RIGHT THE ELECTION IS TOMORROW

I'm not going to prognosticate overly about tomorrow's federal election here in Canada, mostly because I try to avoid making predictions here, and also because the polling is razor-wire close. That said, at this point there's most likely going to be either a Tory minority government (if the Tories get more seats than the Liberals and the Liberals refuse to cut a coalition government deal with the NDP or if the two parties combined don't have enough seats) or a Liberal minority government (if the Liberals don't cut a coalition deal but still manage to get the most seats) or a Liberal/NDP coalition government (if they have enough seats together to form a majority). Now that I have narrowed it down to all of the most obvious possibilities I would like a fancy media job where I go on teevee and talk for five minutes about politics and then get paid a hundred thousand dollars. If it helps, I will make myself look like the Cryptkeeper from Tales of the Crypt since obviously that explains Rex Murphy.

I'll do a post-mortem next week.

HEY BREXIT IS STILL A THING

Boris Johnson has apparently come up with a new Brexit deal, and because this is British politics it manages to be both significantly worse than the previous Brexit deal while also being significantly more likely to be passed into law. The United Kingdom, everybody!

The previous dealbreaker on Brexit was the Northern Ireland "backstop," which was a soft EU/UK border along the Northern Ireland/Ireland border where free labour movement (among other things) would still apply. Brexiteers were virulently opposed to this because, well, free labour movement of dirty Europeans was the major reason they wanted to Brexit in the first place. Boris Johnson's solution to this is - short version - to effectively get rid of the backstop by putting Northern Ireland inside the EU and having the free labour movement border be the sea around the island of Great Britain for the next four years.

This deal effectively cedes Northern Ireland to the EU - Brexited Great Britain would be free to have its own regulatory regime free of the EU (well, sort of; I mean, if they want to keep selling goods to the EU they'll need to abide by most EU regulatory standards anyway, which is one of the reasons Brexit has always been a remarkably stupid idea from the beginning), but Northern Ireland would still have to abide by EU regulations, which would mean a lot of British political control of Northern Ireland would simply not be available to them.

Needless to say, the Democratic Unionists - the right-wing Northern Irish party that has been propping up the current Tory government - are completely opposed to this deal, because the entire reason they supported the Tory government was because they were pro-Brexit and anti-EU (because they're opposed to Irish reunification, and Ireland is the EU, etc etc etc). And the deal itself is projected to harm the British economy even more than the old Brexit deal would have done. But, despite the loss of the DU votes and despite the deal being obviously worse, right now current vote projections by political analysts and insiders have this new deal passing by a very thin margin (as in a margin of five votes or less with two voting blocs of 320-330 a side), because rebel Tories and a few Labour rebels are inclined to vote for this new deal, because this is quite possibly the last chance for a Brexit deal to pass, or possibly because some politicians just want this all to be over.

Parliament passed an amendment proposed by former Tory minister Oliver Letwin, which essentially requires Parliament to approve any deal via vote, and the vote on the deal is scheduled for Monday. Assuming the Speaker of the House approves the vote; it is quite possible that he may not, because British politics stopped making sense a couple of years ago and now it's just one endless clown show.

SANTIAGO-GO

Students in Santiago, Chile have been protesting transit price hikes by organizing mass turnstile-jumping sprees. Sounds like a relatively harmless form of political protest, right? Nobody gets hurt, there's no real damage to property, the opportunity cost to the government is minimal, and a point gets made. So the Chilean government of course responded calmly and rationally by... shooting and tear-gassing protesters.

This calm and rational response provoked riots, where the rioters attacked transit stations and the corporate building of Enel Green Power, an Italian-owned power company which (a long time ago) used to be the national power company and which is the largest electrical utility in Chile, and which has been angering Chileans for a while now because of vastly increased power charges. And the Chilean government responded rationally and calmly to this by... declaring martial law. Which is pretty crazy when you think about it, no matter how much you might think riots are bad! Martial law actually has significant meaning in a country where half the population can remember when literally every day was martial law (thank you, Augusto Pinochet, you piece of shit). The death total so far is seven people, all shot by troops.

None of this is happening in a vacuum, of course. Chile has been a pretty stable country ever since the end of the Pinochet regime in 1990, and it's been a democracy in a reasonably meaningful sense for most of that time. But in all of that time economic inequality has increased dramatically and no party has really taken steps to halt it or change course, and Chile actually has a long and healthy history of nonviolent public protests, and the poor keep getting poorer. (All of this may sound oddly familiar to you.)

MORE PROTESTS! YOU GET A PROTEST! AND YOU GET A PROTEST! AND YOU GET A PROTEST! EVERYBODY GETS A PROTEST!

Okay, so we've got Chile, and Hong Kong is seeing a new wave of protests, and we talked about Spain last week. Who else is protesting? Well, there's Lebanon!

Lebanese anti-government demonstrators have been marching there for five days now, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. ("In the hundreds of thousands" is Serious Journalism for "the protesters say there's a million people and the government says there's a hundred thousand tops and the answer is somewhere in the middle.") The protests started for a truly stupid reason: the government planned to tax instant-messaging services (in particular, targeting WhatsApp) by the message, and I am sure if you are reading this you can immediately appreciate how boneheaded a move this was. I mean, we all hated it when we had to pay for individual texts, way back in the day, right? Imagine that, except it's the government making you pay for texts because they don't want to tax rich people.

And it's that larger context that's why the protests have continued even after the government said "okay, our bad, no instant message tax." They've morphed into general anti-austerity protests. Lebanon has implemented austerity measures to try and get its debt under control, and because Austerity Never Works (tm) instead the debt has just gotten worse. (Lebanon's debt-to-GDP ratio is set to be 150% by the end of the year, which is... very bad!) And as the debt has gotten worse Lebanon's public infrastructure has gotten worse with it, because that's what austerity programs do.

The protests are really kind of noteworthy because they're an expression of mass disgust with basically every political party. (In Lebanon most of the political parties are organized along religious and ethnic lines, so there's a couple of Christian parties, a bunch of Sunni Muslim parties, a couple of Shia Muslim parties, a Druze party, an Armenian party, et cetera. They of course also organize along the political spectrum to a certain extent.) This is understandable when you consider that the government's response to the protests was to organize a massive negotiation session to enact economic reforms - and the final agreement includes privatizing numerous national utility companies. (Somebody in Lebanon might want to ask Chile how that's working out for them? I mean, for real, maybe just ask?)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched since last week:

Star Trek (2009, J.J. Abrams, Blu-ray) - 4.5/5

Dark Phoenix (2019, Simon Kinberg, Google Play rental) - 1/5

I've been playing a lot of Disco Elysium, the new isometric computer RPG where there's basically no combat and instead you are a detective trying to solve a murder mystery, except you have total amnesia and also your mind is constantly arguing with aspects of itself. It reminds me in many ways of Planescape: Torment, the classic computer RPG that was also sort of a philosophical tract generated by an amnesiac protagonist, and I say that as the highest possible compliment. What I am saying is: this is a great fucking game. Highest possible endorsement.

See you in seven.