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The band, the music, the dance.

I wanted to use what ‘reach’ I may have here to share the Carolina Wildlife Center’s urgent plea for donations. If they are unable to raise $75,000 to cover ongoing and future care of their wildlife patients, the center will have to close July 20th, 2026. The services provided by CWC to the community are incredibly valuable, and without them, many wild animals will suffer without the care they need.

Original post

Girl holding her pet dik-dik in Mombasa, Kenya

There’s an entire literary genre built around the cosmopolitan who loves the Global South—as long as the Global South loses with elegance and dignity. Ishaan Tharoor has written a masterpiece in that genre.

He makes a list of the World Cup’s "charming countries": the Japanese cleaning the stadium, the kind Koreans, Vozinha, the noble loser. All lovable, endearing, unforgettable. All eliminated.

The truth is that this kind of picturesque admiration comes with conditions. The "other" is worth celebrating only as long as they remain endearing. And more often than not, they’re considered endearing because they lose and pose no threat to power.

Tharoor built his "love" for Argentina around its decline: hyperinflation, chaos, a team supposedly suffering from injustice. That’s an aesthetic relationship with the periphery. The moment the periphery stops being picturesque and starts winning, the toy breaks.

His use of Eduardo Galeano’s quote about Maradona and Napoli makes the point obvious: it celebrates a dark South humiliating the white North that had despised it. Then he uses that same quote to argue that Argentina is now the North. That’s where the unspoken assumption slips in: the South American who "looks" European somehow no longer counts as a victory for the Global South.

Argentina is part of the Global South whether he likes it or not. That isn’t something he gets to decide based on whether he finds the country sympathetic. On top of that, he argues that Argentina has become part of the establishment because Milei was supposedly going to be sitting next to Trump in the stands (which now doesn't even appear to be true). It’s exactly the opposite.

An Argentine invited to a stadium in New Jersey, sitting beside the people who hold power, is about as peripheral a scene as you can imagine.

Mistaking proximity for power is a basic analytical error. We were never less sovereign than when we were at our friendliest with those in power. The embrace is submission without friction—a surrender. The problem isn't that Argentina somehow became "bad." The reality is much simpler: Tharoor liked an Argentina that lost.

Our goverment has illegally sold many of our water, riverbanks and burnt acres and acres of native land. The buyers are US and Israel.

I've seen people (Afroargentinians, indigenous argentinians, brown argentinians, white argentinians, mestizo, hell even asian argentinians) explaining and recontextualizing and trying and trying. I have seen people who are not even arguing anything get swarmed by hateful comments for using the Argentinian shirt, even worse if they're foreigners who have embraced our country. I have seen these comments telling them "argentinians want you dead, argentinians would turn on you".

They hide behind "you all think like your goverment". They refuse to listen to any nuance on the region. They quote examples of racism and anti-indigenous in Argentina without context, without understanding this shit hurts argentinians first. Brown argentinians are the first victims of argentinian racism.

In this foreign narrative, they don't exist. We don't exist as people, we're a concept. The nazi country. The shithole.

While all of this is happening, Milei is trying to pass a law that allows foreign companies to acquire largue quantities of land. Israeli companies and diplomats are circling us like vultures. The US and Europe are getting for cheap local scientific advancements worth millions.