Yes, I’m back. I decided to take the month of August off entirely, because August is the worst month of the year in Toronto. Possibly in other places as well, but those aren’t relevant to me personally. If you hate August too, though, we are sympatico.

IT’S BEEN A LONG WAY WITHOUT BREXIT MY FRIENDS, AND I’LL TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT WHEN WE BREXIT AGAIN

Boris Johnson just announced that he wanted to torpedo Brexit - in the sense of an actually-useful Brexit - by overriding the current Brexit withdrawal agreement on Northern Ireland, and told the press he’s going to put forth an ultimatum to the EU this week demanding a deal by October 15th or the UK will just walk away from the table. Walking away from the table means - and it’s been a while since we talked about the neverending Brexit clusterfuck so it is worth repeating - that the UK will have no trade deal with the EU at all, which means it will immediately face tariffs with the EU and in fact a good chunk of the world.

(Since Brexit was voted for in that legally non-binding referendum, the UK has, to be fair, negotiated trade deals with Chile, Morocco, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland, Tunisia, Lebanon, Israel, Georgia, a number of African nations, a few Central and South American countries, some Pacific island nations, the Palestinian Authority and Kosovo. These deals represent about eight percent of all UK trade, so, you know, baby steps.)

Eu negotiators have already leaked diplomatic cables to the press in response, the gist of which are “god, we are so fucking tired of these useless idiots.” Who can blame them, really? The EU has given the UK multiple extensions to figure out what the hell they want, exactly, and made immensely clear what the requirements for a favorable EU deal for the UK are, and have told them repeatedly there aren’t going to be any major concessions of the sort the UK wants. Meanwhile, the UK negotiating team is going back to the divide-and-conquer strategy that hasn’t worked this whole time, as Priti Patel is going to try to talk to the larger EU countries and convince them that giving into UK trade demands would enhance EU security. (SPOILER ALERT: this will not work.)

Presumably at some point the Tories will veer away from this cliff they seem desperate to plunge off - not least because the moment the UK doesn’t have a favourable trade arrangement with the EU, London’s status as financial capital of the world collapses into ruin within weeks. But not knowing that for certain is the joyous thrill of the Brexit rollercoaster.

As an aside to all of this, you may have seen a sudden surge of internet type publications talking about CANZUK, the more-or-less-idealized notion that the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand could form their own EU-style trade bloc/freedom of movement and labour, mostly because there is a bit of a market for that sort of fantasy now. It is absolutely true, mind you, that all of the CANZUK countries poll quite in favour of the idea: it instinctively makes sense for Commonwealth countries to have something like this, firstly (although I note nobody is rushing to include the likes of Bangladesh, Jamaica or Mozambique in this association for some reason I’m sure is just random chance), the agricultural synergies are helpful (different growing seasons in different hemispheres), you get the benefit of being able to negotiate with other nations and trade blocs as a larger, more powerful group, and finally the idea of being able to move and work halfway around the world is pretty tempting. I mean, if I could just pick up and work in New Zealand tomorrow, I would be eating kiwi (the fruit, not the bird) today. Because of the international date line, see.

All of that said, CANZUK might be a nice idea in theory, but in practice it’s stupid: Australia and New Zealand’s most important trade partners are China and Japan, Canada’s is the United States, and as much as the UK might not be happy with it presently, the EU is theirs. How would CANZUK work with us having a free trade deal with the USA and Mexico, exactly? The short answer is that it wouldn’t and would require major overhauls to the economy, which is why a lot of British blogs are talking about CANZUK now: in the hopes that other countries will be as bloody stupid as they have been.

[LIEUTENANT WORF VOICE] “MINSK”

If you haven’t been paying attention, the protests in Belarus are probably the biggest in the world right now (yes, even bigger than the American protests). Every weekend, there have been protests of hundreds of thousands in Minsk and hundred of thousands elsewhere across the country - with plenty of smaller protests throughout the weekdays as well, and “smaller” here is strictly a relative term - and they have been steadily growing to boot. Protest strikes are happening. Oppositional politicians and activists are uniting (or fleeing the country because they’re being targeted by police). Everything, in a nutshell, is escalating.

The protests are, unsurprisingly, against the current government and specifically Alexander Lukashenko, who has been the leader of Belarus since 1994 and the only leader the independent country has had since it stopped being a Soviet republic state. Lukashenko is straight-up just a dictator; none of the elections he’s won have been free or fair elections, he has a long track record of human rights violations (he’s homophobic, anti-Semetic and lots of others -ists besides) and he uses state-owned businesses as power proxies to secure his rule. He may not be the worst dictator in the world (there are most definitely worse out there), but he’s a piece of garbage and not worth sympathizing for.

What specifically precipitated these protests was that in the most recent Belarusian presidential election, there was a suspicious internet outage and then the state TV channel reported that Lukashenko got over 80% of the votes in the election, which is so obviously bullshit that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. My general belief is that although there’s been an anti-Lukashenko movement in Belarus for decades and that although it was already almost certainly a majority of the country already, when an attempt to fake an election is this blatant, it basically serves as an insult to one’s intelligence and that really gets people furious.

Anyway, as I said: everything is escalating. Anti-Lukashenko politicians have formed a unified front, and in response the government has started kidnapping them. Pro-Lukashenko demonstrations have “spontaneously” happened, but they’re tiny compared to the anti-Lukashenko demonstrations. Police are upping the aggression level against protestors as the movement is not diminishing over time, and protestors - while still mostly peaceful - are more actively resisting them.

Unlike the Black Lives Matter/anti-racism protests in the United States, there is a clear endgame with these protests: they want Lukashenko gone, and they want free and fair elections. I do think the Belarus protests are worth keeping an eye on, because how they proceed will really tell us a lot about what the limits of nonviolent protest are and whether or not it can be a viable tactic against an authoritarian regime.

Oh, and the protests are also in part because Lukashenko has been fairly inept handling Covid-19 in Belarus, which leads us to…

COVID-19: STILL A THING

With second waves confirmed in several European countries, the Sturgis bike rally confirmed to be responsible for thousands of new cases across the USA, and cases starting to rise again in Canada, Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere, as much as we all sort of hoped it could be done in about eight months or so. Maybe it could have done with better management - certainly some countries have been able to return to near-normalcy, albeit with extremely strict testing and tracing regimes. But, let’s be honest: getting things right in a pandemic is hard - harder when everything that dealing with the pandemic entails goes against all of the norms we’ve come to expect and rely upon.

There isn’t much to say, really, except that speaking as someone who is writing this the day before school resumes in Ontario - and knowing that school returns have spiked cases in literally every country where schools have re-opened - I’m still nervous, and I hope you’re dealing with it better than some of us are.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

I’m not entirely sold on Lovecraft Country yet as a show - it’s uneven from episode to episode (particularly how some episodes are heavy on atmosphere and others gleefully exposition-dump), although the core conceits of the show are excellent. I’m still watching it, though, so there’s that.

Currently playing a lot of Fall Guys, which is gleefully frustrating in all the best ways. I really do love how the game’s format is essentially “learn how to get through the various obstacles, except everybody else gets in your way and them bumping into you is almost always why you die.” This may not be for everybody, but the Mr. Bill-like cries when you plummet to your doom are never not hilarious.

See you sooner rather than later.