81–90 of 210 posts
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Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
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We could get rid of the monarchy tomorrow and ordinary britons would notice zero change in our political and democratic freedoms. They are politically irrelevant, a few completely peripheral procedural and technical issues aside that make no real difference in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against keeping the monarchy to be honest. They're a historical vestigial appendage of th…
We don’t have a written constitution, so if you remove all the pomp and tradition it’s highly likely some things do actually go wrong as people forget they’re meant to happen.
There are places with written constitutions that have turned out better than the US one, but if you look at parallels between the UK and other nations, the US is the most likely one for the UK to follow. That way lies ruin.
We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers
Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?
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Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?
Technically we have a different monarch that is occupied by the same person (she is “the queen of the uk and the queen of Canada”, not really “queen of the uk and Canada”) and has the same rules of succession (implemented in a Canadian bill that must be updated in sync with the British equivalent when it changes). So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.
That way you never have to change Birthday celebrations, or anything else related.
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Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
In the UK, Governments change but Parliament persists. The basics mechanism of state are unchanged until a new Govt defines and votes through new policies. Unlike the US, the UK's civil service doesn't substantially change as a result of an election.
The last really significant change to Parliament was perhaps the 1832 reform act which got of rotten boroughs - constituencies with few if any voters that still returned MPs. Since then the House of Commons has gained primary over the House of Lords, whose main role now is delaying/modifying Govt proposals. The last big reboot was the Restoration.
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>The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers except, even with "disabled root account", you can do "sudo su" to get a root shell. What's the equivalent of that in uk?
Pretty much exactly that. The Government can (and does) request a Privy Council meeting, which issues various kinds of Orders in the name of the Queen. The Queen's Speech is another (less instrumental) way of government using the root account directly. (Or, I suppose, you could `$ sudo su`and then `# instantiate_republic` to permanently promote the usual administrator account to root. Still not clear it's wise to dir…
Here in the UK we're one day into a two day extra 'bank holiday' for the Queen's jubilee (70 years). Seems a good time to remind people of great sites like these, places that take the time to gather the evidence that reveals the truth behind royalty - descendants of thieves and murderers still profiting off the proceeds of their ancestral crimes, with their only 'qualification' being an accident of birth . We've neve…
We could get rid of the monarchy tomorrow and ordinary britons would notice zero change in our political and democratic freedoms. They are politically irrelevant, a few completely peripheral procedural and technical issues aside that make no real difference in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against keeping the monarchy to be honest. They're a historical vestigial appendage of th…
It's unlikely they talk about tea and biscuits.
But the real issue is that the Queen legitimises hierarchy and privilege. Instead of modelling democratic authority and meritocracy, she models the opposite - vast inherited wealth and land ownership, without accountability.
She is also the head of the armed forces, who swear an oath of loyalty to her personally - not to Parliament, and certainly not to the people of the UK.
In the UK she has Sovereign Immunity, which means she literally cannot be convicted of any crime. She can't even interviewed.
None of this would be a problem if she was in any way outstanding, but unfortunately the Royal Family have made some exceptionally poor choices. The Prince Andrew trial - and his $12m bailout - is just the most recent scandal in a long series of shady events and associations.