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The flaw is inherent in the designThe flaw is inherent in the designPosted Jun 27, 2009 13:20 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: The flaw is inherent in the design by drag Parent article: Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears (ComputerWorld)
Thats why the USA (with the longest lasting democracy so far)That is extremely debatable (and this is completely off topic but it's Saturday and I'm bored). For the first fifty-plus years the franchise was decidedly limited, so it's questionable to what extent it was more a democracy than, say, Britain, which banned slavery on its shores earlier but had rotten boroughs and very strange voter eligibility criteria to contend with. I suspect the case of the English Parliament makes it very hard to say what the age of the 'oldest continuous democracy' is, because its democracy was not designed but emerged over a very long period of time. Parliament could perhaps be considered to date back to the witenagemot, which vanishes into the mists of history but has written evidence surviving from the 600s, and was probably an old insitution then. I'm fairly sure that's older than the US, but I'm also fairly sure it wasn't what we'd today call a democracy. When did democracy in England start? Probably sometime in the 12th to 15th centuries, but there wasn't one moment you could point at and say 'here begins democracy', and so you can't say whether England (or its descendant states) or some other nation wins this contest (though it would probably be unfair to disqualify England merely because of temporary disruptions like Cromwell, or on the basis that the Act of Union saw it replaced with the UK Parliament, a body with a similar name, membership, and traditions sitting in the same building). Sorry if this torpedoes your quest for an unambiguous 'oldest' to point to.
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