So, my my this has absolutely been a week, hasn’t it? I mean, Trump’s tax returns getting leaked and it turning out he’s basically broke, then that Melania tape surfaces where she’s mocking suffering refugees, then Trump categorically loses a presidential debate, then he gets Covid, then a bunch of other Republicans get Covid, then he might be having a really bad case of Covid, then he releases videos of him that are supposed to be him looking healthier (and aren’t) and we’re barely into October. Man.

But anyhow.

ARTSAKH: THE NEW PLACE YOU HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT

If you follow conservative media, the Artsakh conflict is what they were all talking about this past week rather than any of the Trump administration’s numerous failures. But it’s actually important in and of itself, so let’s get into it, and I’m going to flex a little bit because I am one of the relatively few number of people who knew what Artsakh was before shit started to go down there these past few weeks. (Mostly due to a couple of random Youtube video watches, mind you, but even so.)

Artsakh - more properly “the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh” - is a chunk of Azerbaijan on the Armenian border that doesn’t want to be a chunk of Azerbaijan. Ethnically speaking, it’s Armenian - the people there are Armenian in heritage and speak Armenian. It’s not really a rich country-slash-territory; it’s basically just a bunch of mountains. (Pretty mountains, mind you.) The question you might be asking, then, is “why was it ever a part of Azerbaijan” and the answer is “colonialism,” of course - first the British Empire did its usual fantastic job demanding that arbitrary border lines be placed wherever they thought it was convenient, and then when Soviet Russia absorbed both Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1920s, they gave Artsakh to the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, mostly because they wanted to placate Turkish diplomats and Turkey traditionally approves of Armenia getting the short end of the stick (or, let’s be honest, the stick stabbed into Armenia’s stomach).

While the USSR collapsed, Artsakh declared its independence from Azerbaijan and fought a war of independence against their former country with Armenia’s help, which nobody really won exactly (although the Armenia/Artsakh coalition definitely came out ahead in the end) but at a certain point everybody’s just too tired to keep fighting. The result of this was Artsakh declaring itself to be an independent country, which has very little international recognition, but which is basically independent because Azerbaijan has no real ruling authority there any more and it’s more or less just a self-governing chunk of Armenia now except on paper. Azerbaijan, however, isn’t willing to just let the territory go, because there are some Azerbaijianis living there and also they have the ownership papers, basically. And until a couple weeks ago that was the situation: a diplomatic compromise where nobody admits they’re going to win or lose and nobody gives up, but at least there’s no active conflict.

Enter Turkey. As you may know, Turkey has been flexing its nationalistic muscles over the past decade more and more since Recep Erdogan became the President there, and this is the latest example: Azerbaijan wasn’t going to go to war over Artsakh by itself, mostly because the Armenian army is better trained and one of the things about Artsakh being a mountain nation is that it’s really very defensible. But Azerbaijan openly being supplied troops and weapons by Turkey (who, remember, Do Not Like Armenia At All) - that’s a different story. And of course, Turkey over the past year or two has been openly all but daring Russia to take a punch at it, so Russia is starting to lend Armenia aid, and as a result a war between two relatively small countries is definitely now punching well above its weight in terms of death and horror.

If all of this sounds a bit like how World War One started, less one Austrian archduke murder, that’s an entirely reasonable bit of foreboding. I mean, Iran is next door, and of course the Kurds live in this general area too and it wouldn’t be a war in the Caucasus if someone didn’t find a way to start attacking the Kurds. Escalation is entirely possible.

THIS WEEK IN PLAGUE

Setting aside the Trumps getting it and then the Trump advisors getting it and Erin O’Toole getting it (you probably forgot he had it, it was only two weeks ago he announced it!), for me the story this week is how badly Ontario is looking to fuck up its Covid response. I mean, granted, it’s at least reassuring that I wasn’t wrong about Doug Ford being an incompetent boob, but I would have preferred to have to grudgingly eat crow on this one.

The story of Ontario’s Covid response is: there isn’t one. Not a cohesive one that makes sense, because the thing about cohesive policy responses that make sense is that they almost always cost a fair amount of money, and the thing about Doug Ford - having had to live in his political orbit for a decade now - is that he is the absolute definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish. He simply doesn’t seem to understand that it is better to spend a lot of money on a Covid response strategy that works so that the economy can stay open, rather than not spend the money and then take an economic hit that will be much worse.

This week, we’ve seen Ontario’s testing capacity prove completely inadequate to demand, and the government’s response has been to announce privatized testing centers. (Which, in addition to being expensive, are also inadequate.) There’s no provincial contact tracing program in place and there’s no intention, apparently, to develop one, and the city of Toronto is shutting down its own tracing program because contact tracing is only really useful when there’s a small number of cases and you’re trying to keep most aspects of life normal, and we’re well into the second wave now so what’s the point, really?

On top of all of that (and the total failure of the government to even try to manage to come up with a schooling plan that could somehow be safe, which is absolutely contributing to case growth), the government’s messaging is simply incoherent. People are expected to cancel their “personal bubbles” and not gather in individual groups of larger than six, but restaurants and nightclubs are allowed to remain open so long as their capacity remains below 100 - so, for example, our family can’t have Thanksgiving dinner together, unless we go out to a restaurant to do it.

This is obviously ridiculous, and this sort of incoherent policy is always followed up by a healthy amount of “blame the populace,” but what do you expect people to do? If you act like there’s a serious health risk, people will act accordingly, and if you act like you don’t give a shit, people will act accordingly to that too.

Good thing we’re heading into regular flu season! That certainly can’t make things any worse.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

We binged all of Ted Lasso over two days, and it is simply a wonderful piece of work: a clever, charming and optimistic comedy where everybody acts like an actual, real human being, which is in fact incredibly difficult to write, let alone write as well as this show is written (seriously, the gags come out at a mile-a-minute pace when it’s really going, but no joke is ever given too little time to sit). Just outstanding stuff.

See you soon.