Holy shit, I’ve been doing this for a year now.

CHILEAN PROTEST UPDATE: SURPRISINGLY, GOOD NEWS

So last week I wrote about the protests in Chile, and in less than a week two things have happened: first, the protests have become a general strike, with essentially every union in the country going on strike and in particular massing for enormous, mostly peaceful demonstrations in Santiago. (Internet and mobile connections in the Santiago area slowed down because of the enormous amount of data traffic uploading from the protests, where marchers wanted to be sure everybody could see their protests were peaceful.) Second, the President of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, responded to the protests by first announcing a series of national reforms, including a large increase to national pension plan payments and freezing electricity tariffs, and then on Saturday asked for the resignation of his entire cabinet and announced that martial law would be coming to an end - well, today, basically.

This is an enormous win for Chilean protestors and it doesn’t appear like they’re willing to let up any time soon. All that said, this doesn’t mean that mass protest is the only way to truly enact social change and it doesn’t mean that it always works - god knows the last couple months of news have made clear that neither of those statements is true. Still, a win is a win, so my general feeling here is that for once, a bit of optimism is warranted.

SPEAKING OF PROTESTS NOT ALWAYS WORKING, LET’S TALK ETHIOPIA FOR A SEC

Abiy Ahmed is the current Prime Minister of Ethiopia. He won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year for his role in ending the “we’re not calling it a war but let’s be honest it’s a war” state of affairs between Ethiopia and Eritrea that was the status quo since Eritrea formally declared independence in the early Nineties. Since then, he’s advocated for economic reform that would probably be best described as mild-to-moderate economic liberalism - ending state monopolies in several industries, privatizing those state companies that are less important to national security (did you know until recently the hotel industry in Ethiopia was entirely state-controlled? Well, now you do), and allowing private actors to buy minority shares of some other more important state firms, like Ethiopian Airways. He also wants to establish a national stock exchange, which seems like a moderately important thing to have in a country of over a hundred million people. (For the sake of comparison, Venezuela has a national stock exchange, and it’s ostensibly a radical socialist regime.)

Ahmed’s moves have undergone harsh criticism from one of his former allies, Jawar Mohammed. Both Mohammed and Ahmed are Oromo, which is the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, but one that has rarely been in power in Ethiopia over the years (which usually has been ruled - regardless of whether you’re talking about when Ethiopia was a monrachy, a Leninist junta or a democracy - by either members of the Ahmara or the Tigrinya ethnic groups, which are both large as well but not as big as the Oromo are), and both were important in weakening the then-government during the 2016 Ethiopian protests. Mohammed was also a big supporter of the 2018 protests which helped put Ahmed in power in the first place. However, where Ahmed is something of a bridge-builder or deal-broker (depending on what you think of him) whose hallmark has been building alliances between the Oromo and other major Ethiopian ethnic groups, Mohammed is something more of an Oromo-nationalist, who’s developed a reputation for being a firebrand, and that’s the most polite way to put it. Last year, after inter-ethnic unrest in the Oromo regions of Ethiopia led to riots and killings, Mohammed’s contribution was to claim - without evidence - that Oromo (who were the ones committing the violence against minorities) had also been killed by government forces in significant numbers. Was he lying? I don’t know! Information creep is not really that prevalent in Ethiopia. But he’s definitely the sort of person who, when faced with rogue members of his ethnic group having committed undeniable atrocities, points fingers at everybody else, and most of the time that’s not a great sign.

Anyway, Mohammed claims (in very non-specific ways) that Ahmed is acting like a dictator trying to enact his economic reforms, which - bear in mind that Mohammed was living in exile as a political prisoner on the run before Ahmed came to power and pardoned him. The result of this has been Oromo protesting against an Oromo leader, and speaking as a white guy living on the other side of the world who is fully cognizant of the fact that he cannot possibly know what is happening on the ground, it still looks kind of bad on the protestors this time around. But take all of this with a massive pile of salt.

OH RIGHT THE ELECTION

No, seriously, I had already completely forgotten that Canada had an election last week. My wife came in while I was writing about this and asked what I had written about the election last week while I was brain-deep in background reading on Ethiopia (seriously, it’s fascinating! Often a mess. But fascinating!) and I suddenly realized that I had, for a blissful couple of days, managed to forget about Canadian politics altogether. Is this how apolitical people feel all the time? If so, I totally get it now. But I am - as they say - back on my shit, so let’s hit the Brief Insightful Summary key on this sucker and go to town.

The easiest way to describe this election is that literally nobody won. The Liberals didn’t win: they survived, sure, and they demonstrated that there is a significant group of people in this country who are intensely motivated to keep the Conservatives out of power and that group is probably larger than we all expected. But they lost their majority and have to govern with a minority, and already they’re making noise about rightward moves like tax cuts and pipelines which are literally what the majority of their base doesn’t want, so I doubt the next election will go much better if they keep on like this. The Tories didn’t win, despite all the noise Andrew Scheer’s camp made about gaining 26 seats, because they got handed an election against an extremely unpopular incumbent who got hit with multiple major scandals in the six months prior to the election and the Tories still couldn’t win the election, mostly because Andrew Scheer is what you would get if you sculpted a human being out of cream cheese and then the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio showed up to turn him into a real live boy who also happened to hate gay people. The NDP didn’t win and are forced to spin “not getting obliterated” into a win now, and yeah it’s great that most of the country sort of likes Jagmeet Singh, but most of the country usually sort of likes every NDP leader and if your name isn’t Jack Layton they’re still not voting for you. The Greens didn’t win, because going from one MP to three MPs isn’t a win for the same reason your kid’s Little League team winning the pennant doesn’t mean they can challenge the Blue Jays to a game and win. And the People’s Party definitely didn’t win, and we can all be smug and happy about that, because fuck those people.

That leaves the Bloc Quebecois, who I guess sort of won a bit, because they’re relevant again when they weren’t for a long time, but they’re nowhere near the heights they used to occupy and unless the Liberals totally collapse it looks unlikely they’ll ever reach those heights again, because Quebec separatism simply isn’t very popular any more and the moment the Bloc tries to seriously reaffirm their dedication to sovereignty again is the moment they collapse back into irrelevance, and they all know it, so they can make resolutions about how they’re totally so sovereigntist you guys all day long but they’re basically just more lefty Liberals at this point.

Really, the only drama coming out of this election was a bunch of nitwits on Facebook demanding that Alberta secede because the rest of the country betrayed them, which means “Alberta stomped its feet and didn’t get its way” which is the cause of literally every tantrum in Albertan political history. Seriously, it’s a province that insists it’s a proud, iconoclastic heartland but collapses into whining every time it feels ignored or put-upon, and its leadership has a long tradition of enabling this stupidity (Jason Kenney is just the latest and worst, turning a national conversation about a fucking oil pipeline into a quasi-referendum about how much you love Alberta, because Kenney is part of the other Albertan political tradition of Never Having Any New Goddamn Ideas and he’s seemingly determined to tie its future to oil, a resource of which the rest of the world is desperately trying to use less and less). Anyway, you can ignore the Albertan separatists even more than you can ignore the Bloc, because at least Quebec has coastlines and ports. The Independent Nation of Alberta would instantly be a joke state desperately pandering to either Canada or the USA for economic survival, and if you don’t believe me go look and see how Tajikstan is doing as an independent landlocked nation these days.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched since last week:

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018, Marielle Heller, Netflix) - 4/5

The Great Canadian Baking Show is finally at the stage it usually hits every season that I like to call “Bake-Off level,” when they’ve gotten rid of all the folks who get anxious if you ask them to make anything more complex than a Nanaimo bar so they can get down to doing (and occasionally screwing up, of course) the really fun, fancy stuff that makes Bake-Off so entertaining. It usually takes the Canadian show four to five episodes to prune down the competitors to the ones who have a serious shot at winning, which sort of makes us seem like a nation of chumps but it is what it is.

Also finished House of X/Powers of X, Jonathan Hickman’s new reboot/retool/whatever of the X-Men comics. It is certainly an ambitious beginning - starting a series with a twelve-volume story that spans several thousand years multiple times, creating a new status quo that can only be called extremely radical (“the mutants are all separatists now but also they’re trying to evolutionarily outrace humanity” is the short short version and it doesn’t do the comics justice), and including all those funky charts Hickman insists on putting in his comics work. But at the same time, I do wonder if it’s going to hold up as a setting for other writers to work in, because Hickman’s vision is very particular and I can see a lot of other writers sorta settling for, you know, solid doubles rather than home runs in this environment. Time will tell, I suppose.

See you in seven.