You got a source for that millionaires per capita thing? China’s Gini coefficients are roughly on par with Western Europe

As I understand it they’re basically just avoiding doing anything that might destabilise the status quo. Changing the country’s name to something else is saying “we are actually a separate country from China” as opposed to being in a frozen war where both sides theoretically claim to be the same country. The ambiguity lets them be de facto independent and lets the PR of China say “it’s de jure ours” without either side actually going to war about it at the moment, so the ambiguity stays

My bad. I blame the thirty eight million times I heard people make the argument earnestly after the British queen died

It’s the country’s law, you can call the high commissioner “king” if you agree to. Ireland calls its prime minister and deputy PM “taoiseach” and “tánaiste” respectively, which are monarchic titles from the Gaelic clan system

Versailles gets fifteen million visitors a year

The simplest method in most cases would probably just be to change the law about succession. Keep the position of king, just make it an elected or appointed one. That way nothing else has to be touched unless you want to change it

The tourism argument is frequently bandied about, but I don’t think there’s much substance to it. The tourist attractions are the buildings (which obviously don’t disappear in the event of ending the monarchy) and ceremonies (which you can keep if you choose to, including the fancy costumes). It’s particularly unconvincing here in the UK when we are literally right next door to France, the world’s number one tourist destination. Versailles does not lack for visitors.

There is no way this doesn’t wind up making an ad that’s misleading enough to get Netflix and/or the advertiser in trouble

• A Highland Song. I can confirm that this one is nice to take a walk through because it is a game about running through a fictionalised version of a place I frequently enjoy walking through in real life. Possibly stretching the definition of open world a little, but the gameplay is about navigation
• Shadow of the Colossus. Which is good because you do spend a lot of time walking across it.

Also, not an open world game at all, but the environments in Pacer are amazing. You barely get a chance to look at them because you’re zooming along a racetrack at 400 mph, but they’re still there. Sonashahar is a futuristic neoclassical Indian city, and I want to explore that

I don’t think I agree with that. None of the Souls games ever had anything like Siofra River or Liurnia. Areas like Leyndell and Farum Azula, sure, but there’s a lot of variety in the Elden Ring map

The visuals were stunning but am I fuck taking a walk through:

• The ultra-plague fallout zone
• The lake of giant sniper lobsters
• The mountaintops of giant spiders made from hands with way too many fingers

I think you are focusing too much on the modern world. You’re ignoring the Middle Ages and before

Also I think you forget that Democracies existed in the ancient world and they didn’t last long either

And they were famous already for being short lived back then.

I just gave you a list of civil wars in England dating back to the 11th century? But with regards to earlier democracies, I didn’t forget, I just don’t think they’re especially relevant since they were not all that similar to a modern democracy like Germany. Even Athens barred most of its population from voting. I think if you want to include them, you need to explain why they are a relevant comparison to a modern democracy. If you’re operating solely on whether or not they allow some people to vote, then constitutional monarchies count as democracies for this purpose and the short-lived fascist dictatorships of the 20th century count as monarchies.

also eastern monarchies as well

I’m focussing on Europe because the article is about Germany, which shares much of its monarchic and democratic heritage with its European neighbours. If you want to bring up other examples, go ahead.

petty succession squabbles

Open civil warfare is not what I’d count as a “petty squabble”. If there’s a years-long war to overthrow a king, that is not stability.

our government can only implement projects on a 4 to 8 year basis which is often not enough to fix problems

While modern democracies haven’t been around that long in the scale of human history, they have been around long enough to demonstrate that they don’t appear to be falling behind their monarchic peers. Take Finland and Sweden as an example; in the past ~100 years for which Finland has been an independent republic, would you argue it has performed worse than its constitutional monarchy neighbour Sweden? I wouldn’t, despite the fact that Finland started in a far worse position and also fought the Winter War and the Continuation War. And similarly, if we look at the the rest of the world, it doesn’t seem to me like republics are doing worse than monarchies that have had otherwise comparable histories.

But I’m not even arguing that democracies are especially stable. I’m arguing that monarchies aren’t particularly more stable.

the evidence seems to point that democratic states have by their very nature an expiration date

What evidence? Again, we have not seen more than a couple of centuries of the modern form of democracy.

it is on shaky ground only 250 years in.

If you’re going to exclude actual civil warfare and overthrow of the government from counting as instability for monarchies, you really can’t count a constitutional crisis as the end of a democracy. Maybe this is the end of the USA, but it’s hardly the first time a country has seen a constitutional crisis. It’s not even the first time the USA has seen one. If the USA does fall completely… alright? Even limiting it to large modern era countries, I can just as easily point towards the Qing dynasty that fell after roughly that amount of time, or the Brazilian monarchy which didn’t even make 100, or the Bourbon restoration in France that was even shorter. Pointing to an individual example that hasn’t even actually happened isn’t evidence of a broader rule.

Here’s a list of civil wars just in England and the post-union UK since it’s one of the best-known and longest-standing monarchies. Are we counting a monarchy that was overthrown multiple times as “lasting 1,000 years” (which it would now be close to if you count it from 1066 to the modern day)?

It also seems a bit silly to expect democracies to have lasted a thousand years immediately after making a point about the timeframe of social movements. The tradition of European democracies and the related ones that were spread around the world during the colonial era and the aftermath of it are too recent a movement to have lasted a thousand years. If we want to see if a democracy can last that long, we’ve got about 800-900 years to wait

It was only just a month into the first post-Euromaidan elected government of Ukraine and Russian media tried to pin the shootdown on Ukraine. Petro Poroshenko, the then-new president, was also talking a lot about forcefully ending the conflict in Donbas and Luhansk. To be clear this is 100% me guessing at things, but I could imagine it being an attempt to discredit Poroshenko’s government

I don’t think that the stability argument really holds. The surviving European constitutional monarchies today are stable, but there’s a pretty huge survivorship bias there — the French monarchy famously collapsed in the French revolution and the resulting wars took several others down, the German, Russian, and Austrian ones went down in WW1, the Italian one failed to prevent the rise of Mussolini, the Spanish one got ousted by the Franco regime. It seems to me like it’s more of a case of the places that have been stable have not kicked their monarchies out rather than them being stable because they are monarchies. And of course, all of the monarchies fought each other constantly in the times before

True, but I would argue that TLJ actually did substantially better than the Disney and Star Wars averages on the visual front. Not necessarily in terms of the technical execution of the effects since they’re always basically as good as they get for the time in both Disney and Star Wars stuff, but in terms of the composition of shots

I’m also pro-TLJ, but I do think it could have done with a few tweaks to the script to catch some stuff. In terms of how it looked and was acted on the moment-to-moment scale they nailed it though, so I’m not sure if that falls under “better execution”

“Did you just switch it to broadcast? Fuck, turn it off!”

Hardly the first time a ceasefire has collapsed in a conflict this year. In such tense situations I can imagine it’s very easy for either or both sides to push their luck with the terms, and then when the other sees them doing it they respond, and now the ceasefire is dead in the water

You’ve got the details a little wrong. The original two were the Whigs and the Tories, as you say. The Whigs became the Liberals who became the modern day Liberal Democrats, who still exist but haven’t been in power outside of being a junior member of a coalition for a century. Tories became the Conservatives, who are still one of the major two and are regularly still called the Tories. There was a faction that broke away from the Whigs called the Liberal Unionists, who merged into the Conservatives, but they’re separate from the Liberals. Labour is not a successor to either of them, though they did make some strategic agreements with the Liberals early on. In the early 1900s, Labour replaced the Liberals as one of the two major parties.

It is still consistently a two-party system. One of the historic parties got replaced and there is a stronger presence for minor parties than there is in the states (see especially the SNP in the past decade and the Tory-LibDem coalition in 2010), but still a two-party system