Ah, I see. We don’t tend to put it to the mouth. It’s more “fuck you”. Apparently comes from demonstrating to the French that you still have your bow-drawing fingers and intend to use them. British archers captured by the french would have their first two fingers removed to prevent them launching arrows.

In the UK two fingers up is a rude gesture and it comes from battles with the french. If they caught a British archer they removed those fingers so they couldn’t fire a bow. So sticking them up at the enemy and gesturing was showing they had them and would use them to fire arrows at them. I am not an historian, though, and this could just be one of those tales that sounds so true everyone believes it and passes it on.

We do? Can you describe the gesture? Maybe it’s so ingrained I don’t even recognise it. Or I need to learn it. Then I can use it at everyone today.

The phrasing was “you get fault points for” which strongly suggests assigning fault rather than listing out “points at fault”.

Also I think the term would be “points of failure” for the way you read it. At least that’s howbive heard it used and used it myself.

He has a wife, you know…

(Next server name: Incontinentia Buttocks)

As long as there’s a system, I think they’re useful. You can argue they weight things incorrectly but it’s useful to have some way to see how a country does against the same evaluation for rest of the world. I don’t know if this is the best data, but I don’t see anything that pops out as particularly odd.

At the bottom, it’s not much between NK and the two below. But the two below are Myanmar and Afghanistan, which I don’t think is too crazy.

I certainly never intended to silence discussion. I’d have said I was opening up the discussion, if anything, by poi ting out that there’s some data available that suggests the USA is far from the most democratic nation. Which, as I read it, was a tongue in cheek statement in the comment I replied to.

But, now it is being discussed, I’m interested in the view that monarchy should have a paeticylarly large negative weight on the ranking. I’m not a royalist and think any monarchy with even a hint of power means less than absolute democracy. But I don’t think many of the monarchies in those high ranking countries have as much of a negative impact as other factors that can reduce the input of a population to the democratic process. The big one for me would be how individual voting gets weighted.

Most democratic country is Norway.

USA is at position 26.

https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/most-democratic-countries/