Surely for most of history one of the biggest limitations to "creative output" was the fact that people needed to eat. Particularly in villages (i.e. poorer areas) you didn't necessarily have the resources for great artistic displays—unless, at least, they were popular enough everyone could benefit.

And a significant one would also have been that we just don't highly regard a lot of creative output, because it was done within a theme we would regard as too constrained to be interesting (e.g. English parish churches were decorated by the parish). But just the same, I think a lot of contemporary artistic output is disregarded as uninteresting in even a very short while (i.e. people's lifetimes—think about popular music, the way people laugh at someone for listening to a lot of music from five years ago).

We're already getting "our fair share of the world's resources"—and then some. Haven't you noticed that we are killing the world we depend on for life?

Not to mention the kings George I, II & III!

What on earth is this kind of comment? It's like "America isn't a democracy, it's a republic". No, Spain and Sweden and the UK are democratic monarchies. They are both democracies and monarchies. The UK is not a theocracy; the church is governed by the the state, not the other way around.

If you vote, you don't get what you want. If you don't vote, you don't get what you want—but you haven't wasted your time.

If it's any consolation, in these parts Scandinavia and Sweden are typically used as positive examples, and I don't think it's occurred to most people to use them badly (altho I've seen the far-right examples on the internets).

Um, it's seriously easy to make booze. You get a bunch of fruit, juice it, make bread, and then ignore the juice for a couple of weeks. What, it's illegal to have food go off now? It's impossible to prohibit that.

How do you get meth or heroin? Heroin comes from specific plants, but you don't just eat the plants whole, and even if you did many countries ban all sorts of plants; here, Scottish Thistle can't be planted; a hundred kilometres over, it must be removed.

The fact that prohibition failed in the case of alcohol is not evidence that prohibition is impossible. The fact that prohibition of meth is incomplete is also not evidence that we shouldn't try it, any more than the prohibition of rape is incomplete means we shouldn't try.

No it's not. "Province" in the context of China has a similar meaning to Canada; it's an integral part of the country. When China calls Taiwan a province, they don't mean they're a colony, they mean they're the same as Beijing and Guangzhou.

It's more like if Yorkshire had its own currency and government.

There are still parts of Mongolia under Chinese control, and Mongolian is still an official language of Chinese. The Mongols from Inner Mongolia are indeed considered Chinese — just not Han. Of course, we're not so big on that distinction in the west.

Here here! I'm sick of hearing "ooh, constitution", "ooh, will of the people", "ooh, rights" as if these make a difference. Might makes right, and anything else just being polite. "Will of the people" is no different today than it is under kings and caesars and autocrats: if the people don't like you, they'll try and kill you. The government will govern as selfishly as they can while still making that unlikely.

The medieval serf had a much better excuse than "information brokers" and "gatekeepers": stomachs. The "information brokers and gatekeepers" as you call it were following the best science available at the time. They didn't have as much prosperity to allow the luxury of huge numbers (in absolute terms) of researchers and teachers. This meant that the gatekeepers and information brokers didn't have enough time to find out what was wrong with their techniques to make them better—and, by the time they did, then they did and we changed and that's how come the west became modern.

Today's much worse. Conspiracy theories are common knowledge. People who think they're wise generally believe huge numbers of early modern era myths, particularly about how people think and act, and this makes it even harder to correct. And the arrogance of our age is without comparison.

So you're right, future generations will consider as a dark age greater than the medieval period, but you're wrong, it's much much worse than you think.

A lot of science has no patentable outcomes even in principle. Science is finding out how things work, not making things work. Consequently, you missed a possibility:

Think of an idea, see if that idea works, if it doesn't run a different statistical test and see if you get a p 0.05. If after two or three tries you haven't, keep adding subjects/test cases until you find p 0.05. It shouldn't take more than about twenty tests to get the desired outcome. Once that's done, omit most of the details and publish the result. Proceed to get ignored by most of the world; but don't worry, if you had've done it properly in the first place you would've been ignored too.

It is funny, but it's precisely because of the reformation that Galileo was punished. Just like today, there are evangelicals and fundamentalists who are critical of Rome's opinion on creation and evolution—and it was a Catholic priest who came up with one of the major pieces of the scientific account—also in those days, protestants were critical of Rome's lack of concern about heliocentrism—and it was a Catholic priest who came up with one of the major pieces of the scientific account. But in those days, the Catholics had secular power, paid more attention to the opinions of protestant fundamentalists, and were basically fundamentalists too (albeit in a different way).

So it was for political reasons that they did evil things. Which remains to this day a good and popular reason to do evil things.

At this point in history, it is a bit difficult to advance science in the garage. Not impossible, but quite difficult.

(a) That's only true if you have a very narrow definition of science. A few thousand dollars buys an eyetracker which will give a cognitive science hours of trying to understand all these basic things we fundamentally don't know about how people think. And considering that almost everything we do involves how people think, this is a massive advance—most people, most scientists outside of the field even, have a level of knowledge of human cognition that's on a par with geocentrism. Of course, university campuses are great for having an easy supply of people who will rock up for credit or $10 for an hour; you can't replicate that in your garage.

(b) Even if that weren't true, do we need to advance science beyond the point where you can't do it on your own?

Why is it that Americans keep coming up with this? "Democracy" and "Republic" aren't in opposition. The United States is both a democracy and a republic; North Korea is a republic but not a democracy; Canada is a republic but not a democracy and Saudi Arabia is neither democracy nor republic.