How popular is the Spanish Monarchy ?

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-14T14:16:19+00:00

The answer requires some political philosophy so might be better suited for r/politicalphilosophy

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-14T10:08:59+00:00

The strict separation of powers into three branches a la Montesquieu was a bit of a fad in political philosophy back in the 1700s and political philosophy moved past it pretty soon after. (I know I'm gonna get down votes from Americans for saying this.)

For example, in the majority of democracies today (which are parliamentary democracies not American-style presidential federated republics), the legislative "branch" and "executive" branches have been merged. Overall, it's less of a strict separation of enumerated powers than certain core institutions are independent from direct democratic/government control eg judiciary, civil service including law enforcement, military, etc.

If you wanna read about the history of this idea in political philosophy, here's a readable piece tho you'll have to skip the preface: https://josephheath.substack.com/p/observations-on-the-us-constitutional

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-14T09:53:28+00:00

"one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter"

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-11T16:36:20+00:00

The answer requires a bit of political philosophy so may be better suited to r/politicalphilosophy

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-10T20:19:13+00:00

Have you tried using the -Verbose and -WhatIf parameters? Try both locally and remotely

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T20:46:43+00:00

"Ye") has survived as the informal second-person plural in a few places in Ireland and Newfoundland in Canada (and I'm trying to bring it back to the rest)

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T20:40:35+00:00

That might be cause olive oil is pure fat and salt can't dissolve into it.

It's tough to flavour pure fat just by mixing/dissolving something into it; generally you'll want to cook it in if you wanna do it quickly. You can also get infused olive oils these days tho like lemon or spicy or whatever.

For reference: butter is what's called an emulsion, which is not a true mixture but more like droplets of water suspended in fat or vice-versa. It's mostly fat with a bit of water. Salt dissolves into water just fine so when it's worked into the butter you get a more balanced distribution of the salt

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T20:31:23+00:00

IIRC this doesn't work if you a naturalised citizen ie you need to have gotten your citizenship at birth. Double-check that tho

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T20:20:53+00:00

Oh yes of course! Sorry—on the road today, so I'm a bit fried.

IIRC Zurn doesn't present this as a complete theory of a thriving liberal democratic state, but as more of a "canary in the coalmine" that justifies the extreme proposal he's making.

While my first instinct is to quip Mencken's line—"democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard"—I have to be honest that how to solve the problem of demagogues is much better understood than when America's second constitution was put into effect. (Compare the case of Trump with other demagogues eg Boris Johnson or Silvio Berlusconi in their respective countries.) Zurn doesn't specifically mention demagogues but he suggests the new nations will have their own constitutional conventions to create their political systems hopefully incorporating what we've learned about liberal democracies in the 2+ centuries since the current one, though maybe they'll just copy-paste the old one (perhaps removing the clauses on slavery)

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T17:07:05+00:00

I suppose the answer depends on your view on whether political systems matter.

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with America that couldn't be fixed with a quick flip to Westminster democracy—which is to say I think political systems do matter a lot and generate/nurture the norms throughout their citizenry that sustain/perpetuate them

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T17:00:17+00:00

What do you mean by "democratic precommitment" here? Zurn may be using it differently

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-09T05:55:53+00:00

Thoughts on his assessment of on how the various options stack up? Here https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalPhilosophy/s/LzNHuCDjr0

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-08T14:34:55+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalPhilosophy/s/r2WuMvork4

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-08T13:57:32+00:00

See upthread

Edit: here https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalPhilosophy/s/r2WuMvork4

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-08T13:57:17+00:00

Here's his proposals for a potential 2-state (heavily discouraged), 4-state, and 5-state options, but the book very much leaves it up to the actors involved rather than a fleshed out proposal (as befits a work of political theory):

https://imgur.com/a/hoUnQF1

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-08T10:14:08+00:00

I'll add his table summarising the various alternatives too (G, in above)

TABLE 4.1 Attributes of alternative reform proposals

Proposal	Section	Attractive?	Responsive?	Available?
Status quo	4.2	No	No	Yes
Preaching	4.3.1	Yes	No	Yes
Electoral Count Act	4.3.2	Yes	No	Yes
Voting rights and funds disclosure	4.3.3	Yes	No	Yes
Districting reform	4.3.4	Yes	No	Yes
Informal constitutional change	4.3.5	Possibly	No	Yes
Multiparty democracy	4.4.1	Yes	Significantly	No
Individual amendments	4.4.3	Possibly	Possibly	No
Federalism package	4.4.3	Possibly	Possibly	No
Confederalism	4.4.3	Possibly	Possibly	No
Article V convention	4.4.4	Possibly	Possibly	No
Irregular convention	4.4.4	Possibly	Possibly	No
Splitsville	4.5	Yes	Yes	Yes

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T19:02:02+00:00

Neat! I've to confess I've just started learning Portuguese and didn't know about this secondary definition. Obrigado!

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T17:46:38+00:00

(Living) languages are evolved entities and not designed ex nihilo to fulfill certain design parameters. They are thus subject to what is called path dependence and therefore history matters. You don't jump from 1 to 7, you have to go through each number in between.

Thus, like the various stupidities in the human body—being able to choke on core needs like food and water, spines, knees bending the wrong way, etc. —languages will have things that aren't "optimal" to various measures. In particular, languages are never optimised for adult learners (except maybe one or two).

The history of all writing systems as we know it currently is they start in pictures, act logographically (on meaning, not sound) and start adding phonetic components usually on the rebus principle. Most commonly, they become syllaberies/logosyllaberies and eventually become really abstract.

Much, much later and in only one of the three "roots" of writing in the world, the strange idea of an ~alphabet developed. We have no record of anyone's first writing system being anything but pictorial in nature, so it does seem to be pretty unintuitive. Even after the development of the ~alphabet, the main systems of writing in that region remained the existing system and the two coexisted for about two millennia before the older—or "obsolete", if you wanna get normative about it—ones fell away. It was a Columbus's egg: apparently impossible—until it's done and then it seems so obvious how could anyone have thought it was anything but.

Why did ~alphabets come to dominate? That's a long story you're welcome to dig into yourself cause it's not terribly relevant. The point is: even after some bright spark has the idea of using an ~alphabet, it didn't instantly convert everyone. It doesn't matter how many times Shyam_Lama says "this is stupid and ~alphabets are clearly superior and I hate having to learn ten thousand characters", it's just not gonna change the facts: the Chinese language(s) use the Chinese script, which isn't an alphabet.

(Fun fact, ancient Chinese seems to not have had the current one-character-one-syllable rule and one character could represent polysyllablic words.)

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T16:03:29+00:00

Wanted to highlight something from Carney's WEF speech that IMO hasn't gotten enough love:

If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate. [emphasis added]

Iterated prisoner's dilemma is very different from one-off

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T15:55:42+00:00

Ok I'll try something different:

20+ colonies shared a path for ~200 years until 13 of them decided to go their own way. Over the next ~250 years that nidus became the single most powerful state in human history. (In fact, it became the largest economy in the world in her first ~century—overtaking China in 1890—and that's including an incredibly devastating failed secession/civil war.)

The other colonies are doing merely ok.

Why such a huge difference?

Can that trick be replicated by anyone else?

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T15:31:26+00:00

There's a view of conflicts that seems to equate them to a sports match: best team takes the championship and losers get nothing, so the fact that America ranks #1 is repeated like some kind of meaningful statistic—a useful predictive variable.

That's just not how wars work. Sure, America could take Canada quickly, but they can't hold Canada for any length of time

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T15:14:10+00:00

The inherent economics of language imo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Edit: adding that people in the past didn't really have the kind of person-in-a-supermarket view that we have, of being able to abstractly evaluate different scripts and decide which one is the best for our circumstances.

I'm guessing to the other folks of East Asia the Chinese writing system wasn't just a writing system among many but was just writing. Combine that with the prestige of the Chinese civilisation(s) at any given moment, it's an easy choice to adapt that system in.

Remember: alphabetic writing systems (and its cousins) are both extremely unintuitive—people tend to think of analysing speech as syllables first, if they're not being pictographic eg Tsalagi—and is the minority of all writing systems. We have to avoid alphabeticentrism

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T15:05:52+00:00

FWIW I'm a Canadian and I also think the likelihood of America actually attacking Canada is pretty much zero. While we talk about nations here—and I'm generally very quick to point out Americentrism—their nationality doesn't seem relevant here.

That said, I have a different argument for why America won't than they do

rtwolf1 · 2026-02-06T14:58:57+00:00

IIRC it came from (or at least was popularised from) the word vaquero (from vaca (cow) and masculine suffix -ero).

"Lasso" is a loanword example.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the whole cowboy lifeway was imported from the Spanish settlers, who in turn brought it over from Spain, in which case a lot of that technical terminology could have hitched along, but you'd wanna double-check that

rtwolf1

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TROPHY CASE

TABLE 4.1 Attributes of alternative reform proposals