Serve America (a shitty website)!
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@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
which was supposed to serve as a counter to the idea that just because you are a (federal) republic you cannot be a democracy for some weird reason.
At which point I tried to demonstrate that you can be a republic without being utilizing democracy.
When earlier my point was that we aren't a democracy.
And that's not a contradiction because it's two different contexts.
It's similarly true that you can be a socialist state and not utilize welfare of any kind, because welfare isn't socialism.
But in that conversation, people seemed similarly keen to change the definition of socialism to mean, welfare system.
At which point there's no point in having any conversations about types of government, because "words change", making them all meaningless.
But I get it now. European political theory seems to exist solely for the purpose of muddying up the waters so that no one is prepared for what anyone means by anything. Which inevitably lends favor to authoritarians, despite their insistence that authoritarianism is a right leaning trait, despite of all their own history seriously disagreeing with that notion.
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@boomzilla said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
which was supposed to serve as a counter to the idea that just because you are a (federal) republic you cannot be a democracy for some weird reason.
Is your country free as in beer or free as in speech?
Free as in ginger beer.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Free as in ginger beer.
I'm willing to see to it that that ginger doesn't have to buy beer.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Free as in ginger beer.
Dammit! That will cause another increase in the ginger ale price.
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@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
But I get it now. European political theory seems to exist solely for the purpose of muddying up the waters so that no one is prepared for what anyone means by anything. Which inevitably lends favor to authoritarians, despite their insistence that authoritarianism is a right leaning trait, despite of all their own history seriously disagreeing with that notion.
Actually, you're confusing two things here: What people/nations call themselves and what they actually are.
I'm going by the actual definitions of the words (i.e. what things are). I couldn't care less if you called yourself the "United Federation of Hopscotch Dancing".
I can't help it when your re-definitions don't match what people have agreed on for the words to mean.
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@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
"words change", making them all meaningless.
ASDESIGNED_WONTFIX
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@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
I can't help it when your re-definitions don't match what people have agreed on for the words to mean.
But the current definitions, as you have given them to me, have lost some meaning, and made some meaning redundant.
I now have to say that someone can have a government designed for the people without representation, to be explicit. And I have to indicate countries that have done so (mostly historical socialist.... oh fuck, I said socialist, better explain what that means....)
The designations no longer have meaning.
And if I were to say, "this is a republic", it's now useless information.
However, I can say this:
- When referring to "Republic", democracy is an implementation detail.
- When comparing "Republics" and "Democracies", "A government based on Democracy" is inferior because it generates tyranny of the majority. The founding fathers referenced this, long after the establishment and failure of classical Republics. Which means they used the same context I am using.
If you insist on removing that context and only using modern definitions, it becomes all meaningless.
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@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Actually, you're confusing two things here: What people/nations call themselves and what they actually are.
I'm going by the actual definitions of the words (i.e. what things are). I couldn't care less if you called yourself the "United Federation of Hopscotch Dancing".
The next thing you'll tell me is that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea isn't democratic or a republic.
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@Dragnslcr said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
People's
Well, this word is definitely redundant when Republic is present.
Which means that they've just added effort to convince themselves.
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@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
I can't help it when your re-definitions don't match what people have agreed on for the words to mean.
Can we go back to arguing what the word "woman" means?
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@boomzilla said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
I can't help it when your re-definitions don't match what people have agreed on for the words to mean.
Can we go back to arguing what the word "woman" means?
It shares the same root as "om", which is electricity. All woman are electric.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
All woman are electric.
Is that why you keep plugging your trans hookers into the mains? I don't think it works that way.
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@HardwareGeek said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
All woman are electric.
Is that why you keep plugging your trans hookers into the mains? I don't think it works that way.
When they said "electricity" and "conversion therapy" I thought they meant I could make my own AC/DC adapter.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
All woman are electric.
That would Shirley simplify it ... We can remove women's vote and still be a democratic republic.
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@Luhmann said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
All woman are electric.
That would Shirley simplify it ... We can remove women's vote and still be a democratic republic.
And now you know why we fight e-ballots so hard.
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@xaade
Republic and Democracy are not a dichotomy.
In modern use republic refers to the fact that there is a 'chosen' head of state. Scary quotes because the choice doesn't require to be a democratic one. The opposite is a non-chosen head of state like king or mufti or a pope ...
Democracy implies that government ultimately receives it's power from the people. How that is arranged is a practical exercise. That is why Democracy is a scale and some countries can be said to be more democratic then others. Opposite of a Democracy is authoritarian where the government reigns just because it is the government independent of the people it reigns.
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@Luhmann said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Republic and Democracy are not a dichotomy.
I never said it was.
I said that a government that is described as a Democracy can be compared to a government that is described as a Republic.
However, if the context is a Republic government, democracy can be employed.
It's two different contexts.
In the same vein, a government can employ republican concepts. In America, the Republic aspect refers to laws and rights. In China, it refers to the fact that the socialist government was established with the public's best interests in mind. In both examples, the implementation of "republic" is different. Also, neither of these implementations of republic government require democracy or representation. (Although the American term for Republic refers to classical liberalism, which includes representative democracy, but also balanced against rights and rule of law).
My frustration with Rhywden is the fact that he made Republic and Democracy inextricable, simply by asserting that the common modern implementation (as well as some period of Roman government's existence) always employs both (rather than most often employs both).
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@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
I never said it was.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you did. In previous post you have pointed that out.
However ... because democracy and republic are two different concepts ...
@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
government that is described as a Democracy can be compared to a government that is described as a Republic.
is comparing apples and oranges.
@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
In America, the Republic aspect refers to laws and rights. In China, it refers to the fact that the socialist government was established with the public's best interests in mind.
Same goes for the word democracy. To Fox it: it isn't because I call myself a native american that I actually am one.
@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
common modern implementation
Doesn't seem to be that common to me. In Western Europe we still have a good bunch of kings running around and outside of that there are many countries where democracy is but a pipe dream.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
And he never did. He had the workflow down pat. He didn't even really need to think about it. MAYBE over time a CMS could save him some effort-- but since the comic only updates about 3x per week, why go through the trouble of finding, installing, learning and maintaining a CMS.
Of course he could have chosen one of currently 445 programs to generate a static site with less hassle. I used to maintain what is probably the oldest package on there which has actually been around since 1995.
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@Luhmann said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
a non-chosen head of state like [...] a pope
Popes are elected.
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@PleegWat said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Popes are elected.
points awarded
but not by residents
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@boomzilla said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Is your country free as in beer or free as in speech?
Yes!
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@Lorne-Kates said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
It shares the same root as "om", which is electricity. All woman are electric.
no... my other dishwasher is electric.
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@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
In fact, in the classical sense, you can have a Republic without any form of representation. As long as the government is geared towards the people, instead of a monarch, etc.
Um, no. In a classical sense, a Republic is a Greek city state with a senate who are elected by citizen voters. You can read about it in Plato's "Republic".
There was also the later Roman republic, which was fought for for centuries, until Caesar did a coup and turned himself into emperator.
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@PleegWat said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Popes are elected.
Bollocks. Popes are selected, not elected, by God Himself.
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@another_sam By influencing the voting of the cardinals, presumably
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@RaceProUK said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
@another_sam By influencing the voting of the cardinals, presumably
Something like that. They're His
puppetsearthly agents or something. I don't really understand how anybody can take it seriously.
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@Luhmann said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
is comparing apples and oranges.
Yes. You CAN do that.
They're both round. One is red or green, the other orange.
Are you saying you can't compare socialism to democracy? Because they're not similar enough?
The point I was making is that Republic and Democracy are distinct concepts that can be compared, but under the context of Republic / Democracy, elements of either can exist or not exist.
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@Captain said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
@xaade said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
In fact, in the classical sense, you can have a Republic without any form of representation. As long as the government is geared towards the people, instead of a monarch, etc.
Um, no. In a classical sense, a Republic is a Greek city state with a senate who are elected by citizen voters. You can read about it in Plato's "Republic".
There was also the later Roman republic, which was fought for for centuries, until Caesar did a coup and turned himself into emperator.
Again, you're wrong.
Sparta was an oligarchy.
The modern type of "republic" itself is different from any type of state found in the classical world.[14][15] Nevertheless, there are a number of states of the classical era that are today still called republics. This includes ancient Athens, Sparta and the Roman Republic. While the structure and governance of these states was very different from that of any modern republic, there is debate about the extent to which classical, medieval, and modern republics form a historical continuum.
Knud Haakonssen has noted that, by the Renaissance, Europe was divided with those states controlled by a landed elite being monarchies and those controlled by a commercial elite being republics
In the other states various forms of autocratic republic existed until most were liberalized at the end of the 20th century.
autocratic - of or relating to a ruler who has absolute power.
Socialist Republics - The Bolsheviks who went on to establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
As I said, various forms of government have been referred to as Republic, where there is no elected representation.
This understanding of a republic as a distinct form of government from a liberal democracy is one of the main theses of the Cambridge School of historical analysis.
Liberal democracy is a liberal political ideology and a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism.
Again, a separation of representative democracy, and republic.
In fact, liberal democracy goes so far as to include rights and rule of law.
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@Luhmann said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
Same goes for the word democracy.
Except it's not just in the words.
The literal word "republic" refers to a government that is made for the people. How it does it is an implementation detail. At which point, it's rather subjective as to whether a government is working for the people or not, isn't it?
The reason it's important difference between China and USA, is that China mocks Democracy.
Socialist Republic is a form of government, and they don't necessarily include Democracy, or representation.
Then you have Calvanistic Republics, which doesn't even require the monarch to step down, just that they operate in the best interests of the people. It evolved into a classical republic concept with representation.
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@Rhywden said in Serve America (a shitty website)!:
I can't help it when your re-definitions don't match what people have agreed on for the words to mean.
But they haven't.
If you have any indepth read of what a Republic entails, beyond the Google definition, you'll notice that there is some variation throughout history, even including today (though much less of it).