MAN IT’S KIND OF A SLOW WEEK

Well, it is. Mostly this past week was a lot of “stuff I have written about previously continues,” so this will be a lighter week than average, in part because I only got started late because I was busy watching the Oscars. (I will write more on them next week, but long story short: ugh, Green Book?)

In Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro is still awful, and the American effort to replace him is still extremely suspicious, with all the wrong people ramping up their rhetoric in a way that isn’t even terribly subtle about just wanting to go in and grab Venezuela’s oil, but you have to give them credit for putting together a food aid convoy and then sitting it outside Venezuela’s borders so they have a ready-made publicity stunt if they ever want to escalate. (Which they do.) As to whether the aid is motivated by genuine good feeling, bear in mind this is the United States, which has supported sanctions (which, yes, included preventing food imports) on all sorts of countries when it deemed it appropriate, so the moralizing is kind of trite, but that’s realpolitik for you.

Brexit continues apace in its weird, muddling “I can’t believe we’re doing this shit” way, with just about all parties acknowledging that a no-deal Brexit would be the worst possible result and yet somehow that is arguably the most likely outcome at this point, as Labour MPs desert the party to form their own “independent” coalition of self-professed moderates who mostly just hate Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn, for his part, is unable to get ahead in the polls of the least competent Prime Minister in living memory and a Tory party that is vastly unpopular for pushing an issue that now is majority opposed by the populace, mostly because of his personal refusal to simply support “let’s just stay in the EU and avoid economic suicide” as a position and instead go with his “look, if I was in charge, which I am not and have no pathway to achieving in the near future, I would totally be able to negotiate a better deal with the EU but I cannot adequately explain why this would be” strategy, which has not been terribly popular for some reason.

The SNC-Lavelin scandal continues to be a thing, but really the only real developments were Liberal bigwig Gerald Butts resigning to be a preliminary blame target (which doesn’t seem to have worked) and Jodi Wilson-Raybould standing up in the House of Commons to essentially request that Trudeau waive the solicitor’s privilege that prevents her from publicly discussing whether or not she was pressured by Justin Trudeau’s office, which by itself doesn’t mean that much but, more realistically, means she believes she was pressured (which we already knew, because duh) and that she doesn’t want to risk endangering her bar membership as a lawyer (because, well, also duh). Probably not a lot will happen on this scandal in the near future, but maybe it will because everybody involved is pissed off. We don’t know. But for now, it’s just people making principled-sounding statements for the sake of same.

The Tories have been awful in Ontario, but mostly not in new ways this week? I mean, we’ll be getting news on their first for-reals budget in a few weeks at the most, and then things will really start to go nuts because either Dougie will have broken most of the idiotic promises he made while campaigning or he’ll cut so severely that he’ll either piss off everybody or he’ll target the cuts to avoid his base so dramatically it’ll basically trigger a civil war in the province, because those are the realistic options when you’ve already slashed government revenue by the billions. In the meantime, we get to watch the Tories just keep fucking up on the autism file, because their choices are do nothing and let tens of thousands of kids go without care, spread the money around so nobody gets a fraction of the care they need, or spend more money, and they’re never going to pick the third option. And this is going to be their fight in every corner of the province in a few weeks, so, in conclusion, fuck these people. (As an aside, the Toronto Star just reported a couple hours ago that the Tories were trying to cut off care to autistic kids within weeks of entering office, because of course they were.)

Google got some press when it leaked that Sidewalk Labs, their subsidiary working in Toronto to do… things? Probably to do with data collection in urban neighborhoods?… proposed that Google should essentially get a share of property taxes if it builds the Queen’s Quay East light rail line, which is shovel-ready and has been for years and is really important to developing the Port Lands properly. The problem is that they haven’t unveiled their proposal yet, and while I am skeptical about the viability of their plan because there are just so many obvious red flags (like “Google has no history of successful infrastructure development or construction” or “I see no realistic scenario where this would be less expensive for the city than simply paying for the goddamn light rail”), I don’t want to comment on it before I actually read the actual proposal - assuming one is ever released to the public - because unlike Ontario’s Tories, Google has actually produced something worthwhile in the past decade. (I like my Pixel 2. It is a good phone.)

There’s been a couple recent elections in Africa (in Nigeria and Senegal) but neither one of them is really emblematic of any larger trend in either country’s politics other than, hopefully, a path towards general democratic normalization. Nigeria’s election has some violence, but the good news is this time there was less violence than normal; Senegal’s election had some weird antidemocratic disenfranchisement of a couple of major candidates who were disallowed from running by the current government, but it is at least possible that the government had kind of a point with the corruption charges? This is how electoral politics works in developing countries: the less violence the better, then the less corruption the better, and then maybe you get to a point where Donald Trump is running things and this entire theory just sort of breaks down.

Oh, and there’s bad climate news, of course, but nowadays there’s always bad climate news. Really, the most viral climate thing this week was US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is a billion years old and has a net worth of almost a hundred million dollars, telling some young children who had come to ask her to vote for the Green New Deal that she knew her job better than they did in an incredibly patronizing way. The proper response to this is that Dianne Feinstein has been a Senator since 1992, and if the United States had started carbon mitigation twenty-five years ago then there would likely be no massive climate emergency that was going to cost the world an actual trillion dollars in the best-case scenario, so maybe she doesn’t know her job as well as she thinks she does.

Man, there’s gotta be something that merits more than a paragraph…

I COULD NOT FIND A GOOD CANADIAN-THEMED INSULT THAT ALSO INCORPORATED “YELLOW VESTS”

Oh, right.

So Yellow Vests Canada is a conservative political activist group, aping the gilets jaunes movement in France, that’s gotten a lot of press over the last couple weeks for their “United We Roll” campaign against carbon taxation and immigration and a lot of other things but mostly those two, and if you’re going to pick one it’s honestly mostly immigration based on their various social media communities. Of course, there are differences between YVC and the original gilets jaunes, like for starters how the YVC are actually just bog-standard white nationalists.

No, seriously. That is what they are. There is at this point a massive surplus of evidence of numerous YVC members and supporters being members of Canadian white nationalist groups like the Soldiers of Odin or the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, of white nationalists like Paul Fromm and Faith Goldy attending their rallies, and of course the endless swarm of social media postings where they fantasize about war with Islam and also executing Justin Trudeau for treason because… uh… to be honest they’ve never really explained why. The sort of people who post on these things usually just kind of assume you understand why Justin Trudeau has committed treason, regardless of whether you understand because you agree with them or whether you understand because you are Part of the Conspiracy Against Ordinary Canadians (tm).

The “United We Roll” campaign made it to Ottawa at the beginning of the week, and it was unsurprisingly pathetic - maybe a hundred protestors showed up. Compare this to the Women’s March in Ottawa (the third one in three years), which got a couple thousand despite it being negative twenty-four Celsius at the time, and which got far less press because, well, the Women’s Marchers aren’t a core part of any party’s base per se and the Yellow Vests are so highly prized that both Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier showed up to compete to see who could suck up to these dumb assholes the most, because Scheer and Bernier are both running on straight-up “I can be the most nationalist” because they are both shitty people. (This was only a few days after Bernier complained that wearing blackface is bad now, presumably because his base are really upset about that.)

So mostly this was a big nothing, but they got 54,000 news stories written about them over the past month countrywide so they achieved their goal. Meanwhile, the protest organizer is claiming he hasn’t scammed over $100,000 in donated funds, which is always the sign of a really great protest.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018, Peter Jackson, theatre) - 4/5

Faberge: A Life of Its Own (2014, Patrick Mark, Amazon Prime) - 2.5/5

How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014, Dean DeBlois, Blu-Ray) - 4/5

How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019, Dean DeBlois, theatre) - 4/5

Started playing Dishonored 2, which is at least as fun as the first one was, and the first one was pretty good. Also finished Unavowed, a brief but decent little horror/action/comedy adventure game, which I would say is worth playing through if you can get it cheap and don’t mind/appreciate old-school pixel graphics.

See you in seven. Also, seriously: Green Book?