4 ms·

British democracy and government is cool. It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution, it's this organic thing

by mindwok 7mo ago

British democracy and government is cool. It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution, it's this organic thing that they've stumbled towards over the last ~800 years with small changes like this one gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy.

rvz 7mo ago
> British democracy and government is cool. Oh sweet summer child. The government there does not care about you and will promise anything to get another 5 years in power despite causing the issues they promised to solve in the first place. You are essentially voting in the same party to be in government and progress there moves in the hundreds of years; hence the riddance of the scam that is unelected hereditary nobles which it took more than 700 years to remove them.
- tjpnz 7mo ago
  What on earth are you talking about? They were elected in 2024. If anything its the issues caused over the previous 14 years which must be fixed.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  In fairness, this is not unique to Britain. For America read "4" instead of "5".
  - rvz 7mo ago
    Are there unelected hereditary nobles somewhere in the US that is entitled to having a seat in congress and can vote against laws being passed? Nope. I don't think so, not even the length of the term is the same.
    - fc417fc802 7mo ago
      And yet all of your objections apply to us in equal measure. Almost as though hereditary nobles don't have much to do with them.
    - xp84 7mo ago
      unelected hereditary nobles Let's break down what Senators are: > Unelected In most states a single party will always win statewide elections, so our Senators are what I'd call "marginally elected" since they only have to face a quiet low-turnout primary election and then they sail to an easy re-election. They're nearly always guaranteed to win their primaries as long as The Party supports them, and they'll do so as long as you're loyal to The Party agenda. > Hereditary Many of them come from generational wealth, and a few suspiciously just happen to become wildly wealthy while in office, including through their stock trades, which has been decided to be 100% not illegal even when they know things the public does not know. > nobles Ours are called "elites," but most things are the same - they tend to all have gone to the top 2-4 colleges, and you can't 'break into' this set unless you were born into old money. Seems close enough from the perspective of those of us who aren't nobles or elites. So, you can think of the Senate as the House of Lords lite.
      - hunterpayne 7mo ago
        Just checking, but you do realize that this kind of unhinged, populist takes are exactly the kind of propaganda you use to destroy a democratic system. You know that right? Only a couple of states are like you describe and none of them are red. The governor of KY (the reddest state) for example is a Dem. One of the Senators for Montana is a Dem, etc. In fact, if you want the Dems to win the presidency in 2028, one of those folks is your best bet. The other thing we can do it get rid of gerrymandering but that's unlikely and the most recent gerrymandering attempts are likely to end up blowing up in the face of the party drawing the lines. Politics is nothing if not ironic. PS Look at who is running for governor of CA right now and ask yourself if any of those folks actually represents CA in any real way. Also, ask yourself why there is only 1 Dem in that race?
        xp84 7mo ago
        You can't destroy a democratic system that isn't democratic and already doesn't serve the people. The Senate was never designed to be democratic in the first place. The House was, but its main problem is just campaign finance decadence that means to the extent those guys do any governing during their 2-year terms, it's a part-time gig in between fundraising. And together, the legislative branch has become a joke. They now just fart around, either rubber-stamping whatever the President says, or shutting down the government whenever the party out of power can't accept that the public has rejected their policies. So I hope I can be forgiven for being pessimistic about whether this "democratic system" even serves any purpose at this point. But back to the Senate. Jon Tester was defeated in 2024. There is a peppering of Democrats in statewide office here and there -- Fetterman and Beshear, and the Virginia and Georgia Democrats, the latter of which got really lucky to both run in the election that was a referendum on Trump's COVID chaos, and the one getting to run against a proud child molester. They are also the exact kind of politicians that don't get support from the blue-state Democrats in primaries for national elections, because they are too moderate. If you don't check every box, the primaries will destroy you. To be fair, Republicans have the exact same problem. Blue-state moderates certainly could have been persuaded to support say, Jeb Bush, but the party only supports... well, since the phenomenon became locked in, they have only given their support to one man. Sorry to ramble, my point is that the practice of split-ticket voting is dying off faster than discounted DRAM. There used to be a lot of these cross-party appeal people like Bill Clinton, Ann Richards, Jon Tester, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, and on the Republican side George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie. But this is now massively the exception, and trending down. BTW I'm all for getting rid of gerrymandering, but the Democrats have set that cause back by 100 years by selling out their supposed deeply held beliefs last year in California. Now we're just being honest that it's only about power. I don't remember who's running for governor in California, but I am guessing there is only one Dem running it's because the California Democratic Party is powerful and disciplined in ways neither national party is, and has told everybody but the party's favorite to sit down and shut up. That's speculation - let me know if I'm wrong.
    - BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
      In the US our unelected hereditary nobility just buys candidates.
    - pjc50 7mo ago
      Not hereditary, but SCOTUS functions somewhat worse than the House Of Lords: unelected, unremovable, life appointments, but ability to change the law. Hence the decades spent shifting the balance to reverse Roe v Wade. A lot of important US freedoms only came from the courts in spite of the legislatures, which I think is an under appreciated problem of the system. The US system skews much older for some reason too. The only president born after 1946 was Obama. Like being stuck in a time warp.
- jongjong 7mo ago
  No idea why this was down-voted, it's true. It's replacing one hereditary system based on inheritance of titles with another hereditary system based on inheritance of capital.
  - pseudalopex 7mo ago
    > No idea why this was down-voted > Oh sweet summer child. And Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - jongjong 7mo ago
      You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content. I really don't think most people are there yet.
      - pseudalopex 7mo ago
        > You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content. Boring does not mean no information content. But the part of your comment about comment voting was boring and noise.
        koakuma-chan 7mo ago
        I think that guideline means that if your own comment gets downvoted, don't reply complaining about it. A "why was this downvoted? it's true" from another user is fine, I think.
        pseudalopex 7mo ago
        It could have said your comments if it meant your comments. And It never does any good, and it makes boring reading was not less true.
- t43562 7mo ago
  The governments don't really cause the issues. The big issues are just things that face the country no matter who is in control - how to pay for everything, how to deal with population aging etc. It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy. The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.
protocolture 7mo ago
I see brits describing it as "Dictatorship with Democratic characteristics" and "3 weasels leading the 4th rabid weasel around by the tail" it doesnt seem "cool" by any stretch, except maybe if it was fictional and the people it hurt were not real.
pjc50 7mo ago
I go back and forth on this. It's a lot like the palace of Westminster itself: charming, whimsical, historical, connected to the past, hopelessly impractical, postponing repairs until things break, and at significant risk of being burned down. On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.
bartread 7mo ago
There is something to be said for your written constitution though: having the fundamental principles on which your nation is founded enshrined in that way should, at least in theory, make it a lot easier to settle arguments (though in practice, and particularly recently, that does seem not to be the case). Constitutional wrangling in the UK is always really fraught though because it's all done by precedent and is therefore incredibly hard work to get to a clear understanding of what the situation really is.
- scj 7mo ago
  The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time). It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"
- inglor_cz 7mo ago
  Well, SCOTUS sometimes produces really weird Humpty-Dumpty explanations for very common words. Such as that growing marijuana plants in your own home for your own consumption influences interstate commerce and is therefore within powers of the Congress to regulate/ban.
  - laughing_man 7mo ago
    That's ultimately the result of the threats FDR made to pack the court if they didn't do what he wanted.
  - wileydragonfly 7mo ago
    Well, they used that same logic to force integration… so.. sometimes good sometimes bad?
- runako 7mo ago
  The USA's written constitution should not be used as an exemplar of written constitutions in general because the founders didn't even enforce it the day after it was ratified. It took a civil war to even turn towards the words as written. The document itself was more aspirational than a reflection of how the founders intended to live and govern. As a result of all of that, we have developed a culture of sophistry around simple words. We pretend the Constitution binds us, but in practice the structures that govern the country are much more opaque and therefore more difficult to change. (This is why every so often we have to ratify a new amendment codifying rights that are clearly enumerated in the articles of the Constitution or in an earlier amendment. At some point, the sophistry tips over and we have to amend it to say what was plainly written in at some earlier point.)
s_dev 7mo ago
If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one. Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.
- kimos 7mo ago
  I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.
  - xp84 7mo ago
    Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist. For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet. And they did their best to create a change mechanism, but I think anyone being truly fair of any political persuasion has to admit that while it has prevented nearly every harmful extremist constitutional amendment (I'd say Prohibition is the main one that sneaked in), it has proven to, within the lifetimes of most living Americans, be so hard to attain as to set the status quo in stone. The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys. Same reason we stopped admitting states before letting Puerto Rico in, an absolutely absurd situation.
    - trimethylpurine 7mo ago
zrn900 7mo ago
What part of hereditary aristocrats and religious and otherwise lifetime appointees being able to send back bills to the parliament an infinite number of times until they are changed as they want them. There are cases in which they sent bills back as many as 60 times until they got them changed.
kergonath 7mo ago
> It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling like the American government. Too much depends on gentlemen agreements and people trusting other people to do the right thing. It works in a stable environment, but shatters the moment someone with no shame and no scruples shows up.
- 01jonny01 7mo ago
  Britain's problems are due to uncharismatic Blairite socialist.
  - skibble 7mo ago
    All of them? Hmmm.
  - ordinaryradical 7mo ago
    This comment may or may not be wrong but it is quintessentially low effort. The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.
    - 01jonny01 7mo ago
      I'm parroting back the opposite of the original reply, which was upvoted That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.
  - b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
    I don't know much about UK politics but I definitely know enough to know that there's no such thing as a "Blairite socialist".
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kitd 7mo ago
JCattheATM 7mo ago
> gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy. And yet, they are still not quite there. There is something to be said for design over stumbling.
- t43562 7mo ago
  The stumbling is natural - it's a sort of stable thing deriving out of the state of now. Design is something put out there which may not stand up to the test of how people actually behave i.e. it may not be stable.
  - JCattheATM 7mo ago
    It's fine to stumble initially, like discovering fire, but design gets us lighters and ovens. Good design allows for some flexibility without leaving everything to chance like pure stumbling does.
themafia 7mo ago
It's significantly ruined by automated royal assent. The balance that's meant to protect the realm has not functioned for decades.
anon291 7mo ago
England's 'democracy' is cool insofar as the freemasons are cool. Old men in goofy hats sound fun until they end up raping some kid on an island somewhere in their old colonial posessions.
MichaelRo 7mo ago
[flagged]
- justonceokay 7mo ago
  At least we know this wasn’t written by AI
- watwut 7mo ago
  Yeah everyone in Britain is mandatory gay now.
  - MichaelRo 7mo ago
    "They" want you to be! :)
fleroviumna 7mo ago
[dead]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

by mindwok 7mo ago

rvz 7mo ago

> British democracy and government is cool. Oh sweet summer child. The government there does not care about you and will promise anything to get another 5 years in power despite causing the issues they promised to solve in the first place. You are essentially voting in the same party to be in government and progress there moves in the hundreds of years; hence the riddance of the scam that is unelected hereditary nobles which it took more than 700 years to remove them.

tjpnz 7mo ago
What on earth are you talking about? They were elected in 2024. If anything its the issues caused over the previous 14 years which must be fixed.
pjc50 7mo ago
In fairness, this is not unique to Britain. For America read "4" instead of "5".
- rvz 7mo ago
  Are there unelected hereditary nobles somewhere in the US that is entitled to having a seat in congress and can vote against laws being passed? Nope. I don't think so, not even the length of the term is the same.
  - fc417fc802 7mo ago
    And yet all of your objections apply to us in equal measure. Almost as though hereditary nobles don't have much to do with them.
  - xp84 7mo ago
    unelected hereditary nobles Let's break down what Senators are: > Unelected In most states a single party will always win statewide elections, so our Senators are what I'd call "marginally elected" since they only have to face a quiet low-turnout primary election and then they sail to an easy re-election. They're nearly always guaranteed to win their primaries as long as The Party supports them, and they'll do so as long as you're loyal to The Party agenda. > Hereditary Many of them come from generational wealth, and a few suspiciously just happen to become wildly wealthy while in office, including through their stock trades, which has been decided to be 100% not illegal even when they know things the public does not know. > nobles Ours are called "elites," but most things are the same - they tend to all have gone to the top 2-4 colleges, and you can't 'break into' this set unless you were born into old money. Seems close enough from the perspective of those of us who aren't nobles or elites. So, you can think of the Senate as the House of Lords lite.
    - hunterpayne 7mo ago
      Just checking, but you do realize that this kind of unhinged, populist takes are exactly the kind of propaganda you use to destroy a democratic system. You know that right? Only a couple of states are like you describe and none of them are red. The governor of KY (the reddest state) for example is a Dem. One of the Senators for Montana is a Dem, etc. In fact, if you want the Dems to win the presidency in 2028, one of those folks is your best bet. The other thing we can do it get rid of gerrymandering but that's unlikely and the most recent gerrymandering attempts are likely to end up blowing up in the face of the party drawing the lines. Politics is nothing if not ironic. PS Look at who is running for governor of CA right now and ask yourself if any of those folks actually represents CA in any real way. Also, ask yourself why there is only 1 Dem in that race?
      - xp84 7mo ago
        You can't destroy a democratic system that isn't democratic and already doesn't serve the people. The Senate was never designed to be democratic in the first place. The House was, but its main problem is just campaign finance decadence that means to the extent those guys do any governing during their 2-year terms, it's a part-time gig in between fundraising. And together, the legislative branch has become a joke. They now just fart around, either rubber-stamping whatever the President says, or shutting down the government whenever the party out of power can't accept that the public has rejected their policies. So I hope I can be forgiven for being pessimistic about whether this "democratic system" even serves any purpose at this point. But back to the Senate. Jon Tester was defeated in 2024. There is a peppering of Democrats in statewide office here and there -- Fetterman and Beshear, and the Virginia and Georgia Democrats, the latter of which got really lucky to both run in the election that was a referendum on Trump's COVID chaos, and the one getting to run against a proud child molester. They are also the exact kind of politicians that don't get support from the blue-state Democrats in primaries for national elections, because they are too moderate. If you don't check every box, the primaries will destroy you. To be fair, Republicans have the exact same problem. Blue-state moderates certainly could have been persuaded to support say, Jeb Bush, but the party only supports... well, since the phenomenon became locked in, they have only given their support to one man. Sorry to ramble, my point is that the practice of split-ticket voting is dying off faster than discounted DRAM. There used to be a lot of these cross-party appeal people like Bill Clinton, Ann Richards, Jon Tester, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, and on the Republican side George Pataki, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie. But this is now massively the exception, and trending down. BTW I'm all for getting rid of gerrymandering, but the Democrats have set that cause back by 100 years by selling out their supposed deeply held beliefs last year in California. Now we're just being honest that it's only about power. I don't remember who's running for governor in California, but I am guessing there is only one Dem running it's because the California Democratic Party is powerful and disciplined in ways neither national party is, and has told everybody but the party's favorite to sit down and shut up. That's speculation - let me know if I'm wrong.
  - BigTTYGothGF 7mo ago
    In the US our unelected hereditary nobility just buys candidates.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    Not hereditary, but SCOTUS functions somewhat worse than the House Of Lords: unelected, unremovable, life appointments, but ability to change the law. Hence the decades spent shifting the balance to reverse Roe v Wade. A lot of important US freedoms only came from the courts in spite of the legislatures, which I think is an under appreciated problem of the system. The US system skews much older for some reason too. The only president born after 1946 was Obama. Like being stuck in a time warp.
jongjong 7mo ago
No idea why this was down-voted, it's true. It's replacing one hereditary system based on inheritance of titles with another hereditary system based on inheritance of capital.
- pseudalopex 7mo ago
  > No idea why this was down-voted > Oh sweet summer child. And Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jongjong 7mo ago
    You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content. I really don't think most people are there yet.
    - pseudalopex 7mo ago
      > You need to have a very cynical worldview already to find my comment boring; as in; no information content. Boring does not mean no information content. But the part of your comment about comment voting was boring and noise.
      - koakuma-chan 7mo ago
        I think that guideline means that if your own comment gets downvoted, don't reply complaining about it. A "why was this downvoted? it's true" from another user is fine, I think.
        pseudalopex 7mo ago
        It could have said your comments if it meant your comments. And It never does any good, and it makes boring reading was not less true.
t43562 7mo ago
The governments don't really cause the issues. The big issues are just things that face the country no matter who is in control - how to pay for everything, how to deal with population aging etc. It's not a simple country - it's a machine with millions of complicated parts and therefore it's difficult to come up with simple things to do that will make everyone happy. The public don't all have a 10000 foot view, which I don't think any 1 person could comprehensively understand anyhow, and are susceptible to being sold "simple solutions" by politicians - in fact they won't elect anyone who doesn't pretend at least to offer simple solutions.

protocolture 7mo ago

I see brits describing it as "Dictatorship with Democratic characteristics" and "3 weasels leading the 4th rabid weasel around by the tail" it doesnt seem "cool" by any stretch, except maybe if it was fictional and the people it hurt were not real.

pjc50 7mo ago

I go back and forth on this. It's a lot like the palace of Westminster itself: charming, whimsical, historical, connected to the past, hopelessly impractical, postponing repairs until things break, and at significant risk of being burned down. On the other hand it avoids the illusion that power resides in a text and that you can legal-magic your way past a power structure.

bartread 7mo ago

There is something to be said for your written constitution though: having the fundamental principles on which your nation is founded enshrined in that way should, at least in theory, make it a lot easier to settle arguments (though in practice, and particularly recently, that does seem not to be the case). Constitutional wrangling in the UK is always really fraught though because it's all done by precedent and is therefore incredibly hard work to get to a clear understanding of what the situation really is.

scj 7mo ago
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time). It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"
inglor_cz 7mo ago
Well, SCOTUS sometimes produces really weird Humpty-Dumpty explanations for very common words. Such as that growing marijuana plants in your own home for your own consumption influences interstate commerce and is therefore within powers of the Congress to regulate/ban.
- laughing_man 7mo ago
  That's ultimately the result of the threats FDR made to pack the court if they didn't do what he wanted.
- wileydragonfly 7mo ago
  Well, they used that same logic to force integration… so.. sometimes good sometimes bad?
runako 7mo ago
The USA's written constitution should not be used as an exemplar of written constitutions in general because the founders didn't even enforce it the day after it was ratified. It took a civil war to even turn towards the words as written. The document itself was more aspirational than a reflection of how the founders intended to live and govern. As a result of all of that, we have developed a culture of sophistry around simple words. We pretend the Constitution binds us, but in practice the structures that govern the country are much more opaque and therefore more difficult to change. (This is why every so often we have to ratify a new amendment codifying rights that are clearly enumerated in the articles of the Constitution or in an earlier amendment. At some point, the sophistry tips over and we have to amend it to say what was plainly written in at some earlier point.)

s_dev 7mo ago

If cool means interesting then yes, it is cool because it's archaic and different but it's not effective. It's the equivalent of a verbal contract. It's simply not as clear or coherent as a written one. Irish democracy in contrast uses STV voting and a written constitution and is modeled between the best of what the UK, the US and France had to offer when it was drafted and is a very representative democracy with many political parties compared to the duopolies in the US and the UK. It's also why Ireland is largely immune to hard shifts to the left or right relative to the UK and US.

kimos 7mo ago
I love this about Ireland because they are such a young republic. And democratic systems are a technology. Something that we understand better over time, and somewhere new can pick and choose from what is best, where it is _extremely_ hard to change existing systems in established countries.
- xp84 7mo ago
  Yes, it's in my opinion one of the great tragedies of our time that some of our established countries are so hard to change. I don't mean this as the policy needs change, everyone will differ on those. I just mean the technology of government like you're saying. Efficient and more fair ways of voting on laws and electing representatives do exist. For example my own (US) has a political system basically frozen in amber from a time before many of the political and policy challenges of our day were not even thought of yet. And they did their best to create a change mechanism, but I think anyone being truly fair of any political persuasion has to admit that while it has prevented nearly every harmful extremist constitutional amendment (I'd say Prohibition is the main one that sneaked in), it has proven to, within the lifetimes of most living Americans, be so hard to attain as to set the status quo in stone. The framers didn't realize that most changes would be blocked by at least one party, out of fear that it would advantage the other guys. Same reason we stopped admitting states before letting Puerto Rico in, an absolutely absurd situation.
  - trimethylpurine 7mo ago

zrn900 7mo ago

What part of hereditary aristocrats and religious and otherwise lifetime appointees being able to send back bills to the parliament an infinite number of times until they are changed as they want them. There are cases in which they sent bills back as many as 60 times until they got them changed.

kergonath 7mo ago

> It's not enshrined in some document they got together and wrote down like the US constitution It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling like the American government. Too much depends on gentlemen agreements and people trusting other people to do the right thing. It works in a stable environment, but shatters the moment someone with no shame and no scruples shows up.

01jonny01 7mo ago
Britain's problems are due to uncharismatic Blairite socialist.
- skibble 7mo ago
  All of them? Hmmm.
- ordinaryradical 7mo ago
  This comment may or may not be wrong but it is quintessentially low effort. The point of HN is to discuss, not to tweet about your political enemies.
  - 01jonny01 7mo ago
    I'm parroting back the opposite of the original reply, which was upvoted That leaves me to conclude HN is a left leaning circle jerk echo chamber, much like reddit. With any dissent to the right triggering the non-hateful liberal lefties.
- b00ty4breakfast 7mo ago
  I don't know much about UK politics but I definitely know enough to know that there's no such thing as a "Blairite socialist".
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- kitd 7mo ago

JCattheATM 7mo ago

> gradually evolving them into a modern liberal democracy. And yet, they are still not quite there. There is something to be said for design over stumbling.

t43562 7mo ago
The stumbling is natural - it's a sort of stable thing deriving out of the state of now. Design is something put out there which may not stand up to the test of how people actually behave i.e. it may not be stable.
- JCattheATM 7mo ago
  It's fine to stumble initially, like discovering fire, but design gets us lighters and ovens. Good design allows for some flexibility without leaving everything to chance like pure stumbling does.

themafia 7mo ago

It's significantly ruined by automated royal assent. The balance that's meant to protect the realm has not functioned for decades.

anon291 7mo ago

England's 'democracy' is cool insofar as the freemasons are cool. Old men in goofy hats sound fun until they end up raping some kid on an island somewhere in their old colonial posessions.

MichaelRo 7mo ago

[flagged]

justonceokay 7mo ago
At least we know this wasn’t written by AI
watwut 7mo ago
Yeah everyone in Britain is mandatory gay now.
- MichaelRo 7mo ago
  "They" want you to be! :)

fleroviumna 7mo ago

[dead]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]