It reminds me on surveys I’ve seen on racism. Questions like “do you consider yourself to be a racist?” get a of “no” answers. But you’ll get a lot more “yes” answers to revealing-oneself-without-realizing questions, like “do you believe that minorities bring poor public opinion on themselves as a group?”, where a “yes” answer is pretty much “I’m absolutely a racist”.
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Why not all three?
This is the image that the Pakistani army has given itself, thanks to friendly politicians undermining civilian agencies and bringing in the army to solve the resulting problems. See for example the origins of the National Logistics Corporation.
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I hadn’t considered the Pakistani case; but I was thinking of that of Egypt; where the military involvement in the economy is hard to describe as a success(except for the military; turns out you can turn a decent profit if your competitors are sufficiently hamstrung).
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there are some marginal-tax-rate lunatics out there who could convince themselves that such an arrangement is amazing because it provides StateSec with a source of operating income that doesn’t show up in tax rates; but it’s hard to read the record of the examples provided to us as anything other than that of a dysfunctional and inefficient piece of legally privileged command economy embedded like a leech in the economic activity of the nation as a whole.
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From what I’ve read, it’s the same in Pakistan.
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I’m late to this discussion. I missed this entire post somehow. Anyway, it’s true that the UK is a constitutional monarchy. However, it’s different than most, if not all, other constitutional monarchies in that it doesn’t have a single, codified Constitution. Its Constitution is a collection of documents including and dating back to the Magna Carta. While the execution of Charles I and the subsequent civil war certainly reduced the power of the monarchy a lot, they didn’t have one singular event or document such that you can draw a line through a year and say, “Before this year, the UK (or Britain) was a traditional monarchy, and after it was a constitutional monarchy.” It’s been a more gradually evolving change in governance. And if you put a gun to my head and made me pick a date when it started inevitably down the road to a constitutional monarchy, I’d probably pick 1215. So I think it’s accurate to say the current monarchy is the same one that existed in 1776. It has lost power and influence, but, as you said, there is a continuous line from now to then.
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Yes, exactly… a changing institution is still an institution!
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This is off topic, but the history of the UK and England fascinates me. I recently watched a video talking about who the first King of England was, and it’s a really open question. Not because we don’t know who was King at various times, but what exactly they were the King of is in question. So not only is it hard to pin down when that nation became a constitutional monarchy, it’s hard to pin down when it became a country. It’s a fascinating history because it’s all so ambiguous.
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Yeah, the best history always is, as it means that historians can endlessly bicker about it… to be fair, we’ll bicker about anything, but… 
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Sort of. Only through coalition with the Center party were the Nazis able to push through their agenda against opposition from the equally-weighted Social Democrats and Communists. Nazi support in the popular vote maxed out at 37% in free elections and in some regions never rose above 15%.
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Me, too! Especially that early stuff, as it’s history and peoples represent waves crashing on the shore, covering the land, then receding, only to be replaced by the next wave. From Gaels, Picts, and Britons to Saxons and Angles, Romans and Norse, to Normans, I find it a fascinating topic.
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Good luck with that. To quote an excerpt from the USAF Air University’s own publishing group:
The United States military has executed 33 stability operations as opposed to 16 combat operations since 1898. The stabilization activities were frequently ineffective and regularly left occupied countries in a worse condition after US forces left than prior to arrival. Several underlying problems evident during each of these stability actions denote the reasons why the US military does not conduct efficacious stabilization activities. The US military habitually sent combat-trained and -equipped personnel into situations where these individuals encountered environments requiring service members with civil administration, law enforcement, and engineering backgrounds. The US military established initiatives throughout this period that created short-term stability at the regional level. However, these enterprises never engendered long-term national stability, and the US military ended these programs as the United States refocused away from nation-building and toward conflict with China and Russia.
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… leaving open the questions of what “stabilization” is, exactly, and of why other countries would owe it to us to be “stable,” and of why the geniuses at the “Air University” would expect countries being “stabilized” by foreigners not to be left in a worse condition 
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There’s a lot that I think could be discussed about that subject; I’m guessing it includes things like disaster response and post-revolution occupations of other countries, and the point of those paragraphs seems to be that US military training isn’t meant to equip soldiers for those tasks; and that clearly (to me, at least) suggests that their own sense of their skill set would not include operating as an administrative force in a post-counter-revolutionary America, which is a rough parallel to a stabilization action. For me, I think military occupations almost invariably make things worse for both sides – but then no one is going to ask me.
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The epaulets.
Interesting. Also brings up a new-to-me twist on the Project 2025 plan to revamp our federal agencies’ staffing, filling them with toadies. When I contracted with the Dept. of Energy, we’d often lose a few staffers when we had natural disasters (hurricanes, etc.) requiring FEMA deployment because the way it works is federal employees working at DOE and other agencies can volunteer to do a “detail” supporting the disaster zone(s) work. These are generally the employees with administrative, legal or other expertise. Just yet another way P2025 will cause unnecessary pain and suffering, if those positions are filled with incompetent people.
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