politics

Firearm Policy, Crime, and the Unspoken Realities in Trinidad and Tobago

A man at a desk staring at a matrix with the Trinidad and Tobago flag in the background, transparent.
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In Trinidad and Tobago, there is much discussion about crime because… well, there’s been a lot of crime, so much so that there’s a Wikipedia page on crime in Trinidad and Tobago. Every administration blames the last administration, playing checkers for getting elected, but the crime has risen through all involved political parties running things over the past 3 decades.

The latest stab – or shot – at crime seems to be giving everyone gun licenses. On the surface, it gives a lot of people a sense of security to be able to get something only criminals seem to have. Right after an election, any criticism of the present government is seen as ‘anti-UNC’ – the political party that won was UNC. Just as any criticism of the past administration was seen as ‘anti-PNM’.

It’s a tired way of shutting down valid conversations. I have seen it in every country I’ve lived in or visited. Group-think offers comfort, and that comfort rivals religion in its power.

I do not care for politics. Both major parties are interchangeable to me. I criticize what I know in the hope that something useful can grow through the cracks in the political concrete.

My Criticism Of Stand Your Ground Laws and Firearm User License Propagation.

Really, I don’t have much criticism of these ideas. I myself applied for a weapon more than once in Trinidad and Tobago some decades ago, where I was told behind closed doors who to bribe and who I would have to buy the gun from. Oddly, the present political party in charge then is the same party.

I do not have much issue with the idea of responsible gun ownership. I myself applied for a firearm license in Trinidad and Tobago more than once, decades ago. I was told who to bribe and who I would need to buy the weapon from.

My applications were “lost.”

I got the bureaucratic shuffle that corruption feeds on.

The thing about it is that I have owned guns in the United States for decades. I am a U.S. Navy veteran and having worked with the United States Marine Corps as their Corpsman, I got not only to train further with weapons but also further in dealing with the wounds. In essence, I know what I’m talking about.

The criticism is here: with more firearms licenses comes more guns to civilians. Training requirements aren’t very high, and the understanding of the responsibility of having a weapon is not seemingly making the rounds as much as the political grandstanding.

My Criticism of Stand Your Ground Laws and Firearm License Expansion

Legal access to guns means new risks. People who did not have firearms before could now shoot themselves or someone else by accident.

It might not happen often. It might happen frequently. But it will happen.
That risk depends entirely on how good the training is.

No one is talking about that. They should be.

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Manipulation In The Age of AI – And How We Got Here.

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We understand things better when we can interact with them and see an effect. A light switch, as an example, is a perfectly good example.

If the light is off, we can assume that the light switch position is in the off position. Lack of electricity makes this flawed, so we look around and see if other things that require electricity are also on.

If the light is on, we can assume the light switch is in the on position.

Simple. Even if we can’t see, we have a 50% chance of getting this right.

It gets more complicated when we don’t have an immediate effect on something, or can’t have an effect at all. As I wrote about before, we have a lot of stuff that is used every day where the users don’t understand how it works. This is sometimes a problem. Are nuclear reactors safe? Will planting more trees in your yard impact air quality in a significant way?

This is where we end up trusting things. And sometimes, these things require skepticism. The world being flat deserves as much skepticism as it being round, but there’s evidence all around that the world is indeed round. There is little evidence that the world is flat. Why do people still believe the earth is flat?

Shared Reality Evolves.

As a child, we learn by experimentation with things around us. As we grow older, we lean on information and trusted sources more – like teachers and books – to tell us things that are true. My generation was the last before the Internet, and so whatever information we got was peer reviewed, passed the muster of publishers, etc. There were many hoops that had to be jumped through before something went out into the wild.

Yet if we read the same books, magazines, saw the same television shows, we had this shared reality that we had, to an extent, agreed upon, and to another extent in some ways, was forced on us.

The news was about reporting facts. Everyone who had access to the news had access to the same facts, and they could come to their own conclusions, though to say that there wasn’t bias then would be dishonest. It just happened slower, and because it happened slower, more skepticism would come into play so that faking stuff was harder to do.

Enter The Internet

It followed that the early adopters (I was one) were akin to the first car owners because we understood the basics of how things worked. If we wanted a faster connection, we figured out what was slowing our connections and we did it largely without search engines – and then search engines made it easier. Websites with good information were valued, websites with bad information were ignored.

Traditional media increasingly found that the Internet business model was based on advertising, and it didn’t translate as well to the traditional methods of advertising. To stay competitive, some news became opinions and began to spin toward getting advertisers to click on websites. The Internet was full of free information, and they had to compete.

Over a few decades, the Internet became more pervasive, and the move toward mobile phones – which are not used mainly as phones anymore – brought information to us immediately. The advertisers and marketers found that next to certain content, people were more likely to be interested in certain advertising so they started tracking that. They started tracking us and they stored all this information.

Enter Social Media

Soon enough, social media came into being and suddenly you could target and even microtarget based on what people wanted. When people give up their information freely online, and you can take that information and connect it to other things, you can target people based on clusters of things that they pay attention to.

Sure, you could just choose a political spectrum – but you could add religious beliefs, gender/identity, geography, etc, and tweak what people see based on a group they created from actual interactions on the Internet. Sound like science fiction? It’s not.

Instead of a shared reality on one axis, you could target people on multiple axes.

Cambridge Analytica

Enter the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal:

Cambridge Analytica came up with ideas for how to best sway users’ opinions, testing them out by targeting different groups of people on Facebook. It also analyzed Facebook profiles for patterns to build an algorithm to predict how to best target users.

“Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread,” Wylie wrote.

Based on this data, Cambridge Analytica chose to target users that were  “more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens.” It used various methods, such as Facebook group posts, ads, sharing articles to provoke or even creating fake Facebook pages like “I Love My Country” to provoke these users.

“The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower explains how the firm used Facebook data to sway elections“, Rosalie Chan, Business Insider (Archived) October 6th, 2019

This had drawn my attention because it impacted the two countries I am linked to; the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. It is known to have impacted the Ted Cruz Campaign (2016), the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign (2016), and interfering in the Trinidad and Tobago Elections (2010).

The timeline of all of that, things were figured out years after the damage had already been done.

The Shared Realities By Algorithm

When you can splinter groups and feed them slightly different or even completely different information, you can impact outcomes, such as elections. In the U.S., you can see it with television channel news biases – Fox news was the first to be noted. When the average attention span of people is now 47 seconds, things like Twitter and Facebook (Technosocial dominant) can make this granularity more and more fine.

Don’t you know at least one person who believe some pretty whacky stuff? Follow them on social media, I guarantee you you’ll see where it’s coming from. And it gets worse now because since AI has become more persuasive than the majority of people and critical thinking has not kept pace.

When you like or share something on social media, ask yourself whether someone has a laser pointer and just adding a red dot to your life.

The Age of Generative AI And Splintered Shared Realities

An AI attached to the works of humans

Recently, people have been worrying about AI in elections and primarily focusing on deepfakes. Yet deepfakes are very niche and haven’t been that successful. This is probably also because it has been the focus, and therefore people are skeptical.

The generative AI we see, large language models (LLMs) were trained largely on Internet content, and what is Internet content largely? You can’t seem to view a web page without it? Advertising. Selling people stuff that they don’t want or need. Persuasively.

And what do sociotechnical dominant social media entities do? Why, they train their AIs on the data available, of course. Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. To imagine that they would never use your information to train an AI requires more imagination than the Muppets on Sesame Street could muster.

Remember when I wrote that AI is more persuasive? Imagine prompting an AI on what sort of messaging would be good for a specific microtarget. Imagine asking it how to persuade people to believe it.

And imagine in a society of averages that the majority of people will be persuaded about it. What is democracy? People forget that it’s about informed conversations and they go straight to the voting because they think that is the measure of a democracy. It’s a measure, and the health of that measure reflects the health of the discussion preceding the vote.

AI can be used – and I’d argue has been used – successfully in this way, much akin to the story of David and Goliath, where David used technology as a magnifier. A slingshot effect. Accurate when done right, multiplying the force and decreasing the striking surface area.

How To Move Beyond It?

Well, first, you have to understand it. You also have to be skeptical about why you’re seeing the content that you do, especially when you agree with it. You also have to understand that, much like drunk driving, you don’t have to be drinking to be a victim.

Next, you have to understand the context other people live in – their shared reality and their reality.

Probably more importantly, is not calling people names because they disagree with you. Calling someone racist or stupid is a recipe for them to stop listening to you.

Where people – including you – can manipulated by what is shown in your feeds by dividing, find the common ground. The things that connect. Don’t let entities divide us. We do that well enough by ourselves without suiting their purposes.

The future should be about what we agree on, our common shared identities, where we can appreciate the nuances of difference. And we can build.

Trinidad and Tobago Changes Regimes (2025)

A map view of the 2025 election results in Trinidad and Tobago, where the UNC won without question.
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Well, elections in Trinidad and Tobago are over, and it’s time for everyone’s favorite game, regime change. The United National Congress (UNC) ousted the incumbent People’s National Movement (PNM). The UNC was decidedly weak in opposition, yet the results of the election are without question.

Over the next months, there will be replacements, cancellations, as the individuals that backed the UNC are given their rewards. That wouldn’t be a problem except there is a definite historical bias of both parties to exclude merit in their considerations, akin to what we see in the United States now with the Trump administration.

Where I live, there’s a majority of PNM supporters and party members, so I expect I’ll hear about this though I don’t really care. The UNC and PNM have not impressed me, but the UNC definitely impressed the majority and now they have to produce in a way that pleases vox populi.

I’ve had my dances with politicians from all parties, and I’m just waiting to see what happens at this point.

The last time the UNC lead, the government took about 7.8 acres of land that they still haven’t paid for while they paid others. The last time the UNC lead, the political leader and some other politicians allegedly stood on my land and said that the land had no deed – but a few years later, they approached me to help NGOs. When I pointed out what was alleged, I was told, “dat is small ting”. At the same meeting, they tried to get me to help with the maps, and as someone who advocates privacy, I simply could not do that because I don’t trust political parties and their backers to use the information appropriately. I stand by that.

Then there was the one laptop per child that they tried, which they started off just as reports were coming in that it was a failure for various reasons. That did not stop them.

And the PNM government, for the most part, just didn’t seem to find their way. I spoke with some of the politicians over the years, and they were about the same as the UNC politicians with a different allegiance.

Will the change be enough? I’m waiting to see, but I’m not hopeful with the same political leader of the UNC running things. Will foreign exchange become more easily had? Will issues with electricity and water be addressed? Will Trinidad and Tobago diversify the economy, and will they be random stabs at it or will there be something that works? Will there be constitutional reform?

I have no idea.

So let’s see what the new administration does. Winning an election means you convinced people you will do the subjectively right things. Staying in power is pretty much the same.

Running a country, on the other hand, has been an elusive goal of government in Trinidad and Tobago.

Having watched both parties for a few decades, you’ll excuse me if I’m comfortably numb.

The Mediocrity of Anomancy

A book cover, beige. The title: "Anomancy: A treatise on the reading of the folds and wrinkles of the anuse", by Zhuang Yunfei
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Yes, it’s a real book. No, I didn’t read it.

I found it by flipping through reels on Facebook and coming across an author who was pointing it out and saying, “Don’t buy this book, buy my book!” in so many words. I know where she’s coming from, but I also don’t want to tie up her writing with this title though she chose to.

It is, less subtly, a study on assholes.

This it seems is something my social media feeds have been rife with. Not the actual physical anal sphincter, but the relatively new popular way of describing just about anyone that someone disagrees with.

So people are spending a lot of time talking about assholes. We all have probably seen it. Presently, it’s the last few days before an election in Trinidad and Tobago with assholes hiring music trucks to blare their political rhetoric – let’s be kind and call them well intentioned lies for the most part – are attempting to sway voters. Really, they’re just annoying wide swathes of people. They’re assholes. And people will elect… assholes.

If that doesn’t deserve a book, I don’t know what does. That’s something I’d love to read about, but instead I read the symptoms in social media feeds mainly about other assholes. For example, anyone in Donald Trump’s administrative circle are really popular as assholes, and people seem quite happy detailing every little fold, anything that has stuck to it, and if you stay on social media long enough you’ll even catch the scent of assholes.

In the particular instance of Donald Trump, after 100 days, it’s gotten rather pungent.

This is not to say that he and his administration haven’t done some good things, but anything contentious related to Donald Trump’s administration is pretty much about them being assholes, or a withering defense of them not being assholes. In the great debates on social media, it’s basically a grading of how much of an asshole one is in this present administration. I’m not an expert, I wouldn’t want to be, and no, I won’t do an interview on it.

So my feed is basically full of people describing their own version of what an asshole is, and describing it in graphic detail.

What did I do to everyone? Why do they keep showing me assholes at various angles?

In the context of politicians, I pretty much view them all as assholes with rare exception. I can’t think of one right now, even pretending to have a gun to my head. Some might call me jaded, I call it experience.

Anyway. To this Anomancy thing. A study of assholes. I won’t read the book, but I can give you my thoughts on maybe it could be about.

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Let’s Talk About That Hyperspace Bypass In Democrat and Republican Terms.

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There’s a lot that has happened in short order in the United States, and I have to say – I’m not really that happy about it. It’s not that I didn’t expect it, but expectations and seeing reality form are two different things.

It’s a lot to soak in.

Because things have gotten so weird, I want to express my thoughts on hyperspace bypasses. If we follow that metaphor, we can see that the Vogons demonstrate both Democrat and Republican behavior.

Since everyone is busy picking on all the idiocy that is happening that is the new Republican Party (or some argue, the old Republican party with the mask dropped), I’ll start with the Democrats:

Democrat-Like Vogon Behaviors

  1. Endless Committees and Task Forces
    • Prioritize forming committees to analyze and deliberate endlessly before making decisions, ensuring everyone feels included, even if progress is slow.
  2. Complex Legislation
    • Craft convoluted, overly detailed laws designed to address every possible edge case but often bogged down in impractical implementation.
  3. Hyper-Regulation
    • Advocate for strict oversight in the name of fairness, equity, and environmental protection, often leading to labyrinthine rules that frustrate implementation.
  4. Compassionate Bureaucracy
    • Attempt to frame authoritarian decisions as necessary for the greater good or social justice, sometimes overlooking individual autonomy in favor of collective solutions.
  5. Poetry as Policy
    • Use elaborate rhetoric and idealistic language to justify policies that can seem disconnected from pragmatic realities (akin to Vogon poetry’s abstract absurdity).

The Democrats basically represent a system that the American public sees as broken, partly because the Democratic party is the last party in power. Is that fair? Maybe not, but Luigi Mangione didn’t kill a CEO because he thought things were going well with healthcare insurance, and the support he has demonstrates a level of anger at a system seen as unjust. The election of Trump is pretty much the same thing, it seems.

Never-mind the lobbyism and corporate interests, but that’s sort of common with the Republicans.

So let’s move on to the Republicans.

Republican-Like Vogon Behaviors

  1. Rigid Rule Enforcement
    • Emphasize strict adherence to rules and traditions, often prioritizing authority and order over adaptability or change, or justice.
  2. Deregulation Irony
    • Push for the removal of “unnecessary regulations” while creating equally complex systems of their own, especially around national security or corporate interests.
  3. Cultural Conservatism
    • Justify Vogon-like authoritarianism as preserving “the way things have always been,” valuing tradition over experimentation or innovation.
  4. Business-Centric Authoritarianism
    • Advocate for policies that favor corporations or industry elites while framing rigid decisions as necessary for economic growth.
  5. Blunt Messaging
    • Communicate in direct, sometimes harsh terms, prioritizing effectiveness over nuanced or empathetic delivery, much like a Vogon officer giving orders.

That speaks for itself, doesn’t it? The blunt messaging of Trump, often filtered by people that follow him as “but what he really meant was”, and the fact that he found all the big tech billionaires for his inauguration… and the conservatism behind “Make America Great Again” shows a demand for going back to the way things were, which has people who couldn’t even vote not too long ago understandably nervous.

The ‘deregulation’ lines up with the ‘Department of Efficiency’ which, ironically, has two leaders – one who made a strangely familiar salute, and one of East Indian descent.

Yeah, this tracks.

Certainly there are some things that the Republicans and Democrats have in a Vogon context, right?

Shared Vogon Behaviors

  1. Lack of Transparency
    • Both sides may engage in Vogon-esque obfuscation, making processes and decisions inaccessible or incomprehensible to the general public.
  2. Red Tape Galore
    • Generate systems so mired in procedure and formalities that they hinder meaningful action, regardless of the side they represent, while they say that they will effectively remove red tape… with more red tape.
  3. Self-Interest as Principle
    • Veil self-serving actions in a cloak of principle or necessity, creating a “justification poetry” for what might otherwise be seen as selfish or myopic decisions.
  4. Overzealous Compliance
    • Strictly enforce rules (often ones they create) in a way that feels overly punitive or needlessly bureaucratic to outsiders.

This all tracks. The problem isn’t the Democrats and Republicans, it’s both of them. It’s the Vogons.

Vogons don’t even like Vogons, yet we keep electing Vogons because if we don’t the wrong Vogon might get elected.

The parties created a system that works for them, and they call upon the people only when they need the people.

I realize that this may upset people of either party, but it’s my experience that Vogons are generally unhappy anyway.

I’ll lean on Buckminster Fuller to finish this.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the new model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller

2024 Ruminations: Navigating Toward 2025

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This post has been in the making over the course of a few days, much longer than usual, but I have been ruminating and getting interrupted by life and it’s distractions which ended up helping me finish it. Writing is like that sometimes.

Everyone’s going to be writing lists and going over the highlights of 2024, making predictions about 2025, and otherwise fighting for readership in the “Everyone Else Is Doing It” spiral toward zero. Sure, when you’re younger, it seems bold and new – but trust me, it’s not that bold or that new.

It’s outright boring when you start abstracting it away. What matters is what matters to you, and if you’re going to spend your time talking about other people, or waxing nostalgic about a single year (!) I have bad news: AI can probably do it better than you. It probably should, too, since those are low hanging fruit.

“Lemme see what happened this year and write about it! And I can write about next year and it will likely be all wrong but if I get one thing right the whole planet will bow to my wisdom!“

“What should I write?“, Boring People, 0-2025
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“In the Future, the World Will Make Sense”

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I was taught at a young age that the world made sense but when I grew up I found that it made as much sense as we had made sense of it.

I suppose as a child being made comfortable with the idea that the world made perfect sense made me easier to deal with.

Some people never seem to get past the need for the world to make sense. The very idea that we don’t understand the world is too much for most of us. I wake up every day wondering about something I don’t yet have the answer to – at least one thing. Every morning when I wake up there’s an implicit acknowledgement that the world doesn’t make sense and it’s fun learning new things.

Some people don’t see the world that way. Some people fear new things. Some people prefer the comfort of belief that they do understand everything. These people trouble me. In fact, they trouble other people who believe different things. No, I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about politics, which effectively is another religion. If I point out weaknesses in a candidate, these people default to thinking I must be on the ‘other side’. That’s almost never true.

People pick their own narratives, and there is nothing wrong with that. The only side anyone should pick in a democracy, in my humble opinion, is their own. You’re supposed to vote your interests in a democracy.

In this past election, some people voted for the building that they sought comfort in. Some voted for the wrecking ball because that building bothered them for some reason, though there are no plans to build anything in it’s place. This election is a reset on a lot of things in that regard, and the next one could be better, or it could be worse, and everyone will have an opinion on that and some will be told their opinion by people with impossible hair on their favorite news channel.

All you need to be a pundit is to get people to believe that they are less intelligent than you are, and it’s alarming how easy it is. Cherry picking facts, painting with a broad brush, and hair that defies the body it’s on.

Part of getting past that is understanding our own biases. Someone in an urban setting sees the world one way, someone in a suburban setting sees it another way, and someone in a rural setting sees it in yet another way. Each one grows up in a different culture and while we like to think they have the same values, there are small differences because of the different cultures.

If you can step outside of your biases long enough, the world is not the same. Yet political pundits like you right there where you are. The systems, many of which seem broken, are designed to keep you where you are – that’s the role of bureaucracy, to stall change. And the people who profit from it all? There you are.

Does it make them bad people? Nope. Being ‘bad people’, too, has a lot to do with culture. Famously, the Greeks called anyone who wasn’t Greek a barbarian, and here we are still waiting for the barbarians.

…Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy

For lack of actual barbarians, maybe the political pundits should be who we call barbarians.

That would make more sense to me.

How Democracy Died.

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Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”

It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”

It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.

This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?

Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.

There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.

If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.

Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.

You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?

Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.

And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.

That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.

Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.

The Oversimplification of Democracy.

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There’s a lot of “Vote for xyz or zyx might win!” going on already in social media, with more than 5 months before an election.

It’s a sign that people are used to a system so broken that they demand crutches.

Personally, I detest that sort of fearmongering. With so much time left before an election, the candidates can and should be working harder to get the votes. Potential voters shouldn’t be smeared by their supporters for not settling so early.

Every election is a negotiation between candidates and voters.

I didn’t want to write about the crappy choices we have for President of the United States in 2024, but recent conversations on Mastodon just irk me a bit.

To get votes, candidates have to convince voters that they’ll work on issues that are important to the voters. These should not be cults. These should be people with open eyes and realistic expectations, which is as hard to find these days as a technology announcement that doesn’t have ‘AI’ in it.

The Negotiation.

Everyone gets so stuck on votes, but the implicit issue is not the votes but what the votes are for. Votes are for ideals and issues, and we vote for candidates because of ideals and issues – and fear. Fear strips the power away from us. It makes us victims of our choices.

To settle for a candidate 5 months and some weeks before an election when one could be demanding more of them seems like bad negotiation to me. It also seems like bad democracy. Candidates should be encouraged to be better candidates. As it happens, the United States is pretty polarized right now because of Trump, and the supporters of Trump will say it’s because of everyone who disagrees with them. There’s no middle ground when we look back at January 6th and the attack on the Capitol, we see just how divided we are – and how easily manipulated some are. It is something to worry about.

That does not mean we shouldn’t negotiate. I wouldn’t go on record for voting for anyone this early into an election because it’s bad negotiation. We certainly don’t have all that we want. We also can’t get all that we want, but we can certainly negotiate better than, “OK, you have my vote, I’ll hope for the best Mr. Politician making campaign promises.” When you have one candidate farting up a storm in court, the other candidate has every opportunity to do better with 5 months+.

The worst thing for democracy are elections so polarized that both sides vote out of fear. Everyone loses. There are no Trump supporters interested in changing the minds of Biden supporters, and vice versa. The fact that neither group of voters feels that their candidate is good enough is reflected in the fear mongering. It also shows a lack of confidence in their candidate. A candidate should be able to stand on their own two feet and attract votes. Any time you have to market a product so viciously, you have a shitty product.

I’ll say this: there’s no way I’ll vote for Trump. That does not automatically mean that Biden gets my vote. Biden has to earn a vote, just like any other candidate, and while he may be the better candidate in my eyes, that does not yet make him a good candidate.

People who are already saying that they’ll vote for their candidate are doing themselves a disservice in my eyes, which is always the problem when decisions seem so clear: The candidate doesn’t feel uncomfortable, the candidate doesn’t have to work as hard, and who suffers? The people, of course. When the President spoke at Morehouse and people were showing unity with Palestinians (not Hamas, as some like to color it), they were doing their jobs as members of a democracy, signaling to a candidate an issue that they care about enough to protest. The candidate may realize that they should do more, if they’re paying attention. That’s the point. That’s negotiating.

What’s interesting is how campaign funding balances on issues like this. We’re seeing it play out with protests over what Israel is doing in Gazah. The unflinching support of the United States in killing civilians is not popular by any poll. How much is that campaign funding changing that?

The Third Parties.

Third party candidates are often judged based on how the two main political parties do.

“So and so stole votes…” No, to steal something it had to have belonged to someone in the first place. The presumption alone that they belonged to the candidate in the first place is the height of disrespect. Had the candidate that lost spoke to the issues those people voted for, they probably wouldn’t have lost.

Putting that on people who didn’t vote for the candidate effectively dismisses the issues that they feel are important, and it’s condescending. No one asks, “Hey, why didn’t you vote for my candidate?”

The truth is that we do need stronger third parties because the parties we have aren’t too concerned about the voters. They dictate and manipulate issues because they always get to pull out the trump card , “But that other person might win and it will be the end of the world!”. I’ve heard that since… the days of Jimmy Carter, though I imagine I heard it much younger during the Nixon years.

Third parties, in my eyes, demonstrate issues that the other parties aren’t concerned about. Young people should get involved with them or start their own, not because they have a chance of winning a presidential candidacy but because you nurture a seed to grow a tree, and the trees we have are old and rotten. Do I suggest spending a vote on them? It is not for me to suggest that, but you can grow a party without voting for them, by supporting them in other ways and making issues you care about get better visibility. Third parties may not win elections, but they certainly can make issues more visible.

That’s an important function. And should those 3rd parties get votes, then it says that those issues meant something to the people who voted, more so than what the other candidates stood for or against.

Losing votes to a 3rd candidate isn’t the fault of those that voted that way. It’s the fault of the candidate that lost those votes to a 3rd party candidate. Some people try to flip that around and say that voting for a 3rd party candidate is a wasted vote, and to an extent that might be true – but if it were a wasted vote, or a lost vote, it would have no value to the person that takes umbrage with it, and implicitly it dismisses the concerns of a fellow voter without even a fair hearing.

Why? Because the system seems broken? It does seem that way. Yet if we concede that the system is broken and don’t do anything to fix the system, those 3rd parties may be the only path to fixing it since the two major parties don’t seem interested in doing so.

Of course, we can just keep doing what we’ve been doing and expecting a different result. For me, any change will likely be beyond the scope of my lifetime; I’m on the downward slope. Yet there are those younger, coming up, who can make things just a bit better, incrementally, and deserve the opportunity to vote their conscience regardless of how others feel about it.

Their future depends on it.

A Battle of Perspectives.

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I had just returned to Florida from a 30 day ‘vacation’ in Trinidad and Tobago, and I was invited to have dinner with some friends who both worked where I had in different departments. It was before the turn of the millennium, my friend was in the midst of domestication, and I had some pepper sauce I had made while down there from bird peppers picked in the yard.

As usual, it was a good dinner, and as I recall I had also brought some rum from Trinidad – I never really enjoyed rum, but it was something to bring from my recent trip and there were no two better people to have it at the time. After dinner, we sat at the pool overlooking the pond, and somehow the whole Middle East came up. Everyone liked talking to me about the Middle East for some reason; I had no roots there, I only had access to the information everyone else had access to. Maybe it was because I was a veteran. Maybe it was because of a project I had completed for Israel when I worked where they did. Maybe it was because I was brown. Maybe it was because I grew up partly outside of the United States.

I dreaded these conversations because I grew up around Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago, and I had grown up around Jews in Ohio. In neither place did either group speak ill of the other at the time. They were busy being who they were, living their lives.

She brings up Israel, and I had only recently found out she was Jewish. She talked about how terrible it was that her people were being attacked all the time in Israel, and I agreed – civilians being attacked is never a good thing, and at the time random rockets had been tossed at Israel from some group or the other that were Palestinian, and she went on about how terrible these Palestinians were. My knowledge of the area being less than it is now, I did know that the Palestinians she was talking about were living in occupied territories, not unlike the ‘Reservations’ in the United States for Native Americans.

Being me – I have an unfortunate tendency to be me – I mentioned that it was terrible, that it wasn’t good of them to be launching rockets at civilian targets. It was a problem, there was no doubt about it, but then I asked, “Well, what do they want?”

She looked at me, having been caught mid-rant, as if I had grown another head. I expanded. “Well, if they’re attacking people, they want something. People don’t go around just launching missiles without a reason”. She stared at me a moment, and she said they wanted to kill Jews. That was pretty obvious, so I asked, “Well, why do they want to kill Jews?” and suddenly I was painfully lectured through World War II history, and the Holocaust – which did happen, by the way, and it’s shameful that I have to write that.

After she wound down, having heard her out, I said, “It seems weird that people who have so much in common would be so violent with each other.” She asked what I meant, and I said, “Well, kosher and halal are pretty much the same idea, the same concept, as an example.” She told me they were not the same thing, but a rabbi1 and I had eaten in a Middle Eastern place in New York City years before, and he simply asked if the meat was halal and was fine with that.

She had become very upset. She’d brought it up, I honestly didn’t want to talk about it anyway, so I tried to change the topic but she wouldn’t let it go. They hated her people. It was deeply personal for her, and I felt bad because she was a friend and I didn’t want her to be upset. The whole time, her husband, my other friend was quiet, but that was his way.

These people, she told me, were animals.

I’ve never liked when people do that, so I said that they weren’t animals, and that there had to be some reasoning – however flawed it might be – that had them upset enough to launch missiles randomly into a human populace.

She told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I didn’t know the history, and got up to go inside – but before she did, I said, “You’re right. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t know the history of Israel.” In a moment, she was smiling again.

She was absolutely correct. I had no idea of the history. So she sat down and told me the history, late into the night, and I listened and asked questions carefully.

I got a big hug before I left and all was well.

The More Palestinian Perspective.

Over the years since then, I’ve encountered more Muslims than Jews that talked about this issue, and they gave me their perspectives, which were sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. So I head that side as well, though I never heard them refer to Jews as animals2. Of course, none of them were Palestinians, and the only anchoring point they had with the Palestinians was a common religion.

Yet no one really helped the Palestinians in meaningful ways. The surrounding dictatorships only seem to use it to political ends, not to end the politics of it.

What I Learned.

The tensions have been built up over the decades – 7 of them – and nothing has been sorted out. An occupied people would of course have some extremists that want to fight back. Until recently, Palestinians weren’t really given voice in the public forum. How could that happen? Everything that came out of the area, everything that went into the area, passed through Israel’s hands. Yet not all Palestinians have resorted to violence. Hamas came into power, but it’s not really a democracy in the occupied territories, and how could there be a democracy there within what is cast as the Middle East’s only democracy?

And when you live in Israel, you don’t want exploding things hitting civilians either. So you get angry Israelis when that happens.

So there’s a lot of angry people doing angry things, but some angry people are better armed, and have mandatory military service that seems mainly to be about keeping the Palestinians in the occupied territories while settlers move in.

The situation is out of control, clearly. The Balfour declaration was born of war, quickly following the declaration of war by the British Empire on the Ottoman Empire, garnering support of Jewish people for the war against the Ottoman Empire. The whole existence of Israel seems to have been built on war, and it battles for existence are extraordinary.

Yet what we’re seeing today is not a part of history, it’s a culmination of history, and while history was being studied, the world has changed. We’re connected now to see things we could not see before, we’re more aware of human rights, and empires are waning. We should not be killing civilians anymore, unlike what Putin’s Russia has been doing in Ukraine. We say we hold ourselves to a higher standard.

It’s time for the situation of Palestinians and Israelis to be resolved, once and for all, not as a final solution, but as a lasting solution.

But it’s not being resolved as the world watches the same mistakes being made again. I cringe at what Israel has been doing, just as I cringed at the actions of Hamas on October 7th, but disproportionately.

I hope in 10 years this is all a bad bit of history, but from what I’m seeing, it could either be remembered as a terrible part of this century or just more of the same. The world wants it to end.

  1. I’d fixed his laptop that he was returning to a store while he was in line ahead of me, and only later found out he was a rabbi. We became friends, though I lost track of him in his travels and mine. I hope he’s well. ↩︎
  2. I had an Uncle who was Hindu that called the Palestinians animals, and was a big Netanyahu supporter in the 90s. ↩︎