Yeah, it's often repeated here that we used to be a "leading power" in the late 19th century and early 20th century, even though nobody paid attention to us and all we could manage was an arms race with Brasil and Chile that basically destroyed our economies lmao
I'm done with my exams and now I'm playing Gran Turismo 4 on the emulator using my Logitech G29 wheel. It isn't the most realistic game or experience, but the game looks stunning for being a PS2 game, the amount of content is absurd and frankly, they don't make games like this one anymore. It's just gone, nothing beats GT4.
Under Communism, the Political Commissar comes into your common housing unit and takes all your jewelry which will be given to the State, then sold to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and with that money buy new tanks to kill people when they protest. Under the Anarcho-Capitalist Wonderland, you have to sell your jewelry, which you might have a strong sentimental attachment to, in order to survive because The Market (TM) demands you to. Problem is, one is a complete lie and the other is very real. Can you guess which one is which?
SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S JEWELRY, COMMIE 
Argentines pawn the family jewels to make ends meet
*Hundreds of Argentines are selling their jewellery at gold dealerships every day as a last resort to face the economic crisis. *
In Argentina's strangled economy, one sector is thriving: the pawn shops buying up gold and other family treasures that many are forced to sell to pay their bills. "When you are drowning in debt, sentimentality falls to the side," said Mariana, 63, who went to a hub of gold dealerships in Buenos Aires to sell a watch her grandfather gave her father as a graduation present.
Reminder that indebtedness is one of the key components of capitalism. Everyone has and should have a debt, this is how the economy functions.
Inflation of around 270 percent year-on-year has gnawed away at her pension as a court employee, and she will use the cash for housing expenses and overdue health insurance payments. With an austerity-hit economy in recession, as President Javier Milei carries out his vow to slash decades of government overspending, Mariana – who asked not to give her last name – is far from alone.
While a neighbouring shoe store hasn't had a single customer in hours, hundreds line up daily at El Tasador, one of the main cash-for-jewellery pawn stores in the heart of Buenos Aires, where "we buy gold" signs abound. "There have been a lot of people lately, I think because of what is happening in the country," said Natalia, one of the four appraisers at the store, who did not give her surname for what she called “security reasons.”
She said the surge in clients came from "people who perhaps had pieces that they did not plan to sell and decided to do so because they cannot make ends meet."
Natalia said the business had been swamped with over 300 daily transactions – triple the amount seen a year ago. "We have increased staffing and working hours because we cannot cope."
Victorian jewels and cufflinks
Daniel, a 56-year-old unemployed accountant, enters several stores to have a silver keychain appraised but leaves dejected. He was barely offered the price of a few Subte subway rides. "The situation is difficult. Life in Argentina is very expensive," he sighs.
Carlos, who manages a small jewellery store, said he has a constant flow of customers but no-one is there to buy. "They bring in anything to be appraised, especially at the end of the month, when the bills arrive." The most usual thing is the sale of small gold pieces.
Natalia, a gemologist, said her store, next to the busy Once railway terminal, is frequented by customers from all walks of life.
While half of Argentina's population now lives in poverty, it was once one of the world's richest countries between the 19th and early 20th centuries, and many people have something valuable to pawn. "The classic thing is the wedding ring, but they also bring Victorian jewels, from the 'belle époque' that come from grandparents and great-grandparents, unique pieces," said Natalia.
Even a few decades ago it was common for men to have gold cufflinks, or for women to be gifted a gold watch when they turned 15, she added. "Gold has always been sold. What has changed is why it is sold," said Natalia.
But the use of these pieces has long ceased for security reasons. This, added to the economic constraints, reinforces the desire to sell. "Before it was to remodel a house, buy a car, throw a party. Today it is because, 'I can't make ends meet', 'my utilities have increased' or 'I'm out of work.'"
Thorough destruction of the Capitalist regime! Death to those who stand in the way of working people!
nazis are not known for their intelligence though!
Everyone goes around saying "oh China is doing this but at what cost?" or "China achieved that but at what cost?" But nobody says "Yeah, Capitalism developed the productive forces like no other but at what cost?"
Argentina protesters facing charges include family selling sausages, man leaving subway
Dozens of people were arrested on Wednesday as they protested President Javier Milei’s Bases Law outside Congress
At least 33 people arrested during protests against the Bases Law on Wednesday have been accused of crimes including attacks on Argentina’s constitutional order. Argentina’s presidential press team has called the protesters “terrorist groups” who attempted to “perpetrate a coup d’etat” — allegations prosecutor Carlos Stornelli quoted in his charge sheet. But relatives of the detained say some were arrested while leaving peacefully, while others had only attended to sell food.
Their situations raise questions about the proportionality of charges, the criminalization of protest in Argentina, and whether those arrested played any role in the violence.
The Bases Law, previously known as the omnibus bill, is President Javier Milei’s broad-reaching flagship reform package. It strips away many economic and labor regulations, permits the privatization of numerous Argentine state companies, and courts investment from large multinationals. It was passed by the Senate late on Wednesday night, although the final version depends on whether deputies approve modifications introduced by the upper house.
Social movements, community assemblies, trade unions, rights organizations, and outraged citizens protested in Congress Square as senators debated the bill. Demonstrators threw stones and sticks and burned garbage dumpsters. A massive police operation responded with tear gas, water cannon, and rubber bullets. Hundreds of people were injured and five opposition deputies were hospitalized after being tear gassed. At least one car was flipped onto its roof and incinerated.
Article sucks on this part. The protest was mostly peaceful and by like 17:00hs people and their orgs began to leave, that's when the police advanced over the remaining protesters. Once again, the bellicose actions of the police plus WELL IDENTIFIED undercover cops began the "riot".
"He wasn’t doing anything but they took him"
Matías Leonel Ramirez was selling sausage sandwiches from a grill. He had driven to the protest. When the police advanced, he stayed with his car to protect it. “He couldn’t leave because he couldn’t get the car out,” said Yesica Maciel, Ramirez’s wife. “A squadron of federal police came by and took him for no reason. He never threw any stones, he’s not with a political organization, he has no criminal record.”
Since his arrest, Ramírez has been transferred to a prison. Maciel and Ramírez, who live in the suburb of San Fernando, have a 17-year-old daughter and are also raising Ramírez’s niece. “He didn’t run, he didn’t resist when they grabbed him, because he thought that since he wasn’t doing anything, they weren’t going to take him. But they took him anyway,” Maciel said.
“All my husband wanted was a couple of pesos so we could eat, because we have a family and our money isn’t enough to live from day to day.”
Musician Santiago Adano, 38, went to the protest with his local community assembly. They left the protest when the situation started heating up. “They have that logic of looking after themselves, because there are retired people in the assembly, so logically, they left,” said his sister, Lucila Adano. “I was chatting with him, and suddenly he stopped replying. Then friends started sending me videos, and it was him.”
He was arrested leaving the subway station, as his friend returned to the square to check on his car. Video footage of Adano’s arrest shows at least 16 officers carrying him away. “They dragged him for like a block,” Lucila said. “They were squeezing his neck, he was completely red and saying he was suffocating, and would they please let him go?”
“The last thing I saw was him fainting.”
Other detainees include three generations of the Ocampo family — father, daughter, and granddaughter. Like Ramírez, they were selling food at the protest. The detainees have been in custody since Wednesday night. Prosecutor Carlos Stornelli has asked Judge María Servini to order all of the detainees be placed in pre-trial detention. Her decision was pending at the time of writing.
Stornelli has charged the detainees with fifteen different crimes including inciting collective violence against institutions by instilling public fear, arson, possession of explosives, and attacking the constitutional order to disturb the free exercise of the Senate. The last charge is punishable by up to 25 years in jail. The Security Ministry said it would file a legal complaint over “damages it suffered to its equipment” and said that more arrests are to come. Vice President Victoria Villarruel said the Senate would also file a legal complaint against “the criminals that yesterday attacked the democratic institutions.”
“We are going to make them pay for all the material damages directed towards the historic buildings and sidewalks of the National Congress,” Villarruel said in a post on X. “ The Argentina of sedition and anarchy is over.”
Manipulating concepts adulterates facts
Human rights groups have called the move a criminalization of protest. “The arrests were made at random. The government posted that there was terrorism and coup d’état, the prosecutor made accusations, and 35 people are being used to generate fear to go to a march,” the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) posted on X. “The goal is political: to instill fear in anyone who mobilizes against the government,” they added. CELS called on Servini to release the detainees.
Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina, wrote in an Instagram post that the violence during the protests aimed to “cause damage and disturbance” — but rejected the state’s classification of the events as an attempted coup. “A coup d’etat has the aim of overthrowing a government and its institutions. Manipulating the definition of concepts is a way of adulterating the facts,” Belski wrote. “At such dramatic moments for society, this attitude only adds confusion and impoverishes public debate.”
Some of the comrades have been released already, but others still remain "in custody" as of this moment. Local orgs and trots have mobilized and demanded the release of all hostages. For some, the memories of the 1976/1983 dictatorship, which used to "suck" targeted people off the streets and their homes to disappear them, came rushing back, which is why a quite seizable movement was instantly organised to demand the immediate release of all hostages.
milei and his adminsitration have doubled down not only on rethorics (calling protesters terrorists) but also on the level of violence. And no government can sustain itself in power by cracking skulls open with batons.
They might have scored a win in the Senate, the tiebreaker fell to the Vice President who of course voted yes. Even after all the bribes, all they could manage was a tie. However, despite their victories, internal contradictions are becoming stronger and stronger.
Vote for these meme candidates that dress like garbage bins or whatever
let them pee their pants, let them shit their pants. never give a single inch to any pig, ever. they had fun bashing people's heads with batons? now you pee your pants and will smell bad all the way back home, pig.
The end is near, KKKavier: 
Omnibus bill: Argentine police crack down on protesters outside Congress
The demonstrators were protesting for a second night against President Javier Milei's reform package, which proposes massive privatizations and delegating legislative powers to the president
Argentina’s security forces cracked down hard on demonstrators outside Congress protesting President Javier Milei’s reform package known as the omnibus bill on Thursday evening. Police used water cannon, rubber bullets, and tear gas to clear the protesters, hitting demonstrators, journalists, and deputies. Members of the Military Police, Naval Prefecture, Federal Police, and City Police participated in the operation.
Photojournalist Nicolás Ramos, from the Anred news outlet, showed TV channel C5N a wound on his calf where he had been hit with a rubber bullet. Over 25 journalists were injured in the crackdown, according to journalists’ union SiPreBA.
Martín Vega, a 50-year-old photojournalist working for Crisis magazine, was hit by two rubber bullets — one in his finger and the other in the leg. “Everything was calm,” he said. “Nobody was trying to block the road, or insulting anyone, or anything.” He said that the situation at the protest did not seem particularly tense when Federal Police officers started to shoot people, both in the square in front of Congress and on the sidewalks. “It’s like, at a given moment, they made the decision to shoot.”
He saw some children among the protestors, he added.
The crackdown started when a large group of people left, Vega said. “[The Federal Police] started to do a dance with their motorbikes, then they started to shoot anyone on sight — they shot a lot of people, one in the head.” Vega hid behind a trash container, trying to take photographs, and then he felt the bullets in his leg and finger. He thinks they ricocheted off the floor.
The advance of the security forces, including the use of fire trucks, took place in two stages in the late afternoon.
Inside Congress, Romina del Pla, a deputy from the left-wing party Frente de Izquierda called for the session to be suspended because of the violence outside. The head of the Unión por la Patria bloc, Germán Martínez, endorsed the proposal and also asked for a recess, but the motion was rejected.
Thursday’s events marked the second night of protests outside Congress, as demonstrators demanded that lawmakers reject the omnibus bill, which proposes giving Milei some legislative powers, declaring a state of emergency in some issues, the mass privatization of Argentina’s state companies, and wholesale economic deregulation.
At least six people were arrested during Wednesday’s protests. Four women were released on Thursday morning after spending the night in a police station. Ivana Bunge, a Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) activist whose arrest was shown on TV, said as she was escorted to a police SUV that she and her friends “were just sitting on the street, singing the National Anthem.”
Photographs taken at the scene showed that security forces were using a U.S.-made combination of OC gas (pepper spray) and CS gas (tear gas) to disperse the crowd. Franco Capone, a doctor and activist with the Socialist Workers’ Party who assisted over 150 people who were sprayed with it, said that the gas is new in Argentina. “It generates an acute pain when in contact with the skin,” Capone said in a post on X. “Press freedom is a fundamental pillar of democracy, which must be defended, guaranteed and respected by all powers of the state and by all political and economic sectors that make up our society,” SiPreBA wrote in a statement condemning the repression.
The police crackdown is taking place after Security Minister Patricia Bullrich launched a new anti-protest protocol that bans protesters from blocking roads, among other provisions. Three United Nations special rapporteurs warned last week that the protocol does not comply with international human rights standards.
Photographs of a Federal Police officer with a Gandsen rattlesnake sewn to his uniform, a symbol of the U.S. far right adopted by Milei followers, were circulated on social media on Wednesday.
That day, people also shared pictures showing officers of the Naval Prefecture throwing tear gas at a group of protestors, including left-wing deputy Alejandro Vilca. The leader of the Polo Obrero social organization, Eduardo Belliboni, said to media outlets in the streets that the police hit him when he was protesting peacefully by sitting down in the street.
IN DEVELOPMENT.
There are rumours, still very early and unconfirmed, of very important cracks within milei's government (which is already cracked tbh). There has been a massive flight of personnel working on Sandra Pettovello's Ministry of Human Capital (I will forever hate this name) after she refused to distribute food to soup kitchens when +50% of the population fell under the poverty line in recent months, while she is also under heavy fire from critics and cornered by social movements. On the other hand, foreign minister Diana Mondino (the one who made racist remarks about the chinese not long ago) appears to be on the list of either purges or resignations. Meanwhile, milei's Martin Bormann, his wif- sorry, sister, is accumulating more and more power within his cabinet. Let me remind everyone that milei's sister has ZERO and I mean ZERO, NOTHING, NADA, IT'S COMPLETELY DEVOID of any political knowledge or background, she's into tarot and is said to be a medium -- able to communicate with the dead. She's as if you take a random dude from the streets and make him Head of the State Department or something.
I am convinced that, if his law is not approved by the Senate, and things continue to deteriorate on the streets and the economic front, we might be at the gates of at least a soft coup carried out by capital.
milei posting more AI generated images and general cringe. Here he says that there have been "great news" from e*rope thanks to the victories of the far right parties in the latest elections. He also claims responsibility for their victory, saying his Davos speech (where he spoke about Communism, the imminent fall of western civilization and LGBT bad) inspired millions to "open their eyes" and vote for fascists and neonazis. . Wait a second, I thought libertarians were supposed to hate fascism and nationalism?!?!? 
.
Anyway, that doesn't surprise me at all. What I love is the AI rendered image. It's him holding europe? But it's fucked up. Ukraine is shredded, Finland shredded, northern Russia grew a mutation of some sort and huge chunks of it and Belarus as completely missing, even though neither of those countries are in the EU. For some reason parts of Turkey and Syria are shown. He's holding the UK, please I beg him to crush it. Unfortunately Ireland was indeed crushed. Iceland is missing, RIP. Also why does he have medals? What is the instrument that is hand is holding that's literally puncturing Spain? Some sort of compass?
I cringe a lot when I see AI generated images but I can't stop looking at them. The more you look, the worse it is. Like the presidential band and part of his body are cut when you look at it near Sicily, it's just gone. The stars of the EU flag are not aligned. His index finger of his left hand is fucked up, is that a cigarette?
A double amputee soldier with Terminator prosthetics in a missile silo in the mountains holding a giant computer chip next to a placard that says "TODAY IS MS BIRTHDAY NO OONE LOVE LOVE BECAUSE I AM POOR": https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=447585464873419&set=a.318863487745618
New fear unlocked: whatever the fuck is happening in his left leg.
A new trailer for STALKER 2 came out which includes bits of scripted cutscenes and gameplay. In one of the scenes, a black character appears for a moment. He seems to be a trader of some sort but that is just my guess. He will be the first black stalker featured in any of the four games. I don't have to tell you about the reaction of certain elements of the community, right? Stalker has gone woke, they're pushing an agenda, etc etc. One character in the whole franchise already broke them lmao, because apparently black people can't exist in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and it's fictional universe.
Wait till they see a woman in the Zone (none of the Stalker games feature one, althrough one is mentioned in campfire stories which make up a chunk of the lore). Actually, THE most popular STALKER mod out there (Anomaly) adds a female stalker known as "Hip" that has a questline and you can later recruit as a follower. This completely drives some people in the community mad, who go as far as creating mods to remove her from the game, turn her into a hyper sexualized object or go straight to where she is to kill her, because fragile masculinity.
I shouldn't have the power to decide who's normal and who's not, but holy shit these people are fucked up big time.
BIG NEWS: Europe sucks massive amounts of ass and they've done nothing good for humanity save for some cool individuals like my main man Karl Marx and some others. It's a good-for-nothing glorified peninsula that without exploitation of the third world it wouldn't even exist.
Contradictions, comrade! When they appear to be winning everywhere, in fact, they're not! They are creating the means of their own destruction!
drinking mate and eating pizza at almost 4 am while i read about medieval villages in Extremadura, Spain, and how they created relationships with the Kings and Lords, reproducing feudalism without being strictly feudal themselves.
also whoever named the Visigoths... the Visigoths nailed it, that name slaps.
Communist Party USA? More like Cock and Penis Party USA
Me thinks mainstream "Communist" parties are all intelligence agents spying on each other without knowing they're all part of the same agency.
My entire economy these days revolves around finding bills that someone lost in the streets
I am a cracker and I can't leave the enemies of my nation alone even for a minute.