Moving to the right thread.
W.R. ‘Dixie’ Dean was a famous British football player in the 1930s. Such was his fame, that anybody called Dean or Deans inevitably got nicknamed Dixie.
Our cultures are more similar than either of us would like to accept.
As a non Argentinian, Solari would be equal to how many Fito Paez? What is an English equivalent? Not being disrespectful, but I don’t know Solari and am trying to gauge.
I’d move to BsAs just for the steak, but Thiel probably has other motives.
They are not in the same tier, when Fito dies there will be sadness, if the family agrees his wake will probably be in some significant place (in his native Rosario, probably) and many will assist, but nothing remotely like this.
Well, the theory was that there isn’t an equivalent and thus explaining the phenomena to non Argentinians is impossible.
I guess it would kinda be comparable to all the Beatles dying on the same day?, except that the Beatles were a global phenomenon, while Solari and his band, probably because they refused to sign contracts with any major record labels, are virtually unknown outside Argentina and neighboring areas.
You’d probably do better moving to Greater Buenos Aires, the steak is the same but the living is better!
As for Thiel… I dearly hope this “investment” blows in his face and plan to make what little I can to make it so.
What about Carlos Gardel? I can appreciate what he meant and means to Argentinos.
Probably a bit less than Gardel, though who knows?
If in 100 years people say of “El Indio” that “He sings better everyday”, and when someone scores a goal in the last minute to win a Superclasico people tells him/her “You are El Indio!” instead of “Sos Gardel!” then it would be same level.
Remember this?.
NOPE! They tried to pass it starting in July and finally gave up today, after the usual mass demonstration against the law was met with the usual repression.
The most delicious part, for me, is that one of the sessions when they tried to to do it was on July 15, but that day Argentina beat England 2-1 in the World Cup and this happened:
(More info on the significance of that here: The Malvinas/Falklands in Argentine culture and politics)
Apparently Milei and co “read the room” and decided that the winds were not favorable to such a law in such a day..
But things only snowballed from there, I’m not sure how much weight to give to the rumors but apparently that flag and the patriotic sentiment it represented started a series of demonstrations and pronunciations by artists and celebrities against the law, that, ending with the march yesterday (under a heavy rain to boot), put paid to any hope of the law passing.
They still passed some disgusting measures of course, making it easier for landlords to expel tenants if they get late on payments for 3 days (three!) and making harder for the government to expropriate lands or businesses (so any privatization of vital infrastructure they plan to do is harder to reverse once they get out of power).
But at least the part about selling lands and the part about making it easier to sell lands affected by forest fires (fires usually provoked to make it possible for the lands to be sold) were stopped.
Three cheers for signs of hope!
— did they manage to get the other things through in part because people were focused on the biggest problem? It does certainly look like it was the biggest, though.
It’s frankly somewhat of a miracle (A Diego miracle?) that they had to give up the more loathsome parts of the law, popular rejection was enough to stop them on those but not on the others, IMHO more of a question of balance of power than of distraction.
I spoke too soon!, the administration has abandoned the law completely now (it still needed to pass the House) and so none of the disgusting shit in it will take effect.
Congratulations to the fine people of Argentina. Hopefully the past, current and future protests will continue to stave off the worse of the administration’s efforts and the failures reduce the outside interference to manageable levels.
I feel like things are in the knife edge right now, the government is bleeding popularity, specially it seems among the disenchanted young people who supported it initially looking for “change”.
Their main succes, keeping inflation low for Argentine standards, is eroding, with the latest monthly numbers around 2.9% (they had promised that about now we were to have “inflation starting with 0” (as in 0.x%)).
They still have the stable dollar though.
Apart from that things look pretty dismal, economic contraction in the manufactory areas continues, consumption of goods and services continues to go down and the number of people who can’t pay their debts is reaching record levels (Apparently many were covering their lack of income with debt and now it’s getting unsustainable).
The administration’s answer to the last problem is telling, “Nobody put a gun to their heads and forced them to contract debt” says Javier Milei, AKA Mr Human Empathy.
But hey! extractive industries are booming, the dream of Argentina as mining/oil/meat/soy colony of the first world has never been closer.
It would be great if Argentines actually saw a cent of all that export money…
We’ll see if things start to go south for the government now, I would say yes but I thought that it was starting to happen several times now only to be dissapointed.