piece about the ongoing problems:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/01/americas/milei-reforms-argentina-agriculture-workers-mate-intl/index.html

Which is about 80% a puff piece (not the issues involved, but pointing to a specific person rather than the systemic issues) and -still- leaning into the ‘for their own good’ style of pull-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps-while-a-kinder-gentler-approach-is-needed.

Pretty much NO talk about the police powers, demonstrations and efforts to put said demonstrations down.

It usually takes at the very least one death for worldwide media to notice something happening in the periphery, let’s hope they continue their non-reporting…
But the way things are going I’m not optimistic… not in the long run at least.