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The "block first, ask questions later" nature of this website is annoying sometimes. Makes you never want to have a good-faith discussion with strangers.

I mainly wanted to end the conversation, not “block first”. I would not have initiated the conversation if I intended to “block first”. I felt it was no longer productive.

But I do think you should seriously ask why “he’s almost certainly got a ton of trans people raped, acutely destroyed families, permanently wrecked international relations, but speculatively his economic impact could be okay” might be an ill-considered, frivolous, even offensive position.

For the record, I’m always happy to let things lie when asked. As for Milei, I never expressed any admiration for the man or his administration. I’ve seen the ill effects up close. What was I was initially responding to was the tendency for people on the left to carry water for the Peronists.

I am Argentine-American and definitely not doing that (I am not a peronist), but there's simply no way that "Massa would have been worse" is something that doesn't strike me as cruel tbh.

I think Massa would’ve meant 100+% inflation with no end in sight. Is that worse than Milei? I honestly don’t know. I do know that poverty soared under Fernandez, and that has to be taken into account.

poverty also soared while GDP shrank under Macri :)

some things in Argentina have no clear political cause or way out short of international collaboration, which is not necessarily bending to the IMF at every step. Some of the current conditions are like this *because* of international intervention.

I don't know why you say I'm not providing any evidence. GDP per capita in terms of PPP clearly trending upward: www.imf.org/external/dat...

once again this is not the metric I cited

Which metric are you interested in?

probably the one I linked that 'GDP go up' is not really interesting, one would expect it to go up following a major recession regardless of interventions or lack thereof. the point is. the page you link also shows this when you run it as % of world, fwiw. witchsky.app/profile/did:...

Again, that graphic comes from an article from 2024. I don't see how it's particularly germane here.

you make specific claims about the economy under 'peronists', it's relevant and you're not pointing to any other graphs that dispute it because you have the wrong metric. the IMF page you're linking actually supports continued _decline_ on similar metrics (% of world GDP is an interesting one)

because again, the intervention I am making here is that there are far longer-running economic trends here that explain the acute performance you're attributing to Milei in a laudatory fashion. I think that's maybe the point of misunderstanding here.

Peronists have been in power about 2/3 of the time since the restoration of democracy, so I don't think it's so unfair to paint with a wide brush. But yes, I do agree, there are structural problems that are not specific to Peronist admins.

Of course, and I don’t see where I’ve painted it as non-complicated. What isn’t complicated, from my perspective, is that Argentina’s long-running approach of propping up demand by printing money has been, generally speaking, bad for the country.

And I’m glad that the current administration sees that as a problem that needs to be solved, and not just rhetorically or as a set of vague promises. That Milei is, to put it mildly to an absurd extent, an imperfect instrument is deeply lamentable.

My hope is that what we see out of this is a broad-based reorientation of Argentina’s political economy that transcends parties. But if had the power to vote the guy out of office, I would, because I do not think that the historical revisionism and the other regressive nonsense are worth it.