From The Mind of Merc - Elections

Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today I was thinking about elections.

One of the main things that always worries about elections when you have a perceptibly awful option that people presume that awful option doesn’t stand a chance and consequently they don’t bother to vote. Whenever people do that, that awful option regrettably stands an incredibly good chance.

The most memorable example of this for me (aside from the 2016 US Presidential election) will always be the 2002 French Presidential election. For this, the options were the incumbent Jacques Chirac, his sidekick, Lionel Jospin, and National Front candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen. It was believed Le Pen didn’t stand a chance – who wants a fascist for President, right? – so the French people think they needed to vote. The result was Le Pen beat Jospin in the preliminary election to get through to the final round of voting. This shocked the French into action and Chirac won by a landslide but their initial laissez-faire attitude nearly meant a fascist taking control of their government.

In Britain we face the apparently obvious choice of Sunak and his self-serving, elitist cronies – who have crippled this country with their obscenely apparent money-grabbing ways – or frankly anyone else. Yet it is not a foregone conclusion that they won’t win. Aside from the fact that people still doubt Starmer’s credentials mean he’s a better option (even though it’s meant to be about policies not people and not a popularity contest), the polls confidently predicting Labour success  has the potential to produce the exact opposite effect to that it intends (as I fear).

Also, a big difference between us and the French election is the French get 2 goes – we don’t – that’s why we have to make it count.

So, on July 4^th, it’s imperative we learn from the almost-mistake of the French. Whether or not the think the Tories stand a chance (and regardless of thoughts or opinion of Starmer and his promises), in order to make sure the Sunak et al aren’t allowed to continue running this country into the ground like it’s their own personal piggy bank – you must go out and vote. If you don’t, their supporters will – just like Le Pen’s.

Remember:
- Never take election results for granted.
- Never assume you don’t need to vote to get the result you want/expect.
- Never let those who are out to serve themselves be allowed to continue in their way unchecked and unchallenged.

And, as a helpful hint, try this website to help get the Tories out: https://tactical.vote/

From The Mind of Merc - Country Names

Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down.  Today I was thinking about names of countries.

It’s a small thought but it occurred to me how odd it is that in our progressive multicultural society that we still use our own words to refer to the countries of other nationalities. What I mean is that instead of paying attention to how people from other countries chose to refer to their homeland we instead insist on using our own words to label them (almost as if to make them more acceptable to us.)

Surely if we want to truly embrace intercultural integration we should be using the names that natives use for their own countries.

For example, this would mean that Europe would include of:

France (France)
Deutschland (Germany)
España (Spain)
Italia (Italy)
Elláda (Greece)
Bŭlgariya (Bulgaria)
Danmark (Denmark)
Nederland (Netherlands)
Suomi (Finland)
Sverige (Sweden)
Magyarország (Hungary)
Norge (Norway)
Polska (Poland)

Some people may say that we use our own words to make these foreign places seem more familiar to us and easier to acclimatise ourselves to. But a lot of these are not very different from the names we currently use and would not be difficult to adopt. Going forward this could be what schoolchildren are taught when they learn the names of countries and it would certainly be easier for people travelling abroad to grasp the local lingo and culture.

Also, how wrong is it to presume to acclimatise ourselves to other cultures in a way that alienates ourselves from those same cultures through our disrespect of a crucial aspect of their national identity.

Forcing our own names onto other countries is little better than forcing family names onto servants – just as the slave-owners used to do in the days before abolition. This may have been acceptable over a century ago but it surely has no place in the world nowadays.

Things need to change. If we truly want to embrace our overseas relations then perhaps we should start by not foisting our own (for them) alien words onto them. We would expect respect for our culture and our land and we should extend the same courtesy to others and abandon the out-of-date and inappropriate approach to naming countries in our own language.