politics

“In the Future, the World Will Make Sense”

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

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.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments

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.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

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.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

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. ↩︎

Truth in Political Advertising.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Imagine.

Imagine what I tell you.

Imagine what I tell you is true.

Imagine what I tell you is true.

What I tell you is true. Do not imagine.

Do not believe others.

I can only help you if I stay in power. I know you’re disappointed about this, this, this, and this, but if you don’t vote for me, bad things will happen. If you don’t vote for me, bad people will do bad things.

This is not extortion of your future. This is the way things have always been. This is the way things will always be. There is no way to change things.

This ad brought to you by YourLovingPoliticalParty SuperPAC.

Protesting The World.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I have avoided this topic for some time.

I oversaturated myself yesterday about the college protests over the Israeli-Hamas war, where civilians have been showing up dead faster than police can arrest protesters around the world in the United States. Clearly, I have a bias, and that bias is for civilians, not a ‘side’, but in supporting the civilians, I end up having to look hard at the people killing and maiming them.

The children didn’t do anything wrong but be born in an accident of geography that happens to be behind walls – or in front of them – on every side of their existence. That’s pretty shitty1.

As someone without a distinct tribe, that’s what I see. As a TCK and a hyper-multicultural, I’m not vested in the tribalisms of yesterday, the present, and the future. I just see people.

This morning, washing dishes, I thought about it, and I recalled my youth and what my mother said about cleaning my room.

Anecdote on Perspective

As a boy, my room was… well, not something that would pass any form of inspection. My mother, who then in the 1970s spent all day cleaning, boycotted my room for her own reasons – some selfish, some not – and tasked me with cleaning my room. This was one of the first responsibilities given to me, and I did not like it. Since I didn’t like it, I didn’t spend much time on it – but time is relative, and as a child, play time is always less time than responsibility time.

This did not work well for my mother, who would ask me if I had cleaned my room and I would say, “Yes!”. Of course I said that. The backyard beckoned, the friends on bicycles beckoned, even the dog beckoned. And, of course, it was never clean. She would stand at the door, look in my room, and say, “That’s not clean. Keep cleaning.”

I didn’t know what she meant. Everything is exactly where it should be, in my eyes, even the dirty socks in the toybox thrown there in a rush so I could go out and play. I had no idea what she meant.

One day, apparently after taking a deep breath, she stood at the door of my room and looked in and said, “Come here.” So I did, and she said, “When you look at your room, pretend that you’re me and look at your room from here.” From that vantage, I could see I had not hidden my mess as well as I had thought.

Soon, my room looked clean from that vantage point, a tribute to my mother showing a different perspective, flawed by being twice my height at the time. It was flawed for other reasons, but from her perspective, it worked because she didn’t have to look at a dirty room when she walked by2.

This would serve me well on Navy and Marine Corps bases: Learning what inspectors looked for and making sure it was sat(isfactory). But it didn’t teach me why the room had to be clean. That would happen as I matured.

Battles of Perspectives.

The world has become so polarized that it seems often we forget to consider things outside of ourselves, or our tribes. As someone generally outside of the tribalisms, I often see individuals and groups fighting over things that they disagree about and forgetting everything they agree about. Sometimes it’s a matter of social inertia. Not everyone is cut out to be a free thinking individual3. I used to get upset about the blind followers, but having interacted with them over a half-century, I understand why some of them are the way they are and are probably better off that way.

Even so, the leaders of groups have a responsibility to their followers to be mindful of what they’re doing. Eventually, because humans tend to more vocal disagreement than agreement, people split off and do their own thing – which gives us diversity of perspectives that we often ignore. As someone expressly against the killing of children, Israel’s actions and policies do not align with what I would be willing to agree with – yet I cannot deny that the Jews I have known over the years deserve a place to live in peace. Israel increasingly doesn’t seem to be that place for anyone. I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but if you have to kill children to protect yourselves, you have to wonder what you’re protecting yourself from.

On the flip side, I don’t think kidnapping civilians is something that’s tenable. In fact, it seems an act of desperation, that things are so bad that you need to make a point by absconding with another human to imprison them until someone else meets your terms. Anything negotiated at gunpoint only results in ceasefires, and ceasefires are just pauses in war where children are born to die when the ceasefire is over.

Many people are trying to clean the room by hiding their socks in their toyboxes when it comes to ethical stances, while some are simply protesting to make the world a better place – a better place from their own perspective.

Protests.

When things get bad enough, people are moved to side with something because they want to feel like they have done something. When I saw the invasion of Ukraine, I wanted to go over and help with the medical as a former Navy Corpsman, and explored it seriously only to find that I had become old, I had a wonky knee sometimes, that battlefield medicine had evolved a lot in tools and equipment, and that I would be a liability in a war zone4. I had purchased tickets to get there that I cancelled, not because of the potential for death or injury to myself, but because I could cause others to die or be injured.

It was humbling in ways that I still wrestle with at times.

So I got on Twitter, pre-Musk era, and supported there through social media, because I could do that but I found myself looking at the mob and seeing things that I considered overstepping. I pulled back. I still support Ukraine sovereignty, but I am careful about weighing the cost to others.

Protesting for or against something isn’t as high of stakes, but in a way it is. I believe in peaceful protest, but peaceful protest always gets people together with perspectives that may be slightly different, that we overlook because at the time they may work towards our ends – and sometimes that hits us in the soft nether regions later on and undoes the good we thought we were doing.

It’s like when the Soviet Union was still a thing. Pilots in Germany would come perilously close to starting a war as the pilots tested each other constantly. With too many people on alert for different perspectives interacting so closely, things can get very hairy very quickly. Sooner or later, something goes just a little too far and both sides need to pull back because they don’t actually want a war. Only fools want war, thinking it’s like a Hollywood production of Rambo. If fools were the only victims of other fools, humanity would be much stronger for it, but fools have a tendency to kill people who are not fools simply because they disagree with them – even if they’re on the same ‘side’. There’s really no such thing as friendly fire. Just fools with excuses.

We should first do no harm.

Israel And Palestine

The sad truth is that until now, Palestinian children weren’t really counted when they were alive and now we count their dead. The sad truth is that the whole situation could have been resolved decades ago and the Palestinians have found themselves to be convenient pawns of the big players in Middle Eastern politics. The sad truth is that those same children grow to become adults and don’t want to be pawns anymore.

It would seem that the protesters for the Palestinians have the same thought, that they see something that should be fixed and want it to be fixed. This I can agree with wholeheartedly and without reservation. It’s clean, it’s ethical, and it reflects the values of humanity that we’ve all been taught at some basic level.

What I cannot agree with is supporting Hamas. What I cannot agree with is supporting the policies of Israel that have galvanized the attention of the world by their ruthlessness and impunity for human life, as Russia has shown in Ukraine.

I’m all for people living peacefully, but that seems almost oxymoronic because of the lack of mindfulness of leaders of followers, and of followers that should know better.

Now the violence is spilling blood on the other side of the planet, all because we as a species have let the issue sit for far too long.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know what the answers aren’t.

The answer is not ignoring the problem – we’ve done that for decades. The answer is not funding weapons to one side, ally or not. The answer is not becoming as polarized as we allowed the whole situation to become. The answer is not creating laws that make it illegal to criticize a country’s policies and actions. The answer is not violence between protesting groups. The answer is not making the world more unsafe. The answer is not giving to one group at the cost of another. The answer is not electing politicians who ignore the problems because of election cycles while effectively shouting ‘squirrel!’ and pointing at some other issue.

Sometimes, we have to sit down and wrestle with our humanity and acknowledge how ugly we can be, even if our own tribes don’t see it because they’re too busy dehumanizing the other side.

Humans are always stronger together, except when humans are together.

So I go back to my favorite quote and wonder what we can build together that would make things better, because the world is broken and we can’t afford the amount of glue to fix it. We have the technology and will to do great harm, but no one seems as intent on the greater good.

We should change that, through social media, through interacting with each other even when we disagree, and find ways to build things because otherwise we’ll run out of things to destroy.

We should be better than this. Let’s try that.

  1. I try not to use profanity, but sometimes profanity is the only way to express something. I wrestled with that sentence. ↩︎
  2. Closing the door would have helped her too, but it wasn’t something I would dare say at the time. ↩︎
  3. including some free thinking individuals. ↩︎
  4. I had good friends who allowed me the dignity of coming to that conclusion myself. ↩︎

The False Dilemma and Democracy.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

For no good reason, I was going through the list of logical fallacies and, given that the US Presidential Election is coming up, the False Dilemma stood out:

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many. (Wikipedia, accessed 22 March 2024).

This has been one of the things that has confused me for some time with regard to democracy, amongst other things. In the context of democracy, it seems that the two party system has become dominant – the binary system. I don’t know why this is. It can’t be a simple reason.

I did what we do these days. I asked ChatGPT why democracies devolve into two party systems. You can see it’s response through the image, and it made me look up the bullet points of First-Past-The-Post, Winner-Takes-All Effect (in the context of voting), Duverger’s Law, etc.

Most interesting is the last paragraph:

…While these factors explain the prevalence of two-party systems in certain democracies, it’s important to note that not all democracies follow this pattern. Some countries have proportional representation or mixed electoral systems that encourage the presence and success of multiple political parties, leading to multi-party systems that reflect a wider range of political perspectives.

This got me curious. Which countries are these? The answer is (in alphabetical order): Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden.

That’s 8 countries. There are a total of 74 democracies in the world as of 2024, with 50 of them considered ‘flawed democracies’ according to WorldPopulationReview, which references the 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

I filled out the form to get the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and wondered why I needed to fill out a form.

There are 195 countries in the world. Less than half are democracies (74/195) according to that information, but according to other information there is more democracy:

OurWorldInData.org/democracy | CC BY, source link: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-nondemocracies-fh?time=earliest..2022

That’s a bit confusing. 47.14% of 195 countries being non-democracies is 91.923 countries, and while I love precision, countries are not decimals. 52.86% of the world being electoral democracies means that 103.077 countries are electoral democracies. It’s just math.

We’ll have to accept that there is some error in what constitutes a democracy or not. Let’s work with the original 74 democracies.

Of the 74 democracies, only 24 are not considered flawed. How many of those countries that are not 2-party systems considered not flawed? According to this data, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden are not flawed, but Brazil, India and Italy are.

5/8ths of democracies that are not 2 party systems are considered democracies, 3/8ths are considered flawed democracies.

When I started writing this, I had hoped that countries with more than 2 political parties would be considered more democratic, and on the scoring it’s not very clean cut. In fact, Brazil, India and Italy being flawed democracies demonstrates that a system not made up of 2 parties isn’t a silver bullet.

Is it that false dilemma’s can have more than 2 options? It’s possible.

A false dilemma is also an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available, and maybe that’s the real problem: It’s not the number of options, it’s access to better options.

Any adult knows that being stuck with options we don’t agree with is unfortunately common. Yet a democracy is supposed to allow for better options. Why aren’t we seeing that?

We Gotta Do Better Than this.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments
Joe Trump, effectively the main presidential candidate in 2024.

I don’t know how we got here, with Presidential Candidates like Donald Trump and Joe Biden as presidential candidates.

Well, actually, I do have an idea, but I don’t know that it’s right or true. What I do know is that both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are not attractive in any way. I remember a similar time with Gore and G.W. Bush, and look how well that turned out – we invaded Iraq for no good reason, the manufactured consent being about weapons of mass destruction and the only ones we found were the ones we brought with us.

Many of we veterans were against that. Nobody really listened. Look how well that turned out.

Trump is… well. An ambulatory legal disaster. Biden is… at best, conflicted. Both candidates can’t keep things straight because they are old. There’s a line somewhere between experienced and old that they have both crossed some time ago. One harnesses the anger at an establishment that doesn’t work for them while doing nothing about it, even making it worse, while the other is running on not being the other guy.

Reproduction rights – oh, who are we fooling, they’re women’s rights – will be a part of the campaign. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade does not make sense to me. If you’re religious, you believe in God, and God is supposed to sort out things at a personal level according to a variety of scriptures. Legislating away choices that are supposed to be between a person and their deity of choice or lack thereof seems peculiar to me. I don’t have to agree with someone else’s choice that doesn’t affect me.

In fact, that particular choice regarding abortion only impacts taxpayers when there is no abortion. That’s where we then have the need for social programs for humans that one day will become adults for at least 18 years. Do I agree with abortion personally? Sometimes, sometimes not, but it boils down to it not being my choice and I won’t force someone to have a child they don’t want or cannot support. That just sounds like a bad mix. So in my mind, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade seems… stupid. Meanwhile, in Alabama, things got really weird.

People do things I disagree with all the time. I’m not special enough to dictate to anyone else how they should do things. I wouldn’t want to be. My own life is weird enough. And how is this an election issue?

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has no real oversight, which is just astounding when you see how much lobbyism impacts the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is hardly ‘supreme’ unless in a Taco Bell Burrito sense, with similar effects to the dietary tract.

What else is there. Oh, growing socioeconomic divides that neither candidate speaks to in a meaningful way.

We have the “I wish Israel would listen” issue with 65% of Americans against what Israel is doing to some degree. Neither party wants to take on that, and when most decisions cannot be explained in politics it usually becomes about money. Around the world where the wars are, we see corporate needs. Ukraine – oil, minerals, and farmland. Where the Palestinians are – were, hopefully still are – oil. Let’s not forget what’s going on in the Congo.

I like capitalism. I do. The system we have now, though, is overreach without a reach-around. There do not seem to be checks and balances. The masses, upset, are told what the issues are, the candidates are told what the talking points are, and the lobbyists keep everything lubricated to get the interests of those with more free speech than others to center stage.

Dystopian fiction doesn’t have a market when we live it, so unless you plan to do some time traveling to sell your book, forget it.

There are third party candidates. The major parties will have people decrying them about splitting the vote, but I have something to tell you. Voting for a bad candidate to win is just that. That is a wasted vote, and if you don’t like your candidate, you’re telling your political party of choice that you’ll keep taking it. That you like it. And they won’t change.

I know the blind followers of political parties. The rhetoric is the same, the names and issues changed or inverted to just keep the herds going on the paths chosen for us. I do not like their choices, but like abortion, it’s not my right to tell them how to vote and in the same vein, it’s not their right to tell me how I should vote.

Somewhere along the way, people might vote for their interests again rather than playing a fabricated tug of war on issues that goes out of it’s way to dehumanize the ‘others’. ‘Trump Supporters are stupid’, ‘Libtards’, etc – not the way to have a meaningful discussion about the future of a nation, and implicitly, the world – a world that is watching, with enemies that are probably laughing at the whole thing.

They should. It’s idiotic.

Whatever part of the political spectrum that you fall on, all I have to say is that you should do better with your candidates – and I’ll throw the third party candidates in there as well.

If you can’t be critical of all the candidates, you’re not a voter. You’re a sheep.

That’s what I have to say about the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t expect to write about it because I’m not interested in politics, I’m interested in doing better, and it doesn’t seem like politics is a part of that.

A Thought On Democracy.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
By Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp and Garrett Hellenthal – López, S., van Dorp, L., & Hellenthal, G. (2015). Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate. Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online, 11(Suppl 2), 57–68. http://doi.org/10.4137/EBO.S33489 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844272/, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50508700

Those of us in democracies think that they’re the best way of doing things that we have found so far. We tend to think that democracy started off when it was first called democracy by the Greeks.

Yet, if we look throughout human history, we see what democracy looks like.

However you believe humans showed up, be it by deity or evolution, the common thread is that humans started somewhere. From that somewhere, humans scattered all over.

We don’t talk about why because we don’t know why.

We could have fun speculating. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in an area. Maybe one group migrated away from another group because they couldn’t agree on which end of the spear to use when hunting, where the group that used the wrong end was erased by history because of their stupidity. Maybe they couldn’t agree on how many stones to throw at an adulterer. Who knows? The point is that a group made a decision to leave and voted with their feet.

There’s a reason we use this term.

This was democracy. If you didn’t like how things were going you could leave. You could wander off that way in the belief and/or hope that things would get better over there, and maybe it had something with the society where you were.

Humanity did this until it started running into each other again. Our technology advanced, and we could cover greater distances than our ancestors did, and we could do it faster.

Suddenly, there’s nowhere to go. We run into situations these days where nations that are democratic are often split close to 50/50 on decisions, and nobody can leave. No group can get together and form it’s own nation-state, really, because that would require every other nation-state to identify that it is a nation-state.

Nomadic humanity has nowhere to go. We don’t talk about this because there’s quite simply nowhere to go. We can’t go anywhere without bumping into other humans, and there’s always some reason that we can’t get along that magically seems to reinforce those borders where people who are dressed the same wearing rubber gloves. There is a ritual to crossing borders, a ritual which has become more and more complex because people find comfort within their boundaries.

You can get political asylum, but the people within the nation-state you’re going to have to agree that you need it.

We have people that have built walls around other people, then complain about how they behave within those walls even if they don’t agree with the way people do things within those walls. That never ends well unless the wall comes down.

What are these borders worth to us? I’m sure I don’t know. They’re worth it to some people.

For now…

Linguistic Oddities

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

I was sitting having coffee with a few friends, and of course the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel, with lots of civilians getting caught in the crossfire, came up. I mentioned it’s a problem no one seemed to want to compromise on, citing UN Resolution 181, and mentioning truthfully that it’s such a mess that it doesn’t seem like anyone was as right as they wanted to be.

It’s a mess. I don’t know enough, I’m not invested enough, I can’t trust any news source because even the news seems polarized at this point. If you say one side is doing something wrong, people are quick to say you’re supporting the other side. I don’t support the killing or injuring of civilians, so I don’t neatly have a side to pick. It’s not as clean cut as Ukrainians defending their borders against Russia. Criticize Israel, suddenly you’re branded as anti-semitic and people with pitchforks and torches appear out of nowhere. Criticize Hamas, much the same happens. Geography matters in this regard, and since I’m not in the continental United States I do hear a lot more of the anti-American and thus anti-Israel rhetoric as well.

It’s safer to say nothing, really. To do nothing. Yet a history of that has pretty much gotten the world to where it is, and so it gets violent because we didn’t address things when we should have. That’s the story of the world.

It’s a mess, and this post isn’t about that mess but rather an interesting way a meaning has changed for at least some, arguably most, people in English. This is an academic exercise.

Someone brought up that the word ‘semitic’ actually was related to the semitic languages, and that it had become bastardized to mean ‘Jewish’. Since I’m pretty interested in words, I dug in. Here I am, over half a century spinning on the planet, learning that.

Semitic Languages.

Semitic languages are languages that derived from Afro-Asiatic languages, which to me demonstrated how ignorant I was on the topic because I’ve never traipsed through the history of language.

The major Semitic languages are:

  • Arabic,
  • Amharic (Spoken in Ethiopia)
  • Aramaic (Spoken in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria)
  • Hebrew,
  • Maltese and
  • Tigre (Spoken in Sudan)

There are, according to different places, dozens of Semitic languages. Aramaic, being the ‘Language of Jesus‘, surprised me with how widespread it’s usage still is. The world is very big and our thoughts on it almost always too small.

Therefore, it’s peculiar that we use it in the context of only one, Hebrew, these days, but apparently not everyone does otherwise I would not have been told about it. In learning this, I had to dig in.

The Modern Use of Semitic.

These days it seems the most popular use of the word semitic is in ‘anti-semitic’, used to say that something or someone is against Jews for some reason. I’m not, but I have met people who are so I know it’s a real thing.

The use of ‘anti-semitism’ first showed up with Willhelm Marr. Marr’s theories would be a part of the foundation of the genocide the world knew in the Nazi era based on pseudoscience. Marr later allegedly renounced anti-semitism according to Moshe Zimmerman, an Israeli historian.

Still, he introduced the pseudo-scientific racial component into that period. It’s pseudo-science because race is a social contruct and isn’t very scientific at all.

It boggles the mind that we’re still using an inaccurate phrase coined by someone who helped pave the way to the Holocaust, but there it is. We don’t like swastikas or reminders of that terrible part of human history, yet we retain one of it’s labels in it’s original form.

I’m not going to say that we should stop using it. That would be like trying to change the wind by blowing and flapping my hands in the opposite direction, but it shows how things persist even when they’re wrong.

In fact, one could argue that the modern use of the phrase ‘anti-semitic’ is ‘anti-semitic’ in both the modern context of the use of the word (loosely, ‘against Jews’) based on who coined the phrase in the first place, or even against everyone else who speaks a semitic language other than Hebrew and is being afforded no context.

Speaking for myself, from now on if people have a problem with Jews, I’ll use ‘anti-Jewish’, but I won’t wander around correcting people.

Putting that all into context, we have two linguistically Semitic people at war and only one side is considered Semitic, which seems odd too. I don’t have answers. I’m just boggled by humanity once again, using words that could be connecting people but instead using it in divisive ways.

We are such strange creatures.