02-01-2018, 10:34 AM | #71 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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One idea with that is to have a bride show. It would be ridiculously like The Batchelor. In practice a disproportionate number of commoners to marry princes will be rich tradesfolk as not only do they have political advantage, a prince is likely to grow up knowing several personally, they won't be as impressed by his crown, and thus the chance of being burdened with a golddigger are less.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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02-01-2018, 11:03 AM | #72 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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In that sense any state is a corporation. It holds property, can sue or be sued at it's own volition(General George Crook once advised the Apache to sue him; obviously they wanted to sue the Federal government, but apparently there was some hassle about that), and make contracts. It even considers itself to have an inherent honor which can be offended by others, and capable of taking revenge violently which of course commercial corporations can't legally do at least at the present time. Of course the two things run together. Any group with a sustained common interest will also to some extent be a legal person. Even nomads from deceptively simple societies with little of the stuff that is required for large parts of law like agriculture and specialization and warespace(for property that never leaves the possessors sight can be defended personally and specialized jobs need appropriate regulation), accept and pay weregild for offenses.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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02-01-2018, 11:09 AM | #73 | |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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02-01-2018, 11:19 AM | #74 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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02-01-2018, 03:52 PM | #75 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
While the OP quite reasonably objected to, "every democracy is a western liberal democracy and every monarchy is medieval England" there are a number of obscurities in the Common Law that are exotic enough that one does not have to go abroad to find interest. One I found in one book was that it used to be a custom in some villages to cede land as designated parking space to passing Traveller clans, presumably those they have some sort of trade alliance with. The details of land use are also complicated. For instance there have been occasions where two villages shared a wood as pasturage. Likewise rent can have all sorts of weird connotations. In one place on the border it included the duty to sound a horn if the Scots are coming. In another place it included the obligation to marry the landlord's daughter(to provide for her naturally, though moderns would prefer the same effect done with rather less baggage to say the least).
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
02-01-2018, 04:57 PM | #76 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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A lot of this came out of Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies, which I think is a really brilliant study of medieval political thought. It's been my experience that if I want to make up exotic and mind-blowingly weird alien cultures, I can often do so by having them do something some human culture has done, because human beings are weirder and more diverse than most Americans (and probably most people in any one culture) can imagine.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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02-01-2018, 06:29 PM | #77 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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In regard to tenure I once tried to think of how land could be owned alodially by anyone except the state or a rich lord with the power to hire mercenaries as the nature of land makes it impossible to protect personally(you can protect your pocketknife by hiding it, but to protect land you have to fight for it and more important you need the help of others in fighting for it). A sort of commune like Ancient Athens was possible but that is just paying rent in another way. One way I thought of was an agrarian guild that gives options in return for money and labor. The guild dues would not be paid for land one holds now but for future land by developing and protecting someone elses. In essence it would be a pyramid scheme.
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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02-01-2018, 09:36 PM | #78 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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We could probably render land near-useless today chemically or radioactively, but making it selectively and conveniently reversible is harder, but it might become possible in the future by some means. But if only Yeoman Doe can use that acreage for anything, then it's only valuable to Yeoman Doe. That doesn't mean he's entirely out of the woods, of course, the very fact that it's potentially still valuable to him gives others some leverage. But that ability might provide one foundation plank of an exotic setting. If one the blood heir can make the land useful, usurpation becomes more complicated, among other things...
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HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here. |
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02-01-2018, 11:53 PM | #79 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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02-02-2018, 12:10 AM | #80 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: Exotic Governmental/Legal Systems
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I didn’t bother to list the various non-combatant auxiliary corps because, if I wasn’t picked for a combat corps, I didn’t care whether they used me as an experimental animal or sent me as a laborer in the Terranizing of Venus — either one was a booby prize Some of them were dropped without prejudice and allowed, if they wished, to sweat out their terms in the non-combatant services; And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked, and endangered — yet their votes count." |
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