We'll be starving and fighting, but we'll be able to vote

Kaplan and Zakaria. What to say? 'The Coming Anarchy' was depressing, but made a good point about the environment. I found that to be one of the points that really stood out to me, as it is such a big issue. We've long known that the environment was in trouble and going to cause problems in the future, but only now are people starting to do anything about it on the big scale. Coming from a country that's currently in a seven year drought, I can understand how important water is. Having said that, our country is fortunate enough to be no-where near the point of starvation or dying of thirst. But it is only in the past few months that our government has made big steps in joining other nations in trying to do something about our environment, and that was only after a major change in government. People need water and food to survive, and as it becomes limited, humans' nature to survive will come out and people will fight for what they can get. Which will result in lots of fighting and death.

Zakaria's 'The Raise of Illiberal Democracy' definitely woke me up to the fact that my ideas about democracy were totally off. I have to admit, I didn't really think about it and always just assumed that all democracies were liberal. It was just automatic to assume they went together, as it's what I've been brought up with. But obviously they don't. I thought his comment that liberal non-democracies are often better than illiberal democracies was interesting. It shows us that we shouldn't judge a country just by whether they have multi-party elections. There's more important things than just voting, especially when many democracies, like the U.S. don't even make voting compulsory. Sure, there will always be those who will vote by the colour of the flier, instead of by party beliefs, but if not everyone votes, then the government isn't a representation of what the people want. It's only a representation of what a small percentage of the people want. Anyway, that was off topic. It seems to me that having a liberal society, where the people have rights, is more important than just being able to vote, but having no rights. And how can we have an ideal democracy, when cultures are so different? No-one would be able to agree on anything because not everyone shares the same values. While it might be important for us in the west to have women's rights, it's not going to be up there for other nations, and it's unlikely that everyone would be able to agree on everything. While it would be great, it just seem like it's not possible to have an international standard for everyone to follow. Otherwise everywhere would be a liberal democracy already.