Red Mosquito

Mickey wrote:

96583UP wrote:

Mickey wrote:

theplatypus wrote:

Mickey wrote:

96583UP wrote:Evo Morales: the latest in a seemingly endless line of far-left South American leaders to take office in a parade of righteousness and leave office in a flaming clown car of corruption

Unbelievably fucking wrong on this one, bub.

Bumping for Mickey's take on this

It's not a particularly hot one. I don't think you have to be a supporter of Morales or the pink tide more broadly to think that what happened in Bolivia is disturbing. You don't even have to dispute the neutrality of the OAS and their allegations of inconsistencies (the majority of which are explained entirely by the difference between the quick count and the official count insofar as it pertains to rural areas, which both overwhelmingly support Morales and are historically slower to report their votes). Leaving that aside and accepting that the elections were fraudulent and that Morales should never have been allowed to run for a fourth term (this means disputing the sovereignty of the Bolivian Supreme Court, but okay), there's still the fact that Morales was run out of office by the military, that protest leaders called for his arrest even after he abdicated the Presidency, that his house was ransacked, and that the new interim regime is explicitly racist and anti-indigenous (burning the Wiphala, bringing the Bible back to the Presidential palace, etc.). We should also note that no one disputes the idea that Morales got more of the vote--only that he didn't get the sufficient 10% lead necessary to win outright--and that he had already agreed to hold new elections. This isn't to say that Morales is not, to a lesser or greater extent, corrupt or authoritarian, or that his presidency was the right move for the Bolivian people--we don't need to go down the Telesur rabbit hole. But the idea that he was run out in a "flaming clown car of corruption"--as if this is a populist and ethical response to the abuse of executive power rather than, say, a violently racist right-wing backlash supported by international business and with chilling similarities to Bolsonaro's rise in Brasil--suggests that you might not have a clear idea of what's happening in Latin America.

or it might suggest that someone who doesn’t subscribe to his deification was posting for entertainment on a pearl jam message board rather than to promote their book in Foreign Affairs magazine

so for the sake of humoring reader microaggression:

“flaming” = mass protests because he committed fraud. the military should be commended for stepping in on behalf of the will of the people to remove an illegitimate leader
“clown car” = the shitty plane he flew on to hide in shitty mexico
“corruption” = apparently not disputed

and he may be a lesser evil in a region plagued with fraud!

but maybe a special forces team of U.S. white privilege intelligentsia can air drop in and convince all those protesting people that they are wrong to express their will for free and fair elections

Posting for "entertainment" doesn't make you less wrong, homie. It may surprise you to learn this but there are actually discrete interests in Bolivian society, it's not a monolith. If you think the interim government represents the "will of the people" you are an absolute fucking moron.

Two individuals, a married couple in China, have been diagnosed with “pneumonic plague,” according to international reports — a strain of the plague “more infectious than the strain that ravaged Europe in the Dark Ages.”

a Mongolian couple died from eating raw organ meat from an infected marmot

McParadigm wrote:My personal favorite before now was the time they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to an ad company who just took one of the posters they were already using and slapped the phrase “WHY DIE ON MARS” across the top.

Simple Torture wrote:My graduate school mentor is a professor at the University of South Dakota and he loves it.

Mickey wrote:If I'm going to job search on the plains I might as well just head to Canada.