I still don't think you should just accept "Marie". Her name was Marie-Antoinette. I'd much rather see the quiz accept a misspelling such as Mary-Antwanet than accept half her name.
Agree absolutely! It's Marie-Antoinette, and double and hyphenated names in French need to be in full. Ever heard of Jean-Claude Van Damme being referred to as Jean Damme? Or Jean-Marie Le Pen as Jean Pen?
This is pure fantasy if you bother to factor in human frailty at all. Everybody has weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and when those get turned into national policy, regardless of benevolence, weird stuff happens. It's not a good plan, even if it has, a few times in all of human history, turned out okay.
I fail to see any reason why a "benevolent" dictatorship/monarchy would be any better - but several reasons why it would be considerably worse. First of all, that idea seems to stem from the myth that there is a "right thing to do", an ideal policy, and that a government's role is to just discover and implement it - which ignores that there are competing interests in a society, and that the main role of a government is precisely to arbiter between them. Second, there is no reason to believe that a dictator/monarch would be any "freer" from special interests - even hereditary absolute monarchs relie on a power structure that upholds their claim. Kings have courts, dictators advisors and ministers, and both more often than not relie on the cooperation of religious leaders, economic interests, and whole clientele of other special interests (the nobility, the military, their party...).
Democracies are just more acceptable because you can fire your leaders without violence.
I would argue that Qaboos bin Said, the former Sultan of Oman would count as an enlightened despot. His response to the Arab Spring was not the best, but overall, he was pretty good for Oman. Emir Sabah al-Ahmad of Kuwait was also pretty good for his country. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar I would argue are the non-benevolent types with the UAE being a special case since there are seven emirates and each ruling house is different.
Emma Lazarus's extraordinary poem — which includes the words "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" — is not actually written or engraved on the Statue of Liberty. Indeed, it wasn't even there when it was first unveiled. A few years later, a plaque with her poem inscribed was placed inside the statue's pedestal.
The Proto-Sinaitic script is ancestral to the Phoenician script and is just as sound-based. However, since you're asking for the language rather than the script, "Phoenician" is still sort of correct because the Phoenicians would have adopted the Proto-Sinaitic script before developing it into their own script. Even so, this was not the first "sound-based alphabet." Proto-Sinaitic was in turn derived from Egyptian heiroglyphs, a partially sound-based system which included symbols for words, for grammatical features, and for sounds. Mesopotamian cuneiform had a similar structure, also predating the Proto-Sinaitic script. The distinction of the Proto-Sinatic script is that it was the first writing system in which *all* the symbols represented sounds. So you could describe it as the first "fully sound-based alphabet." Personally I prefer "fully sound-based writing system" because the term "alphabet" has multiple conflicting definitions.
No, me neither.
Democracies are just more acceptable because you can fire your leaders without violence.
Both of us were probably wrong.