GUELPH, ON – Upon reading headlines that Syria’s Bashar Al Assad regime has been deposed by rebel forces, local data specialist Michael Varley has responded conclusively that this is either very positive news or maybe really worrying news.
“Well obviously Assad was a brutal dictator, so this is clearly good news,” affirmed Marley while glancing at his phone over breakfast. “But wait, are these the kind of rebels who are just going to replace one dictatorship with an oppressive theocracy? I honestly forget.”
“So maybe it’s bad, I guess. I dunno,” confirmed the amateur geopolitical pundit.
With the situation in Syria coming to a head very quickly this past weekend, Varley insists that he’s been “really busy” and thus unable to form an opinion more complex than “maybe this is good and maybe it’s not”. Still, he continued undaunted, knowing that failure to project an air of understanding of this tense regional conflict was not an option.
“Now Syria, they were in the news a whole bunch, but like a really long time ago, right,” asserted Varley about the Syrian Civil War which began as an offshoot of 2011’s Arab Spring uprising. “Now Assad, I definitely remember that he’s a bad dude. But here’s a tweet from some guy saying it’s America that’s actually worse…” Varley trailed off, perhaps lost in thought about the heavy human toll that the civil war has already inflicted on the people of Syria. “Oh, that reminds me – I never watched that new trailer for Captain America: Brave New World.”
Varley then continued perusing sporadic headlines about the fast-moving regime change, in between checking his fantasy hockey league standings and watching 3 separate YouTube videos about tiny van life influencers.
At one point, Varley turned to his live-in partner, Kayla Magrite, to discuss the chaotic events playing out on the other side of the globe. “Hey, wasn’t your cousin Rachel dating a guy from Syria last Fall? I think he was a refugee?” asked Varley, before being informed that her cousin had briefly dated Yusuf, a stock analyst whose family had emigrated from Turkey.
Later, Varley confidently asserted that the presence of North Korean forces in the Syrian conflict would likely complicate matters, never realizing that he was definitely conflating this conflict with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Asked whether he would continue to research the Assad regime’s decades of human rights abuses, or the potential for regime change to create future regional instability, Varley insisted that he was “going to get right on that,” before using his phone to stream 5 consecutive episodes of Seinfeld.
