You Can’t Win Newsletter - Don’s Note - Late May

More blood for the blood god. Not a lot of great news coming out lately but I’m trying to remain upbeat. My terrible rural Internet was down for a few days so just getting around to typing this up for y’all.

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Upcoming Episodes

Starting with this week, a few of our Monday episodes include notorious poster “Agile Tablet” as co-host on topics like getting older and academia. The crew has a lot of opinions but no PhDs… why didn’t they take the plunge? Why is academia so weird? Also, the premium episodes will continue Tom’s journey around the world. Sign up to the Patreon to support our posting careers. Thank you to the early adopters there.

Tom and I have been talking about where we want to steer the pod over the next while, now that we know we have a modest base of listeners. One thing we want to do is get a bit more specific about topics. We have mostly been giving our broad moods about big topics, and having pleasant chats with friends, but we need to dig a bit deeper. I’m going to start trying to read and review books and maybe movies on air, discussing them with Tom, and vice versa, to give more of a specific anchor while letting us talk about the topic. Plus it’ll help me get reading more. It’s been a slog trying while out of school because there’s no external authority yelling at me to read about the rule of law or whatever. 

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Politics Takery

The Canadian election is this fall and as a news junkie you should probably know who the different major parties are and why they are making me depressed. Canada uses an antiquated first-past-the-post system similar to the biggest anglo hells so vote totals might have little relation to seat totals. A game of chance we will ultimately lose.

Liberals - World-famous hunk Justin Trudeau has got himself into a pickle by yelling at his underlings until some of them started testifying in public against him. He has nuked most his astroturf progressive goodwill in the process. Most major Liberals are vile people who talk about a gendered foreign policy and then try to escalate wars with Putin or whatever. The means-testing tinkering continues while Trudeau goes full jihad for the oil industry. Still, Liberals pay public relations professionals enormous amounts to command the narrative, so never count them out. Early prediction: Liberals win a minority government.

Conservatives - Led by non-hunk Andrew Scheer, the Conservatives are trying to coast to victory by promising to destroy what little is left of the environment to earn some lucre. Given that a majority of Canadians still breathe air, Scheer has been trying to whip up some fear about the border. Yes, because Americans are fleeing ICE, some of them are heading north. So Scheer is, yes, trust me, you get it, complaining about how we need to secure the American border against Americans. Early prediction: Scheer stumbles but gains a few seats.

New Democrats - Led by the affable Jagmeet Singh, the social-democratic New Democrats seem to be running on the old idea that Trudeau broke his promises and isn’t a real progressive. Unfortunately, no one really cares about that and never has, because most people assume that all politicians will break their promises and that none of them are real progressives. At present, it appears the NDP platform will mostly be things the Liberals promised in the past but never delivered, which isn’t that inspiring. Early prediction: NDP gets lost in the mix, loses a few seats.

Bloc Québécois - Led by Yves-François Blanchet, the Bloc is a social-democratic sovereigntist party which was in total chaos for a while, but seems to have regrouped and is poised to pick up a few seats. Quebec will be a crowded field this time and will be a good example of how first-past-the-post can lead to dramatically different outcomes given small changes in vote totals. I’m not even really sure if they are proposing much other than “wow Canada seems poorly governed” this time, but they are right. Early prediction: Respectable seat increase.

Green Party - Led by Elizabeth May, the Greens have done surprisingly well at the provincial level over the past few years, and seem poised to win a few seats at the federal level. The Greens put out stuff like “not left nor right but forward” and are probably way more conservative than a lot of ecologists in the country but they are better than the main two parties at least. Recently they announced that Canada should only use Canadian oil, which is almost precisely anti-ecological thinking in favour of crass pseudo-environmental nationalism. Early prediction: Respectable seat increase.

People’s Party - Led by Maxime Bernier, the populists are far-right psychos and just having them around will suck. Bernier is fairly skilled as a provocateur and is fundraising decently for a minor party. He could run a credible campaign in a number of ridings. Just terrible policies like trying to trigger the libs or whatever. The media will totally give him the microphone just like they did with Trump and he’s betting big on that. Early prediction: God smites them all.

Communist Party - Not expected to win any seats but if you donate to them you get a tax refund and they will use it to troll people or make cool memes or whatever - your decision.

Expected goodies: Hopefully the Liberals will announce some anti-poverty measures or something. They always pivot left in an election to help the brand. Maybe by accident something good will come of it.

My vote: I will probably vote NDP again. #whocare

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Content:

Economics for a Fried Planet

Harper’s Magazine blog: https://harpers.org/blog/2019/05/economics-for-a-fried-planet/

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Life as a Content Generator

Closing in on 20,000 Twitter followers is an odd thing. First, it’s true that at least half of those need to be corporate bots. A good share of the rest are journalists who follow me because other journalists follow me, in a sort of example of the Kardashian Principle. Then there are a few hundred people who follow me just to screenshot me to their Protestant DMs or Trotskyist Slacks or whatever people do all day. Still, after all that there are probably a few thousand people reading my jokes, which I guess they used to do before, but now I have some evidence.

How should I react? My oppositional defiant disorder makes me want to sell my account to Russian hackers so they can steal your identity and I can use the $4,000 to build a new life in Serbia. However, this would have negative consequences for my “Author Platform” which seems to be the contemporary equivalent of a small plot of land I can use to survive.