OK, pardon if I have interpreted your claims too uncharitably, or if I sounded too personally critical. I didn’t mean to pick on you as having low intellectual standards or anything like that—I merely wanted to point out that your reply sounded like a cached thought of a sort that, in a different context, would likely raise a red flag for many people here, possibly including you, thus potentially indicating some widespread biases reflected in failure to notice the cached thoughts in this particular case.
When you say that “clearly the main advantage is the ability of the population to elect the head of state,” this can mean, to the best of my interpretation, either that this ability is somehow valuable in itself (so that this value should be counted as a positive term separately from its practical consequences), or that it self-evidently has advantageous implications. Do you think this interpretation is incorrect or uncharitable? I certainly find neither the former nor the latter possible meaning as “hardly worthy of controversy.”
Your subsequent comments indicate that you had in mind the former meaning, i.e. that popular election of the head of state is somehow desirable and valuable in itself, which however may need to be weighted against its possible bad practical implications. But as I said, I definitely don’t see how this claim is self-evident. How exactly would you justify it?
As for the issue of personal union (i.e. sharing the head of state with other countries), you characterized it as an “additional disadvantage,” thus implying (again to the best of my interpretation) that it is indeed, on the net, a disadvantage. But I don’t see how this could possibly be self-evident either—off-hand, I can easily produce a bunch of reasons why it could plausibly have both disadvantages and advantages. (As an off-hand example of an advantage, as a Canadian, you can still get some degree of British consular protection.) Which of these prevail of course depends both on empirical questions and how we choose to weight individual concerns. But again, I really don’t see how such an assertion could be “hardly worth of controversy.”
OK, pardon if I have interpreted your claims too uncharitably, or if I sounded too personally critical. I didn’t mean to pick on you as having low intellectual standards or anything like that—I merely wanted to point out that your reply sounded like a cached thought of a sort that, in a different context, would likely raise a red flag for many people here, possibly including you, thus potentially indicating some widespread biases reflected in failure to notice the cached thoughts in this particular case.
When you say that “clearly the main advantage is the ability of the population to elect the head of state,” this can mean, to the best of my interpretation, either that this ability is somehow valuable in itself (so that this value should be counted as a positive term separately from its practical consequences), or that it self-evidently has advantageous implications. Do you think this interpretation is incorrect or uncharitable? I certainly find neither the former nor the latter possible meaning as “hardly worthy of controversy.”
Your subsequent comments indicate that you had in mind the former meaning, i.e. that popular election of the head of state is somehow desirable and valuable in itself, which however may need to be weighted against its possible bad practical implications. But as I said, I definitely don’t see how this claim is self-evident. How exactly would you justify it?
As for the issue of personal union (i.e. sharing the head of state with other countries), you characterized it as an “additional disadvantage,” thus implying (again to the best of my interpretation) that it is indeed, on the net, a disadvantage. But I don’t see how this could possibly be self-evident either—off-hand, I can easily produce a bunch of reasons why it could plausibly have both disadvantages and advantages. (As an off-hand example of an advantage, as a Canadian, you can still get some degree of British consular protection.) Which of these prevail of course depends both on empirical questions and how we choose to weight individual concerns. But again, I really don’t see how such an assertion could be “hardly worth of controversy.”