Yeah, the Electoral College is peculiar - but this is one of the reasons that I don't put the US up as an exemplary democracy. I think if we look to the US we're going to be less confident about democracy in general, but I think that what it suggests is that the US system needs an update, just as the Australian, German, New Zealand, UK, Swedish, Dutch and other systems have had through the years, and continue to consider.

Regarding the economic system, the question is whether a certain system should be 'baked in' to democracy, or whether it should be democratically chosen. The former is more static, while the latter can be responsive to various changes in society and so forth. If people want a certain type of economic system for their own benefit, then they can democratically choose that - nothing is stopping them, theoretically.

(By the way, I'm not convinced that 99% of people all want a similar economic system to each other - what constitutes responsibility, fairness, obligation, charity and other moral values inform people differently on this measure.)

You've made this question a Rorschach test - this is great if you want to learn about yourself. If that is what you want out a question of this sort, then you're going quite successfully - but it also sort of doesn't matter what the question was.

I was merely asking what chain of reasoning led to this question being significantly considered in the first place.

Right, and isn't that "backstory" what makes the question meaningful? Aren't you inspired to uncover that backstory and determine its meaning? — Metaphysician Undercover

The backstory is what makes it meaningful - that's what I've been saying and I agree on that. But not every question has a backstory, and my complaint is whether we are thinking up the question first and assuming it has a meaningful backstory, or whether we develop these questions because of the backstory we have already uncovered. My ghost question might have a meaningful backstory - might.

This is why you and Devan99 potentially having completely different understandings of the question is problematic to me. You speak of poetry and finding relevance for ourselves, and this is exactly my complaint - that this question might be so vacuous that the only meaning is what is projected onto it. This is quite different from being based on a meaningful backstory.

I feel as if your defence of this question being meaningful is to make the whole thing nebulous, personal, poetic and subjective.

I am surprised you accused me of potentially "possessing an unshakeable prejudice" when it seems that bringing our own perspectives to the question is all that it consists of - my response, as far as I can tell, is just as reasonable as yours, because your metric for reasonableness doesn't even require that two people understand if they are considering the same question at heart.

These undermining elements are really interesting! Thanks for the list.

1. An electoral system not based on the popular vote. — FreeEmotion

I'm uncertain how to respond to this one - various concepts of deliberative democracy, which I am quite sympathetic to, will agree or disagree with various electoral systems depending on how representative they are. Sometimes this will disagree with the idea of a 'popular' vote, but I guess that this depends upon what a popular vote really is. Do Germany or the Netherlands have a popular vote?

2. Government agencies monitoring citizens without judicial approval — FreeEmotion

I'm broadly in agreement with this.

3. Large monopolies controlling major sectors of business

This is more difficult. Personally I think that this is an issue that democracy should be solving, but not necessarily an issue with democracy. However, campaign finance and lobby groups are problematic, as you note, and I think this is the overlap that strikes me the most.

6. Debating / attacking skills as the only qualification for presidency — FreeEmotion

Well, I live somewhere without a presidency, and where these skills are not so emphasised. I think Canada, which we were talking about earlier, doesn't rate this as highly as the US either.

7. An economic system that is unable to serve benefits to the vast majority of the population — FreeEmotion

There is debate regarding whether this is a core part of democracy or not - conceiving of democracy as a liberal democracy versus a social democracy (as frameworks, not policies) will lead you to different answers here. If this is the measure that you are using, then democracy has again had remarkable improvements over a longer-term timeframe and some challenges more recently.

Interesting to know how this is really democracy if it needs an external party to prop it up — FreeEmotion

I mean, it doesn't need this to prop it up - it's just an academic justification for the system. I only pointed this out because of the comment about loyalty to a foreign monarch and wanted to note the technicality that Canada's monarch is the Queen of Canada, who just happens to be the Queen of England, who just happens to be the Queen of Australia.

I don't feel like you've answered it, for a variety of reasons. First, what it is the makes the relationship between time and existence something worthy of a question? I don't mean this in an abstract, all knowledge is good worthiness - I'm up for that. But there's evidently some underlying backstory regarding these concepts and formulations of them that gives rise to this question. It didn't come out of nowhere.

Second, what's "the source of existence"? It, too, has a backstory, a rationale for being in this particular question.

Third, why use the phrase "God" for the source of existence? This is a word, or name, loaded with a host of different meanings (that not everyone agrees on all of the time). Why not use "the source of existence", instead? There is some further backstory here that places this word into the question as meaningful. I can't even tell if your description of the question matches Devans99's original understanding.

Either that, or we have just jumbled some words together in a random word generator and gone for it.

So I don't buy this "either you're interested and it is meaningful or you are not interested." The meaningful nature of this question stems from the presuppositions or previous work that it arose from - especially because it concerns such a specifically contested concept such as God. My question is really to what extent the backstory is grounded or to what extent it is circular, and based upon similarly 'floaty' questions.

As for this:

Perhaps you don't care about this relationship, or possess an unshakable prejudice concerning this relationship which renders questioning it as meaningless. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you might have misidentified who might have an unshakeable "prejudice" here.

This is a type of equivocation, surely? What constitutes the "universe" if there is something that is creating it? Would we be better served asking how the universe self-created?

I disagree with the way your probability works - you're not asking what the probability is of the universe forming from some initial conditions, you're asking what the chances of identification are given what the universe looks like now, which is not a probability question, it's a weight of evidence question. You're really asking: Does the evidence support hypothesis A or hypothesis B? In which case, plausible responses involve, "What about hypothesis C?" or "We don't know."

It's not a fifty-fifty chance if I am a woman or a man just because you don't know. It's about a fifty-fifty chance that you'll guess.

To deny the question as meaningful, as you are doing is what is a fictional construct. Just because you have no interest in this type of question doesn't mean that it is not an important question. — Metaphysician Undercover

Honestly, I hate this type of response. This language in this response suggests (a) the question is meaningful, (b) I know it, (c) I publicly state that it is not because (d) I have no interest in it.

I am interested enough to have replied for the first time in two years. What your response doesn't tell me is why it is meaningful.

You've provided a set of starting points for the conceptualisations of these ideas, but that doesn't tell me much about how or why we think these are meaningful enough and accurate enough to be able to phrase this question and answer it.

For instance: is the unfinished business of ghosts borne out of situatedness or virtue?

I have definitely heard this as an absurdist joke rather than as a Zen koan.

I guess my point is - the question in the joke is nonsense, and the answer is nonsense. It would take quite some theorising to put together a group of concepts to suggest that there is a meaningful answer, and the answer is going to be wholly determined by the premises that you bring to it. We can certainly ask if God is timeless or eternal, but first we have to have determine what God is, what timelessness and eternity are, and so forth. And by the time we've done this we are so far away from wherever we started that the entire question and answer are just abstract, fictional constructs that don't tell us anything except how creative we can be.

It reminds me of the 'orange juice seat'. There is a linguistics discussion in which it is questioned whether the phrase 'orange juice seat' can be meaningful. Given context, it can: if there are three seats at which apple juice has been served and one at which orange juice has been served, we can identify this seat with the phrase 'orange juice seat'. So it can be meaningful, and so ca, probably, any phrase be meaningful. But the entire context that makes them meaningful has to be supplied and doesn't tell us anything much about the world or how it works.

So I guess where I'm going is - why do we think that this is a meaningful question?

I think that this is one of those "the question is wrong" type of questions. There are just so many premises and conceptualisations of power, potential, time, intention and other things to be even able to frame this question.

This reminds me of the question: "What is the difference between a duck?"

How do we get to questions such as these?

You say

Canada is a democracy if you measure according to accepted norms. — FreeEmotion

But I was curious as to what definition or concept of democracy you were using, and you still haven't said. I have no way of knowing what you think accepted norms are, or why you might strongly disagree with them.

Just so you know, Canada has a Queen known as the Queen of Canada. She is also the Queen of another country (for example, Australia!) but that doesn't mean she isn't the Queen of Canada. It is a separate political institution from Queen of England.

It might be more informative to talk about what is democratic and how much of a role these factors play. Being able to vote, stand for office, have robust and fair electoral systems that are responsive to voter input and reflect voter preferences, communicate freely with office-holders, publish and discuss differing opinions, be educated in political matters, place constraints on unilateral power, encourage multi-faceted engagement and have some level of ownership and satisfaction without political decisions are democratic factors that countries such as Canada enact relatively well - moreso than, say, North Korea. I suggest that this makes Canada fairly democratic, and the existence of a hereditary monarch who rarely, if ever, intervenes, and especially not so in a particularly partisan way, does not negate these factors. Nor might it place Canada in a less democratic position than various US states such as Kansas where some of these norms are being challenged, such as who and how electoral districts are drawn and how office-holders are voted in, even though these states do not have monarchs.

I am interested to know, if you are suggesting that "technically" Canada is not a democracy, what definition of 'democracy' are you using? Because as far as my studies in political theory and political science treat it, constitutional monarchies are absolutely capable of being democracies, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and many other places are considered well-functioning democracies. Democracies are more than just checking if the person at the top is elected - technically Kim Jong-Un is voted in.

I'm not altogether sure how much I'd attribute a democratic revolution to the US for a variety of reasons.

I disagree with you that "the boundaries are very distinct, there is such a thing as just a democracy". The short answer is that "democracy" is a contested term, that there are many conceptions of it, and that they have been evolving since before Athenian democracy was on the cards - and I don't think that the US is a strong example of what democracy is or could be. Should we take Australia or New Zealand, for example, there are voting reforms and other institutional changes that have made these countries more democratic. As a contested concept scholars like Schumpeter think that current forms of democracy are relatively adequate, while Dahl and others think that democracies are relatively non-existent. What is common is that democracy is discussed, explored, and generally agreed to be preferable and legitimate, and that improvements and challenges are raised all the time. It is a very active field, and there is a trend for local political institutions to test out more democratic practises and for these to work their way up to larger bodies including countries, so I think there is life in it yet.

On a short time-scale democracy is perhaps being challenged, but on a longer timescale there has been a general movement towards more democratic societies and anything we see in the last ten years is a minor fluctuation. Suggesting that democracy is dying is, I think, quite premature.

Note: What you call a republic is often referred to as a 'representative democracy' outside the US, while 'republic' refers to a system without a monarchical ruler - I mention this just so we are on the same page, not because I have a quibble with it.

You've focussed on one particular democracy, the US, but I don't feel like it is especially representative of democracies in the world today. At best, I think you've made a critique of US democracy, but no more than that. What's your opinion of other places?

I also think that the distinction between a democracy and a republic as mutually exclusive systems rather than different possible overlapping features of regimes is a very US-centric view; I don't hear that distinction in any other country's discourse. What's the difference, in your opinion?