Transcript
A threads post saying “There has never been another nation ever that has existed much beyond 250 years. Not a single one. America’s 250th year is 2025. The next 4 years are gonna be pretty interesting considering everything that’s already been said.” It has a reply saying “My local pub is older than your country”.
Dumb people hear something, misunderstand it, and repeat an incorrect version with authority and without any critical thinking. I’m sure this person heard that the US is the oldest existing democracy. The next oldest, depending on the criteria you use, is probably Switzerland at 175+ years. But does this person really think that the US has existed longer than, say, the ancient Egyptians, the Ottomans, the Byzantines, etc.?
The oldest existing democracy is Iceland depending on how you define democracy. But that was around 930 ad and had free men participating in making laws
This part of your comment seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland
It does a lot of heavy lifting when defining the US to be a democracy too.
You’d have to be a white supremacist to think the US was a democracy when slavery existed. Sure some people may have been voting, but there were Lords in a lot of places in Europe voting on stuff for a very long time.
We may as well say the Holy Roman Empire was a democracy because people voted for who would be Emperor. Sure the peasants didn’t get to vote, but it doesn’t matter if not every one gets to vote? Or does it?
And how you define nation/country. You could say the Isle of Mann, but it probably doesn’t meet the definition.
Those are not nations in the modern sense. Modern Turkey and Egypt have only been around since after WWI. Byzantium hasn’t been a nation since they were conquered by the Ottomans.
The post doesn’t say existing nations, it says there has never been one longer than 250 years.
How do you define a nation? Rome, Byzantium, the Ottoman empire, etc., those were all empires. You can debate whether you want to consider them nations.
The US is an empire unless indigenous peoples don’t count
If a country has ethnic/lingual, racial, gender/sexual, or wealth requirements is it really a democracy?
I’m not convinced that the USA was a democracy prior to 1964.
In that case there wasn’t any democracy up until maybe 100 years ago (no clue what country first ticked all the boxes, or when)
Yeah 100 years seems like a good guess. Basically the aftermath of ww1.
It is not. Not a democracy, at least in its modern sense.
It wasn’t one back then either. Women and black people weren’t allowed to vote from the start.
If the Greeks were a Democracy then so was the United States; they both used the same rules.
If Women and Minorities are your defining line then Great Britain didn’t become a Democracy until either 1928 or 1969.
Yeah.
The US didnt become a democracy until the civil rights act in 1964.