The politically relative metric

Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist

The politically relative metric

The right measure of the political tolerance limit of acceptable and civilized behavior for human rights and democracy has been established by the same standards that differ from all over the world when it comes to standardized metrics for the system of measures and particular capabilities of the hegemonic nation that contrary to most cultures that sought to establish their standards through international agreements, which are ignored by none other than the one who should be the protagonist of balance and respect for the multilateral consensus established by multilateral organizations through international standardization agreements and commitments.

The question is that some variables are qualitative and others are quantitative, so the question is how to establish a proxy for the qualitative variables from the quantitative variables?

The great uncertainty is that we don't know how to predict and believe that: the same country that, contrary to the rest of the world, uses knots as a measure of speed for vessels while the rest of the world does it in kilometers per hour; instead of measuring the speed of land vehicles in a canonical way, it measures it in miles per hour, instead of the rest of humanity that records the speed measurement of land and air vehicles in kilometers per hour; that unlike the rest of humanity that records distances in meters and kilometers, makes the respective measurements of distances in inches, feet, and nautical miles and terrestrial miles, causing an ambiguity and excess of incongruities between measurements that are not even arithmetic multiples. each other; a country that measures volumes of liquids in gallons and in barrels, without even establishing an exact fraction relationship between the gallon and barrel measurements, unlike the rest of humanity that uses the linear metric system to establish its submultiples for volume measurement, length and distance, respectively and reciprocally; so the confusion is being established because there is no relation of correspondence of scales of arithmetic multiples between the measures of: nautical miles, nautical miles, inches, feet, gallons and barrels, a confusion invented in the middle ages and without any concern with rationality Cartesian and Galilean.

So the same confusing and highly ideosyncratic metric is transferred to measure and judge the degree of democracy of a foreign nation or the level of human rights.

How is it possible to passively accept all this?

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político