#41
Getfiscal'd again
#42
As I write this, I am very sad. Our President has been overthrown and replaced, by the benevolent General Krull! All hail Krull, and his glorious regime! Sincerely, Little Girl
#43
*krul
#44
#45
Remember the Kermalist take during the failed putsch against Erdoğan that, "actually,” military interventions in the political process were themselves part of Turkey's constitutional tradition? That seems refreshingly honest at the moment.
#46
The people quibbling, or pretending to quibble, over the nature of what is happening in Bolivia are pushing a cartoon fantasy of military coups as matters of naked assertions of raw power, as opposed to affairs that are often accompanied by legitimizing street theatre and constitutional wrangling.
#47






screaming about the army needing to slaughter the "hordes" and declaring the bible has returned to the palace is how to be a real #girlboss
#48


#49



"I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites, the city is not for the Indians who should stay in the highlands or the Chaco".

fascism commences now in Bolivia
#50
nice


#51
congratulations to Bolivia for the creepy lady saying she’s president now and five people clapping
#52
https://rhizome.pw/what-happened-in-bolivia/ good article w concise rundown

So what happened during the election? To answer this question, we must first know how the vote count system in Bolivia works. In Bolivia, there are 2 separate counts: the quick count (TREP) and the legally binding count. The quick count is only meant to be a preliminary count and would only cover the first 80% of the votes, this was agreed to 11 days before the election. After the release of the preliminary count, "the EPO has up to five days to complete the calculation" and to release the subsequent legally binding count.

On October 20th, as planned, the TREP is released at around 80% and then halts so that the real count can take place. At this point, Morales is leading but without the 10% margin he needed to defeat Mesa. The media misinterprets this due to their failure to understand the difference between the TREP and the real count, and consider this a halt done to tamper with the remaining votes. Due to media pressure, the TREP resumed the next day and at 93% it shows that Morales now has enough votes to avoid a runoff election. Mesa begins calling foul and saying that the halting was done to tamper with the votes despite it being agreed to 11 days prior to the election, and rioting begins. The legally binding count was then released, showing that Morales has 11% more votes than Mesa, and everything went to hell. Rioting continued over the next weeks, and Morales called in the OAS to perform an audit. The OAS audit came back declaring that it could not verify that result of the election, and recommends Morales to call for a reelection. This he did, though some hours later, military commanders turned against him and called for him to step down. As a result, Morales resigned and disappeared as his home and his sister's became a target for ransacking by the opposition.

#53
The governing doctrine for these coups is "democratic backsliding", which is a thing that says all democratic institutions can be working fine and the government can reflect the will of the majority, but if it starts doing things that piss off big property owners or the U.S. bourgeoisie or, really, if it does anything at all other than the will of the opposition party that lost the election, then it's secretly non-democratic and the military can kill everyone with U.S. help or under U.S. direction.

It's a clever innovation, because you don't have to manufacture a counter-story to an election or political event that holds up against any real scrutiny to get eggheads writing op-eds for your coup in big-time news outlets. You can just say that the people of a country electing someone is Actually anti-democratic, that the elected government doing something their constituents want is Actually backsliding against democracy, etc. You can always manufacture a "backsliding" crime out of whatever current policy. Just something to keep an eye on...
#54

cars posted:

The governing doctrine for these coups is "democratic backsliding", which is a thing that says all democratic institutions can be working fine and the government can reflect the will of the majority, but if it starts doing things that piss off big property owners or the U.S. bourgeoisie or, really, if it does anything at all other than the will of the opposition party that lost the election, then it's secretly non-democratic and the military can kill everyone with U.S. help or under U.S. direction.

It's a clever innovation, because you don't have to manufacture a counter-story to an election or political event that holds up against any real scrutiny to get eggheads writing op-eds for your coup in big-time news outlets. You can just say that the people of a country electing someone is Actually anti-democratic, that the elected government doing something their constituents want is Actually backsliding against democracy, etc. You can always manufacture a "backsliding" crime out of whatever current policy. Just something to keep an eye on...



this, but also i just want to add that there is an interesting extra twist they've added here, which is concern trolling about climate change. i think this will become the go-to reason for regime change in the years to come.

jhanisse daza is a human rights foundation associate and PR spook, with family ties to bolivia's reactionary political groups and a history of campaigning for regime change in bolivia due to "democratic backsliding" *and* "environmental protection". she also happens to be a member of jared leto's cult (really) and good friends with claire wordley, who is a spokeperson for extinction rebellion. leto and claire both have considerable platforms and claire in particular has been pushing evo's apparently uniquely evil attitude to the environment hard in pieces she's written for UK media outlets and on her social media feeds. it may seem small but she has 100s of 1000s of people who trust what she has to say, and for leto this is millions, and "think about the critters and the trees!" is a good way to get people to shut down their brains in these situations

#55
re: climate change there is some stuff about extinction rebellion protesting outside a bolivian embassy in germany at the end of august, timing seems a bit odd to say the least: https://translate.google.co.nz/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://extinctionrebellion.de/veranstaltungen/berlin/sos-bolivia-protest-bolivian-embassy/&prev=search
note that one of their demands was that the government ask for 'international help' for fires in the amazon. i'm not really clear on whether the fires in the amazon actually are in bolivia and what the bolivian government's response to them may have been.
#56
imo the fires thing was more used as a pretext to pour money into groups inside Bolivia before the coup, I don't think a lot of people are really into the idea of climate change as the reason for a coup
#57

cars posted:

imo the fires thing was more used as a pretext to pour money into groups inside Bolivia before the coup, I don't think a lot of people are really into the idea of climate change as the reason for a coup


some really deluded motehrfuckers are though, it always involves ignoring facts like Morales being a staunch defender of the environment - personally heaping scorn on the empire's endless list of crimes against the planet - and the complete non-persecution of individuals and groups actually involved in rampant environmental destruction. individual smears might work on a microlevel to gain meaningless consent from a very small portion of the public but any environmentalist worth their weight in piss can see through such obvious lies. Older and almost entirely white and anglophonic individuals are losing their fucking minds trying to grapple with the somewhat succesful recuperation of environmentalism and embracing crudely paranoiac distractionary narratives thhrown out there by various state and private propagandists. check out this sad piece of shit article ive seen trafficked by some of the older and more hapless individuals of that type entirely uncritically, completely incoherent garble:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article208187.html

I have to keep telling myself taht these morons have got to be much less influential than they are loud and it's reassuring that they seem confined to very marginal spaces and don't have muych of if any international influence. god i ahte it so much though

#58
"With the right-wing coup in Bolivia nearly complete, the junta is hunting down the last remaining dissidents"

i was really hoping a sizeable portion of the military would back Evo and the indigenous population enough to reverse the coup but the situation is not looking good.
#59
i’ve been seeing more so-called leftists arguing that if the U.S. wasn’t terrorizing the world another country would take its place and be even worse so therefore, we should continue supporting the current death machine. people actually believe this lol.
#60
[account deactivated]
#61

Synergy posted:

i’ve been seeing more so-called leftists arguing that if the U.S. wasn’t terrorizing the world another country would take its place and be even worse so therefore, we should continue supporting the current death machine. people actually believe this lol.


at the end of the day most of that stuff seems like aspiring egghead state department crack. wouldn't be surprised if they also tried saying that the Iraq War wasn't for oil, in a long boring twitter thread about how we need to exercise discretion in our claims against "Capital"

#62

toyot posted:

it's crazy how ppl here can literally not imagine a peaceful world or international relations based on peace... like the simple absence of war... just, millions NOT being killed and conscripted, engineers NOT developing weapons, they can't imagine a single better thing they could be doing... you suggest it's possible for the work of war to just not happen and you're a total nut, b/c we live in a fascist death state & the culture agrees with itself



a lot of this is just mistaking cynical posturing for being intelligent, the disease of high-school dweebs, Kissinger worship and the terminally Online

#63
putting aside issues with the intercept, this is a pretty good video

#64
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/10/16/bolivia-detains-doxxes-election-observers/

Bolivia’s unelected transitional administration has repeatedly threatened international electoral observers, detained monitors from Argentina in the airport, and shared the private information of Spanish supervisors with a far-right activist.
#65
Was thinking if the Chilean left can cram a bunch of amendments in the new constitution which can't be fulfilled under capitalism, and people keep revolting, the Trotsky Museum in Mexico City would suddenly start eerily glowing, until on the night of revolution when his gravesite suddenly bursts open and spirits escape as Chile vindicates the Transitional Program. Revolutions then spread from country to country as printing presses across the world become possessed and start spewing out copies of The Militant. The mechanics try to hit the emergency stop button but it doesn't do anything.