NON-AMERICAN ELECTION NIGHT SPECIAL

Beyond all the hubbub of the modern pandemic-and-Trump-wracked world, a few elections worth mentioning. First off is New Zealand, where Jacinda Ardern's Labour party took an outright majority of the seats in Parliament, the first time anybody's done that in New Zealand since 1993 and the first time Labour's done it since 1987. Labour took just under 50% of the popular vote, and the Greens and Maori party combined took another nine percent, so this is a massive win for left-leaning parties in New Zealand and is obviously because Ardern's government - while certainly not successful in all respects - hit a home run with its Covid-19 response, enacting swift and harsh near-total lockdowns until the pandemic had almost wholly subsided and then re-opening with a robust test-and-trace program in place. The results of this is that last night I was watching the Bledisloe Cup match between Australia and New Zealand live from Auckland, where a crowd of 60,000 or so was enjoying live sports, so it's fair for the Kiwis to be quite thrilled with how Ardern's government handled the biggest public health crisis of the last hundred years. (Hey, remember going to live sports?)

The second is Bolivia's re-do of its election from last year, which as you may remember was more or less cancelled by members of the right-wing opposition because of concerns about electoral fraud which were ultimately found to not actually be grounded in anything particularly realistic or serious, but not so unrealistic or unserious enough that Jeanine Anez, the acting President of Bolivia (mostly by virtue of her saying "I'm the President now" and nobody being willing to contradict her) wasn't willing to try to start shredding former President Evo Morales' policy initiatives. The main candidates to watch here are Luis Arce, who is the left wing's replacement for Morales after he was forced to flee the country, and Carlos Mesa, a centre-right former President of Bolivia who failed badly enough that he resigned because he didn't want to unleash the army on protestors (and which failure was directly responsible for Morales becoming President).

As of ten days ago, Arce was polling in between 32-42 percent and Mesa in between 24-33 percent. The election was held earlier today, and some early preliminary results were leaked before the government was able to shut down the leaks (because they had decided earlier not to announce preliminary results, as a discrepancy between preliminary results and final results was the right wing's alleged reason for evicting Morales from office when he had won the election). Those results had Mesa getting 53 percent of the vote, which would win him the Presidency outright and also be suspiciously much higher than he has been polling all year.

Finally, let us turn to Guinea (not Guinea-Bissau or Equitorial Guinea - the other one), where 82-year-old president Alpha Conde - who has one of the great names in world politics - is up for re-election to his third term to office. This is a little odd if you happen to know that Guinea's constitution term-limits Presidents to two terms. See, what happened is that earlier this year, the Guinean government held a constitutional referendum, which had a lot of good stuff in it, to be fair - banning female genital mutilation and child marriage, giving women equal rights in divorce and affirming that the public service would be at least one-third female, et cetera.

But that referendum also proposed resetting the current term count for the purposes of term limits for Alpha Conde - in other words, letting him run for re-election this year as if he had never been President before. This is a fairly obvious end-run around the problem, and as a result there were widescale protests against the referendum and the opposition parties encouraged a boycott of the referendum, with the result being that since most of the vote was Alpha Conde's supporters, the referendum passed with 90 percent support. The French government and the Economic Community of West African States both considered the vote to be not credible, not least because they found evidence that Conde was trying to rig it before the vote took place.

Anyway, preliminary results have Conde's primary opponent, Cellou Diallo, leading. But those are only preliminary results and Guinea's track record with elections is not that great.

RETURN OF THE MIK'MAQ

Four weeks ago I wrote a bit about how (white) Nova Scotian fishermen were attacking Mik'maq fishermen who were abiding by their treaty rights allowing them to fish out of season. Things have, unfortunately, only escalated. At this point the fishermen have attacked numerous Mik'maq, sabotaged and burned numerous fishing boats, stolen and destroyed catches, and even attacked and burned a fishery. The RCMP has, at the best of times, done nothing at all to prevent any of what could only be called vigilante justice in the most generous interpretation, and mob violence in the actuality of what's been going on; in various incidents they have even appeared complicit with the mob. All of this is on account of the Mik'maq collectively fishing the equivalent of one commercial fishing boat's seasonal catch out of season.

The governmental response at all levels has been negligent (even before you consider the fact that the RCMP is, after all, part of the government). Only over the past weekend have we started to see any government action whatsoever, and it's mostly been to request definitions of what a "moderate livelihood fishery" (which is what the Mik'maq are entitled to under their treaty rights) rather than, say, to stop the crazy violent mob of bigots. It's just a really depressing situation all around and given Canada's truly sad record with respect to First Nations rights it's entirely fair not to be optimistic.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

We've started watching The Good Lord Bird, which mostly gets everything right. Doing a show about John Brown is difficult, because John Brown can be a difficult figure to treat fairly, because Brown was someone who was A) firstly, absolutely in the right with respect to slavery and whose moral bravery was completely unquestionable, and B) also more than a little bit crazy. The show thus far manages to walk that fine line between having Brown be a sympathetic figure and also an entertainingly crazy person.

Also finished up the first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, and... it's fine. The storytelling is uneven and often too frenetic, and the show frequently relies on Trek references to generate laughs rather than telling actual jokes, but when it does decide to sit back and tell a comedy Trek story, it mostly gets the job done right.

See you soon.