elections

Why did Colin Powell defect from his old political party?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Colin-Powell-defect-from-his-old-political-party/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

This question represents a severe disability in one’s comprehension of a democracy.

It’s an attitude very much like what Elon Musk displayed when he thought suing advertisers for abandoning his increasingly Nazified platform was justifiable.

It would be like walking past a McDonald’s restaurant and getting fined for not stopping in for a burger and fries or not agreeing to make an additional purchase after being prompted by their upselling suggestions.

Imagine being charged double on your meal because you didn’t want to pay extra for a hot steaming pile of sugar called a “pie.” This cartoon scenario represents the same level and quality of entitled thinking in this question.

No one is obligated to go along with their party in a democracy. Being a political party member is not indentured servitude unless you have no self-respect or ability to think for yourself. You are admitting to your willingness to accept life as a baby bird whose mouth yawns open to await the trickle-down meal of mental stimulation to determine how and what you should think.

How is that a democracy in your mind?

It’s not.

How is that not a grotesque degree of abdication of your free exercise of will?

It’s a betrayal of everything we have had the luxury of enjoying because our forefathers sacrificed their lives fighting for and dying for the right to dissent from their party.

Anyone who steps away from a party is sending the most potent message possible that that party no longer represents their best interests.

The last thing anyone owes a political party is their loyalty.

Genuinely considering oneself a patriot who loves and is dedicated to freedom means protecting one’s integrity and family, friends, and community by walking away from a corrupt party. That’s not a defection but a courageous act of patriotism.

As terrible a VP as Mike Pence can be considered, he at least redeemed himself by showing the courage of a true patriot with a love of country.

Colin Powell may have royally screwed up while serving in the Bush administration, but he is not a defector. Colin Powell represents one of the most loyal patriots the Republican party has had in decades.

If your party cannot put the needs of the many above the desires of the few, then your loyalty to your country demands you to walk away from them.

Yes… that line was a direct ripoff of a very familiar source of inspiration for what defines us as humans. Even you must be able to recognize a universal truth in whatever form you encounter it. You cannot be a human who cares about creating the best world for all of us without acknowledging universal truths.

If your party no longer works to represent your best interests, then the only way you can be a freedom-loving patriot is to turn your back on that party.

If you think that people who walk away from their party are being disloyal, then that makes you disloyal to everything you claim to believe in and value.

If you can’t support a party member’s right to walk away, then that makes you a fascist.

If a party expects loyalty to whatever platform it concocts, then they are not a party that values democracy or freedom.

It is the party that must conform to the demands of their people. It is the party that must permanently relinquish power to serve the needs of its people properly. It is up to the party to adjust its platform to acknowledge what the people want and need. It is up to the party to represent their people, not vice versa.

The thinking embodied within this question is the core of the rot that makes an American style of democracy so vulnerable to enemies foreign and domestic.

If you genuinely want to fight for and protect your democracy as a patriot, then you must fight against a two-party hegemony.

You should demand complete electoral reform to eliminate the kind of corrupt thinking this question represents. It’s abhorrent that people have reduced a public dialogue into a mindless cheerleading competition.

The only people who win that game are the nation’s enemies who seek to usurp its power.

You should consider people like Colin Powell and Liz Cheney among the bravest members of your party because they are not afraid of the consequences of sacrificing their political influence and benefits for ideals that transcend petty politics.

The kind of thinking which embodies this question is what created concentration camps and gas chambers less than one hundred years ago.

This kind of thinking has been responsible for repeating that ugly history, and it’s already at the stage of recreating concentration camps.

How much further must we venture into this nightmare before people realize the horror they invite as a stain on their person and the burden of profound regret they will carry to their graves?

Why is democracy considered an ideal form of government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-is-democracy-considered-an-ideal-form-of-government/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

There is no such thing as an “ideal form of government” because humans are from “ideal.”

What makes democracy a superior form of government to all others is self-determination.

What makes democracy a far more chaotic form of government than all others is self-determination.

No other form of governance is as capable as a democracy of facilitating the full achievement of human potential because no other form of governance empowers individuality.

No other form of governance is as prone to overt assaults against it, while no other form of governance can survive those assaults.

Human nature demands self-determination, while the assaults against democracy today are born of that demand for self-determination — albeit in horrifically corrupted and myopically self-serving terms.

Think about the perspectives of those displaying an aggrieved assault against democracy. They are commonly born from an autocratic mindset which expects the world to conform to their perspectives. They interpret the evolution of society as a rejection of their insular views and a violation of their rights to those views. It is Frankenstein’s monster of cancerous individuality disguising a toxic desire for sublimation to authoritarian rule by people who imagine freedom as their right to dictate the lives of others.

They are not entirely oblivious to the inherent hypocrisies they champion, or they would otherwise not conduct their protests while disguising their identities or hiding behind masks or fake profiles, managing multiple sock-puppet accounts on social media.

They are the disruptive elements in a democratic society screaming a need for a much more coherent strategy for social development. The challenge at hand, however, is not an authoritarian solution dictated to the masses, as history’s failures have made clear. Today’s dynamic in an information-rich society demands a supportive strategy of education and social welfare programs providing opportunities for healing and growth for a species emerging out of a dark and brutal history while still suffering the effects of generational PTSD.

For democracy to survive its current challenges and begin to approach whatever may be deemed as an “ideal form of governance,” our systems must evolve to prioritize the people over the plutocracy seeking to regress human civilization to a medieval state of rulers and serfs.

We will otherwise find ourselves repeating the bloody histories of our ancestors who sacrificed everything to win the freedoms far too many take for granted today.

In today’s world, the closest examples we have to an “ideal democracy” are embodied within the Nordic models of social democracy.

We would save countless lives if we could take stock of how fundamentally destructive the world’s current adoption of right-wing ideologies is for human society and global stability.

What are the implications of a two-party system on democracy in the United States?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/What-are-the-implications-of-a-two-party-system-on-democracy-in-the-United-States-1”

Well, that’s simple… Gridlock.

You’ve been watching it in action for a couple of decades now.

Whatever one party initiates, the other dismantles.

The fine arts of negotiation and compromise no longer exist because one party views that as submission while the other regards that zero-sum game attitude toward cooperation as toxic and prone to counterproductive and even destructive initiatives that create problems without solving any.

For example, there is no rational justification for abortion restrictions. The entire issue is a non-issue stoked up to an irrationally unhinged fervour based on two misanthropic lies, that abortions are a lazy excuse for birth control by whores, and that they are acts of murdering babies. Neither perception resembles anything remotely true or anywhere near accurate renditions of reality.

They are lies stoked for the simple reason of creating political alignments on the vector of hating one’s fellow citizens. Since about 80% of the population is against abortion legislation, it’s been hijacked by the tyranny of a minority and leveraged as a power grab for a political party. The overblown abortion issue is a political wedge and a fundamental betrayal of a democratic system. This would not be possible in a multiparty system.

A two-party system is a recipe for conflict. In contrast, multiparty systems have been denigrated as being incapable of progress. The reality is that multiparty systems encourage negotiation and compromise among varying ideologies that more accurately reflect the expressions of individual beliefs than the aggregated pools of power occurring within a duopoly.

Another major disadvantage of a two-party system is that it limits the spread of investments the ownership class requires while choosing campaigns to finance. It’s a win-win system for them because it’s the cheapest way to hedge their bets. They can’t afford to spread their campaign investments to many parties in a multiparty system. So, their influence in politics is significantly diluted, and the will of the people is much more accurately represented by the diversity of ideological voices in Congress.

A further, much more subtle, and arguably the most profound impact on society is the homogenization of public thinking through aggregating issues into bundles. All nuance is bred out of each issue as it becomes incorporated into a party package to be accepted wholesale — like a cable deal where you can’t opt for individual strategies or solutions. It’s an all-or-nothing approach to addressing political issues that pressures the electorate to reduce the political process to the level of cheering for one’s party, like a sports team.

A two-party system cannot but lead a nation toward escalating internal strife as party positions become increasingly polarized. One party may successfully drag the other party into its ideology. However, that flexibility and willingness to accommodate the other can only go so far before the opposing party must run backwards in the opposite direction. That’s where the DNC is now, after decades of capitulating to a fascist rightwing leadership banking the complete corruption of a democratic system on the corruptibility of their opposition.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/wednesday-september-23rd-meet-middle

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Why is intellectual honesty so rare in politics?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora. and can also be accessed https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/

I believe it’s less rare than cynical minds might think.

Too many people can’t see past their biases to know the difference between a politician’s words and their internal recreations of the meaning of their words.

Too many people, for example, will repeatedly utter how Joe Biden destroyed the economy while professional economists across the board praised it as one of the most successful economies in decades.

Too many people are still incapable of acknowledging the reality of the last election being one of modern history’s most secure and scrutinized elections. They will still adamantly insist that the election was stolen.

They will hang onto the words of a convicted felon who should be rotting behind bars and overlook his public money laundering schemes for overpriced watches and sincerely believe he has the best interests of the struggling class in mind.

They don’t even care how badly he bloated the debt by redistributing wealth to the plutocrats who are steadily taking over the global economy.

They would rather demonize their political opposition as “globalists” while doing the job of playing defence for the actual globalists.

None of them will stop to pause and consider the rationale of their position within any objective perspective.

Everything about their position hinges on tribal identity, and they can’t be wrong about their beliefs because it would mean the criticisms about their toxicity are truthful and correct. They desperately need mental health assistance in the same way that most people who have undergone interventions by their loved ones were deemed in desperate need of professional help.

The problem of corruption in politics is not and never has been a problem with the politicians themselves in a democratic nation where the people vote for who they entrust to manage their affairs on their behalf properly.

The evidence is beyond evident in distinguishing between politicians who at least try to truly represent their best interests and those who parasitically drain their constituents of their value while sending them deep into a pit of poverty.

I don’t even need to post a comparison between states that shows which politicians and parties best represent the needs of the people. It would be pointless to do so because their mental filters will dismiss all evidence as “fake news.”

The problem is not that politicians are dishonest but that the people who elect them cannot discern between honesty and dishonesty. That means that a significant proportion of the population is fundamentally dishonest.

If we are sincere in our desire to fix a perceived problem with dishonesty in politics, then we must be earnest in fixing our problems with being dishonest people at heart.

If we don’t don’t want dishonest politicians, we must stop being dishonest ourselves.

Which political system could replace democracy with fewer flaws?

The original format of the question this post answers was written as follows: “Which possible political system could replace modern democracy and have less flaws than democracy and still benefit the many?”

This question makes it seem as if how we manage our affairs and have a dialogue over how best to peacefully coexist in productive societies that encourage us all to achieve our best potential as individuals and as a society is just a matter of a change of clothing.

That’s now how this works.

Societies do not succeed or fail based on the system we use to govern ourselves.

Societies fail because we fail to govern ourselves as individuals.

Societies fail because human corruption leads us to failure.

Societies don’t fail because we pick the wrong system.

Systems fail because we fail to raise humanity from the muck of our primitive urges as individuals.

Haitians in Springfield are not living in fear today because democracy has failed them but because corrupt human beings have chosen hatred over understanding.

The only system that will ever work is the system that cures us of horrifying statistics such as one in five of us is a mentally unstable individual or 70%-80% of families are dysfunctional, or the primary cause of people leaving their jobs is because of abusive leadership in their place of work.

The only system that will work is the system of people who refuse to tolerate monsters corrupting human society, and that extends far beyond simple politics and well into every other aspect of human life and what we colloquially refer to as “civilization.”

The only system that can ever have a hope of working is the system that focuses on developing human potential, which means education, healthcare, and the ability to succeed on one’s merits in a system that encourages and develops our ability to achieve success through self-determination.

We don’t need to be ruled. We should know better how horribly wrong every other system has turned out to be. It doesn’t matter how messy democracy is because that’s not a problem with the system of democracy. That’s a problem with human beings.

We need to fix ourselves as humans and as a species sharing this mudball with billions of other species if we want any system to be stable over time.

Democracy as a concept is not “flawed.” It’s the best idea we have ever had. The problem is us. We must focus on being better individuals before we can better organize ourselves within any system.

We need to stop pointing the finger of blame at anything and everything that is not us and start taking some responsibility for who we are and what we are. If we can’t manage to do that, then we deserve to send ourselves over the brink and into oblivion.