Saying, "To be polite, we have to say that a child born to a king is different than a child born to a commoner" isn't actually "polite," it's oppressive. And we don't have to do it. We can say, "Fuck that. Inherent hierarchies of people don't exist."
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I think Nicholson is just a life peer, fyi, but that changes very little about your point.
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Replying to @iridienne @Eristae and
I mean yeah but her dad was a baronet, her mom was the daughter of the 27th Earl of Crawford and her uncle was the Lord Chancellor Her blood's pretty blue, it's kind of absurd to claim her own life peerage was purely by merit
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Titles like "Lord", "Lady", "Baron", "Baroness" don't become LESS stupid and offensive when they're detached from their original meaning and thrown around willy-nilly for asshole politicians ("on carpet consideration", as Shakespeare would say)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
How’s your system working out for you?
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Replying to @Shatterface @iridienne and
*shrug* The US and UK are both pretty fucked because they're both trying to run a 21st-century country on a constitution that's gone at least 200 years without a major overhaul Germany is doing pretty well by contrast
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Shatterface and
This really makes we wonder what happened between 1770-early 1900 in terms of ideas about good government. Where did all those better ideas about elections come from.
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Replying to @EVE_Megarom @arthur_affect and
I'm naturally most interested in where the ideas for the Finnish system came from, because it survived a civil war. I know there is a book about it released on 100 year birthday of our parliament, but haven't gotten my hands on it yet.
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Replying to @EVE_Megarom @Shatterface and
Well look when the American Revolution happened people still thought of "democracy" as a concept as a bad, dangerous, harmful thing and the American system is built on all this uneasy compromise -- the whole "We're a republic, not a democracy" shtick Madison basically made up
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Replying to @arthur_affect @EVE_Megarom and
It was an actual explicit design goal of the US Constitution to keep the existing wealthy landowner class on top and to only allow as much voting as necessary to keep people from getting so pissed off that we'd have another war
1 reply 7 retweets 31 likes
And even then it only kind of worked (we had the Whiskey Rebellion *right after* we passed the Constitution)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @EVE_Megarom and
The overhaul taking us from there to here required a number of "unwritten rewrites" to the Constitution, like the whole take that Jacksonian democracy was really a new system overlaid on the old one, a popular uprising of the (white, male) working class
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