by Colin Hyde
I spoke with a brother who read the book on karma. I said to him, so then, tell me why bad things happen to little children. They are innocent, right? Yet, bad things happen to them sometimes. Wait there: of course, I didn’t mean innocent in the sense that they do no wrong. There, in the question I meant specifically innocence of calculation. Those little bohgaz, they do what they do without a care for anyone; for them it’s just me, me, and me. Those bad little beasts, the genes of evil, selfishness, run rampant in their little minds, hearts, and souls. Personally, I believe a good whipping is their cure.
If your wiring is similar to mine, you know nothing about your past life, and nothing about tomorrow. All we know is what has transpired, and some, not all of the threads related to it.
We don’t know if the people who hambog wi, if we hambog them somewhere, sometime. All we know is that wi geh b*ch. We are out of the lines to say karma will deal with those who injure us, because it might be karma dealing with us, for past wrongdoings our present selves know nothing about.
Now, I must say this: many—wait, most of us need a crutch to lean on. If holding onto karma helps us keep our sanity, saves us from hambog up somebody, then karma is a good thing, for us and for the society. Hold on to your crutch—but don’t hold onto it with both hands. We are allowed to seek restitution. That ugly thing called revenge is for politicians only, and sportsmen. My, it is funny how a thing always has two sides; in one place it is terrible, and in another place it is pure. Politicians and their revenge games, not good. What would sports be without the payback?
You see why North Korea and Iran da “crazy” people
North Korea will not give up its nuclear arsenal, and Iran pushes on to creating one, if it doesn’t have one already. Iraq wanted nuclear weapons, and the US wiped out the country to block them. Poor Ukraine, in search of peace, and under pressure, it gave up its nuclear weapons, and now we see how Russia has turned on them and bullied their a*s. The US talking about making Canada their 51st state, it could be bait for Quebec; but even if it is, there would not have been a big grin on Trump’s face when he was at that microphone, if Canada hadn’t opted to not have nuclear weapons. I guess human beings will forever be animals, little canine-teeth animals behaving big because of their gunpowder and bullets.
So, the US is getting cozy with Russia now. Hmm, the way the world works, you have to make a space for the friend of your friend. We’ll be happier with Russia under a new kind of leadership. Ditto for Israel. Most Belizeans yearn to love Israel. Every morning when we read our Bibles, we pray for God to cover Israel. Netanyahu and his far-right friends, they have sullied a good thing.
Returning to Russia, local supporters of the invasion say Ukraine was doing bad things to the Donbas and Crimea districts, effectively chaansing the Russians who live there. There are many tribes over there, and over the centuries, borders have not always been fixed. Apparently, when the Soviet Union broke up and Ukraine became a separate country, it wasn’t all that neat.
Those of us who read Freedom at Midnight are aware of the horror that followed when India became two countries. The British get all the blame, but when dealing with messy situations you won’t get the best solution, only the least bad one. In 1947 the British, severely weakened by WWII, yielded to the Muslims and gave them a country all their own, Pakistan. We’ll lean on the Wikipedia for more on that story:
“The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wise Hindu or Muslim majorities. It also involved the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury, between the two new dominions…The partition displaced between 12 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions; there was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present.”
When the Soviet Union broke up, there were Russians in Ukraine. I bet they could have sold their properties and bought land under the hammer and sickle, but people get used to where they live. They remained in Ukraine, with their hearts in another country. Britannica says, “Although granting Ukrainian Russians the full rights of citizenship was never an issue, many of them were frustrated that Russian was not recognized as the second official language of the country. This highly contentious matter was resolved to some degree in 2012, when a new law was passed that allowed regional authorities to confer official status upon minority languages. Moreover, the gradual Ukrainization of the school system has not been popular in regions of Ukraine with large Russian populations. The matter was further complicated by Russia’s vow to defend the rights of ethnic Russians in the so-called ‘near-abroad,’ which includes Ukraine.”
Manuel Esquivel reminded us that when baby waahn baal yu jos luk pahn dehn and the wailing staat. Ah, that devilish Mr. Putin claimed that “his” people were being chaansd in Ukraine. And Ukraine had given up its considerable nuclear arsenal. Bwai, this world, you give up your weapons and dehn bully you. These big countries have to give up their veto. But I believe they would have a point if they demanded that voting power be based on population and contribution to the UN.
These big countries really have to give up these weapons. Everything must be decided at the UN. Some things we have to leave to reason.
Alternative Vote, the best of FPTP and PR combined
Andrés Velasco, in a 2024 piece published by Project Syndicate titled “In Praise of First-Past-the-Post”, said that after the last election in the UK many said it was “Britain’s least representative election result ever”, and they made demands for electoral reform. Velasco said “changing the system would be a big mistake”, that “while critics claim that FPTP is a bad electoral system, the conventional alternative, proportional representation (PR), can be far worse…”
Velasco said, “If the PR system used in Scotland had been in force throughout the United Kingdom, Labour would have won 236 seats, not 412, in that election.” He said, however, that FPTP is not meant to be proportional, and that for the UK to have “near-perfect proportionality” they would need all 48 million registered voters voting “in one gigantic national constituency”, a proposition that would see a ballot with “the names of 3,900 individual candidates.”
He explained that the alternative, PR, would see a ballot with the names of the six parties, and the party would decide, based on the number of votes the party got, which of its delegates would get its nod to go to parliament. Velasco said that would sever “the link between individual voters and their MPs – a crucial element of the British democratic tradition.” He pointed out that, “proportionality is not the only desirable feature of an electoral system”, that practicality is important, “and so, too, is a process that allows for effective governing thereafter.”
Velasco said: “In PR systems…keeping a stable working majority can be problematic. One possible result is a minority government that could come crashing down any day, as Spain experienced recently…Then there are countries such as Israel, where an extreme form of PR puts disproportionate power in the hands of tiny groups of parliamentarians with extreme views.”
He said in the UK with its many parties, “elections increasingly underrepresent smaller parties, leading some voters to feel disenfranchised”, that this “undercuts the legitimacy of British democracy”, thus the clamor that “the electoral system must be reformed.” But despite that and its other faults, he says he isn’t buying, he’s sticking with the FPTP. “Britain’s [FPTP] electoral system is perfectly Churchillian,” he said, “the worst of systems except for all the plausible alternatives.”
Ah, but all isn’t lost. In 2011 the British went to a referendum to decide on replacing the FPTP with the AV (Alternative Vote), a hybrid of the FPTP and PR. The Wikipedia says, “The proposal to introduce AV was rejected by 67.9% of voters on a national turnout of 42%.” It would be interesting what British voters would say if they were to vote on it 10 years later. Here’s a discussion from the Electoral Reform Society on the AV, which is used in Australia, Ireland, and many American states and cities:
“The Alternative Vote is designed to deal with vote splitting. Under Westminster’s First Past the Post system, a candidate the majority dislike can win, if the majority split their votes across multiple candidates…The voter puts a number by each candidate, with one for their favourite, two for their second favourite, and so on. They can put numbers on as many or as few as they wish…If more than half the voters have the same favourite candidate, that person becomes the MP. If nobody gets half, the numbers provide instructions for what happens next. The counters remove whoever came last and look at the ballot papers with that candidate as their favourite. Rather than throwing away these votes, they move each vote to the voter’s second favourite candidate. This process is repeated until one candidate has half of the votes and becomes the MP.”
In AV, “Voters can vote for their favourite candidate without worrying about wasting their vote. This means there is less need for tactical voting… than in Westminster’s voting system. Unlike hosting a run-off vote to decide the winner, the Alternative Vote uses a single ballot and avoids the need for tactical voting to stop a disliked candidate getting into the final round. Candidates are also incentivized to run less divisive campaigns, as candidates will want to become their opponent’s voters second favourite candidate. As extremist candidates on the political fringes are likely to be the first to be excluded, the Alternative Vote tends to work against candidates who are polarizing and help those who are broadly liked.”