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I'm also thinking about care with our language today, in light of democracy's 2024 challenges:
A common point of confusion for creationists (intentional or otherwise) is to conflate a "species"--a human classification that can change with time and improving knowledge of genetic kinship--with the underlying reality of lifeform variation under selection pressure giving rise (sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly) to different morphologies.
We conflate words with realities in politics, too. 1/2
😅 Okay, no - now I have a whole article in mind. More on this soon.
So I'm going to exercise more care this year with how I use the word "democracy", because it's also a human construct, and different "species" of democracy don't begin and end cleanly. They're labels we put on loose groupings of sociopolitical factors that exist along a spectrum.
Just as lifeforms can undergo selection pressures quickly, so too can a gradual spectrum of sociopolitical factors shift rapidly. We need to name the specific political "morphologies" we're trying to avoid instead. 2/2