Well they are right next door to the country that made an award-winning reindeer pizza out of spite, so probably

Right, well until someone has a real plan for actually doing that, I’m still going to suggest that we should ban the bottom trawling equipment in the meantime

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359281130_New_perspectives_on_an_old_fishing_practice_Scale_context_and_impacts_of_bottom_trawling

China and Vietnam do the most and second-most bottom trawling in the world. We need to collectively ban the equipment, because the economic pressure exists regardless of which extant system the country uses

You got a source for that millionaires per capita thing? China’s Gini coefficients are roughly on par with Western Europe

As I understand it they’re basically just avoiding doing anything that might destabilise the status quo. Changing the country’s name to something else is saying “we are actually a separate country from China” as opposed to being in a frozen war where both sides theoretically claim to be the same country. The ambiguity lets them be de facto independent and lets the PR of China say “it’s de jure ours” without either side actually going to war about it at the moment, so the ambiguity stays

It’s the estate that makes the income though, not the family. In the UK most of that estate is owned by the position of the monarch itself rather than by the monarch; a perk of the job, not private property. In other words it’d probably still make just as much money in a republic, arguably more since we could let visitors in to see the buildings

Additionally, a figurehead monarch doesn’t address any of the issues with a successful Trump-like politician. Here in the UK I often hear people saying “would you want a President Boris Johnson?” No, I wouldn’t, but him being called Prime Minister instead of President removed literally none of his practical political power

My bad. I blame the thirty eight million times I heard people make the argument earnestly after the British queen died

It’s the country’s law, you can call the high commissioner “king” if you agree to. Ireland calls its prime minister and deputy PM “taoiseach” and “tánaiste” respectively, which are monarchic titles from the Gaelic clan system

Versailles gets fifteen million visitors a year

The simplest method in most cases would probably just be to change the law about succession. Keep the position of king, just make it an elected or appointed one. That way nothing else has to be touched unless you want to change it

The tourism argument is frequently bandied about, but I don’t think there’s much substance to it. The tourist attractions are the buildings (which obviously don’t disappear in the event of ending the monarchy) and ceremonies (which you can keep if you choose to, including the fancy costumes). It’s particularly unconvincing here in the UK when we are literally right next door to France, the world’s number one tourist destination. Versailles does not lack for visitors.

There is no way this doesn’t wind up making an ad that’s misleading enough to get Netflix and/or the advertiser in trouble

I wonder if it’s a language issue? Lithuanian is only really spoken in Lithuania, which is quite a small country, and most Lithuanians also don’t speak another EU language (the most common second language by a wide margin is Russian). It might be that nobody has made a successful effort to publicise the campaign in a language that most Lithuanians know. The disclaimer here is that I don’t speak Lithuanian and cannot check

I think you are focusing too much on the modern world. You’re ignoring the Middle Ages and before

Also I think you forget that Democracies existed in the ancient world and they didn’t last long either

And they were famous already for being short lived back then.

I just gave you a list of civil wars in England dating back to the 11th century? But with regards to earlier democracies, I didn’t forget, I just don’t think they’re especially relevant since they were not all that similar to a modern democracy like Germany. Even Athens barred most of its population from voting. I think if you want to include them, you need to explain why they are a relevant comparison to a modern democracy. If you’re operating solely on whether or not they allow some people to vote, then constitutional monarchies count as democracies for this purpose and the short-lived fascist dictatorships of the 20th century count as monarchies.

also eastern monarchies as well

I’m focussing on Europe because the article is about Germany, which shares much of its monarchic and democratic heritage with its European neighbours. If you want to bring up other examples, go ahead.

petty succession squabbles

Open civil warfare is not what I’d count as a “petty squabble”. If there’s a years-long war to overthrow a king, that is not stability.

our government can only implement projects on a 4 to 8 year basis which is often not enough to fix problems

While modern democracies haven’t been around that long in the scale of human history, they have been around long enough to demonstrate that they don’t appear to be falling behind their monarchic peers. Take Finland and Sweden as an example; in the past ~100 years for which Finland has been an independent republic, would you argue it has performed worse than its constitutional monarchy neighbour Sweden? I wouldn’t, despite the fact that Finland started in a far worse position and also fought the Winter War and the Continuation War. And similarly, if we look at the the rest of the world, it doesn’t seem to me like republics are doing worse than monarchies that have had otherwise comparable histories.

But I’m not even arguing that democracies are especially stable. I’m arguing that monarchies aren’t particularly more stable.

the evidence seems to point that democratic states have by their very nature an expiration date

What evidence? Again, we have not seen more than a couple of centuries of the modern form of democracy.

it is on shaky ground only 250 years in.

If you’re going to exclude actual civil warfare and overthrow of the government from counting as instability for monarchies, you really can’t count a constitutional crisis as the end of a democracy. Maybe this is the end of the USA, but it’s hardly the first time a country has seen a constitutional crisis. It’s not even the first time the USA has seen one. If the USA does fall completely… alright? Even limiting it to large modern era countries, I can just as easily point towards the Qing dynasty that fell after roughly that amount of time, or the Brazilian monarchy which didn’t even make 100, or the Bourbon restoration in France that was even shorter. Pointing to an individual example that hasn’t even actually happened isn’t evidence of a broader rule.

Here’s a list of civil wars just in England and the post-union UK since it’s one of the best-known and longest-standing monarchies. Are we counting a monarchy that was overthrown multiple times as “lasting 1,000 years” (which it would now be close to if you count it from 1066 to the modern day)?

It also seems a bit silly to expect democracies to have lasted a thousand years immediately after making a point about the timeframe of social movements. The tradition of European democracies and the related ones that were spread around the world during the colonial era and the aftermath of it are too recent a movement to have lasted a thousand years. If we want to see if a democracy can last that long, we’ve got about 800-900 years to wait

It was only just a month into the first post-Euromaidan elected government of Ukraine and Russian media tried to pin the shootdown on Ukraine. Petro Poroshenko, the then-new president, was also talking a lot about forcefully ending the conflict in Donbas and Luhansk. To be clear this is 100% me guessing at things, but I could imagine it being an attempt to discredit Poroshenko’s government

I don’t think I can offer much here other than that I sincerely hope it succeeds

Entirely besides the point of the actual petition, I really feel like that flag could be a lot better. Half of the stars are blending into the background too much

I don’t think that the stability argument really holds. The surviving European constitutional monarchies today are stable, but there’s a pretty huge survivorship bias there — the French monarchy famously collapsed in the French revolution and the resulting wars took several others down, the German, Russian, and Austrian ones went down in WW1, the Italian one failed to prevent the rise of Mussolini, the Spanish one got ousted by the Franco regime. It seems to me like it’s more of a case of the places that have been stable have not kicked their monarchies out rather than them being stable because they are monarchies. And of course, all of the monarchies fought each other constantly in the times before