Guyana is overcome with perverted reasoning

Dear Editor,
The right to free speech is not necessarily the right to be taken seriously. The much-vented views of persons like David Hinds, Lincoln Lewis and Vincent Alexander, published in Guyana’s newsprint, are all stirring the same pot with different spoons.
Their discourse contains 3 similar ingredients: (1) The election results must be declared using CEO Lowenfield’s concocted figures; (2) The PPP rigged the elections using deceased and duplicate votes; (3) The election impasse can be resolved by fresh elections (a persistent call by Vincent Alexander).
But the most overpowering ingredient contained in all their ‘analyses’ is really simple: Black people are the rightful rulers of Guyana.
Hinds writes (July 26 KN) “…this would be a prolonged process. I arrived at that conclusion based on my study of elections in ethnically divided societies”. Now, no one knows which societies he studied, but numerous such societies, like fellow Caricom countries, declare election results in a day or two!
Hinds’s clamour for dialogue is both pathetic and far-fetched. When his Party won in 2015 by 0.3%, he did not see the need for such discourse. Today his call is tantamount to a couple coming home to discover a thief leaving their house with his arms full of their bangles and rings. In the ensuing confrontation, the thief requests a dialogue to discuss sharing the loot.
Here is a pertinent example of perverted reasoning: White says 5+5=12; Green says 5+5=10 and Brown jumps in and offers a compromise: 5+5=11.
The Prussian philosopher Kant (1724-1804) defines reason as a “faculty of principles” or the “faculty of the unity of the rules of understanding under principles”. The problem is how to justify these concepts and principles. This problem is acute because Kant also argues that these concepts and principles often lead us into error and contradiction, and into the realms of logic and illusion where duty compels one to flawed reasoning as one has a moral obligation applicable only in pursuit of a predetermined goal.
Such thought process was spewed a week ago by one-time PNC strongman, 82-year-old Hamilton Green. In his declaration to “set aside the Constitution and disregard the law”, he called for Granger to be sworn in.
It is quite relevant to ask what this former Minister of 5 different portfolios, now receiving close to a million dollars in pension monthly, contributed to his country. And in yet another twist in Guyana’s election circus, former Cuffy Ideological Institute lecturer, PNC cadre catapulted to Min. of Housing, then Labour, under the PPP gov’t, and now candidate for ANUG, joined the call for shared governance. The hop scotch reasoning of Henry Jeffery continues to bewilder…much like the convoluted thought process of caretaker president Granger, who called for a recount, then moved to the court to challenge the legality of his own recount! We can evaluate such crooked reasoning ad infinitum! The narrative perpetuated ad nauseam by these self-anointed Black intellectuals is: GECOM must declare the election results based on the report of its CEO, Lowenfield, regardless of how he invalidated votes and arrived at 4 different results. This will give a victory to the Coalition, and exactly what Kant described 200 years ago as the obligation to reason in pursuit of a predetermined goal. Hopefully, with the Court of Appeal ruling, the PNC- led Government will now finds itself in a state of attenuation. It has run out of legal options, and will capitulate. (If you cheat on a test and get an A, does that make you the brightest?) Finally, any appeal to the CCJ would be most frivolous and comical, as the apex court would have to negate its own prior rulings!

Sincerely,
Leyland Chitlall
Roopnaraine