I don't think that's right - well, Canada and Australia ofc. The "U" in "UK" refers to James IV of Scotland becoming James of England, thus uniting the states of Albion. Charles succeeded him.
Scotland and England were not united into a single Kingdom of Great Britain until 1707 (under Queen Anne), and it did not become the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Ireland) until 1800 (under George III). So technically the "U" actually refers to union of Britain and Ireland, not England and Scotland.
Before the Acts of Union of 1707, England and Scotland were not united into one kingdom, but two kingdoms that shared the same king under a personal union.
It's not vital at all. The authority cones from having people who will lock you up if you disobey.
The fact that the language is "flowery" is an attempt to convey strict semantics using human language. The Latin tenor of legal language in Anglophone countries is a historical quirk. The wigs are because the legal profession is inherently backward-looking and there was a time when such wigs were normal. The theatricality of all this is incidental; a court's authority depends on none of it; it's the men with batons and guns.
The theater lets you get by with a lot fewer armed men backing it up, and with a lot less usage of them. Even authoritarian countries with preordained verdicts engage in this theater. Why? It's not because they're worried about being extremely precise with their language or because they're really into centuries-old fashion. It's because the whole thing helps to convey a sense of authority into both the involved parties and the populace at large, and that makes it easier to control them.
Every policy has winners and losers. There is no set of policy that any single voter supports entirely. Getting elected is a game of eliding over details so that you remain rosy-tinted and so that you don't get mauled on bikeshed details. Governing is a game of horse-trading to get as many policies that you like implemented with as few as you don't like.
In that context, no politician with perfect integrity can be successful. People with information but who lack nuance will always be outraged that their candidate sold out.
When you sarcastically call politicians scum, it adds no fucking information. The politician that you like cannot exist.
I have no difficulty with condemning anyone who joined Epstein in his crimes. I also have little difficulty in tolerating anyone who worked with him while unaware of his crimes. In between, there's an enormous grey area based on whether or not you shun people based on rumour. How many rumours went round your school, and how many of then did you believe?
> then why trust them to decide who makes & enforces laws?
Firstly, it's not black and white: humans are swayed by propaganda, but not entirely.
Historically:
We tried feudalism, and we have run limited experiments with one-party states.
Classical republics with a citizen class might obviate the fuckwit-voter problem somewhat; but the French Revolution made the idea of a political underclass unpalatable, and I'm not sure the conditions still hold. Classical Athenian education was sufficient to prepare the gentry for the problems of classical Athens; society today has more moving parts.
Benevolent and wise dictatorship would be nice, but the "benevolent" and "wise" parts may be unrealistic expectation.
I like anarchy, but i don't believe it scales to nation size.
I am open to being convinced that some given form of government would be ideal, but i very much doubt that i can be convinced that there's any path to get there, and I'll always be skeptical that the given idea will be as sweet as promised in practice. Revolution tends to pan out badly.
We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.
> We are all motes in a complex system. The fact that we can perceive and reason about that system is a cosmic cruelty.
I like how you put this. I feel the same. Effectively too self-aware and intelligent as a species still hooked into the same primitive nervous system as our ancestors and animal cousins.
I think the real lesson of the french revolution is that the petty nobility will run things right into the ground for a quick buck if you let them.
I don't think it was that the lower class was disenfranchised, it was that disenfranchising them made the petty nobility comparatively over-enfranchised.
This isn't exactly a hot take. All those memes about good times and weak men resonate for a reason. The British hereditary nobility did better, a little, but also were very much not great.
And of course there's a pretty obvious parallel between these groups of people the the professional managerial class in modern western societies that lack a rigid social class.
I scorn trump as much as the next socially-adjusted human, but this is overstated:
> he managed to loose the USA's remaining superpower status in just a few years
America is still the most powerful military force and the largest economy, and mickey mouse has recognition in places where they carry water from wells in pots. A beast that size keeps lumbering a long time after brain death.
Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore. Ignoble but not ignorable.
If we run the clock forward, then declining arms exports due to sovereignty concerns wool make the USian defence industry harder to sustain. But that takes decades to play out.
> America is still the most powerful military force
Not true (not anymore). China always had more manpower for recruitment, their current navy fleet is already bigger (64 submarines both, but 4 times as many ships than USA), moreover Chinese fleet is top of the line and brand new, while USA's is old and rusty. Chinese are way ahead in space too. God knows what technology they have in their military satellites and in Tiangong. They have already demonstrated (potential) military maneuvers in space that US military is just dreaming of. https://interestingengineering.com/beyond-earth/shijian-chin...
> Trump has shredded other nations' trust in America as a partner, but he has not made it possible to ignore.
I'd argue that other nations are now working on solutions to exclude the USA as much as possible on every front possible, so basically to ignore. Agreed, they are not there yet, but they are actively working towards to that goal so they will be there (and sooner than later). The problem with loosing trust is, they will look for alternatives, and once found, they won't switch back, even after Trump's long gone. Regaining trust is much harder than loosing it.
FYI, Trump's f*ckup is much bigger than you realize.
There appears to be a crossing point, which you say has happened already, where China is the greater superpower. I think that point is still approaching. We do not disagree by much.
I'm not a military buff, but a couple of tubers say that China's navy includes a lot of coastal tonnage.
In China's favour, they seem to be getting more R&D "purchasing power". Against them, the demographics. The space race is wide open. I could believe they have the space military advantage, but frankly, if you can lift tonnage into space then you can drop tonnage onto cities from orbit.
Do not underestimate the power of Hollywood to set the frame for political conversations everywhere. Apart from anything else, immigration is America's safety net against demographics.
> There appears to be a crossing point, which you say has happened already, where China is the greater superpower. I think that point is still approaching. We do not disagree by much.
I'm not sure if there's one explicit crossing point. All I see is, as time passes China is gaining on the USA in more and more fields. I'm not sure if they already have the advantage in most fields, or in the most important fields, but if things do not change, they surely will.
> I'm not a military buff, but a couple of tubers say that China's navy includes a lot of coastal tonnage.
Could be. But it's worrying that they have 4 times as many ships and numbers are growing.
> In China's favour, they seem to be getting more R&D "purchasing power".
Not just that. I can't cite any scientific paper in the last decade which does not have at least one Chinese name as its author. They got the know-how while USA was paying the bill...
> The space race is wide open.
Maybe. But only China is able to sustain its own space station, nobody else.
> Do not underestimate the power of Hollywood to set the frame for political conversations everywhere.
Not any more. Since Scientology took over and brainwashed people started writing the scripts, everybody is laughing at Hollywood and their expensive but shitty movies (just take a look at box office numbers outside of the USA). And the last nail in their coffin was the rise of streaming, Hollywood has already lost its power too. https://planetoffilms.com/hollywood-box-office-failures-2025...
> Apart from anything else, immigration is America's safety net against demographics.
And also the reason for its success. Von Neumann, von Brown, Einstein, Pulitzer, Schwarzenegger, Natalie Portman, Henry Kissinger, Nikola Tesla, Rupert Murdoch, hell, even Elon Musk is an immigrant.
Thanks to Trump and it's ICE rampage, now great minds are literally fleeing the USA. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-scientists-ar... Again, by loosing these people USA will surely loose the advantage in R&D too, if haven't lost it already.
When there's a retail-grade desktop os built with capabilities as a foundational feature, it will want a shell with appropriate primitives and an ergonomic syntax for them.
Pwsh is not the last word on shells, but it does have automatic cast from string to FileInfo. Ergonomically, it kicks the shit out of legacy shells.
Pirates of the Spanish Main, Pieces Of Eight popular conception wanted plunder, and gold was being shipped in fat galleons. Fiat currency was not available for them to plunder, because banknotes were not, in any significant commune, mined in Spain's new-world colonies and transported to Castile.
Pirates were not necessarily stateless. Drake sailed with a letter of marque. I'll grant there may be contemporary pirates off the horn of Africa who would be hard pressed to obtain a passport.
Blackbeard's thoughts on financial mechanisms are lost to us, sadly.
I think you're trying to explain that fiat currency is predicated on trust. Thanks; that cleared up some misconceptions.
Unfortunately, it turns out that crypto is also, on inspection, predicated on trust: chiefly, trust in the infosec of whatever party maintains your wallet. That trust has been violated maaany times. I've also personally formatted a disk holding a decent chunk of coin (fuck me for trusting myself).
A better analogy would be if gold could spontaneously vaporise and escape any container. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to contain - it would be a more accurate metaphor.
Well yes, people should be stakeholders of the state...?
I agree that high state control will give rise to a different kind of owner class. But that's a balancing act. Defence is widely agreed to be the state's business; industry is widely agreed to not, mostly, be the state's business. We're all in an Overton window, right?
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