Endorsed (Canadian, here!), and I want to second that I absolutely hate that the term "Republican" has been absorbed by the GOP hate group.

uch as the fact that we have a Royal Navy but we a British Army (loyal to Parliament, and not under royal command

I had no idea that there was this distinction. HUnh

we have a Royal Navy but we a British Army (loyal to Parliament, and not under royal command).

So how does this work operationally?

Also a question from the unknowing. Did this evolve this way due to the crown financing war ships way back in the day while ground forces were paid for by lower level dukes and such?

I have a suspicion that the military take a different view, possibly being loyal to "The Crown (in Parliament)" rather than the constitutional monarch at the time, but they certainly aren't loyal to the Prime Minister (as one of them (Blair) apparently discovered on a PR visit to the Middle East when he referred to 'my army' and was bluntly corrected).

I believe the Monarch still has to sign-off on declarations of War, etc. (though that will be the usual formality - they can refuse but only get to do it once).

Chris. (History was a long time ago - in my case about half a century.)

Some of the "royal" versus "national" stuff gets disturbing at times. Back when I was Over There, we noticed — but nevernevernever discussed with the local citizenry — that there was a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but only the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. That is, among the Windsors there was no available royal patron to stand up for children (especially the unwashed) — just for Corgis. It's almost shocking that Marcus Rashford actually received an MBE after facing down BoJo over school lunches for children who frequently relied upon them as their only meals.

Maybe this shouldn't be all that surprising given some of the little things that have made the news about the Windsors — and their "household" — that have not been controverted with any whiff of credibility.

This. And also, billionaires are effectively another form of aristocracy: unelected cunts who used mechanisms beyond democratic control to seize significant decision-making capacity on a global scale. Both hereditary monarchies and oligarchs are moral and policy failures on a massive scale and an affront to human dignity.

Then you would be wrong. The work of the likes of James Watt, Richard Trevithick, Carl Benz and Rudolf Diesel and many others made the institution of slavery uneconomic. Many societies before the mid-19th relied on either slavery or bound labour to do the menial and heavy work needed. The invention of machinery powered by fossil fuels changed that, and I can't see the estate owners of the southern US able to resist the increased profits that mechanisation would bring.

BTW Did you know that the Scottish Parliament in the late 17th passed legislation that bound colliers, and their male children, to the mine owners they worked for?

The invention of machinery powered by fossil fuels changed that, and I can't see the estate owners of the southern US able to resist the increased profits that mechanisation would bring.

Our dust up in the 1860s occurred just before the industrial revolution got on a fast roll. So the data on when they would do what is lacking.

They were on a slow roll to switch them from the direct labor to the direct machine operators/tenders. Or at least the ones who shoveled coal into the boilers. It has taken a long time for the machinery of the industrial revolution to not require a large number of people doing terrible hard dangerous work to keep the machines running. These machines were labor multipliers, not labor replacements.

For some reason Facebook has decided I like videos from 3rd world countries of bare foot folks operating/repairing huge industrial machines in ways that an anti-OSHA (USA thing) person would find appalling.

If one looses a leg or arm or few, there's a ready pool of replacements with all their. arms and legs.

I can't help but feel that "Republican" carries a degree of nuance in Ireland too. Thankfully we're no longer where we were up towards the tail end of the last century, but it was definitely loaded with meaning in its time.

From the U. S., I always figured the royals were sort of like Fox News or the NFL: entertainers who were allowed to plunder the customers. It's not about government (or journalism, or sportsmanship), it's about distraction from the mundane.

I sincerely hope you are whatabouting the various monstrosities of slavery, serfdom and bound labour. They were all monstrous, even if some of the beneficiaries did some interesting things in the world.

Slavery may have been uneconomic, but you must recall that the slaveholders fought a treasonous war at great cost on blood to hold onto it and even force it onto any new states that were created.

On the topic: I agree with the abolition of the monarchy. As a Canadian I find it bizarre that we somehow still have these people on our currency and at least theoretically in charge. I don't see it happening here because it would mean cracking open the constitution, and that opens up a huge number of entirely local issues.

It would be worse if we had to pay for it, like the Brits apparently do.

Inertia.

It's a tradeoff, and it also depends in which country you're in. I got to grow up with Princess Elizabeth, but now I get her idiot kid. Other countries elect their head of state, and you get fun folks like Mr Trump in the United States. Still others let their PM become a demigod.

By about a 5% margin I prefer a hereditary dictator with very limited powers to an elected dictator with tons of power.

It's fun to watch the folks in the US pull themselves together and defeat a bad dictator, but it's way too exciting for a boring Canadian like me. I like "peace, order and good government", and can put up with kid visiting occasionally.

There's that saying, no one who wants to lead a country should be allowed to lead a country.

billb: YELLOW CARD for going off-topic (the deplorability of monarchy) within the first 10 comments, never mind the first 200!

I am unpublishing the replies to that comment for 24 hours, to prevent it derailing the discussion completely. (I'll put them back later.)

It is a tradeoff, indeed. Anyone still living in the UK must feel that the advantages outweigh the burden of monarchy, or else they'd emigrate to... where? Switzerland? Lithuania? the USA?

Another Canadian here (hello from the colonies!). I've tended to think of the royal family as comparable to the Kardashians. Kardashians who receive big payments while the taxpayer foot the bill. Kardashians who can probably change one more law before they're stripped of their legislative abilities. Geez maybe more like Cardassians

All hail Charles 3 Felis Mortuus? I suppose all the glitzenglamour of Da Coronation seems as tacky to you as a Hollywood gala does to people like me who grew up adjacent to it.

we have a Royal Navy but we a British Army (loyal to Parliament, and not under royal command)....Also a question from the unknowing. Did this evolve this way due to the crown financing war ships way back in the day while ground forces were paid for by lower level dukes and such?

It may be relevant to remember that in windjammer days, the Navy was involved in foreign policy in a way that the army was not. Certainly by the time of the Raj this line became blurred for the UK (and other colonial empires, including the US). And the distinction was gone by WW2. But ships a long way from the homeland are independent actors in a different way than a home-based army is.

I dunno how regressive Charles is - I know he's very pro-environment. Beyond that... it's not like I'm one of the idiots in this side of the Pond who obsess over The Monarchy!!!

However, sorry, not "hell, no" on slavery, rather "HANG EVERY SLAVE OWNER", and give their non-human property to the former slaves.

Republican: YES. You might have noticed I absolutely REFUSE to refer to the GOP over here as their official name "Repoublican" because THEY ARE NOT, in any way, shape, or form. Come the Revolution (yes, Becoming Terran will be coming out later this year or early next, and what do you think it's about?)

This morning my local (Canadian) paper carries an editorial entitled "King Charles III is not my king".

Oh, btw, speaking of your official state religion, there's a long, considerate article in today's Guardian about Pagans, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/27/dawn-of-the-new-pagans-everybodys-welcome-as-long-as-you-keep-your-clothes-on
Key relevant takeaway: "While less than half the UK population identified as Christian in the 2022 census, 74,000 people declared they were pagan, an increase of 17,000 since 2011. And that might well be a significant underreporting."

IF we were starting from scratch, then - yes - a monarchy would be a bad idea.

BUT - we are not starting from scratch, with no history or background.
AND - getting rid of the monarchy solves zero problems.

It wouldn't even save money.

Her successor is a snobbish, reactionary seventy-six year old multi-billionaire. Who has a long record of environmental campaigning, long before it was fashionable, or "political".
I would like to see evidence of the claim/label "reactionary".

I thoroughly agree about the religion bit, but that rot runs very deep ... people whinge & rant about the "prejudices of the BBC" - usually people who are, themselves fascists ... but. BUT.
You cannot escape Xtianity inside the Beeb & its all-too-often grovelling RC xtianity.
ANY attempt to challenge this is ignored into the ground - guess how I know this?
- { See Also: whitroth @ 20 }

In the last main paragraph, you appear to be conflating the cruel arrogance of our current appalling misgovernment with the monarchy ... which is .. mistaken.
Though I agree that the bastards are trying to use the current ceremonies as a distraction.
Ignore the distraction, deal with the real problem, ok?

Meanwhile, what a wonderful opportunity for the fascist/tories to make hay, by introducing this subject as a way of actually solving NOTHING.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Charles decides: "Fuck this for a lark, I'm retiring, as a (very rich) private citizen" ..... NOTE
What then - we've got rid of the monarchy, but we've still got the tories, oh shit.

NOTE
It has long been rumoured that "The Firm" would go to "Living of their own" - with C III as chief.
The Civil List is abolished, "The Firm" pays normal taxes, like any other company or body corporate, & keeps the remainder for themselves, as all the other companies do.
No-one can complain, because they are paying the correct taxes.
The screams from government would be interesting - can any of you work out why that would be so?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Chris S
Yes - And that is, actually a reason in favour of the current arrangement.
Blair or Bozo or shudder Braverman actually in direct charge of the Armed Forces, rather than the admittedly political direction we have now.

billb
Yes. I've also mentioned this before.
The Industrial Revolution doomed slavery.
It was cheaper & easier to let the desperate poor scrabble for underpaid, unsafe jobs, after all. { /snark }

Retiring
SPOT ON
I remember, all to well, the "free & liberated" Irish Republic, as it was ( 1965 ) when I first saw it - a truly oppressive theocratic dictatorship, how nice.
It took many years for that to be smashed.

KE
You would be wrong, then.
Currently, the "royals" are paying about 85% tax or higher ...
See Living of their own as mentioned above.

Kardashians who can probably change one more law before they're stripped of their legislative abilities.

Unfortunately they "change" laws by providing feedback to the prime minister and cabinet office while the legislative agenda is being haggled over, before the bill gets drafted. So they never have to visibly lift a finger to veto anything -- anything objectionable to them mysteriously never comes up in the first place!

One thing I'll say about the House of Windsor: they don't engage in vulgar looting of the British state

That's what the Tories are for.

I suspect that if Prince Charles had gone hard left, and been somewhat vocal about it, he would not now be King Charles.

I'd certainly like to see the monarchy removed from Canada, but it isn't something I'd man the barricades over. Which is largely why it hasn't happened here - most of us can't be arsed to think of an alternative.

Also, if we remove the figurehead we'll have to reopen our constitution, and that is not a politically tractable process.

No arguments here - I live in London, have never met (or wanted to meet) a Royal in my life, and really don't feel that it's much of a loss. I mostly notice them as a source of disruptions to transport etc. It's much like when I was working for a Church of England school - religion has zero relevance to anything that interests me, but every now and again a bishop or something would visit and everything would go into panic mode for a day or two before the event.

About the best I can say for them is that they do bring in tourists, which may generate a little wealth - but also causes pollution and makes parts of London way too busy at certain times of the year. I think they're probably a net loss if all factors are taken into account, and possibly a big one.

The Guardian has an excellent series on how that works:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/series/queens-consent

Notable is the fact the Crown is exempted from anti-discrimination laws. Convenient, since until at least the 1970s black and brown people were deemed unfit to do anything more exalted than cleaning the toilets.

Lizzie the Second was canny in keeping her mouth shut, and everything you think know about the royals has been filtered through the very best PR money can buy. I don't know how much Chuck the Third spent on his lifelong campaign to whitewash Camilla's atrocious reputation, but it's got to be in the several hundred million pounds.

It's a tricky one.

I would rather not have the monarchy. I just don't know how to remove them and fill that power vacuum with something suitable. It would have to be something worked out carefully over a long time to avoid ugly failure modes. That process itself would involve politicians, lobbying and referendum(s).

An ugly problem to fix. One I wouldn't want to start addressing until social media, and other disinformation channels, have had their wings very firmly clipped.

It might be the BRITISH Army, but the Regiments are Royal [We have the same problem here in Australia]. All of our military is under the control of the Executive under the so-called "Royal Prerogative", with Parliament having no say in it. We are currently having a low level public discussion about the role of Parliament in going to war. The answer is that it has none [which most recently led to the Iraq War debacle].

we have a Royal Navy but we a British Army (loyal to Parliament, and not under royal command).

So how does this work operationally?

Since the UK's ability to unleash nuclear destruction on any country resides in its SSBN force, this is a question of some interest. Wasn't there a thread here some time ago about the Duke of Cornwall(?) standing in the nuclear chain of command?

We're also having a very slow discussion about the role of the Official State Religion, its place in Parliament, and which other religions might be graced with the recognition that comes with admission to the Sacred Chambers. https://www.nsl.org.au/secular-issues/prayers-in-parliament/

In some ways it's a bit "technically a monarchy" and "I supposed it's a state religion". But at the same time Christian religions holidays are explicitly public holidays and the rest can suck it up. We're unlikely to open parliament with an explicitly Hindu ritual, just as we're not going to have acceptance of Rastafarian rituals that break the law in the same way we recognise Catholic ones. Likewise not wanting to pledge allegiance to the crown means you can't work for much of the government or be elected to even quite lowly positions. Or become a citizen.

Of course, we also have the Howard "monarchy or get fucked" referendum to look back on with great fondness. Charitably, it was an attempt to swap the labels and move on but in reality it was designed by monarchists to reinforce their subservience to the Most Holy Ruler of Us All.

Writing from a non-monarchy, European-style monarchy seems awesome since it must be way less vulnerable to autocratic capture than any republic that has an office of President. Even if the President is a powerless, symbolic one, the guy will have been just voted in by a plurality or majority of the people, which gives them an awesome mandate to try and grab more power. It's hard to explain to the median voter in a democracy that the official who got elected with millions of votes should have no say in anything, vs. the party apparatchic parliamentarian with just thousands.

In Finland we experienced a somewhat-autocrat President hanging on to power for three decades, through most of the Cold War, redoing any elections whose results he didn't like. (a pretty good statesman for an autocrat, AFAICT, but still, three decades!) After he grew too old and confused to keep ruling, our traumatized political class cut down the presidential powers to near-monarch levels, but who knows if that'll really work to prevent a second coming of Kekkonen. In modern times there's Orban and Erdogan for cautionary examples.

OTOH (in my imagination at least!) it's a totally fringe idea in, say, Britain or Sweden that the Monarch should get any say in the ruling of the country. They have no popular mandate to rule and have just been born into the position, so an attempt at a power grab would be ridiculous. Their every teenage drama has been documented by the local tabloids. If you've got to have a symbolic head-of-state to host receptions, launch ships and such, can you get safer than that? I mean, you could pick a citizen at random, but that's cruel to the citizen, and you're unlikely to get table manners matching Charles's.

In modern times there's Orban and Erdogan for cautionary examples.

Modi?

Prof Pedant
There was the attractive then-young female, who had the right-wingers ( but not yet fascists ) of the tories in conniptions ....
A younger Wellesley who was both a Journalist & a Trade Union official ... oops.

Robby
You hit it right on the nail: .. * and fill that power vacuum with something suitable* - without making everything even worse, yes?

Tivichan
YES
IF monarchy is so horrible, then why are we not seeing the same urges in: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands or even Belgium or Luxembourg?

David L
And, lest we forget: TRUMP, De Valera, the most serene REPUBLIC of Venice etc ....

Trump wants to be a dictator. Modi seems to be there already.

Looking on from the outside, I think that "£50M party and national holiday" may be a net money maker for the U.K. economy ... just from the U.S. tourist spending it generates. And that won't be the only source of revenue that comes from it ...

There may be many good or bad reasons for abolishing the Monarchy (not my country, so it's not for me to say), but I don't think the cost of the Monarchical Pomp & Circumstance is one of them.

From what I've read, the Monarchy generates a positive cash flow for the U.K. that is greater than the burden on U.K. taxpayers for supporting it.

One possible adavantage I have seen suggested for a constitutional monarchy.

There are those who for some strange reason want to tug the forelock and bend the knee. Giving them an object for their adulation which is generally lacking in actual power may protect against them idolising someone who is claiming power. In the USA, we have seen royalist-level reverence directed toward The President, and we have also seen how that can play out.

I'm not necessarily endorsing this, just putting it out there.

JHomes

The only really good argument against a UK republic must surely be the recognition that we would have had President Thatcher as she grew ever more demented and, later, President Johnson using the Presidential budget to tour the world giving paid for talks.

A British friend of our family once said that a Royal Hanging would be just as popular as a Royal Wedding...

Not necessarily, but OTOH for every Tarja Halonen there's a Paul von Hindenburg and right now we seem to be heading in the latter direction.

The authoritarian problem with hereditary monarchs can be seen in the UK so it's not just an "over there" issue. Just because the royal guards aren't out shooting people in the street doesn't mean it's all sweetness and light.

It seems to me to be a really hard line to draw, between the government having the freedom to actually govern and not having the ability to trample roughshod over their subject's rights. Australia being perhaps a useful example of having all the laws necessary for outright fascism in place while remaining apparently democratic. And as we see all round the world climate protests especially, but protest in general, is widely agreed to require stronger laws banning the practice (of subjects objecting to their government?)

Satirical site has it covered: we have an election and everyone gets to vote for the new king: https://theshovel.com.au/2022/09/12/ballot-for-electing-australian-head-of-state-revealed/

The Shovel is a fun site.

I admit I was hoping that JuiceMedia would come out with an honest monarchy ad, rather like this one for the British government:

https://youtu.be/qyt3Op2dTc0

(NSFW language warning, for all their honest ads. Which I highly recommend.)

If we're talking about changing our political system, I'd put replacing FPTP well ahead of replacing a figure-head-of-state.

For all the Tories moan about expensive and irresponsible governor generals bleeding the poor taxpayer, the monarchy costs us a lot less than the average neocon giveaway to corporations. Hell, I think Doug Ford has cost Ontario more than the entire royal family has cost the country.

Canada spends more money subsidizing professional sports than we do the monarchy (which is about $1.55 per capita, annually).

Some regiments are Royal. And then there's the Household Division, the Guards.

The Army not being Royal goes back to the New Model.

The oath is the same for all the Services though, the {named} Sovereign and their lawful successors. Make a legal change in constitution (one of which we do have, although it could perhaps do with a bit of writing down in larger chunks) and the Services will be right behind it, no less than the general population.

Seeing an image here, I ask OGH how he feels about the occasional posting of such and, if it's OK to do that, how to do that. Emphasis on "occasional".

Every few months I have a graph that I think worth posting.

I vaguely recall some executive guidance on the occasionally thing, and given the current level of moderation I'm fairly confident that someone will notice and remove the image link if they're offended. It was taking me more words to summarise the bloody thing than to just include it... a bit like "should we get rid of the monarchy" :)

para 2: Cromwell. (The warty one.)

In the USA, we have seen royalist-level reverence directed toward The President

"Royalist-level"? I beg to differ:

https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/pastor-criticizes-now-removed-fort-oglethorpe-billboard-comparing-trump-to-jesus-09-22-2021

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/billboard-featuring-donald-trump-make-gospel-great-controversial-bible-verse-taken-missouri-214229930.html

I find myself a bit torn between monarchs and presidents; both have been terrible, both have been ok. The hereditary bit is a big problem though, not least because it is a form of slavery. Gilded, certainly, but wrong nonetheless. “Supreme executive power belongs to the people “ sounds great until one remembers just how deplorable “the people” can be - and that applies whether one is referring to the entire population or a small cabal like the Tory party membership.

The hereditary bit is a big problem though, not least because it is a form of slavery. Gilded, certainly, but wrong nonetheless.

I figure it's involuntary the same way the chain around Fenris' neck was involuntary, and it serves much the same purpose, considering the Windsors are well-connected billionaires.

My other cheerful thoughts are that everything ends, and everything can be hacked. In this regard, I'm not sure the US Presidency and the UK monarchy are all that different.

Troutwaxer @ 40
Actually, the first Duke of Wellington said something very similar!

Moz
the government having the freedom to actually govern - like THIS, do you mean? - which shows that the monarchy is NOT a problem, or not compared to shits like Braverman & Raab & BoZo & .....

Rbt Prior
YES - a real problem, rather than an imagined one ...
Meanwhile, no-one has answered my enquiry about all the OTHER, all N-European monarchies round here, Norway-to-the Netherlands.

If you do replace the monarchy (or more likely Scotland gets loose and adopts republican government), try not to replace it with a pointless ceremonial head of state. You can just have a constitutional government with a prime minister from the parliament, who also serves as head of state while they have the office. They do all the state stuff anyways, and nobody pretends that that the ceremonial head of state actually does anything except ceremonies.

You would have gotten rid of the figurehead king in this scenario. No need to replace them with fake elected figurehead king afterwards.

"If you do replace the monarchy (...), try not to replace it with a pointless ceremonial head of state."

There is a point to a separate head of state, as long as they do understand that they are supposed to be, and to be seen to be, non-partisan. The Prime Minister is necessarily partisan (How do you think they got the job?), and so is seen by a substantial part of the population as not representing them.

Yes, being non-partisan is an ideal that will often be fallen short of. But at least the ideal is there, which is not the case with the Prime Misery.

JHomes

You can also have a ceremonial head of state that isn't alive. There is the Eternal President of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Kim Il Sung. Makes it a bit awkward to bring them out to shake hands with visiting dignitaries. North Korea being closer to a hereditary monarchy than anything else, but with this weird glitch.

The idea of not having a monarch at all has come up many times before, of course, but I'm not sure I've seen anyone address the legislative work involved.

Everyone here is familiar with dependency chains. To first approximation the monarchy is a potential problem with all legal documents in the UK. The person who wears the crown doesn't matter but the are centuries of accumulated rules that assume that there's a British monarch somewhere.

We're all computer people enough here that we're familiar with normally well behaved software that invisibly calls a thing that calls another thing that calls yet another thing - and suddenly throws undefined behavior when something many stages deep is corrupted or missing.

I certainly don't want to be on the team that looks at every piece of paper the British government has and tries to figure out if it calls out to something important.

that's easy. Just legislate that all dependencies that formerly ended at the crown now end at X.

let X := Nyarlahotep.

Writing from a non-monarchy, European-style monarchy seems awesome since it must be way less vulnerable to autocratic capture than any republic that has an office of President.

Unfortunately this just ain't true.

Your classic example is Thailand, where saying anything even vaguely doubtful about the king can land you ten years in prison -- and does: the government (not the king) uses spurious accusations to suppress opposition.

You can easily end up with an autocratic government run by an autocratic prime minister who keep the monarch in a cotton-wool-lined steel box and roll them out for ceremonial occasions to give them the spurious appearance of legitimacy. (Classic example: the UK under Thatcher.)

I'd be more enthusiastic in my endorsement of this position if I thought the sort of person who gets to be in charge of the elected bits of our government would be an improvement.

My main problem with images is link rot (which is inevitable). My second problem with images is the risk of someone spamming the blog with goatse.cx or similar -- specifically content that's illegal in the UK. (Not inevitable, but increasingly likely if griefers decide to annoy me.)

(If that happens I'll just have to disable the image tag completely in comments, leaving it for actual blog entries.)

I figure it's involuntary the same way the chain around Fenris' neck was involuntary, and it serves much the same purpose, considering the Windsors are well-connected billionaires.

I am watching (very occasionally) Harry and Megan Windsor's post-royal careers. If they're successful over a 10 year period then maybe there's hope for the other victims of the cult of royalty.

Thing is, members of the royal family are trained from birth for a career that is essentially a constitutional decoration, lacking the ability to function in civil society as ordinary citizens. And the Palace (an institutional bureaucracy that exists primarily for training, containing and controlling rogue royals) is both a toxic workplace (exempt from anti-discrimination legislation!) and punishes defectors. Thereby making it very difficult for someone to resign from the Firm.

In some respects it's a bit like a cult in the way it brainwashes the inmates makes it hard for them to leave.

Writing from Ireland, I take the contrarian view that the Head of State (elected President, in our case) is not a decoration, or a day-to-day political role, but a constitutional tie-breaker.

So like some other European countries our President is mostly a figurehead role: the official task is meeting new Ambassadors,etc and day-to-day role of ceremonially thanking Scouts, community groups for their service and cutting ribbons. But this is to me to burnish their reputation as nice, uncontroversial,moral spokesperson for the country.

Their real constitutional role is when politics gets divided. Their main power is to decide whether or not to call an election when a government falls (before its 5 year term). They have a secondary power to send any proposed bill to the Supreme court for adjudication but for technical reasons its rarely used.

The constitution in Ireland severely limits the day-to-day power of the President (they can't leave the country or make a speech without the Prime Ministers consent, etc). But its they who get to decide if we fight or surrender in a war (the Army literally stands behind the President in any ceremony, not the PM). All the resty of the fluff is to reinforce their stature.

I think a review of how the Irish presidency has worked and evolved over time would be very valuable for would-be ex-monarchies: it was a step-in replacement for the British royal family, and our structures learnt a lot from others.

You can easily end up with an autocratic government run by an autocratic prime minister who keep the monarch in a cotton-wool-lined steel box and roll them out for ceremonial occasions to give them the spurious appearance of legitimacy.

Such a setup can continue for generations, as Japan demonstrated.

I can't really imagine BoJo as shogun, but Thatcher could have done it...

Because the only options available are approve of everything or emigrate.

I can't really imagine BoJo as shogun, but Thatcher could have done it...

BoJo didn't need to do it: by the time he became PM, Lizzie Saxe-Coburg Gotha was 94.

Even a spry, active 94-year-old great-grandmother with no cognitive impairment is unlikely to be up for a bruising political battle with an idiot and bully half her age.

To paraphrase: "if you don't love America, go live in Russia".

It's a morally bankrupt opinion. Most people can't afford to emigrate, especially now that the Klept have raised barriers to migration globally. Brits no longer have freedom of movement (which means residency) within Europe -- we're locked down here unless we have six or seven digits of cash slopping around with which to buy an "investor's visa" somewhere.

You know how most Americans are one pay check away from serious financial hardship? Well it's the same in the UK. If you can't afford to leave your job, or even pay for a passport (around £100 these days!) or a budget airline ticket to a neighbouring country, how the hell do you expect to leave?

I certainly don't want to be on the team that looks at every piece of paper the British government has and tries to figure out if it calls out to something important.

Didn't the Brexit hard liners recently have to admit that just tossing out all EU related regulations was going to take more than a few months. Belatedly but they seem to have figured this out.

Yeah I know all that. I was responding to the "if you like it so much why don't you go live there" type comment above.

Luckily for me I /do/ still have freedom of movement to EU, via citizenship of a country I have only visited twice where I don't speak the language. Even technically being allowed to do it doesn't make it easy.

amckinstry
Yes, NOW ... but you had how many years of the evil, corrupt, theocrat, "Dev" in post?
Um.

Charlie @ 67
Now THERE is a really serious & important issue, which means all this "UK-republicanism" is irrelevant 7 useless, because we'd still have the same problem: Brexshit & all it's ghastly fall-outs.
Let's try to deal with that first, eh?

No need to stick to one problem at a time. Multitasking is possible.

On the coronation itself, I'll take the bank holiday but I shall be escaping the orgy* of forelock tugging the nation appears intent on indulging in.

*I have invitations to 2 different street parties, but unfortunately I shall be otherwise engaged. Mountains don't climb themselves.

Are there magazines (now likely web sites) in the UK that are popular and do nothing but follow the foibles of the royals?

I'm thinking of those supermarket checkout stand magazines in the US. People, US, whatever... I use them to track my falling lack of knowledge of celebrity status. While waiting I look at the photos on the covers and see how many I know the name of vs. those I don't.

I have invitations to 2 different street parties, but unfortunately I shall be otherwise engaged

Who would have thunk it?

Sounds a bit like Superb Owl parties in the US. Likely 1/2 of the people who attend such never look at the TV screen. Well except to watch the ads.

54 - I am not advocating this, but "King of Scotland" did used to be an elected office, about 1_000 years ago.

72 - Yes, as confirmed when I went to get our weekend messages yesterday. There were a loathsome number of "Chuck III Horrornation Specials" on the magazine racks.

Greg, de Valera died in 1975.

To put that in perspective, in less than two years it'll be the 50 anniversary of his death.

Most folks now alive hadn't been born when he died. You may remember him, but I was 11 and living in another country when he cacked it.

So it's probably about time to consign him to the history books and stop attributing the politics of Ireland today to his influence, just as Hitler's direct control over modern Germany is, shall we say, less than minimal.

Are there magazines (now likely web sites) in the UK that are popular and do nothing but follow the foibles of the royals?

Yup. Can't get past a supermarket checkout without running the gautlet of those things.

or else they'd emigrate

Actually quite difficult to do. It's expensive, with lots of hoops to jump through. Even harder if you have a family. Harder still if you (or anyone in your family) is disabled.

"If you don't like it, leave" is pointless unless the person being lectured actually can leave.

I've seen this argument many times before, but they never address the point that it just doesn't happen! Your example of Finland shows a President that had a lot of power abusing it, but the crucial point is that a ceremonial, monarch-like President just does not take over power in a mature democracy. It's very easy to explain to the voter why they shouldn't: they got elected for a ceremonial position, and that's exactly what they should do. Instead the voters should feel betrayed if a President started pretending that their millions of votes for a ceremonial position meant that they have a mandate to take over the country.

Examples? Pretty much all democratic republics in Europe: Ireland, Iceland, Finland (since the President's powers were reduced), Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Austria. The ones that are currently having democracy problems, Poland and Hungary, are emphatically not due to the President becoming power hungry, but due to the prime minister misbehaving. In France the President does have a lot of power, but it's not because they grabbed power, but because that's what the President was always meant to be. It's in any case still a long way from an autocracy.

Re the Crown and the British Army, it's been under control of Parliament since 1689 and the Bill of Rights and the Mutiny Act, which can be paraphrased as "you can form an army, but we won't pay for it, and we can also declare it illegal and hang 'em". Applied to army of England, but Scotland also fell in as soon as the Act of Union was done in 1707. Parliament was so nervous about a standing army that the troops required for continental wars and colonies were garrisoned in Ireland rather than mainland Britain well into the 1700s, and cost outsourced to the Irish Parliament. First purpose-built British Army barracks is actually Collins' Barracks in Dublin. The soldiers were not there to occupy Ireland, it was the British standing army. Mind you, no harm having it where so many potential supporters of the Old Pretender were too.

Of course Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and the '45 put paid to any lingering anxieties about having the army on British soil. The relationship of armies and royalty is a complex one in the UK, but the separation concept is strong. Crown influence on British strategy or operations in the Second World War was minimal, for example.

Now would seem a good time to boost the profile of the Glorious Revolution though, to be frank.

there's a whole ecology of Royal "journalism" within mainstream media. Everything from the BBC down has Royal correspondents, wheeled out when the occasion demands to fill us in.

Ok, maybe not the Morning Star.

No organs specifically devoted to the monarchy I can bring to mind, which is a bit odd when you consider that there is no aspect of British society, no matter how niche, without at least one publication. Have I Got News For You digs out a different one each week for the "fill in the incomplete headline" bit.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/metro.co.uk/2015/04/17/11-of-the-most-memorable-publications-ever-to-feature-on-have-i-got-news-for-yous-missing-words-round-5149667/amp/

It didn't hurt Douglas Haig's campaign to replace Sir John French as commander of the BEF in the Great War that he was married to a lady in waiting to Queen Mary. Royal patronage has declined significantly since then

I wouldn't read too much into the names. Historically, once the political nation had decided to give up on a military dictatorship, and the Commonwealth navy had hastily swapped Civil War victory names for Royal Charles and so on before retrieving Chuck II , the next order of business was to demobilise the New Model Army, leaving the Kings personal regiment of guards (now the Grenadier Guards) and the personal following of his chief supporter Gen Monck (now the Coldstream Guards) Obviously the army later grew back ...

The Restoration navy was in a state of transition, with Pepys driving it towards a permanent bureaucracy capable of supporting long term career development, but only because Chuck and then Jim took a personal expert interest in the institution. (see NAM Rodger's three volume history of British sea power)

And on reflection Mountbatten was no doubt having quiet chats with Bertie in Buck Palace, but his later role was as much about keeping the Americans (who loved him) on side as defining any operational plans or strategy. Being royal doesn't mean incompetent, though his handling of Indian independence very much exposed his political and administrative shortcomings.

Being a royal is also still presumably the highest scoring card in the great British social class Top Trumps deck. If post-war meritocratic levelling turns out to have been a blip (and the current profile of the governing class in England at least is an argument for that being the case) then it's not unreasonable to fear an increase in their 'soft power' again.

The connection to slavery is very apt, insofar as the behavior of monarchs and their aristocratic hangers-on go. In places like the American south and Brazil, slave owners - especially plantation owners - were perfectly happy to sabotage their own economic success as long as doing so let them maintain their own relative status. The southerners, for example, famously opposed the creation of canals and roads that in theory would have enriched them, because it would threaten their power relative to poorer whites. The plantation owners were rich enough to get the luxuries they needed and keep the lower rungs of free society happy, and that's all that mattered to them. Economic efficiency was irrelevant.

I bring this up because that's the same pattern of behavior you see with monarchies. The pro-monarchy types often claim that it's good to have them because they're able to be more focused on the long-term best interest of the country rather than the next election. The problem is that this conflates "the best interest of the people in the country" with "good enough for the monarch." Charles doesn't care that Brexit and Tory economic policies are making people poor and miserable, because Charles and his friends in the Eton crowd are all insulated from that. If anything, everyone else being more dependent on the largesse of their betters actually increases his personal status. It's no different than the Kims or the House of Saud except in scale. Kim Jong-Un has enough money to get his personal luxuries and run a nuclear weapons program, and so what happens to the rest of the country is largely irrelevant as long as the army gets enough scraps to keep the peasants in line. MBS merrily takes family members hostage and imposes harsh religious laws on everyone who's insufficiently rich (or who are rich but annoy him) because he's the crown prince and all that matters is his own personal desires. The House of Windsor has the same attitude, just lower-key in public because the bargain they've struck with Parliament to not do anything too visibly political is their equivalent of paying off the army.

Yes. And there's a Royal Air Force, a Royal Navy, a Royal Marines and a Royal Artillery.

Plus the Guards and the Household Cavalry, and a bunch of Royal regiments.

Yes, it's largely in name only, with all forces under control of Parliament, but at the end of the day that's kind of the point. Constitutionally all the armed services serve For King and Country, and in that order.

I am watching (very occasionally) Harry and Megan Windsor's post-royal careers. If they're successful over a 10 year period then maybe there's hope for the other victims of the cult of royalty.

The part I always have to remember is something that is true for celebrities, the super-rich, and authoritarian politicians: they're parts of systems. They can no more do it all for themselves than an ant can. They're autonomy, to the degree it happens, comes from systems' management, not from directly acting themselves.

Megan and Harry are both celebrities, so as long as they manage adequate cash flow, they can work as celebs. Or in the real estate game, or whatever. They're as set as any of us are during this climate crisis.

The tricky bit about the Windsors is that they're wealthy, celebrities, and trained for to work within The Firm. To me, that makes them potentially dangerous, not helpless. If one of William's descendants has the makings for an authoritarian leader, watch out.

Richard I was the first King of England to claim the throne by right of primogeniture, up until then it was still technically an elective monarchy. One of the excuses William I used for invading was that Edward had promised William would be his successor and Harold had promised to support William's candidacy, but strictly speaking Edward could only recommend a successor and Harold abided by the result of the election. Wiliam II and Henry I both used the "ignore the large men standing around and vote as you choose" ploy, Stephen got the job because the electors went "Ewww, gurlz" when faced with the Empress, Henry II was Stephens nominated successor and then things fell apart when Henry 2.5 died leaving his brothers Richard, Arthur and John to bicker among themselves and argue with their father. See "The Lion in Winter" for the dramatised version.

Even a spry, active 94-year-old great-grandmother with no cognitive impairment is unlikely to be up for a bruising political battle with an idiot and bully half her age.

I have an uncharitable image of BoJo stuck in mid-air and Britain's favorite G-grandma asking, "How long can you leave him up there?"

"As long as you like, Ma'am" is a tempting answer. I suppose someone would get suspicious after a few days.

But as a practical matter you're right.

Didn't the Brexit hard liners recently have to admit that just tossing out all EU related regulations was going to take more than a few months. Belatedly but they seem to have figured this out.

As I recall, they spent the years leading up to Brexit frantically not seeing that, as any halfway honest assessment of the project would expose that leaving the EU without causing multiple overlapping disasters was a project for decades not months.

Perhaps we should elect three women, who sit in a pleasant cabin overlooking a pond, looking at people walking around the pond. When at least two of the three of them agree that one person looks like a likely candidate, one takes a dip in the pond, swims near their candidate, and holds up a sword....

I'm not sure Chuck's economic opinion matters, given what I've read here over the last few years. I mean, there were long discussions over whether Liz could Do Something when BoJo started to pull the trigger on Brexit.

Economic efficiency was irrelevant.

Ummm. There are a few complexities worth contemplating.

One is that, until at least the 1850s, the Old South was the economic powerhouse of the US, and they made their money in the 19th century exporting cotton to the UK. The power centers of today, like the New York financial system, grew up in part around slavery, not independent of it. You're right that the slavers lost because they didn't get the full power of industrialization and mass free immigration. The part worth contemplating is that it took five years of Civil War for that to be demonstrated, and for the first half of the war, it wasn't obvious to anyone that the north would prevail. I've been playing around with an alt-world where two sides were slightly more equal for Reasons, and it's not pretty.

RE: the UK monarchy, for what it's worth, I suspect Chas3 does actually care about the effects of Brexit. Problem is, he's basically the UK's biggest landowner, not running the country. As such he has little more than his wealth, celebrity status, and waning ritual power to push for better governance. The Windsors lobbying for legislation in private is what I'd expect the biggest landowner in any country to do.

This isn't what the house of Saud or the Kim dynasty are doing. Saudi power is propped up by how oil under-pins modern life. Their politics are akin to those around the spice trade in the Dune universe (probably they served as the model for this). MBS is an authoritarian monster by my standards, but he's also following in his father's footsteps of trying to create these huge projects to get his country's economy on a different basis, of which NEOM is the latest one. I personally think these projects are huge gambles with a foundation of batshit, but what do I know? I think petrochemical civilization is much the same. And AFAIK, all the previous projects have failed.

Anyway, I agree with you that MBS is a monster who lives in a different reality than we do, but I think he's reality-based enough to realize that the oil's running out, and that the House of Saud didn't do a very good job prepping Saudi Arabia for the aftermath. His solutions to the problem are horrendous IMHO, but that doesn't make him insular.

The Kim Dynasty are basically a bunch of bandits who ended up running their country as an extortion racket. The thing to realize is that I married into a Korean family, and I've undoubtedly got distant in-law cousins in North Korea. The schism between North and South was imposed by the US in 1945 (a couple of well-connected staff colonels literally drew a line on a map, without knowing anything about Korea, IIRC. They didn't even follow provincial lines). Pyongyang and Seoul are about as far apart as Los Angeles and San Diego. The point is that South Koreans especially see themselves as part of one split country. Many northerners have been brain-washed to despise the south, but they acknowledge the relationship too. A lot of people have family on both sides of the DMZ.

The problem with North Korea is that it has been badly mismanaged, and it's pretty marginal for agriculture anyway. Their army gets dismissed every spring and fall to help plant and harvest crops, and they get into famines pretty regularly despite this, and soldiers do starve to death on occasion. This is even without the gulags they run. So there's 26 million desperate people in there.

Then there's the Kim syndicate, who are into nuclear blackmail, cybercrime, drug running, supplying weapons, et merde. Put them in Mexico and they'd be labeled a cartel. Why put up with them? It's not really the nukes, it's the 26 million desperate people. China and South Korea know that, when something takes down the Kim syndicate, there will be 26 million starving people north of the DMZ and east of the Yalu River, trying to escape or at least survive. So when the crops fail in North Korea and Kim predictably starts threatening nuclear armageddon, the politicians do the math--it's not hard--and send food aid. Yes, it's extortion, but it's considerably cheaper than dealing with a desperation invasion or having a city nuked.

And the Kims enrich themselves off this. Sick doesn't begin to describe it.

But I don't think the Windsors, the Saudis, or the Kims are playing the same games, and that's the important point.

You might want to look at the Roman Republic before you get too attached to saying that's a good form of government.

The problem is, every form of government that people have tried has had really vile problems. And the reason is simple: Those with power make decisions to favor themselves and other like them. This applies to monarchies, to democracies, to republics, to theocracies, to bureaucracies, to corporations, etc.

I accept without qualm the criticisms that Charlie is laying onto the monarchy, but am quite unsure that you wouldn't end up with something worse if you tried to change it. (Consider the exceptional skill of the democratically elected Parliament in the BrExit negotiations.)
OTOH, I'm located on the US west coast, so I'm depending on Charlie for my interpretation of those negotiating skills.

What I'd like to see tried is a) you have to run a government-approved Civiliation, or some such, before you can run for office. Then have specially-trained AIs that test out all new bills, and they have to demonstrate that they'll do what is asserted they do, before they can progress out of committee.

And no one would be attempting a Kobayashi Maru.

Charlie
Re. "Dev" - correct, but, just the same, I will never, ever forget the challenge I was met with on arriving at Amiens St station for the first time: "Do you have any contraceptives on your person?" { 1965 }
It has, very fortunately, since changed for the better, though at the price of a female human sacrifice.

Mataeus Araujo
* the crucial point is that a ceremonial, monarch-like President just does not take over power in a mature democracy.* - like Hungary, you mean?
I don't think Turkey counts, though they were close, until Erdogan screwed it ...
IIRC, he's "Not well" all of a sudding & there does not appear to be a nominated successor?

petrajet @ 82
Let's not forget the actual oldest regiment in the British Army, shall we?
The Honourable Artillery Comapny - a now several-years-deceased old friend is scattered across their grounds.

SS
And the bastards are still defying gravity & reality - see the obnoxious Frostie, recently ...

Charles H
Yes ....
The "last years of the actual SPQR" - destruction-of-Carthage/Marius/Sulla/Caesar/Triumvirate etc ... were NOT pretty, were they?

Of course they would. But just having to take the test would put off a lot of these idiots, who would consider that too much actual work.

Monarchy - Charles III

Monarchy as a system is the backbone of a family trade economy. The first generation to grab onto power transfer it to the next generation that they've specifically trained to do the same 'in their name'. It's a form of living for forever esp. for egotists.

No idea what C3 is like as a person apart from what the mass media have reported which is that he's pro-environmentalism. Mostly I think of him as a walking/talking bit of UK history - that's a lot of soft power. Although officially apolitical, what he says and does - including when some PM tells him what he's allowed to say and do - publicly can make people take a closer look at their elected government. (COP27 comes to mind - Truss explicitly told him he wasn't to go. He was supposed to deliver an opening speech - very high profile for him, the conference and the UK. What he did do was hold a pre-COP27 event party - something that Truss was powerless to stop.)

The form of government is a preset bunch of rules to prevent its being too easily undermined. Whoever is in charge of the rules determines whether that form of government works as advertised - see SCOTUS. (No idea whether the UK Supreme Court wades into such things.) No form of government works if the rules make it easier for only some people but not others to get in. Gov't also doesn't work if the players/decision makers aren't held accountable, i.e., BrExit's impact on the UK economy and the ordinary person.

I'd like a cost comparison between running Charles' estate* vs. the House of Lords. A lot of the focus lately has been on the UK's rotating door PMs but the HoL has a lot of power too - don't they? Haven't checked recently but do recall that their numbers have been outpacing MPs - you know: the people who actually get elected by real people and have some connection to real people. So, if you're getting rid of the monarchy, are you also getting rid of the House of Lords? And puhleeze don't tell me that they're there because they've demonstrated great personal ability/knowledge. Yeah, sure - I've seen almost all of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals but in no way does that mean he's competent to exercise legislative powers. Not by a long shot! (Net take-away: Webber has more legislative power than C3.)

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/shortcuts/2015/oct/27/andrew-lloyd-webber-vote-in-favour-tax-credit-cuts

*I love museums and what I personally really liked about E2 and feel that C3 is likely to continue is being a very good steward of UK historical artifacts and lands.

"I didn't vote for him."

You don't vote for kings!

(Well someone had to do it, and I'm only surprised that someone hasn't already, although whitroth has grazed it. I dare you to attend the coronation and shout out the feed line to see if the main actor is alive enough to give the response.)

I see little point in repeating my thoughts on the subject, since I have posted them at length the last time you did a thread on this subject; my views haven't changed, and I see yours haven't either, but...

"I want to live in a nation governed with the consent of the people, rather than by the divine right of kings."

Well the second bit's no problem. We don't have that any more. We were the ones who showed the world what to do about it: if the king starts thinking he has it, chop his head off.

The first bit, I don't think there are any of those. It certainly isn't determined either by whether or not you have democracy, or whether or not you have a monarch (note: the two are not mutually exclusive; they refer to two different things). Neither the UK nor the US has even made a vaguely credible pretence of it for more than a century/few decades, and neither the UK nor the US has got it now: instead both use the same method of deliberately sticking to a voting system which does not produce an output meaningfully related to consent, because the output it does produce makes sure that the two main parties can be confident one or other of them will always get in.

"a £50M party and national holiday"

50 meg is fuck all to blow on pointless crap these days. They probably spend more than that when they decide that some government function with offices in every town has to have a new set of initials or a new font to write them in and have to go round changing all the signs in every town and all the stationery. The only difference is they don't advertise that so people don't notice.

Not that I'm having any problem not noticing this. In fact the only thing that has called it to my attention is you posting this article. (Someone's passing mention of the "forthcoming coronation" in a rail context a couple of weeks ago doesn't count, because I thought they were talking about an impending railtour hauled by a Stanier Pacific and lost interest the instant I realised there wasn't one after all.) As for the crap by the supermarket checkouts, I find the interludes when they're all blaring identical crap about the monarchy or football or whatever far less offensive or intrusive than the ordinary times when they're all doing their own take on being the Englischer Volkishcer Beobachter für Dummkopfen.

Supreme executive authority derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!

Charles environmentalism is not very rational, is much hyped and is very selective, for starters he is very pro-organic farming and all that implies including being anti all GMOs regardless of who created them or why, stuff the fact that they are luxury goods, stuff the fact they can't feed the world particulary in a changing climate etc.. He happily dispays ivory possessions with no indiction of the problems. I could go on, but you should get the point.

He has actively altered proposed legislation so that it does not apply on Crown Estates, and that includes Health and Safety and minimum wage legislation, stuff his employees, so yeah I'd call him reactionary. His family have done plenty of looting, see articles about all the coronation gifts to the Crown that have ended up in personal collections, the odd diamond tiara, matching necklace, bracelets and earings to mention one of many. But way before that the Royals only acquired places like Sandringham and Balmoral because of who they were and where they got their money, no monarchy and they'd have had problems funding those purchases.

The fact that MPs have to swear alleigance to the monarch to take their seats is one of the reasons the properly elected Sinn Fein MPs have never sat in Westminster, thus eliminating any representation at a Parliamentary level of a considerable portion for the Northern Irish population. And yes of course the HoL needs reform, although their total numbers aren't particularly important as many never bother to do any work, and others only bother to "sign in" for the day to get their attendance allowance. Final and, of course we need to abandon FPTP voting, but they are all side issues in this discussion.

slybrarian @ 84:

The connection to slavery is very apt, insofar as the behavior of monarchs and their aristocratic hangers-on go. In places like the American south and Brazil, slave owners - especially plantation owners - were perfectly happy to sabotage their own economic success as long as doing so let them maintain their own relative status. The southerners, for example, famously opposed the creation of canals and roads that in theory would have enriched them, because it would threaten their power relative to poorer whites. The plantation owners were rich enough to get the luxuries they needed and keep the lower rungs of free society happy, and that's all that mattered to them. Economic efficiency was irrelevant.

More apt than that ...

You have to look at WHO the English sent to colonize (exploit) the southern part of the New World (that which would become the southern U.S.).

Attitudes of the later societies were shaped by their origins. They acted like "aristocratic hangers-on" because that's where they came from. They were the descendants of aristocrats & their "hangers-on".

The tidewater society around the Jamestown colony was formed for the benefit of Gentlemen Adventurers and their London investors. They didn't come as yeoman farmers, they came as Conquistadors. They did eventually import (impress?) members of the lower classes to do the work "Gentlemen" would not stoop to do (and the natives could not be forced to do).

The "deep south" was founded by the (second) sons & grandsons of the Colony of Barbados. They established a carbon copy of the existing colonial Barbadian slave state. And here too members of the lower classes were imported to do work that was beneath the "gentlemen".

THEY acted like aristocrats because they WERE aristocrats; descended from aristocrats .

mandate from the masses

The commonwealth has rather a lot of masses, and they are overwhelmingly, ah, foreign. In the not-very-white sort of way you see a lot of in places like Nigeria or even Pakistan (just going off degrees of not-whitefulness in the very traditional British Empire sort of way).

The UK is only ~5th most populous country in the Commonwealth. It's entirely possible we'd end up with King Modi running things from a new palace in Uttar Pradesh. They have a tradition of palaces there...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_member_states_of_the_Commonwealth_of_Nations_by_population

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh

Anyway, I agree with you that MBS is a monster who lives in a different reality than we do, but I think he's reality-based enough to realize that the oil's running out, and that the House of Saud didn't do a very good job prepping Saudi Arabia for the aftermath. His solutions to the problem are horrendous IMHO, but that doesn't make him insular.

So you are saying MBS is a monster, but at least he does not stick his head in the sand?

I'll see myself out.

Jazzlet
stuff the fact they can't feed the world particulary in a changing climate etc.. - would STRONGLY dispute that assertion!

also:
The fact that MPs have to swear alleigance to the monarch to take their seats is one of the reasons the properly elected Sinn Fein MPs have never sat in Westminster - BOLLOCKS.
They knew the rules before they stood, now they want to ignore them ... eff off.

CORRECTION
FIRSTLY - and, of course we need to abandon FPTP voting - { deleted }

So you are saying MBS is a monster, but at least he does not stick his head in the sand?

It looks like he hires engineers to do that for him.

The original fascism also is an example of this: Mussolini in Italy ascended to power with the approval (or at least acquiescence) of the king of Italy, even later offering him the title of emperor.

No, Mao Tso Tung was right. Supreme executive authority comes from controlling enough firepower to suppress any opposition.

Pigeon is right about the money involved. And it's not just the money for a meaningless state ceremony - casting envious eyes at the wealth of the monarchy shows a ridiculous degree of lack of thought. Most of the income involved is actually passed to the government, anyway. They bring in a lot of revenue. And they conserve a large proportion of our national heritage.

In just a few years, our democratically elected governments blew nearly 100 billion on Brexit, enabling the COVID scams, and Trussonomics. And the first thing they would do if they got absolute power over the Crown assets would be to sell them off probably to their cronies at a discount, in return to for a backhander. You regard that as an improvement?

I've got very mixed feelings about this.

The lack of democratic legitimacy for the monarch strikes me as a feature rather than a bug. Various people have mentioned "President Thatcher" and "President Blair", and even worse, "President Johnson" and "President Truss". Under this is a more fundamental issue: if the head of state is elected then there will be a lot of people who actively voted against them because they think this is the wrong person for the job. This will be at least a substantial minority of the population, and possibly even a majority depending on the electoral system. The Head of State is meant to be a unifying symbol commanding the respect and (depending on the system) the obedience of the population. Elections cannot deliver this.

Perhaps someone who lives in the USA can say more. How does it feel to sing "Hail to the Chief! We salute him, one and all" to Donald Trump?

As for the cost of the coronation, £60M once a generation is actually quite cheap. The Americans spend ~$100M per inauguration, and they hold one of those every five years. At least when we pick a new chief executive the only cost is a new lectern.

On the other hand it seems to me that condemning someone to live their life in a gilded cage just because of who their parents were is a violation of their human rights. So I'm on the side of Harry and Megan in their escape attempt. I'm also very aware that, but for an accident of birth, right now we'd be contemplating the coronation of King Andrew the Mayonnaise, which I confidently predict would *not have much public support. The case of King Edward the Nazi is also instructive, although both Elizabeth and Charles seem to have taken that lesson to heart.

(Note: I made the point about the gilded cage last time this topic came up, and it got some discussion then. I'm referring to the fact that while the Royal Family have some big houses and estates, they are virtual prisoners inside them. They can't just take a jog in the park or spend a day on the beach. Any expedition outside the perimeter is a significant event, and even then they have to carry the perimeter with them).

*Rich, thick and oily.

SFReader @ 98: Whoever is in charge of the rules determines whether that form of government works as advertised - see SCOTUS.

That raises an interesting parallel with the UK monarchy. (If this is going off topic please knock it back).

Both the Monarch and SCOTUS are supposed to be above politics. The Monarch has no formal power (but quite a bit of soft power), while SCOTUS has carefully circumscribed responsibilities for the interpretation of the constitution.

In both cases the reason is the same: their legitimacy depends on staying out of politics. Once you get involved in actual day-to-day political decisions you will inevitably turn out to be wrong some of the time, and the loss of legitimacy from those errors will accumulate to the point where you are no longer considered a legitimate source of authority.

This was Edward the Nazi's first mistake (his second was being a nazi). He thought he could get involved in politics whilst keeping his hands clean because he would only do it when the Right Thing was blindingly obvious. Unfortunately for him, in the long run Herr Hitler turned out to be in the wrong. Fortunately for both monarchy and nation he wasn't king by then, but that was pure dumb luck driven by a completely orthogonal issue.

In the USA SCOTUS is making the same mistakes. They (or at least six of them) have decided that a Christofascist take-over of the USA is obviously the Right Thing, and they have waded into day-to-day politics to make it happen. As a result they are bleeding legitimacy.

In the year 2000 the SCOTUS effectively decided the US presidential election. Democrats grumbled but accepted the result. If there were to be a rerun of that scenario next year I'm not at all sure the same thing would happen.

The two things which would revolutionize U.S. politics would be a privacy amendment and a bodily autonomy amendment to the U.S. Constitution - so much of what the right wants to do to us would be taken off the table.

Intelligent phrasing counts for a lot, of course.

The points about the cost of emigration are reasonable. Though a couple of my ancestors were dirt-poor when they fled the UK. And somehow they managed to reach Illinois.

But OGH doesn't have those financial barriers to emigration. Heck, he was in Illinois recently -- he could have applied for political asylum then! 😄 My guess is that the burden of living in a monarchy is tolerable, and that the rant is just a rant, and the monarchy is a convenient target for a rant. We all do them from time to time, using our own particular perceived monarchy.

Paul @ 109:

Perhaps someone who lives in the USA can say more. How does it feel to sing "Hail to the Chief! We salute him, one and all" to Donald Trump?

AFAIK, no one ever sings "Hail to the Chief". It's just played by the Marine Corps Band.

... until now it had never even occurred to me the song has lyrics.

But thinking about it NOW, Trumpolini is just the kind of asshole who would demand a choir to sing his praises.

he was in Illinois recently -- he could have applied for political asylum then!

Pretty sure I couldn't.

(The USA assesses asylum claims based on the political system of the country the claimant is coming from and the UK is, for better or worse, a US ally and at least in theory a democracy with a good-on-paper level of civil rights. Oh, and then there are my pre-existing medical conditions. Under the US healthcare system my prescriptions alone would run something like $3000-5000/month.)

That would only be the case if you didn't have insurance, and at least in California you can purchase Obamacare for two for around $1000/month if you're a legal resident - and I think it would be very easy for you to become a legal resident; famous author, good income, lots of people to speak on your behalf, etc.

Not that this would be a great healthcare situation, but probably no worse than the horrors the Tories are/will be inflicting on the NHS... It's also possible to sign up for an HMO, which has it's good and bad points, but the useful thing for a newcomer to the U.S. is that you'd have all your healthcare in one place, which is a substantial savings in "you must learn about this to survive" costs.

Whether you want to live in the U.S. is another matter, but it's not nearly as costly as you imagine - under an HMO the drugs for both my wife and myself run around $150-200 month.

Troutwaxer
The tories are, quite clearly, bent on a wrecking spree to smash up as much as possible, loot as much as they can whilst they can & then blame Labour for the costs of clearing up the mess. So far: The law, the nurses, doctors Etc - the whole NHS & the railways ( Harper is trying to re-enact Serpell )

In these circumstances, worrying about the monarchy is a deliberate distraction, another "dead cat".

Keyword: ancestors. The situation then in not the situation now.

The points about the cost of emigration are reasonable. Though a couple of my ancestors were dirt-poor when they fled the UK. And somehow they managed to reach Illinois.

How long ago was that?

We emigrated in the 60s. It was affordable then to someone in the middle class, difficult for someone in the working class (unless they were marrying a Canadian). Much more difficult now.

The days of welcoming 'huddled masses' are long gone…

It was a joke, of course. Though impressive that you know what the requirements are.

But the larger point is that everyone has something they don't like about the government they live under, and they (we) all gripe about it.

I want to live in a nation governed with the consent of the people

Which nation would that be? Any nominees?

Also: We all want something. The question every time is, how much do we want it?

As a very pertinent example of how badly wrong an even partially-democratic system can go ...
Ron de Sanctimonious is visiting Britain RIGHT NOW -& cosying up to the tories.
EUWWW
However, it may not have gone too well - how sad.

Meanwhile, much closer to home - REALLY close to my home, too....
I'm seriously unimpressed by the level of misogyny & stupidity from Leicester Plod ...
& really angry that someone I regard as a friend has to go through this sort of shit

Re: 'And the first thing they would do if they got absolute power over the Crown assets would be to sell them off probably to their cronies at a discount, in return to for a backhander.'

Agree - that's the first scenario that leapt to mind.

As long as C3 stays reasonably well-liked by the populace, the Crown will be able to keep all that historical stash.

The second scenario that keeps coming to mind is the Tories looting the Royal Museum/Royal Collection Trust. Some years ago I said that the total value of all of those held-in-trust royal/public domain historical assets were probably worth about a trillion. I wasn't kidding. The UK has at least as much wealth in art and historical artifacts as Italy or France. And way, way more than the US. BTW - Freddie Mercury's possessions are going on auction in a few months. Pretty sure that the total sales proceeds will be published since a portion will be going to charity. And this is just one UK celebrity's possessions collected over about 15-20 years. A mere drop in the bucket.

Jazzlet @101: 'His family have done plenty of looting, see articles about all the coronation gifts to the Crown that have ended up in personal collections.'

How far back are you looking? I tried looking this up and couldn't find anything from the late 20th to current century. I'm not arguing that aristocrats regularly amassed wealth via conquest and/or parties wanting to gift (bribe) their way into their circle. Not so sure that's been a thing in the past 60-75 years though. I am aware that E2 definitely tried to make sure that all her royal estates were specifically exempt from any current gov't interference/regulation. No idea what the specific motivation was but getting that exemption certainly puts a layer of protection against Tory pillaging. As for the working conditions - no idea. I was of the impression that many if not all of the employees work there for the opportunity to interact with history , the prestige and not for the wages. Additionally - since very few ex-employees have published tell-all books, I'm guessing that either there are really good NDAs in place or the employees who choose to continue working for them aren't being severely ill-used. Not much chance of a promotion, but hey, you decided to work directly for a monarch!

C3 and his take/perception of what are environmental issues - 'environmental issues' therefore solutions are extremely vast as you've probably picked up on if you're a regular reader of this blog. I'm leery of saying he's an uninformed idiot on this topic for one key reason: he was invited to speak at the opening of COP27. I'm guessing they wanted him there for positive reasons, not to diss/mock him.

Paul @109: 'gilded cage'

Agree - his sons have had much more direct personal experience with ordinary people and have even experienced some of the major developmental stages in modern life (i.e., uni). And this is evident in how they interact with other celebs, the press and people attending royal parades/events.

One positive thing I remember hearing about Charles, decades ago when William and Harry were small, was that when he was a boy he was terrified of his father, and he was damned if his children would have reason to be afraid of him.

Not certain how good a father he actually was (especially given the constraints of being royalty), but he seems to have avoided Philip's mistakes at least.

Elizabeth Windsor is dead. Her successor is a snobbish, reactionary seventy-six year old multi-billionaire. He's so divorced from the ordinary lived experience of his subjects that he reportedly can't even dress himself.

Just... nope. Any source making that claim, should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

He got packed off to Gordonstoun as a kid; not an easy option, it rather specialises in developing self-sufficiency. His naval command appointment was HMS Bronington, a minesweeper[1] with a crew of 32; no room for valets and batmen in something that small, while he was allegedly "a decent boss" (high praise from the matelots). He completed P Company, because he decided that being Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment required that he pass "Test Week" (less the milling, apparently).

Make no mistake, he's a hard man; he's physically challenged himself more than 95% of the male population of the UK... Contrary to popular belief, being an Officer in the Armed Forces doesn't allow you to exist in a comfy little middle/upper class bubble - it's more of a social mixer than most jobs. He may have some wild ideas about architecture and organic farming, but at least he was talking about sustainability from the 1970s onwards (remember the "Talks to Plants" jokes about him in the 80s/90s, not least in Spitting Image? The easy option would have been to shut up and say nothing)

I rather agree with Robby @30 - the problem isn't so much that we have a monarch, but that proposed replacement mechanisms suffer a greater likelihood of capture by the relentlessly ambitious. President Farage? President Johnson? President Sturgeon? We can't just hand-wave away a Trump or a Bolsonaro by insisting that yes, they're incompetent, corrupt, antidemocratic, and occasionally murderous - but at least they were voted in :(

[1] Strictly speaking, an MCMV, but close enough

Martin
Lest we forget .. Charles' father was a serving, originally long-tern Naval Officer, not expecting to become "consort", so was his grandfather, who was not expected to become king { Geo VI } as was his father ...
And, even that far back, you learnt to respect the opinions & attitudes of the "ratings" { & NCO's } in your command.
Hence Geo V's comment during the General Strike, when the right-wingers wanted to visit fire & sword on the strikers: "I want to be King of ALL my people"

YET AGAIN: There are a cluster of constitutional monarchies round the North Sea - how is republicanism doing in: Norway / Sweden / Denmark / Netherlands / Belgium ?????????

P.S. Belated Thanks to EC for pointing out the "sell-off to crooks" tendency of the tories & why (economically) getting rid of our monarchy would be a "bad move"

"I'm leery of saying he's an uninformed idiot on this topic for one key reason: he was invited to speak at the opening of COP27. I'm guessing they wanted him there for positive reasons, not to diss/mock him."

I don't see any reason to believe his level of knowledge is any kind of outlier on the "enthusiastic amateur" distribution. I'm also inclined to see the phenomenon of him being mocked over it as mainly a reflection of the way the subject as a whole was a popular target for mockery when it first began to become prominent, and both the general and the specific targets seem to have become less attractive as the matter has become more widely accepted as a genuine concern.

The point isn't his expertise, it's his support and the implication of respectability it carries for the subject. He makes a good figurehead for it. (Which is the same as his day job, after all.)

AFAIK, no one ever sings "Hail to the Chief". It's just played by the Marine Corps Band.

Then there's the spoof in the movie MASH. They sang that.

The lyrics are here: http://www.bestcareanywhere.net/songs.htm#hail

I couldn't easily find a link to audio or video.

Greg Tingey @ 105: "would STRONGLY dispute that assertion!"[re: organics]

Do explain how when the yields from organic farms are almost always lower than from conventional farms. Also explain why GMOs are always a bad idea as that's what the organic standards say.

Not at all sure what you mean by your response to my FPTP point so I'm not replying.

SFReader @121: "How far back are you looking?"

Well the last time we had a coronation was in 1953 so your search parameters may have missed this, take a look at the coverage in the Guardian. Anyway the fact that it was Albert that went cap in hand to the Government to ask for more money, given because he claimed the queen needed more money to do her duties, which he then spent on Sandringham and Balmoral etc doesn't change the fact they were bought with tax payers money so should belong to us.

That the existing staff, those not sacked with no notice during the funeral of EII that is, don't publicly complain is likely to do with the fact that the laws don't apply to them - and yes to damn good NDAs. The only one that I recall who did write a tell-all is Burrell who worked for Diana after she had left the protection of the Firm and that was at least in part an attempt to justify having some of her things in his possession after her death. Of course we don't know that much about the royal's staff, turnover, wages, holidays, accident reports as nothing is published, so we just don't know if eg. there are a accidents that could have been prevented with decent H&S or a high turnover. I do not agree that the estates will inevitably get sold to Tory donors, for starters we're not going to see the Tories get rid of the monarchy so initially they won't be in a position to do so, and it can be made pretty hard to do so if we have the will, we can not refuse to act just because some people are bad actors or we'll never get anything better.

How informed do you have to be to be aware that the display of ivory is contentious? They have a whole bleeding throne on display FFS. Just to be clear, I am not questioning his intelligence nor mocking him, I am accusing him of hypocrisy over something that would be easy to acknowledge at the least.

How old is it? I'm guessing "centuries".

Waves flag

... Aaaand I'm getting pro-monarchy flag-shaggers in my email inbox now!

Predictable. Something about monarchy rots the brain.

Meanwhile, in related insane bullshit: Coronation: Public asked to swear allegiance to King Charles.

And you know what the Church of Ingurlundshire can do with that oath, right? ;->

I agree with you there, but I rather doubt that the brain-rotting is any worse than that caused by republicanism.

What I don't understand about people like you (being usually fairly rational) is what answers you have to questions like:

1) What system (with enough detail to debate it) would you replace the monarchy by?

2) How would you propose to protect against our kleptocratic elective dictatorship becoming worse?

3) How would you propose to get there from here?

The current problem is the capture of our political system by an unholy conspiracy of sociopathic media mogols, kleptocratic multinationals and multi-millionaires, and megalomanic political parties and their politicians. In this environment, nominally elected presidents do not provide reliable checks and balances, because they are effectively appointed by the same organisations that appoint the prime ministers.

Consider, for example, our current system, but with King Charles replaced by President Rees-Mogg, Braverman as Prime Minister and Patel as Home Secretary. That is, regrettably, not an unlikely combination. With that, I can't see an order to the army to use live fire on political protestors (say, Extinction Rebellion) could be legally resisted. Or an order to the navy to sink small boats in the channel and not pick up survivors. Or having political dissenters imprisoned without trial; we already have it after trials by hand-picked judges in camera.

In my lifetime, we have seen a massive increase in the power of the executive, and reduction in checks and balances. The hereditary peers stood up for us commoners' civil liberties against Thatcher (because Kinnock didn't), which Blair regarded as intolerable and so emasculated them. The proposals to give the prime minister the power to choose judges and ministers the powers to ignore and override judges are in abeyance, but are assuredly still live. And that is on top of the existing powers, which are.

There have been two proposals to suspend general elections which, I suspect, were dropped after a quiet word from HM that she would not allow the use of the Parliament Act to override the Lords' opposition. There have been at least three attempts to use the army against civil dissenters, which were probably dropped because the Chiefs of Staff would not do it without authority from their Commander in Chief.

The farcical tectonic ceremonies are about to get under way.

"Looking on from the outside, I think that "£50M party and national holiday" may be a net money maker for the U.K. economy ... just from the U.S. tourist spending it generates."

I've seen this argument many times but never backed by any serious analysis.

After all, France is not famously known for it's absolute lack of US tourist spending caused by them decapitating their last king.

And any time I've seen claims of "this egregiously expensive public event brings in tourist money" all serious analyses find that it's actually not true, whether we're talking about the Olympic Games, Euro cup in football or whatever.

It feels a bit attack-y to push for how to fix the system, and suggest obvious failure modes. This is what I was trying to call out at 30.

It is perfectly feasible to deeply dislike the current system, but not have an alternative ready to go.

This is where I liken a constitution to cryptography. It should run along in the background and keep things running smoothly, whilst being largely invisible to the user apart from at occasional, pre-booked ceremonies.

Whilst aspects of the cryptosystem in use may irritate me, anything I come up with will be worse, because I can only come up with a system that I can't break. I am not an expert in breaking such systems. Any proposed replacement system needs to spend a long time being attacked by a diverse range of experts from any angle you can imagine.

When all of the vulnerabilities are known, you take it out of the hands of the experts and let the generalists decide if they want to use it. Are the vulnerabilities bad enough to cause a problem, or are they so vanishingly unlikely or difficult that they can be ignored for a century.

That's where social media scares me for a profound constitutional change. It would require some kind of public vote or referendum, and we all know how that can go wrong.

Re: 'serious analysis'

Here's one place to start:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielshapiro/2021/03/10/inside-the-firm-how-the-royal-familys-28-billion-money-machine-really-works/?sh=10c7705c2bcc

The tourism revenues-royalty connection is mostly due to which are the preferred tourist destinations and whether those destinations have visible royal connections.

Another financial impact is a royal's stamp on some commodity - often food stuffs, tea, etc. Sales usually go up with this type of endorsement. I haven't checked but I don't think the royals make much (if anything) for their product endorsements. Would be interesting to compare royal vs. pro athletes vs. other celebrities endorsement revenues.

BTW - according to the above article, the royals keep about 25% and a much larger chunk goes to some sort of public trust. And the chief financial decision makers are often not the royals but a largish professional staff that looks pretty much like what you'd see in a corp or major gov't dept.

Re. "Dev" - correct, but, just the same, I will never, ever forget the challenge I was met with on arriving at Amiens St station for the first time: "Do you have any contraceptives on your person?" { 1965 }

....having travelled from, if I remember correctly, a part of 'the indivisible United Kingdom' where a Catholic could buy a condom but not get a council house.

No-one's asking you to forget it Greg, we're suggesting you try retain a sense of proportion and relevancy. You were responding to Alastair talking about the office of the President like Dev used it to run the country; the man had been head of government for 22 years at that point, and I suspect that had rather more impact than his basically retiring to being the person who had tea and sandwiches with Kennedy.

And to back up Alastair's point: one of the most pivotal constitutional acts an Irish President has ever done was refuse to answer the phone.

Who is Alastair?

No, you emphatically do not end up with President Farage, President Johnson, President Trump, or President Bolsonaro. Ambitious partisans do not seek the position of President in a parliamentary system, because a ceremonial head of state simply does not have the power to achieve what they want.

This is a bad faith argument. A real argument would be if you found objectionable actual Presidents of parliamentary systems. You know, like Alexander Van der Bellen of Austria, Sergio Mattarella of Italy, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, Michael Higgins of Ireland... This is the kind of people that seek the office of President.

»There are a cluster of constitutional monarchies round the North Sea - how is republicanism doing in: Norway / Sweden / Denmark / Netherlands / Belgium ?????????«

Denmark: Hanging in there, but painfully aware that one single misstep will stop the party. Generally understood to be a major part of Copenhagen's Tourist-Business, and trotted out internationally every so often when Danish companies hawk their warez. Queen recently, and very unexpectedly, removed the royal titles from the kids of our spare prince (Joachim), and said something oblique about pruning trees so they could live on. Crown-prince has built a pretty good image, served in special-ops as diver, took kids to school on cargo-bike etc. Seems to be in touch with reality when he opens his mouth.

Norway: As I understand it, in mild trouble, in no small part because of the spare princess talking to angles and pushing faith-healing and other clap-trap. Crown-prince married a single mother, who had dared to have lived real life, including music concerts and general partying. They do not seem to have embraced the tourist-attraction model very much.

Sweden: King not at all popular, never really was. Everybody is waiting for the crown-princess to take over, not the least because the law enacted by parliament which made her the heir (being the oldest) still pisses the King off enough, to say dumb shit about the job being taken away from his son. Crown-princess seems to have built a good image.

Netherlands: King has been skillfully rolling the "one of us" image for decades for instance with a not-very-secret hobby-job as KLM pilot (I think I have flown with him, he is a pretty easy guy to recognize.) dont known much else.

Belgium: Not enough info.

"the spare princess talking to angles"

Not the many-angled ones, one hopes. If so, there might be some cause for concern.

Yeah, I think I may have been a passenger on one of Wilem-Alexander's KLM flights on more than one occasion (I used Air France/KLM as my main airline for over a decade; AMS is one of the two main international hubs and is as close as Heathrow to Edinburgh in flying time). I think he's past retirement age for a commercial pilot, though -- he's 56. The ICAO hard limit is 65 for multi-pilot operations, but KLM have (or had) a retirement age of 56.

O you don’t remember correctly. I lived in a Manchester council house from about the time of the last coronation. Many of my neighbours were Catholics. St Anthony’s Catholic. Church was competed before any Protestant church. The Catholic primary school of the same name was completed about six months after the school I attended. In some of the neighbouring areas there were no Catholic grammar schools so children who passed the eleven plus were sent to private Catholic grammar schools at council expense
And they could also buy condoms, often from the barber. “Anything for the weekend?”

EC
It COULD be even worse ... Consider, for example, our current system, but with King Charles replaced by President Rees-Mogg, Braverman as Prime Minister and Patel as Home Secretary - especially the way Braverman & De Santis have been cosying up to each other ...

Robby
It is perfectly feasible to deeply dislike the current system, but not have an alternative ready to go. - like Russia 1917, or France 1848-9, you mean?
Perhaps not?

anonemouse
I never, ever said that NornIron was a haven of anything, especially in that late period, just before it all boiled over - exactly during my first two visits in the mid/late 1960's

Actually, Johnson is not so much power-hungry as prestige-hungry - he might well go for it. But I can't see that President Rees-Mogg would be any better.

More importantly, you have missed the points I made in #131 - would such a president have the spine and beneficience to stand up to Prime Minister Braverman? - indeed, would the office be given that power, or would the Prime Minister have absolute powers?

We desperately need our political system reformed, but simply replacing our more-or-less functional monarchy by an elected presidency with similar powers would be an irrelevance at best and very probably a recipe for a disaster.

Shudder. While, in some sense, this is off-topic, it is supporting evidence for my concerns voiced above - look at the speaker list. Doesn't the phrase 'National Conservatism' remind people of anything?

https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-uk-2023/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/

Given how universally loathed Rees-Mogg is, I find it inconceivable that he would manage to get more than 50% of the country to vote for him. In any case, this is again pointless speculation. A valid argument would be to point a despicable individual that actually managed to become President in a parliamentary republic.

As for your points in #131, you're just speculating that the monarch might have acted as a check on the power of the government, there's no evidence for that. We do have proof of the contrary, though: when Johnson illegally prorogued parliament Elisabeth Windsor was powerless to stop him, despite knowing perfectly well that it was illegal. That stems from the lack of legitimacy of the monarch: they can't use the powers they have on paper even they're needed.

In Austria, for example, that would never happen. The prime minister can request to dissolve (or prorogue) parliament, and the President can actually say no. He actually had to intervene (for the first time in Austrian history) when the shit hit the fan recently with the Ibiza affair. And I'm very glad he did, the situation would have been much worse with a powerless monarch.

I do agree that the British political system is in serious need of reform. Perhaps abolishing the monarch would be the catalyst needed to start it. But even if you just replace the monarch with a president without changing anything, at least you won't have this fawning over an inbred twat that is by law better than you.

Would we?

At least it ought to stop dimwits going "but they were socialist!!"

AAAARRGHH. That should have been "Wouldn't we?" [kicks self in head]

when Johnson illegally prorogued parliament Elisabeth Windsor was powerless to stop him, despite knowing perfectly well that it was illegal.

That happened in 2019. Elizabeth Windsor was 93 at the time. As I've said elsewhere: expecting mental agility and dynamism of a 93 year old is ... well, you might get it, but it's very rare indeed at that age.

This on its own is a strong argument for a mandatory retirement age for the head of state, whether elected or hereditary. By 85 almost everyone is slowing down a lot. Even 80 is probably too old, even for a primarily ceremonial/tie-breaker role.

146 - "a despicable individual that actually managed to become President in a parliamentary republic." Trumpolini, for example?

150 Para 3 - The Dutch monarch has to abdicate, retire or whatever you want to call it at the normal retirement age for the nation.

"I think it would be very easy for you to become a legal resident; famous author, good income, lots of people to speak on your behalf, etc."

Don't be so sure. I have a friend who has been blocked by immigration for over a decade in California despite having all of those things, and the demonic lawyers of the Mouse on his side. He's won two Oscars (in his sub-field) and yet has been told that his job could be done by 'Real' Americans and had his Green card rejected.

He is still able to work on a lesser visa and makes quite enough for all of them, but it has meant that his spouse has been utterly barred from working at anything, ditto their child (who is now moving back to Canada for school).

Immigration into the US is not easy. Current US behavioural patterns make it much less appealing as well.

No "has to" about it for the Netherlands monarch, it's just become traditional. Age 75 for Beatrix, 71 for Juliana and 68 for Wilhelmina. Willem-Alexander has just turned 56.

Would disagree.

Tell Johnson he can be President, go to lots of banquets with good booze, go on official visits all over the world, give crap speeches, be the centre of attention and deference, be talked about and get a honking salary and he wouldn't hesitate.

Probably Thatcher too. She referred to herself as Head of State - which pissed of Liz II royally. She hated being out of it- I mean, how was Dennis supposed to get his insider trading info!

And as for Farage, he would do the job for 20 fags and a bottle of beer.

So… an 86-year-old Joe Biden or 82-year old Donald Trump would be just a bit too old in January 2029, in your view? (Reagan was 77 by the time he left office, and AIUI too old by then).

I also note that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are as old, if not older than the pair of them… US senior politicians seem to hang on far longer than in other nations

The calculus where OGH is concerned is different. He works for himself and can write anyplace he can sit down, so the only question is whether he pays U.S. taxes or not; there is no U.S. citizen who can do the job of being Charlie Stross.

Whether he wants to come to the U.S. is another matter, of course, but at this point it's a choice between the frying pan and the fryer, or he can move someplace else that's not the U.K.

What about Ezer Weizman? Francesco Cossiga? Christian Wulff?

Even ceremonial Presidencies are attractive to the power-hungry

She still had advisors, that could tell her the blinding obvious. Do you seriously think that things would have turned out different with a bright young monarch, like the 74-year old Charles? I don't think the British monarch has the power to deny a request from the prime minister.

I wrote parliamentary republic, i.e., one where the real power lies with the prime minister. The US is a presidential republic, where the real power lies with the president.

And as for Farage, he would do the job for 20 fags and a bottle of beer.

That would be the Farage who enjoys his chauffeur-driven Range Rover, or his flights to/from Brussels on private jets?

He’s as successful in projecting a “man of the people” persona as Boris Johnson; perhaps more so, as he hasn’t been caught out yet.

He’d claim in public to do it for 20 fags, but still find a way to make it pay him very well indeed…

I really don't see how you find such an argument compelling: look at this list of politicians who always tried to get power! They would surely try to become a powerless President in an alternate reality.

Again, a compelling argument would be showing actual presidents of parliamentary republics that are Johnson-like.

where OGH is concerned is different

But all of that is an argument for other factors determining the location. The sort of thing Feorag might say when wanting to move to Majorca, for example :)

With no information about the duties, powers, treatment or appointment process of the president it's really hard to speculate about who would apply, let alone who would be chosen.

One twist would be a citizen's jury being the appointment board, and their task being to devise selection criteria which would be used to produce a group of candidates that would then run for election. In that kind of system it seems likely that there would be spending limits, possibly even of the form "you get $100,000 total budget for the next six months, covering everything from living expenses to advertising". Then have a few candidates debates and some TV interviews preceding the election.

I suspect a similar process to decide what the president does would also work, just because small groups of people are better able to navigate contentious issues than larger ones. It might take a few iterations, because any report produced is going to get vigorously debugged by the many eyes of the public and other interested parties (Our Lord Murdoch would have opinions, I suspect)

"The Fifth Elephant" plot involved a maguffin called the Scone of Stone, now at last I understand the reference. Buh-haw!

Agreed. OGH can move wherever he wants. I wasn't saying he had to move to the U.S. I was saying he was wrong about insurance/medicine costs.

This on its own is a strong argument for a mandatory retirement age for the head of state, whether elected or hereditary.

Possibly the standard retirement age for the country? Give them a new title (maybe even create one just for retired monarchs) and let them earn their keep doing ceremonial stuff like opening events, but with no political involvement.

There is no such definition, except in your mind. In the US, real power lies with the legislative and judicial arms of the government, not with the executive. Oh and there is no Prime Minister. The POTUS is head of the executive, not of the legislature.

This actually raises several interesting* points.

The UK also has a Royal Air Force, which originally came out of the Army (Royal Flying Corps).

Australia has a Royal Australian Navy and a Royal Australian Air Force, but our army, like yours, is not royal. However, it is composed of several specialist Corps, some of which are royal (the now-defunct Royal Australian Survey Corps, for example) and some are not (the Australian Army Catering Corps is the only one that springs to mind, but there are others). I suspect the British army has similar arrangements.

There is no such definition, except in your mind. In the US, real power lies with the legislative and judicial arms of the government, not with the executive. Oh and there is no Prime Minister. The POTUS is head of the executive, not of the legislature.

Not how many (all?) Americans see it. The POTUS has the ability to start a civilization-ending nuclear war whenever he wants. Whoever can launch nuke(s) has power, period.

The COTUS theoretically has a lot of power, but they've been increasingly sidelined since WW2, because for Mutually Assured Destruction to work, the POTUS has to be able to launch without a declaration of war. SCOTUS only has power to the degree that anyone's willing to listen to them.

Does having Shiva in a silo mean they can handle things like, oh, climate change, homelessness, or the threat of social media? Heavens no, anymore than you can use a claymore to stop pollen from giving people hay fever. But don't think therefore that they're impotent.

It may also be useful to consider that the batshit insanity spewing from the Fascists right now is in part designed to erode the power of, and public trust in, these branches of government. This is a normal precursor to an authoritarian takeover by a strongman promising to restore sanity ad nauseum. Works pretty freaking well, too.

Yep.

Note that folks over 80 have a limited life expectancy -- humans tend towards a maximum around 117 years but very few live past 100 -- so can be expected to discount the significance of forecast future events more than about 5-10 years out (unless they're very far-sighted or concerned for their descendants). I really don't want leaders in positions of executive power to have no skin in the game other than securing their place in the history books: that's how you get a Vladimir Putin.

(Putin is 70 and is a cancer survivor believed to have active disease. Only one Russian leader in the past 400 years lived past 80: the odds are against Putin living to that age. He could have tried to modernize the Russian economy and pivot away from petrochemical resource extraction ... but instead? Let's invade Ukraine and rebuild the empire, because it's legacy time! Obviously leaders of constitutional democracies are less likely to go that specific route, but ignoring or discounting unprecedented climate change is not unusual among the elderly ...)

Your understanding of our political system is seriously flawed and neither of your two remarks about it are correct. If you think that our two controlling parties would allow a genuinely open election for ANY post, you haven't looked at the last 70 years of our political history. And the illegality of asking for prorogation wasn't blindly obvious - it relied on an interpretation of the law, which can be done only by courts in the UK.

No, what I said was NOT mere speculation - there was published evidence for the latter.

And your rantings remind me strongly of those of the Brexiteers.

Actually, he DID try to sort out the Russian economy in the early days of his presidency, but failed fairly dismally.

Insist on calling the national conservatism movement the NatCs. Seems on brand for them anyway.

I was saying he was wrong about insurance/medicine costs.

You just told me I'd be paying north of $1000 per month -- and doing a shitload of paperwork -- for a part of my life that is currently free, both of payments and of paperwork.

Also living on a continent infested with spree killers with AR-15s. (The last spree shooting in the north of the UK -- just south of Scotland -- was in 2010, and only killed about 3 people, including the shooter, because guess what? No automatic weapons. And the last school shooting was in 1994, after which, no more because guess what? No handguns and significantly tighter registration.)

Finally, just add Screaming Jeezus People and that's a big "nope" from me.

(Canada would be more acceptable -- Feorag has relatives there and qualifies for a passport and there are fewer lunatics overall -- but it's a long way to move in my state of health at my age.)

I know he has expensive tastes. Afterall, he has been funded by others for decades and his £700 jackets don't just appear by magic.

I was more implying he is easily bought.

Judge a man by who he associates with.

the POTUS has to be able to launch without a declaration of war.

No.

The POTUS has to be able to retaliate without a declaration of war. Starting a nuclear war (i.e. launching a first strike) is very much not the same thing as responding to an attack in a manner dictated by law and/or standing executive orders that have been pre-approved.

(The situation in the UK is that, since the Prohibitions of Nuclear Explosions Act was passed, it's a criminal offense to procure a nuclear explosion, carrying a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. (As that's the replacement for the death penalty since the death penalty was abolished, that indicates how serious a crime it is.) There are nuclear weapons carried aboard RN strategic deterrent submarines, with sealed orders to be opened in event of a confirmed nuclear attack on the UK. If a strategic first strike on the UK took place the UK can be presumed to no longer exist -- it'd be a posthumous revenge.

It's understood that Parliament can permit a nuclear attack by passing an amendment to the PNEA. But it's going to take a government with a working majority in the House of Commons to do that, and there are no likely circumstances that could lead to it because the only rationales would be (a) resumption of nuclear weapons tests (prohibited under international treaty law, would require active cooperation by Australia or the USA) or (b) HMG wants to launch a nuclear first strike on someone (lolwut?!?). I dunno, maybe a dino-killer asteroid from outside the solar system shows up and they want to join in a multinational effort to nuke it ...?

Very little of the Royal/British/National distinction is more that labelling, and a lot of it is historical. It's a mistake to assume that different labelling actually means there is a difference.

No, for the UK, I look at the politicians operating in the UK to work out how it would work with a UK president.

We are inundated with politicians who have no vision, no innovative thought, few skills but enough nous to work out Think Tanks can provide the first two. How else did we get 44 day Truss and the likes of Fox, Widdecombe, Raab, Braverman, Johnson and Kwarteng.

For them, integrity is something that happens to other people.

They have no interest in what they will do in post - apart from whatever the Think Tank tells them - other than take the money, enjoying the grace-and-favours accommodation, travelling overseas, networking - curry favour for future non-exec directorships and generally being deferred to.

Most are monumentally shallow people - the glitz appeals. Having the Title matters to them, not what they accomplished with it.

Given my (limited) experience with USA medical insurance, that of some of my friends, and what I understand about your conditions, you might be landed with a lot of important exclusions or restrictions. Insurers are very fond of excluding or otherwise restricting treatment for the effects of pre-existing conditions.

That's why I'm insisting one should not speculate, but instead look at the people that actually get elected in parliamentary republics. At least in this way the discussion is based on reality.

I think it's a safe assumption that in the event of the abolition of monarchy the UK would adopt a system similar to the existing parliamentary republics. Instead of inventing something completely new or, even worse, copying some dysfunctional system like the US.

Parliamentary republic, presidential republic. Please inform yourself before embarrassing yourself in public.

Canada would be more acceptable -- Feorag has relatives there and qualifies for a passport and there are fewer lunatics overall

Assuming you avoid Alberta… and certain parts of the BC interior… and…

Canada tends to follow American trends with a 5-10 year delay. Different starting position but the same direction. Something to consider if you are relocating.

As is the climate. I know you live in the frigid north of the UK and are inured to the chill, but if you don't like -20 as a daytime high in the winter you should probably avoid the Prairies, for example.

There's nothing special about the UK. People are the same everywhere. Shallow, incompetent politicians without principles exist in every country, yet somehow they manage to get respectable presidents.

Now come on, do you seriously believe that the British people are so stupid and evil that they are not capable of doing better than a hereditary monarchy? The logical conclusion is that they are not capable of electing a government and should go back to an absolute monarchy.

I'm not British, but I did live in the UK for a while. I really liked the place, and in particular the people. I'm sure you can manage to elect a head of state.

Even 80 is probably too old, even for a primarily ceremonial/tie-breaker role.

Hold our beer please. He says from the US.

England has never had an absolute monarchy.

I also note that Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are as old, if not older than the pair of them… US senior politicians seem to hang on far longer than in other nations

Yes they are.

But the real problem in the US just now along these lines is Dianne Feinstein who, at 89, is stuck home with Shingles (and/or whatever else might be afflicting her) and by most accounts, suffering way more dementia that anyone accused Reagan of. And being on the Senate Judiciary committee, any of Biden's judicial nominees with a whiff of "we Republicans don't like them". are stalled. And the list is growing longer. And there is no time line of when she's be back at work. And she has stated many times she will not resign.

Unless she resigns or dies she can't be replaced on her committees without the consent of the R's or a rules fight which the D's will not win with her out.

And by some account Strom Thurmond was a dottering basket case in his last years in the Senate.

Insurers are very fond of excluding or otherwise restricting treatment for the effects of pre-existing conditions.

Old news. Most if not all of that has gone away. Especially for ACA/ObamaCare. But the footnotes can be mind numbing. There ARE cracks in the systems.

do you seriously believe that the British people are so stupid and evil that they are not capable of doing better than a hereditary monarchy?

What I'll call social inertia has a huge pull in this area.

As I get older I see "resistance to change" as a root cause of more and more problems in society.

I have, at least to the extent of knowing that you made up the title "presidential republic".

The POTUS has to be able to retaliate without a declaration of war. Starting a nuclear war (i.e. launching a first strike) is very much not the same thing as responding to an attack in a manner dictated by law and/or standing executive orders that have been pre-approved.

No.

Executive orders are used within the executive branch alone. Congress or a subsequent President can countermand them.

We know very little about what's in the nuclear football, except that it contains a menu of commands that the POTUS may issue to the military, and said menu in 2001 did not contain useful options for dealing with the 9/11 attack, which has been published.

The football also purportedly contains contingency executive orders, some perhaps dating back to the Kennedy Administration, all dealing with the chain of command and "Continuity of Government." None of this seems to have been touched by Congress. Purportedly current iterations of this plan assume that COTUS and SCOTUS will be bombed into oblivion, as will the official members of the succession (VP, Speaker, and cabinet members), and so whoever's alive on a secret list of B-, C-, or D-Team presidents will emerge from their current cloak of secrecy, declare themselves POTUS by waving already-written executive orders around, and take over as unelected POTUS after the war if anyone will follow them. None of this has been publicly debated by the COTUS.

So yes, I think it's safe to say that the POTUS can start a nuclear war. I also think it's safe to say that none of them will, because all since Reagan and The Day After have understood that nukes are a horrible option. But that's the constraint on their action, not legislation.

This has been a problem that's led, among other things, at least one court martial of a potential missileer who simply asked if there was anyone in the nuclear chain of command who would or could check to see if an order to launch was legal (following the code of military conduct rule against following illegal orders). That question not only went unanswered, they were court martialed for asking it repeatedly when ordered to not ask.

In the US, real power lies with the legislative and judicial arms of the government, not with the executive.

Yes. No. Not really. Depends on your event horizon.

Since Franklin Roosevelt the office of the president has been exercising more and more power. (Jackson and Lincoln did a lot on their own also.) Congress and the courts keep writing laws and interpreting them to limit the power of the office. But Presidents want to get things done and so the small army of lawyers and "smart" people working for them and more and more in outside think tanks keep looking for cracks in the system to let them do what they want. And the president then issues an executive order. Franklin issues 5K+, Truman 9500+, and since then all have issued more than 10K each.

And these tend to have force of law. And the courts in general say they are OK if constitutional and don't break existing law. If not they still start being implemented and it is up to someone who doesn't like them to start a lawsuit in the federal court system and get them tossed or modified.

One reason so many of us fear a second Trump presidency is that he wrote all kinds of obviously bad executive orders. Most got stopped very quickly. (The US Chamber of Commerce (I think) said they wish he'd do the same things but follow the rules so his changes would actually get implemented.) But near the end he was starting to pay attention. Or staff was getting through to him. Anyway, in a second term the general feeling is that he's let the staff come up with legal executive orders that would pass muster and let him wreak all kinds of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order

Question for the Brits:

There's something in the news about members of the public being "invited" to swear allegiance to C3 on Saturday.

Reactions?

I don't know who had the idea, but it's politically stupid. Charles has very properly tried to open up the coronation to more than the Great and Good, but that is not how to do it.

As a monarchist, I shall ignore it :-)

Question for the Brits:

There's something in the news about members of the public being "invited" to swear allegiance to C3 on Saturday.

As I have never met with, worked with, nor socialised with C III I have no idea why I would swear allegiance to him - and especially not his successors, who I know even less about.

I think those suggesting it are several sticks short of a bundle.

The situation in the UK is that, since the Prohibitions of Nuclear Explosions Act was passed, it's a criminal offense to procure a nuclear explosion, carrying a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

What is "procure a nuclear explosion"?

Does it mean detonating a nuclear device, or merely being in possession of such device?

Actually, you wouldn't (inside this hypothetical) do a shitload of paperwork, particularly if you got an HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) via Obamacare. At your age - I'm some months older than you, if I understand correctly - you'd pay about 40 percent of your estimate above. It wouldn't be great, but if you had to leave the UK in a hurry it wouldn't be horrible either. (I completely get why the U.S. wouldn't be your first choice - no arguments there, and at the moment it's not my first choice either.)

In the great scheme of things, this is probably not worth arguing much over, except that I'd like you to understand the number.

Sorry. "...understand the numbers."

Leszek Karlik @ 133:

"Looking on from the outside, I think that "£50M party and national holiday" may be a net money maker for the U.K. economy ... just from the U.S. tourist spending it generates."

I've seen this argument many times but never backed by any serious analysis.

After all, France is not famously known for it's absolute lack of US tourist spending caused by them decapitating their last king.

And any time I've seen claims of "this egregiously expensive public event brings in tourist money" all serious analyses find that it's actually not true, whether we're talking about the Olympic Games, Euro cup in football or whatever.

IIRC, the argument was applied to ALL of the ongoing pomp & circumstance and ceremony around the royal family; not just ONE ceremony. The coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event and may cost a bit more than the contemporaneous tourist revenue it brings in this month, but on average the tourists who come to see the royals year in & year out and the income it generates for the U.K. is greater than the cost of maintaining the royals.

So "net money maker" in that it maintains the on-going tourist revenue stream.

Does the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum in Rome cost more to maintain than the tourist revenue they generate?

PS: Not just American tourists, I bet the Japanese & Chinese tourists spend more in the U.K. every year than the Americans do.

Does the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum in Rome cost more to maintain than the tourist revenue they generate?

They both create "vibe" in drawing tourists to the countries even if said tourists don't actually visit those things.

paws4thot @ 151:

146 - "a despicable individual that actually managed to become President in a parliamentary republic." Trumpolini, for example?

You got the "despicable" part right, but the U.S. is NOT a parliamentary republic.

"Does it mean detonating a nuclear device, or merely being in possession of such device?"

Or indeed just getting someone else to do it?

Which reminds me - people used to be quite fond of pointing out that as Duke of Cornwall, Charles had been granted special permission to set off nukes whenever he was bored, and it was at least sort of true. (Wonder who it was that hated Cornwall that much.) Has he still got that, or is it William now, or what?

Let me note that, once again, the GOP refused to allow the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment, women). The media covered the vote not at all, for all practical purposes. This was a vote to remove the arbitrary, and never used before, 7 years requirement that the Amendment be passed.

(Early Dylan voice)Every ruler must get stoned?(/edv)

EC @ 185
Chas I tried it ...
But I think the closest we came was Henry VIII { "Britain's Stalin" to quote Charlie } & "Bloody Mary"

Meanwhile, rather than vaporing about our monarchy, there is Real Evil loose - AND - THIS ... "National Conservatism" indeed - the last time this ort of shit was around, it was labelled by it's initials: N.S.D.A.P.
RIGHT?

I dunno. Bet they could make a lot of tourist money by doing recreations of the Haircut....

I like that, and think I'll steal it.

Reactions?

"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

(EC is a monarchist. I'm an anti-monarchist. Between us you can get the synthesis.)

Does it mean detonating a nuclear device, or merely being in possession of such device?

The law refers to explosions, not simple possession. That's presumably controlled by other regulations -- if nothing else, simple possession of the sort of explosives you need to implode a pit is tightly regulated, never mind radioactive materials -- but possession of nuclear weapons is clearly allowed by law under very limited circumstances (members of the military in the course of their duty: staff of installations tasked with fabricating them: police, military, and hauliers transporting them under orders: and so on).

Well it did inspire a new song for football supporters in Glasgow :
"you can shove your coronation..." - you can probably approximate the remaining words.

"Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

Um, my standard response is, "no thanks, I don't know where they've been. And I'll pass on the horse too."

For your sake, I hope someone adds a properly historic note by infiltrating 20 kilograms of fleas into the cathedral, watering the booze at the reception, and bollixing the critical plumbing that everyone will need. Cheers!

Vulch @ 153:

No "has to" about it for the Netherlands monarch, it's just become traditional. Age 75 for Beatrix, 71 for Juliana and 68 for Wilhelmina. Willem-Alexander has just turned 56.

In the U.S. a maximum of two terms for the President was TRADITIONAL ... up until FDR came along.

And then the Republicans (who hadn't quite become the GQP yet - although the seeds were already planted) pushed through the 22nd Amendment - very much to their own regret because the very next Republican President was Eisenhower who could easily have won a third (and possibly a fourth) term ...

So "traditional" or not, Willem-Alexander could choose to stick around until well into his second century (assuming he's not deposed or dies) unless there's a mandatory retirement age written into the laws.

And age 56 (or 75 or 100) is NOT as old today as it was a generation or two back. A healthy 56 year old with access to good health care (especially preventative medicine) can be as vigorous & ABLE as his parents when they were half his age.

I'm obviously not a Brit, but I think it makes an odd kind of sense that involves a clear understanding of the problem without understanding that your proposed solution makes the problem worse. So you have this deepening divide between the left and right, with one side being very ugly about things, while continually provoked by lying yellow journalists... and the other wants something vaguely sensible, but for weird pro-capitalist reasons is considered a far worse problem than the proto-nazis on the other side, and anyway, the left doesn't have the political or propaganda cover to attain any of their ideals.

So someone, maybe even Charles, said, "Let's have everyone, left or right, declare their allegiance to the new sovereign at this politically important moment."

And someone else said, "By Jove, that's a great idea," without understanding that an oath of loyalty to the new King is the hydroxychloroquinine of British politics; a cure that's potentially far worse than the disease.

Re: 'EC is a monarchist. I'm an anti-monarchist. Between us you can get the synthesis.'

As far as it goes in the UK, there is no practical difference in your stances ... from a furriner's POV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_the_United_Kingdom

The UK constitutional monarchy isn't that different from the Swedish constitutional monarchy: the Swedish monarch is the official host of the Nobel awards dinner while the UK monarch awards OBEs, knighthoods, peerages, etc. but neither monarch decides who gets that award. The Swedes though don't seem to care much about their royals apart from wanting them to show up for certain events. Guess Merde-doc doesn't own/publish any news rags there.

If you're fed up with how the UK is being run, I think you know pretty well that it's the PM, MPs, Lords and their backers that are screwing things up. Recently read that there are a few elections happening this month in the UK. Not sure what that means in terms of overall impact though.

Half wondering whether this antimonarchy post happens in any way to be tied to being completely fed up with not being to modernize your abode ... a designated heritage/historical building. :)

If you're fed up with how the UK is being run, I think you know pretty well that it's the PM, MPs, Lords and their backers that are screwing things up.

No, they're the front men (and women). The real fuck-uppery can be tracked back to the small coterie of media oligarchs who have created an incredibly toxic press culture, and to the semi-anonymous lobbyists behind outfits like the 55 Tufton Street cluster of "think tanks" who inject policies into political discourse -- policies eerily compatible with those of the Koch network and the (American) heirs to the John Birch Society.

The coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event

Heh. Since C-3 is 74, I expect to live to see his son's coronation (if the UK is still a monarchy).

I expect I'll be long in the ground before his grandson becomes king. Assuming, as above, that the UK is still a monarchy.

(Of course, the coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event - for C-3!)

The situation in the UK is that, since the Prohibitions of Nuclear Explosions Act was passed, it's a criminal offense to procure a nuclear explosion, carrying a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

cheaper in Germany, only at least 5 years of prison, when negligently caused it shrinks to 1-10 years :)

It being May Day, I think the appropriate answer to the Coronation and other things is Billy Bragg.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAw0Ri4FSdM

"As far as it goes in the UK, there is no practical difference in your stances ... from a furriner's POV."

There's not a lot of difference here either, as far as that aspect goes. I think a considerable majority of the population would give a response that evaluates to "fuck off". Nobody would think it at all inconsistent for the response to be followed with "I don't think we ought to get rid of them or anything, but I mean for fuck's sake", or words to that effect.

Someone appears to have had a brain fart and figured that anyone who was enthusiastic enough to turn up would be self-selected from the upper tail of the distribution of how keen on the idea people are, so it ought to be a great way to get everyone into the party mood. They overlooked the point that all the people who don't want to turn up will naturally be even keener to tell the world that if they had been asked they would have said "fuck off".

"The Swedes though don't seem to care much about their royals apart from wanting them to show up for certain events."

Nor do we really. There's blah all over the media when something like this happens and crowds turn up that look impressive on TV but most people don't take any notice. It's not uncommon for some random totally non-royal crap to happen that has blah in the media and crowds and a good many of them seem to attract more general attention than this one is doing. I haven't noticed anyone in my street putting flags up but I know for sure that if it was football there would be several houses with great big ones. Similarly for the jubilee last summer they officially closed part of the street off for people to have street parties and nobody did. The frantic obsessive celeb-watching thing seems to afflict Americans standing outside looking in more than it does people here.

This is the thing that people miss about British monarchy. The great thing about them is they're ignorable. All the "notable interactions" between the monarch and the rest of the political apparatus over the last thousand years odd have shared the same basic purpose of increasing the number and/or extent of situations where the monarch can be ignored. Now we've basically achieved full coverage and can rely on them to carry on docilely posing for stamps and cutting ribbons in the background while we can all get on with our lives without them compelling us to notice them at all. This is what we want: it all Just Works and doesn't change so it carries on Just Working and nobody has to worry. And it's particularly attractive because the most obvious/available thing for most people to compare it to is the US Presidency and you seem to have to worry about that all the time even in Britain let alone the US.

"Sorry Herr Richter, I was just giving this nuke a bit of a polish and it fell on my foot..."

Grant @ 194:

Question for the Brits:

There's something in the news about members of the public being "invited" to swear allegiance to C3 on Saturday.

As I have never met with, worked with, nor socialised with C III I have no idea why I would swear allegiance to him - and especially not his successors, who I know even less about.

I think those suggesting it are several sticks short of a bundle.

Again, looking on from outside it seemed to be sort of a symbolic gesture - like the "moment of silence" on Remembrance Day or everyone singing "Jerusalem & "God Save the Queen" (King) on the last night of "BBC Proms"

... something meant to bring all of the people of the nation together in a shared moment rather than any heavy-duty political statement.

Like in the U.S. where they start baseball & (American) football games with the national anthem.

I don't think the secret police will be monitoring compliance, whether you mumble the words or substitute bawdy lyrics ... or just ignore the whole damn thing.

JReynolds @ 216:

The coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event

Heh. Since C-3 is 74, I expect to live to see his son's coronation (if the UK is still a monarchy).

I expect I'll be long in the ground before his grandson becomes king. Assuming, as above, that the UK is still a monarchy.

(Of course, the coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event - for C-3!)

Technically it will be the second in his lifetime (as it is for me - he's about 10 months older). He was, I believe, 4 years old when his mother was crowned. I wonder how much of the ceremony he remembers? I don't remember it at all.

I don't even know if it made the TV news over here, and I wasn't yet the "news junkie" I would become later in life (I was only 3 y.o. & an American to boot).

I might still be around for a third one if Charles goes prematurely.

He was, I believe, 4 years old when his mother was crowned. I wonder how much of the ceremony he remembers? I don't remember it at all.

He probably remembers it the way I remember the Apollo 11 moon landing. Yes, I was 4 when it happened. And yes, I remember being woken up at 5am to come downstairs and watch it on TV: it was a very big deal.

Your mum being crowned? I'm pretty sure that would be an even bigger deal.

I don't even know if it made the TV news over here

There was no real time trans-Atlantic TV back then; they made a big deal about delivering film of the coronation to the colonies using RAF Canberra jet bombers -- just barely subsonic! -- to get it to South Africa within 12 hours and Australia within 36.

Real time trans-Atlantic TV only became a thing after Telstar 1 went into orbit in the early 1960s.

It confused me no end. We had to chalk union jacks onto paper, go to a crossroads, and then wave them as a car drove by. It was over a decade before I understood why.

That was in what is now Zambia, and the car probably held the governor general.

Are you talking about the British public which - with some help from the First Past The Post voting system - voted Cameron, Brexit, May and Johnson plus Redwood, Truss, Kwarteng, Rees-Mogg, Shapps, Bridgen, Badenoch, Patel, Gove, Fox, Patel, Dorries, Grayling, Widdecombe, Hunt, Baker, Zahawi, Anderson, Dowden, Ross, Williamson, Javid, Wragg, Davis into Parliament and Johnson Snr and Farage into Europe?

That British people?

Would you really trust them to chew gum and watch a soap opera at the same time?

There is something special about the UK, we have the least talented politicians in europe.

Frankie Boyle has a 45 minute video titled "Farewell to the Monarchy" on his 'Frankie Boyle's New World Order' Youtube site. A nice synopsis of why kings are not good.

He probably remembers it the way I remember the Apollo 11 moon landing. Yes, I was 4 when it happened. And yes, I remember being woken up at 5am to come downstairs and watch it on TV: it was a very big deal.

I was 15 for the Apollo landing. We hadn't had a TV for 9 months as our 13" B&W was broken. My 11 year old brother and I told my parents that if we didn't have a TV by the time of the launch we'd pack our things and head for the nearest neighbor who would put us up for 3 or 4 days.

But kids memories 4 years old and younger are very malleable. I have a memory of Jesus showing up at our front door to take my sister. (She died when I was 2.) I have to assume my mother told me this (that Jesus took her to heaven) so often that the memory got imprinted. To this day. Interestingly much later in life I realized that Jesus looked just like his portrait in the church hallway.

I also have a few other strong memories from under 12 that I now have details that are wrong.

the appropriate answer to the Coronation and other things is Billy Bragg.

I once had a fun explanation from an anarchist about the difference between Bragg's version of the Internationale and the proper one.

And somehow YouTube guessed that I would be keen to watch Frankie Boyle's explanation of why the monarchy is so fun and useful.

crowds turn up that look impressive on TV

Yeah, it looks great until you remember the crowds that turned out for the invasion of Iraq, and for other similar celebrations of British culture.

The great thing about having a holiday when the old monarch retires and then another holiday when the new one arrives is that we can arrange to have lots of those if we want to. "ruler for life" has often been much less time than you might think, as the noted historian Dr Boyle mentioned in the video above, Jane Grey ruled for nine days, was deposed but her life was spared... for several months. And you'll note that she "claimed the throne" but whining peasants still go on about whether she was really queen at all. Perhaps the human sacrifice at her coronation was done improperly?

I’m five months older than the King. My memories of the coronation are limited to: Getting a television delivered the day before and watching Andy Pandy after which the man from the TV rental shop demonstrated to all the neighbours how the tube would not implode by tapping it lightly with a hammer. It broke. All the neighbours crowded into the living room of our council flat watching the coronation the next day on the replacement TV. The street party had jelly, which I liked and blancmange which I hated. Charles probably had even less memory. But, unlike me he, had full colour films of the day which he must have seen many times and will have become memories, even though second hand.

I read that CBS hired a civilian P-51 to fly the film to Boston. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/queen-elizabeth-ii-coronation-television-broadcasting-battleground/ I was 2 1/2 years in the future, an acceptable excuse for not watching.

an acceptable excuse for not watching.

In June of 1953 I have to wonder if even 1/2 of the people in the US had access to a TV. Even at a friends or neighbors house. It would be 2 more years until 1/2 of the households in the US had a TV. But most of that was concentrated in urban areas. Where I grew up didn't have a viewable TV station for another 2 years after that.

The only thing special about the UK is the FPTP voting system, that indeed is the worst in all European democracies. But the people, the politicians? No, all countries are full of scoundrels. I'd wager that you are deeply familiar with the British ones just because you are British.

Look at Austria, for instance. Very recently we had the Ibiza scandal. The prime minister, Kurz, survived the scandal, but got kicked out shortly thereafter because of an unrelated corruption scandal. And that's only recent history. If you go back two decades you have the legendary Jörg Haider, whose tales of corruption, incompetence, and hatred can fill entire books. And nevertheless Austrians have managed to elect respectable Presidents for decades.

I'm genuinely curious about your view on democracy. Your arguments against letting people elect the head of state all apply to electing the government. Which is a much more pressing matter, given that the head of state has so little power. Should elections be abolished altogether then? How do you think the government should be chosen?

Re mass singings of the national anthem, pledges of allegiance, etc. - That kind of public affirmation isn't really a thing we British engage in with any enthusiasm - in fact anyone who does show enthusiasm is usually regarded as faintly embarrassing. Of course we are British, why make a fuss about it? The rare occasions when we are required to sing the national anthem it's done more with mumbling and shuffled feet than enthusiasm. Maybe we feel that such displays are a sign of insecurity? Weirdly that doesn't apply so much to enthusiasm for the individual componant nations of the UK, usually expressed through sporting fixtures - though excessive nationalism outside those events is restricted to small subsets of each population who mostly get quietly ignored by most people with perhaps a bit of eye rolling.

Hence Terry Pratchett making the words to the second verse of the Ankh Moorpork anthem consist of "ner ner ner ner", except for the last line, since only some one very dodgy actually remembers beyond the first verse of their national anthem.

Indeed, very much so.

I should perhaps also note that in my view one of the reasons for the Scottish National Party's rise is the sidelining of nationalists and an emphasis on "We can do better" rather than "We just are better". Nicely summed up in the Corries song "Scotland will Flourish", written as a rejoinder to the fervent nationalists they had acquired as fans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkr9c_ok-7c

For EC & others interested in Astrophysics & the misfits in the models: A crack has appeared - it seems

Charlie @ 215
Doublepusgood!
Oh yes, oldest known person was Jeanne Calment - made it to 122 (!)

Grant
Worse than Hungary?
Not counting Russia, obviously ....

AJ (He/Him)
What SNP "rise"?
It's beginning to look as they are almost as incompetent & crooked as the tories, but I will say that they don't seem to be either deliberately cruel or wreckers, which the tories are ....

Yes. Singing the following in a pub (while swigging some beer) during the coronation is about the limit of acceptable patriotic fervour - it dates from the last King Charles, after all :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here%27s_a_Health_unto_His_Majesty

Well, let me answer. I don't belong to your religion (The Holy Populace is always right) and most particularly don't believe in your dogma (so-called representative democracy is the One True Form of Governance). I believe that representative democracy is purely a means to an end - i.e. I side with Churchill (*) - indeed, I side with Pope (+).

The reason that I am a monarchist has NOTHING to do with claptrap like the Divine Right of Kings (though a little to do with tradition - i.e. preserving history). It is because I regard the UK's so-called representative democracy as having actually failed, and being incurable short of a revolution, for the reasons I gave in the first paragraph following the questions of #131 and OGH gave in #215. And I don't see any hope of a revolution, for reasons hinted at by Grant in #225.

I regard King Charles as being more loyal to his country (sic) than any of our politicians. His brain may sometimes wander out to lunch, but his heart is in the right place, and he has a spine. This puts him two organs above any of our recent prime ministers. No, OF COURSE, monarchy is not universally superior, but I assert that it would be in the UK of 2023.

(*) https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/

(+) https://libquotes.com/alexander-pope/quote/lbv2w2s

I was actually replying to Grant #225, but forgot to click the button.

Being a monarchist and against democracy is at least consistent, I grant you that. But you didn't say how do you think the government should be chosen then.

You are still misunderstanding. I am not against democracy, nor even against the mechanisms that are called that, but I don't regard them as sacrosanct. And I most definitely don't hold with the dogma that they necessarily bring benefits like liberty and social beneficience in their wake. The evidence is strongly against that.

Traditionally, the UK monarchy and its immediate predecessors appointed the government, partially constrained by the advisory council (which has varied over the years). My assertion is that we would be better off with that system than what we have today. Unfortunately :-(

If you are asking me about what form of government I actually believe would be best for the UK, that's an entirely different question. No, I am not going to answer that, unless OGH wants me to, because it would take over the post.

Today it has been deemed newsworthy that Princess Anne doesn't think it's a good idea to "slim down" the monarchy. Clearly an entirely objective viewpoint. Discussion closed. /s

"IIRC, the argument was applied to ALL of the ongoing pomp & circumstance and ceremony around the royal family; not just ONE ceremony. The coronation is a once-in-a-lifetime event and may cost a bit more than the contemporaneous tourist revenue it brings in this month, but on average the tourists who come to see the royals year in & year out and the income it generates for the U.K. is greater than the cost of maintaining the royals. "

Again, [citation needed]. Would the tourists who come to see the Buckingham Palace forgo coming to UK if instead of a country where the royal family owns 12 billion pounds worth of real estate they could visit the empty Buckingham Palace and a Golden Guillotine monument, or equivalent?

The Eiffel Tower is like The Tower of London, a building with minuscule costs of upkeep that people want to visit regardless of the wealth of some posh guys who own or don't own it, it's not like there would be three times more tourists coming to France if the France would still have the Royal Family owning billions of euros in real estate and owning the Louvre.

The assumption that people would not come to visit London if not for the billionaire wealth of the royal family seems just silly to me. But then, this is the UK, so silliness seems de rigueur.

I have mixed feelings. Unaccountable power is always a bad thing, I'm sure we can all agree.

The problem there is that all the post-Johnson PMs of the UK have unaccountable power. They weren't elected, they don't even represent the mandate on which their predecessor(s) were elected, and we've got years before we can sling them out. During that time they are 100% unaccountable.

And that even assumes they were ever accountable. The lesson of demagogues is that if they're any damn good at demagoguing, it's nearly inevitable that they'll get power by making promises they can't keep. Republicanism requires an informed, educated electorate who are familiar with analytical thinking. None of those points are majority-true in modern Britain, and there's moderate evidence that demagogues (Thatcher, Blair and Johnson particularly spring to mind) either made efforts to keep it that way or at the very least let it slide. That a paper could claim "It was the Sun wot won it" and not be entirely wrong should be terrifying.

Is a £50m piss-up worth having right now? Hell no. Am I as prone to screaming "moral bankrupcy!" about this as, for example, Boris Johnson continuing to claim he represents anyone apart from himself and his latest piece of skirt? Also hell no.

I'll also mention David Lammy (Labour MP) on "Any questions" on R4 the other day, when the panel were asked for their opinion on the coronation. He said that after the London riots, he got precisely one face-showing visit from the PM, and precisely no backing to rebuild. Conversely he got 5 personal visits from Charles, and Charles personally pivoted his charities in that direction. So OGH's claims do require a question of whether he's objecting to a hypothetical royal entity or this specific one, because the latter does not seem to be based on evidence.

You would be right, were it anyone else. But look up her record.

I regard King Charles as being more loyal to his country (sic) than any of our politicians. His brain may sometimes wander out to lunch, but his heart is in the right place, and he has a spine. This puts him two organs above any of our recent prime ministers.

Then your support for monarchy is contingent on the personality and character of one specific monarch (and, I assume, his predecessor).

Ask yourself -- if a random improbable accident wiped out most of the royals such that the monarchy landed on Prince Andrew, would that change your position? How about Princess Michael of Kent (who appears to be quite the racist)?

What you're saying is not that you're a monarchist, but that the rest of the framework of government has failed and the current incumbent shows favourably in contrast with the likes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

With your comment I'll now ask questions that have been rattling around in my mind.

What if the next in line is born with Down Syndrome?

Or has a traumatic brain injury in an auto accident?

Or????

Or is just not all that bright?

This non UK person is curious about such.

That's exactly my point.

Most of the time, the UK lucked out with monarchs during the 20th century. The one time when they didn't they got Edward VIII, who was friends with that nice Mr Hitler. Scandalously marrying a divorced American was the excuse the Palace used to pension him off -- in reality, by 1937 it was glaringly obvious the UK was heading into a war with the Nazis and having a Nazi King would have been a little bit embarrassing.

I want to emphasize that the UK got lucky in recent history. (Consider what might have happened if Eddie hadn't conveniently handed the Palace Wallis Simpson as an excuse?) But there is no guarantee that such luck will continue.

The Downs Syndrome question is one that is probably dealt with these days by prenatal testing and a discreet abortion -- along with any other testable hereditable diseases. Not that anyone will admit to any such eugenicist practices in public, but I give it a 50/50 probability that it's happening. (Possible exception: Downs Syndrome in particular can be mitigated these days with the right education and care affordances -- there are even people with Downs Syndrome who have gained a university degree. But they tend to succumb to early onset dementia and die in their 60s, and that's a problem for a hereditary institution that emphasizes continuity.)

The TBI ... at that point, the monarch or heir is probably declared incompetent and retired and the spare is activated.

"Just not all that bright" is a recurring problem with monarchy -- just look at Kaiser Wilhelm II for a horrible example -- and that's when you rolled snake eyes. The institution works around it to some extent by keeping the incumbent in a cotton wool box, but that has its limits ...

discreet abortion

There are a lot of whispered legends that many still births "back in the day", especially in rural areas (the US west in the 1800s) were really euthanasias at birth by doctors and midwives after they saw what came out. But no one wants to discuss such in public.

No. That's not so.

They have a tradition of service, which our politicians have lost, and their controllers (see #131 and #215) despise. Andrew would be no worse than Johnson, and he is about the worst plausible candidate. Reverting to the Sovereign in Council would be better for at least a generation or few, and we have traditional methods of removing unacceptable monarchs. But that is only part of what I am saying.

The other (and more important) part is that I am saying that our entire political system (not just the framework of government) has failed, and is not recoverable short of a revolution. We have had two opportunities for change 2011 and 2019, and both were sabotaged by the broken system. Bugger the individuals currently ruining our country - they're irrelevant.

Turning your question round, is what YOU are saying that abolishing the monarchy would correct this? If so, I call out 'bullshit'.

Re: 'The assumption that people would not come to visit London if not for the billionaire wealth of the royal family seems just silly to me. But then, this is the UK, so silliness seems de rigueur.'

You seem to have forgotten a wee detail: C3 and firm are okay with regular people visiting/seeing the historical stuff they own. I seriously doubt that this is the case for other UK billionaires. So yes, fewer tourists would likely visit the UK if C3 and family weren't around.

Apart from 'OMG are we seeing the start of WW3!?' when Russia invaded Ukraine I figured that no way would I now ever be able to visit The Hermitage. Even though the USSR did away with their version of monarchy, it not only held onto but protected that historical property and contents for their populace. I have one of the books below - and now wonder whether Putin and friends are going to try to sell any of it off to finance their war against Ukraine.

'The Hermitage Collections: Volume I: Treasures of World Art; Volume II: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Present Day'

https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Dr-Mikhail-Borisovich-Piotrovsky/dp/0847835030

Social/group identity, sense of belonging as well as one's place in a family, group, or society relies quite a bit on shared history and ritual and most rituals have a mix of visual, auditory and movement components. Birthdays, high school/college graduation, wedding ceremonies/celebrations and funerals are still around. And if you think they're irrelevant - suggest you read up on the people who had to miss these during COVID lockdowns. I think that the 'ritual' question should focus on what message that ritual is tied to how that message benefits the people involved. (My understanding is that there's usually an acknowledgement of some new responsibility attached to most 'ceremonies'.)

BTW - Charlie & EC - I agree with both of you because both of you (I think) are saying that when it comes to government, i.e., managing a society, how it actually operates is more relevant than what it's called. Unfortunately when this topic comes up for discussion, the label (monarchy, democracy, republic, etc.) usually becomes the sole focus: the magic wand by which the pols/backers are guiding the attention/distracting the audience. IOW, this label fixation is in itself a societal ritual.

Prince John of Wales for instance? Never higher than 5th in line though, younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI.

246: Princess Michael of Kent is nowhere in the line of succession. Prince Michael was 15th in line at the time they married but lost his place because she's Catholic. He was reinstated in 2013 by the act that put Charlotte ahead of her younger brother, but in the mean time a lot more have gone in higher up.

C3 and firm are okay with regular people visiting/seeing the historical stuff they own. I seriously doubt that this is the case for other UK billionaires.

From 1945 to the last decade the National Trust was a big thing. Inheritance tax gutted the land-owning noble families after WW2. The National Trust then moved in to buy up/take over a lot of stately homes and open them to the public as museums (or in some cases, hotels). The original owners frequently kept the right to live there, but the NT took over the maintenance and running costs of estates ranging from mansions all the way up to royal palaces.

Then the Tories broke everything.

Reagan was definitely too old...or at least too sick. Senile dementia. Nancy Pelosi is also causing problems because she is sick. And she may have some mental problems, also.

It's not being too old, per se, that is the problem, it's the problems that often (usually?) accompany it. There's also the problem of getting out of touch with the changes in the world. Sometimes this is desirable, but not all that often.

That said, flowing with the popular opinions is also often a recipe for disaster...just a different kind of disaster.

It probably has it's own failure modes, but I often thing the best choice would be government by triads selected by sortiledge (not the whiskey).

Sorry, but no. The real power in the US government lies with the executive. That's not what it says on paper, but that's the way it has developed. The legislature is too often deadlocked, and can only override the president when there's a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court is too slow to be effective. By the time it gets around to deciding a case, the president they're overriding is already retired.

But what would be the role of a President in a Parliamentary government? He really needs to have some major role, or the whole idea is a waste of time. Possibly it should be the right to call a new election whenever requested. Possibly it should include the right to request that the courts try politician he names for ethics violations. Possibly it should be an overrideable veto. (That's not so bad if he doesn't have an executive bureaucracy to back him up.) And possibly he should be immune to Parliamentary correction...except that a new election could replace him.

CharlesH, unless you've heard something I haven't, I think you meant Dianne Feinstein and not Nancy Pelosi (although she is clearly not as agile as she used to be - there are too many seriously old people in the halls of power). Dianne Feinstein is ruining her legacy by not resigning even though she is clearly not able to do the job. (There are several things about the US politics of the last couple of decades that would have turned out quite differently if certain elected officials had been willing to step aside when they were no longer at their best.)

You wrote: "Republicanism requires an informed, educated electorate"

This! Many, many years ago, I was talking to a co-worker, both of us programmers. I said, "I know you consider me weird, and I'm happy with that, but just out of curiosity, why do you think I'm weird?"

She thought for a minute, then replied, "Well, you've got an opinion on everything."

In my mind, not saying it to her, was "but it's the DUTY of a citizen of a democracy to have informed opinion, how else can you vote?"

No, Raygun was a lot worse than that. He literally wanted to be a G-man, and J. Edger Hoover, who was Not a nice person, thought he was a wacko. He also betrayed his union - he was president of the screen actors' guild, and informing as much as he could to the FBI.

Here's another problem: ChatBots. Currently Hollywood writers are on strike because of them, so they're already a factor to be considered. Would a "incompetent, but well meaning" King scripted by a Chatbot be a bad idea?

Actually, if you're contemplating revising your government (which we are, if only in the abstract), then the changes in AI need to be integrated into the replacement. But who controls the goals and message of that AI?

For that matter, in the US we've already been warned that we're heading into a "deepfake election". I don't know what that means, and I don't think anyone else does either, but it could get pretty bad.

Add to this that the AI landscape is not standing still. So HOW do you change the government if you redesign it? It's starting to look like it's likely to be like a government run by Twitter, unless precautions are taken, but what precautions.

To me this feels like a terrible time to start changing aspects of government. But that next year would be worse.

Perhaps all the symbols of stability should be cherished and protected right now.

I have been reading the discussion and I'm a bit puzzled by the stance that republic must involve having a president. I realize that most (all?) republics these days have them, but it is by no means given. And if you really want the office of president, the Romans had a solution to the issue of checks and balances: Have two presidents (consuls) with the power to veto each other.

You're right. I'm also having memory problems. Interestingly though, I can still program, which surprises me. (But then I always had problems with names.)

I wasn't saying that Reagan was a decent person or a good president, I was saying that towards the end he suffered senile dementia. (Yes, your criticisms of him are valid, but those are unrelated to whether older people should be retired from vital offices.)

I think every deliberative body needs a "president", i.e. one who presides over the discussion. The office has several different titles, and, in fact, I suspect that one of them is Prime Minister. (I don't know enough about the UK Parliament to be at all sure of this, though.)

OTOH, clearly no government needs an office with the name of "president". It can be called several different things. And the name can be given to several different offices. (From what I've read earlier in this list, I suspect the Irish "President" is a different office than the one who presides over the legislature.) In the US, certainly, the "President" is the guy that presides over the executive branch. The Senate is presided over by the Vice-President, and the House by the Speaker. (Possibly the Supreme Court is presided over by the Chief Justice, but I'm not sure.)

So. If you've got one main governing body, then the "President" should be the one who presided over it. But titles don't always match function.

As such, in most of the comments what is meant by the term "President" isn't well defined. Often it seems to be thought of as a purely ceremonial job. In which case it could well have a different title, and even be one role of a different job. (Mayors often cut construction ribbons.) But SOMEBODY has to be the one who says "OK, do it", even if that's all they do.

I suppose the idea is that since there's no Monarch to do the ceremonial duty, you need someone else in a Republican government, and that seems right. It seems silly to call that person a president, but that seems to be a traditional term in many places.

It's not being too old, per se, that is the problem, it's the problems that often (usually?) accompany it.

We accept age limits to certain professions (airline pilot, for example). It doesn't seem unreasonable that we also have age limits for politicians. (And judges, for that matter.)

Every few years the hoary old issue of testing older drivers rears its head, after a senior clearly experiencing cognitive decline kills someone. Never goes anywhere, because older voters vote, but maybe it should. (I'm glad my mother recognizes that she shouldn't drive at night anymore. Some of her friends don't recognize their limits — to the extent of "wake me up if I fall asleep, my medication has that effect sometimes".)

There are several things about the US politics of the last couple of decades that would have turned out quite differently if certain elected officials had been willing to step aside when they were no longer at their best.

Not just elected officials. Consider what might have happened if RBG had resigned when Obama had the votes to replace her, rather than letting Trump pick her successor.

Every few years the hoary old issue of testing older drivers rears its head

I know a very well respected cardiologist. And due to that specialty most of his patients are older. He said the #1 question he gets asked is: "Am I OK to drive".

And almost always the very adult children in the room but sitting behind the patient are waving hand and shaking their heads in an emphatic NO!!!!.

I'm also having memory problems. Interestingly though, I can still program, which surprises me.

Decades ago a friend of mine had brain cancer. She lost a lot of her vocabulary*, but could still design microchips. The mind is a strange and wondrous thing…

*For example, referring to "the thing you go in and out of" because she couldn't remember the word "door".

Every few years the hoary old issue of testing older drivers rears its head, after a senior clearly experiencing cognitive decline kills someone. Never goes anywhere

Here in the UK, once you hit 70 your driving license needs renewing every 3 years, with a doctor signing off that you're still fit to drive. (Prior to photocard licenses coming in, you got a paper license that was good until age 70; now the photocard needs renewing every decade because I guess photos age.)

I'm now an older driver. I'd be HAPPY to retake the test, if everyone else older had to. Given I'm a better driver than 80% of those out there (evidence to support m claim: let's see, last ticket was... decades ago.)

almost always the very adult children in the room but sitting behind the patient are waving hand and shaking their heads in an emphatic NO!!!!

Yeah. I worry about my mother. I still remember her nearly backing over a young mother with a stroller, and saying "she should have known that I can't see behind me" rather than accepting that her minivan had restricted visibility that was her responsibility to deal with (by, for example, keeping track of who walks behind you and not backing up until you see them emerge).

It doesn't seem unreasonable that we also have age limits for politicians.

James Baker of Reagan's cabinet and advisors recently said in an interview that older politicians need to step aside. He said he feels as smart as ever but knows he's a step or two behind where he should be to be in government. He's 93.

George P. Shultz on the other hand is of the same cadre of Reagan's cabinet and advisers. And keeps getting involved with shady things when he should know better. Theranos for one.

He was around 90 when he got involved.

I like the statement by Charles de Gaulle:

"The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”

And then there's Henry Kissinger. Who I understand got bilked out of millions by Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos. (She intimidated Kissinger. Just let that sink in for a minute.)

Taking away the car keys is likely the most contentious thing adult kids get to do with their parents. Almost, and at times a bigger deal, than selling the home.

A common thing is for the "kid" that lives in another city to take the keys when they leave after a visit "home". Then the ire and spleen venting is not directed at the ones still local and having to deal daily/weekly.

These things were contentious with my mother and mother in law. In different and strange ways but it did create divisions between siblings that still hang around 10 years later.

Yeah. It was a Big Deal when a good friend of mine had to arrange to take away her partner's car key (and the car went away).

On the other hand, under the heading of my role model, when my father got a ticket for going too slow on a bridge, in his late sixties, he sold the car. But then, my folks lived in Philly, with good public transit.

Graham
Horribly correct. In fact the Monarchy is considerably more "Representative" than either of BoZo's successors, & probably have the whole nation's best interests closer to "heart" than the current crew of { as you say: unaccountable } liars, chancers, crooks, thieves & fascists.
Um.
Republicanism requires an informed, educated electorate who are familiar with analytical thinking. - NOT EVEN WRONG, starting with Rome, if not Athens & true ever since.
SEE ALSO whitroth @ 257!

THANK YOU for that David Lammy quote .. I didn't know that.
Yeah, right: tory PM makes soothing noises, does nothing, but Charles TAKES NOTICE.

Charlie @ 253
Then the tories broke everything - not quite, not yet, but...they are working on it.
They are clearly trying to completely smash the NHS, the Railways &the welcoming image of Britain, & make it difficult to go abroad, & fill the rivers with shit ... and anything else they can break & loot, before the next election. ...
And then blame Labour for the cost of clearing up the wreckage.

Rbt Prior
It's a witch-hunt, given the "accident" rates for under-25's ....
I've had to remove 3 seatbelts from the L-R & legally declare it an 8-seater, so that I can continue to drive it, because "It's a BUS" & I used to get the extra medical tests either free, or low-cost & it's been toryised & I can't afford it.
But then, like my deceased aunt who gave up driving, voluntarily, at 91, because she realised her eyesight wasn't up to it ... in my case, I'm concerned about my (future) reaction-time. { Which, incidentally is NOT TESTED } after your initial Driving Test ...

Last time I had to help an older relative renew their driving licence, it was all self-certify. There was a question around "Are you healthy enough to drive", but nothing that require getting the doctor involved. Click yes to the boxes, and the new driving licence turns up.

This was around 2017-19, so under the Tories. I don't know if it was different under the previous administration.

And now, for today's news headline: Anti-monarchists receive ‘intimidatory’ Home Office letter on new protest laws:

Official warning letters have been sent to anti-monarchists planning peaceful protests at King Charles III’s coronation saying that new criminal offences to prevent disruption have been rushed into law.

Using tactics described by lawyers as “intimidatory”, the Home Office’s Police Powers Unit wrote to the campaign group Republic saying new powers had been brought forward to prevent “disruption at major sporting and cultural events”.

Need I say anything more?

Even with all of his faults, isn't King Charles a true environmentalist?

Might be handy to have a Green King when the climate change storm hits the British Isles.

It’s not always like that. I’m 74. I have sleep apnoea. If my respiratory medicine consultant reports me as not taking CPAP treatment I will lose my driving licence. And modern CPAP machines as used by the NHS are internet linked. Somebody has a complete record of my sleeping habits. If the internet connection goes down there’s no sign on the equipment but I will get a letter in a few days asking me to fix the connection (the data is stored and retransmitted). For my last driving licenc e renewal I also had to provide a new photograph. Since my passport renewal was within a few days of the driving licence renewal and both needed a new photo. These days you get your photo taken and the photographer provides a time limited internet link to the passport office and DVLA. Luckily both my applications were dealt with quickly. The same photo is used for both.

Elisabeth Holmes’s went out of her way to recruit helpers who knew nothing at all about Laboratory Medicine. When I read about Theranos i looked up what information was available and it was an obvious scam. Or maybe a crazy idea which made her start the scam when it failed. It’s not impossible to do tests on one drop of blood. A drop of blood is about 20 microlitres. Most modern medical biochemical anaysers us 2 to 10 microlitres on blood per test. But sending a drop on blood taken from a fingerprick to a central lab for testing can’t be done. Different test need different anticoagulants an preservatives. Repeat tests need to be done for quality control failures and to check and/or dilute unexpected results. And reliably collecting blood from a fingerprick is not easy. And serum and plasma give more reliable results than blood for most tests. Nobody with lab experience should have been taken in. I wasn’t worried about my job becoming outmoded. .

"The assumption that people would not come to visit London if not for the billionaire wealth of the royal family seems just silly to me. But then, this is the UK, so silliness seems de rigueur."

The point behind that argument is about the attractiveness to tourists of seeing a living tradition in action, rather than there being nothing more than a pile of stuffed relics that nobody does anything with any more except to dust and polish them every now and then. We've got craploads of relics, but they aren't stuffed, they are still alive and kicking and still being used for something at least related to their original purpose. So it's particularly attractive to eg. the kind of tourists who think the whole thing's like Disney and are keen to see a real place that real princesses really live in, not just somewhere they used to or some cardboard mock-up staffed by actors.

Of course it looks silly when you take a result expressed as a bunch of reals and try and reduce it to a single bit, but so do lots of arguments, so that doesn't count. What's really silly about it is a lot more fundamental. It's an attempt to counter an ignorant objection that isn't based on anything factual by trotting out a canned answer that sounds knowledgeable and researched but is really just another thing pulled out of someone's arse.

"Oh, let's get rid of the royals, they're a waste of money. Of course they are, they must be, just look at them, it stands to reason."

"Oh, but all the tourists they bring in spend even more money, and it's more than enough to cover it. Of course they do, they must do, just look at them, it stands to reason."

As far as assertions of the form "it takes however-much money to have X" mean anything at all to begin with, we do actually have a tolerably close approach to an accurate answer, in the form of the "money wot goes to the royals" item in the government accounts. I can't remember how much it is but it's remarkably small, comparable to the quantities local city councils piss up the wall by being fucking stupid (eg. "1.9e7 < 5e5"; repeat until budget exhausted, then whine), let alone central government. People either don't know this and assume it's a couple of orders of magnitude greater, or they do know it but don't like it so they invent their own figures which are more than a couple of orders of magnitude greater, by adding up irrelevant shit like how much money goes on things currently called the "royal something-or-other" that we'd still have to pay if those things weren't called "royal" any more because we'd still have the things, and chucking in bollocks like "and of course they don't pay taxes" (they do).

As for the tourist money bit, that's pretty much entirely made up. Foreign tourists come here and spend money. There's probably an estimate of the total amount which is not intolerably inaccurate, but how much difference it would make not having the royals and even in which direction is basically impossible to discover. You can't get any useful data by asking them, and you can't exactly do a controlled experiment. (Parallel universes as a sandbox for testing different ideas for constitutional restructuring?) So what you get is some anally-extracted figure chosen to sound plausible, whether you get it from someone down the pub or from some bunch of crawling parasites who charge people millions of pounds to pull figures for money for things out of their arses and hork up a multi-megabyte PDF of guff and random photographs to put them in.

257 - One of my workmates once said to me and I quote, "Christ, do you have an opinion on everything?"
The correct answer would have been, "No, only on things I care about!"

263 - Well, the Irish Parliament is complicated, partly by the reuse of terms, partly by the use of Irish Gaelic names.

264 - A recent fatal crash in Scotland was a single vehicle crash where the driver/victim was 19. Should he not have been driving because he was "too old"?

278 - Greene King predate Speaker to Plants by a couple of centuries.

Rct 264: I want every damn car on the road - retro fit them - for the driver's seat to be a Faraday cage, no, you CAN NOT USE YOUR DAMN MOBILE WHILE DRIVING. They're all holding them, and reading them at lights....

prevent “disruption at major sporting and cultural events”

So targeted against football hooligans and those who insist on singing along at the opera, right? :-)

We've got craploads of relics, but they aren't stuffed

Yeah, but that's a fixable problem… :-)

you CAN NOT USE YOUR DAMN MOBILE WHILE DRIVING

I use mine all the time: as a GPS with navigation. (And music system, for longer drives.) Mounted to the dash (neat holder that clips in a vent), plugged into the car stereo so I can easily hear the directions.

It's really handy to hear the navigation prompts for upcoming turns, especially when the truck traffic is blocking my view of street signs (such as my trip to Vaughan yesterday, where I was stuck totally surrounded by semitrailers with absolutely no view of any signs).

Got it set so it automatically blocks incoming calls/texts while I'm driving (I can override that when I'm a passenger, but the default is block incoming calls).

That doesn't seem particularly strange to me at all; it's how my mind works anyway. The object that represents the thing in my mind basically isn't verbal at all, but "a thing you go in and out of" is a much more accurate verbal expression of it than "door" is. "Door" is just a label tied on to some random attachment point with a bit of string that doesn't really have a fat lot to do with it. In conversation I do occasionally find myself unable to locate the bit of string, and maybe I manage to fumble my way to a different bit of string that ties on the label "la porte" or maybe I just get stuck and say "you know, one o' them inny-outy things".

The label certainly isn't a necessary or even very useful item for thinking about the thing. With programming especially I get on better with no labels at all. It never occurs to me to make my own up. The "official" labels appear to be specifically designed to create confusion and mystery around things which are really simple and dead obvious, and make these really simple things impenetrably obscure by ensuring that any discussion or description of them has in any given sentence at least three fucking stupid words being used to mean something not far off the opposite of what they look like they ought to mean, if they look like they mean anything at all; therefore I never know what they are supposed to mean, and if I find out I can't remember it because it's such a mindbendingly inappropriate word that has nothing to do with this dead simple thing I've known about for years. The lack of labels doesn't hinder me at all thinking about stuff in its own right, even if it does mean that I think most people on stackoverflow are talking gibberish.

Tweak the radars in radar speed cameras to operate with enough power and at the right frequency to burn out the front ends. Ought to be possible with fixed installations at short range.

Trouble is you still have to deal with all the divs who insist on talking to their passengers while driving and fucking looking at them all the time they're doing it.

That doesn't seem particularly strange to me at all; it's how my mind works anyway.

Well, it surprised the hell out of her neurosurgeon. They thought it was strange enough that they got several research papers out of her.

Charlie @ 277
THAT is the tories trying to use & claim that the Monarchy belongs to them. { HINT: It does not. }
Fucking crooked liars & I refer you back to the post by Graham, itself referring to the response of the Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy.
NOTHING to do with the monarchy, everything to do with the crooks many of "us" were stupid, ignorant & gullible enough to vote fore in 2019, yes? JUST like bleeding Brexit, in fact.

Re: 'Foreign tourists come here and spend money. There's probably an estimate of the total amount which is not intolerably inaccurate, but how much difference it would make not having the royals and even in which direction is basically impossible to discover.'

Agree - unless I'm visiting family my travel destinations include as many points of interest as possible. Although I don't know what specifically belongs to the royals and what belongs to the National Trust I'd definitely include sites associated with various monarchs through the ages.

Disneyland - okay for kids; for adults - meh. The line-ups are insane.

Oh, it's that shitey Public Order Bill. I was thinking it was something that had just happened.

That's shite because the Tories are a bunch of shites. It's not because we've got a monarchy, it's because we've got a government that is working towards having "looking at a copper funny" as an imprisonable offence.

And I'd guess that when you're doing something like that, what you pay for accommodation, food, and getting around the place is far greater than what you pay for visiting the actual things you visit? And there are more things you want to visit than you have time for all of, so you'd still be doing about the same amount of visiting whether or not the relative attractiveness of the various choices was altered, and not be left short of things to do?

puzzled by the stance that republic must involve having a president

I think someone needs to be in charge, that's why many parliaments developed prime ministers and a similar need for organisation led to political parties. Spokescouncil models bypass this but not especially well and similar ideas from history have similar problems.

The Swiss have a rotating presidency in their council of elders* and that seems to work ok. https://www.thelocal.ch/20211230/explained-why-does-switzerlands-president-only-serve-one-year

My impression is that the Swiss system relies on local culture to work, but OTOH so does every other system. The current "Voice" debate in Australia got particularly silly when the far reich tried to liken it to the Treaty of Waitangi... because they didn't bother to find out that the Waitangi Commission is purely advisory, their power comes from the enthusiasm with which voters say "you racist fucks can get fucked" when a government disregards the suggestions of the tribunal. If Australians were similarly committed to "The Voice" it wouldn't matter whether it was a completely unofficial gathering of respected senior traditional owners or a Swiss Heptarch with absolute power.

(* "elder" refers to experience not age, someone who was first elected at 18 would serve ahead of someone first elected at 40 if first elected at the same time)

"If my respiratory medicine consultant reports me as not taking CPAP treatment I will lose my driving licence. And modern CPAP machines as used by the NHS are internet linked."

I think those would be regarded in the USA as good examples of dystopian governmental over-reach by both the left and right sides of the polity.

Charlie Stross @ 223:

I don't even know if it made the TV news over here

There was no real time trans-Atlantic TV back then; they made a big deal about delivering film of the coronation to the colonies using RAF Canberra jet bombers -- just barely subsonic! -- to get it to South Africa within 12 hours and Australia within 36.

Real time trans-Atlantic TV only became a thing after Telstar 1 went into orbit in the early 1960s.

Did Canada have TV news then? I'm sure if they did, however it was filmed & delivered to Canada for broadcast, THEY would have made a copy available to the U.S. networks in New York City.

Whether the U.S. TV networks would have found it newsworthy I don't know. I barely remember some images, but they might have been something I saw when I was older.

AFAIK, TV news in the U.S. was in its infancy with only 15 minute network shows weekday evenings & once a week news summary programs on Sunday. I don't really remember the weekday shows, and only vaguely remember the Sunday Show because my parents watched it.

David L @ 232:

an acceptable excuse for not watching.

In June of 1953 I have to wonder if even 1/2 of the people in the US had access to a TV. Even at a friends or neighbors house. It would be 2 more years until 1/2 of the households in the US had a TV. But most of that was concentrated in urban areas. Where I grew up didn't have a viewable TV station for another 2 years after that.

The first VHF station in this area, WFMY, Channel 2, in Greensboro, went on the air in September 1949. There was a UHF station in Raleigh, WNAO Channel 28, went on the air in July 1953, but it went off the air in 1957 after the arrival of WTVD, Channel 11, in 1954 & WRAL, Channel 5, in 1956 and I'm pretty sure we didn't have a UHF tuner for our TV because it would have required an EXTRA set top box at the time.

So, likely my family didn't yet have a television in June of 1953.

I do remember we had one in 1954 - because my parents didn't get up one Saturday morning to put the plastic protective screen on the TV for Winky Dink & You and I drew directly on the CRT with my crayons and I got in trouble for it.

zumbs @ 260:

I have been reading the discussion and I'm a bit puzzled by the stance that republic must involve having a president. I realize that most (all?) republics these days have them, but it is by no means given. And if you really want the office of president, the Romans had a solution to the issue of checks and balances: Have two presidents (consuls) with the power to veto each other.

For that matter, why couldn't a country be a republic and still have a figurehead king?

"why couldn't a country be a republic and still have a figurehead king?"

Because if it has a king, then it is not a republic, it is a (constitutional) monarchy. This is a matter of definitions, not of practice.

This is largely the state of those Commonwealth Countries that kept the Monarch as head of state after gaining independence from the Empire.

JHomes

Charlie Stross @ 277:

And now, for today's news headline: Anti-monarchists receive ‘intimidatory’ Home Office letter on new protest laws:

Official warning letters have been sent to anti-monarchists planning peaceful protests at King Charles III’s coronation saying that new criminal offences to prevent disruption have been rushed into law.

Using tactics described by lawyers as “intimidatory”, the Home Office’s Police Powers Unit wrote to the campaign group Republic saying new powers had been brought forward to prevent “disruption at major sporting and cultural events”.

Need I say anything more?

I still wonder how getting rid of the Monarchy is going to rein in the government's fascist tendencies?

I think the hope is that since what's there now clearly hasn't stopped them, something else might be better. But as we saw with the progression from May to Johnson to Truss, progress isn't necessarily positive. And having a referendum isn't necessarily a good idea.

I'm kind of hoping that their first past the post system completely fails to produce a majority and they need one of the voting reform parties to govern. Whoever "they" is, because I'm not convinced that UK voters actually understand that it's time to stop digging themselves into the hole. Or even that they can decide to stop.

I'm mostly sad that we don't get a pubic holy day to celebrate the coronation of the new King of Australia (etc), even though some of the etc do. Doesn't seem right.

I know I'm pointing out a typo here but that might sound like a fun holy day! (depending on how it's celebrated.)

An archaic form, rather than a typo. Holiday, being derived from holy day (hāligdæg in old English). A day off from serfing in the fields used to be associated with a religious festival of some sort.

And I didn't even spot the actual typo!

Pigeon @ 292
Exactly

John S
why couldn't a country be a republic and still have a figurehead king? - which is (almost) exactly what we have got .....
and ...
I still wonder how getting rid of the Monarchy is going to rein in the government's fascist tendencies? - Well, it isn't, of course!

"Official warning letters have been sent to anti-monarchists planning peaceful protests at King Charles III’s coronation saying that new criminal offences to prevent disruption have been rushed into law."

Did you get yours ? You could frame it over your mantle. Sort of British Monarchy memorabilia ...

Precisely. The government is taking aim at anti-monarchists to divert from their targets - which are 'terrorists' like Extinction Rebellion, pro-refugee demonstrations, and eventually Amnesty and Liberty. Yes, they are trying to get the monarchy to take the blame for their fascism.

Yes. We definitely need more pubic holy days :-)

That doesn't seem particularly strange to me at all

It's a medical condition called aphasia and it's a common side-effect of brain damage or a brain cancer. Can also be caused by a stroke.

(My cousin, who died of an aggressive astrocytoma about 20 years ago, had severe aphasia during his last six weeks. He lost all his nouns and pronouns, but could still verb, at least until the cancer hemilaterally paralysed him and then turned him into a vegetable about a week before the end.)

If you or someone you know develops this suddenly, seek medical help urgently.

Tweak the radars in radar speed cameras to operate with enough power and at the right frequency to burn out the front ends. Ought to be possible with fixed installations at short range.

That's a great way to destroy cars. You do realize that large numbers of vehicles manufactured and sold in the past decade have permanent built-in cellular modems for stuff ranging from satnav map/traffic updates to engine management firmware and vehicle theft prevention?

It's also a great way to murder folks with implanted defibrillators or pacemakers (many of which are remotely adjustable), insulin pumps, etc. Not to mention sleeping laptops, bike couriers (who use smartphones docked on the handlebars as a moving map), and so on.

The Swiss have a rotating presidency in their council of elders and that seems to work ok.*

Also note that the EU Council of Ministers has a rotating presidency -- each member state gets the baton for six months, on a strict rotation.

There's no elected office for "President of Europe" but there is in principle a presiding officer for the CoM who could fit the role of "greeting visiting dignitaries" as well as chairing meetings.

As I keep repeating: the monarchy gives the fascists a pretext.

(Remember that nice Mr Mussolini, and his relationship with the Pope and the King? Or Kaiser Wilhelm II's approval of Hitler?)

Depends on the details of the holiness, surely? Apparently C3 is still head of his personal church as well as having a bunch of related titles and even a gesture or two acknowledging that other faiths exist.

Charlie @ 312
But, the EU has the office of: "President of the Commission" - currently held by Ursula v der Leyen, whom the actual fascists, who, in typical fashion, project & accuse her of it, if only because she is German.

• @ 313 - NOT buying it. I really think you are wrong here, completely so.
  See previous references to David Lammy, yes?

Our Swedish king* had his 77th birthday this weekend.

Very few paid any heed. I expect this will be the state of affairs in Britain in a generaion or two.

At the millennium, the Swedish state church was officially severed from the state after 1000 years. very few pain any heed.

Time will corrode the grip institutions have on people's minds once they are no longer relevant -at least if people are well fed and feeling secure. If there is economic turbulence a lot of people will turn to "tradidions" for a sense of security.

• "the new king" as we sixtysomethings call him.

The line-ups are insane.

There are tricks and methods. But without them, yes, insane.

Of course the correct way to deal with using a phone while driving is the same as the way to deal with drink driving.

Make it socially unacceptable and increase the likelihood of getting caught. Socially unacceptable is the important part.

Drunk drivers still exist of course, but unlike 20 years ago nobody will admit to it.

Android auto on my cars screen offers a superior navigation experience to the builtin satnav, assuming I have a signal.

Make it socially unacceptable

And in the nothing new under the sun department.

Before cell phones (candy bar and flip) became widespread I was driving down a road near here. 40MPH speed limit and narrower than standard lanes. 2 in each direction. Downhill and curved. I noticed the lady in the big SUV next to me was flipping through her day runner (remember those?) with it sitting on the steering wheel. Steering with one hand with a thumb I guess holding it to the wheel while flipping pages with the other hand.

I quickly decided I did NOT want to be beside her. Or behind her. I sped up well over the speed limits for a few seconds to get ahead of her. I didn't notice any cars flipping over behind me after that so I guess she survived.

rocking back and forth They call them tories over there, they call them tories over there, they call them tories over there, th

As I keep repeating: the monarchy gives the fascists a pretext.

American Republicans seem to be managing their slide to fascism without a monarchy.

Trump clearly wanted to be a monarch really badly. Don't bet against acquiring an imperial presidency if the slide into fascism progresses to completion. (You've already had quasi-hereditary presidencies: the Kennedy and Bush dynasties both spring to mind, although the former seem to have run short of plausible candidates in the current generation and the latter were derailed by The Wrong Son getting the nomination for 2000.)

Well, FWIW I had to use Wikipedia to find out when Chuck III was born, and that he does not (presently at least) have an "official birthday". The level of my interest can be gauged by my not linking the Wikipedia page.

Trump clearly wanted to be a monarch really badly. Don't bet against acquiring an imperial presidency if the slide into fascism progresses to completion. (You've already had quasi-hereditary presidencies:

Yep. I have relatives who basically wanted him to be king. Ugh.

Our hereditary tendencies go way back. The two John Adams, father and son, were the 2nd and 6th presidents.

Our only saving grace last time was how massively fucking ignorant he is.

The idea of someone who listens to those wiser and more capably evil or who knew how to capitalize on a national crisis like a pandemic is terrifying, as is the fact so many people cheered gleefully for it to happen.

This is what makes Ron DeSantis so scary. And he's not the only one. (RDS understands how US politics works, as well as what his base wants and how to con them into voting for him. Assuming he didn't over-play his hand with the Disney fight, he has a good chance of picking up the nomination ...)

O you don’t remember correctly.

I was unsure whether I correctly remembered from the several previous times Greg told that story whether he was arriving from Belfast*; I am extremely sure about the existence of historic housing discrimination in Northern Ireland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_Housing_Executive#Background

*Arriving into Connolly he's unlikely to have been coming from anywhere else, but given it was 20 years before the DART opened I can't exactly extrapolate the current train situation back.

amckinstry; sorry, I know of him from elsewhere and had a brain-fart that not everyone would know who I meant.

I get definite Führer-vibes from DeSantis, but - at this precise moment - it looks unlikely that he will either be the Republican nominee, or be able to win a national election. At this precise moment. There are so many many ways that things can go wrong, and the Democratic Party has far too much affection for 'the status quo' for me to assume that they will be willing to start calling Republican/Fascist 'nonsense' (domination games) for the nonsensical pointless cruelty that it is. Among many many other things Biden, Schumer, et al, should be pointing out that the 14th amendment almost certainly makes the 'debt limit' unconstitutional and that the only reason the Republicans are suggesting they will default is because they want to make life worse for Americans and the world.

Or Franco, who passed a law that his chosen successor would be king - and who picked the heir to the throne as that successor.

MOUNTED TO THE DASH. As opposed to 90% of the idiots on the road, who, for example, I see when stopped at a light, who are holding it in their hands, in their lap, looking down at it, not at the light, etc.

I mean, picking a legal fight with Disney (did you see the DeSantis hats they were selling with Disney font? whooo boy that's dumb) kinda disproves the whole "capable intelligent villain" thesis.

Like on tv shows, where they're never looking at the road....

Just since my earlier comment is being referenced by Greg, I wanted to make it traceable. David Lammy's comments are at 39:00 in this link. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001l9j8

David Lammy's claim is that after the Tottenham riots, he had one-off visits from David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Theresa May and Ed Milliband. They all arrived, left, did nothing. C3 came 5 times, and pivoted the Prince's Trust, the Prince's Foundation and other charities in the direction of Tottenham. He directly credited C3 with turning around Tottenham after the riots. I can't fact-check that, but it's one datum.

Re pretexts, Charlie, that isn't a valid argument. The definition of a pretext is that it's 100% unrelated. If it was at all related, then it wouldn't be a pretext, it'd be a reason.

As I believe I've mentioned here before, a year or two ago, TFG thinks he's Lex Luthor. And he is. The trouble is that he's not the modern Lex Luthor, the brilliant and evil billionaire, he's the Lex Luthor of the first Superman movie, with one bumbling sidekick, who wants to steal nukes and set off The Big One with the San Andreas Fault, so he can sell beachfront properties in Nevada.

and that the only reason the Republicans are suggesting they will default is because they want to make life worse for Americans and the world.

There is a small group of R's in Congress who truly want to burn the house down and start over. They have mostly been ignored for the last 13 years. Bonner got fed up dealing with them and resigned. But their numbers were not enough to screw up everything. With only a 5 vote margin in the House McCarthy has to deal with them on EVERYTHING. If not he gets booted as Speaker and there is no replacement in sight without a coalition with the D's.

It is not even clear that the recent "bill" passed by the House to deal with the current debt situation would pass as is if everyone was present. And that assumes the Senate and Biden take it as is. And they will not. Nope. Never. Not even Mitch.

So there is this sneak attack the D's started a few months ago where they a majority can force a bill to the "floor" (we're getting seriously inside the lines here) and force a vote. There are time limits which is why they started it a few months ago and other tricks to make it work without the consent of the Speaker. If things get down to a crisis deadline the D's would need 5 R's in the House then 10 or so R's in the Senate (Feinstein anyone?) to vote with them to make this happen. Will it? I don't know. But it sure seems more likely than McCarthy getting ANYTHING through.

Some of the "burn it down" crowd say any changes will cause them to vote nay. And some of them say there must be more pain before they will vote yea on a final bill.

The end of this month is going to get ugly on this side of the pond.

Assuming he [Ron DeSantis] didn't over-play his hand with the Disney fight, he has a good chance of picking up the nomination ...)

Ron DeSantis seems to be fading badly in the 2024 presidential election polls. (His disastrous overseas trip certainly didn't help him at all.)

The U.S. now has a remote chance of Trump taking office in January of 2025 while living in a prison cell. Interesting times... 🫤

Ron DeSantis seems to be fading badly in the 2024 presidential election polls. (His disastrous overseas trip certainly didn't help him at all.)

More and more people are realizing he's more of a "burn the house down" kind of guy than they may want. His strongest support is from retired people. Who, to be blunt, don't seem to care about the wreckage they seem to want to leave behind.

Among many many other things Biden, Schumer, et al, should be pointing out that the 14th amendment almost certainly makes the 'debt limit' unconstitutional

Yeah, but if you were the Democrat party would you want to bring that case before the current SCOTUS?

"Are you feeling lucky, punk?"

@ 310: I was referring to Robert's comment that it was "strange" (and wondrous); I am very aware of "thinking about things" and "translating thoughts into language" as being separate parts of my brain function that don't have a whole lot to do with each other, so I don't find it strange that the right kind of brain lesion can clobber the second part while leaving the first part unaffected. And all the more so since things like the experience of the second part conking out for a word or two occasionally being more or less universal are clues that suggest everyone's brain works like that, whether they're aware of it or not, and it's not just me.

@ 311: The first part isn't a bug, it's a feature. whitroth's Faraday cage idea basically wouldn't work - it's fine at DC (like Faraday's original result), but as soon as you start dealing with AC fields things start going to pot, even at broadcast radio frequencies (I think I've told the GCHQ screened-room story before), and the higher the frequency the harder it gets and the more meticulous you have to be about the design and implementation. It's not a case of "you just have to put metal around something" - I've tried putting a mobile phone inside a metal biscuit tin with a metal lid and wasn't very surprised to find it still worked, and the metallic foil handbag/pocket liner things you can get on ebay are basically not much less of a joke than the hats. Depending on lots of random geometry it's even possible for doing something like that to increase the signal strength at some points inside the "shield". To dependably block all the holes through which a GHz signal can get inside a car would be a heck of a task, and it could still trivially be defeated just by opening a window a crack.

It's also not sufficient, because it only affects phones held in the hand, and does nothing to address things like phones connected to an external aerial, or set up to relay through some external device. The law distinguishes between "held" and "mounted" partly because only "held" is possible to enforce at all, and partly because it's hard enough to get the public to believe it's a problem at all even when you do have an obvious factor to use as an argument, never mind trying to put over an argument based on technical details about brain function. But the cognitive impairment doesn't care whether people understand it or not, and most of it is down to talking over an inherently deficient channel and the plain fact that you're fucking about with something instead of driving, rather than exactly where the thing you're fucking about with is. So since the point of the proposition in the first place was to compensate for lack of enforcement arising from an arsability shortage, it makes sense to extend the solution to also cover lack of enforcement arising from unfeasibility.

Regarding the second point, this is not the usual idea about simply creating a gigantic field strength that fucks anything electronic simply by brute force like a localised version of a nuke. The point here is merely to transmit enough power at a specific frequency for an aerial tuned to that frequency (which the aerials inside phones are) to send enough of it onwards to the most sensitive part of the circuitry to fuck it up. It relies on the target already being designed to collect and concentrate energy at that frequency right into its tender bits, so the amount you need to transmit is less.

AIUI implants that talk do so by means of low-frequency inductive coupling between an implanted coil and a coil held in the right place outside the skin. Anything like a cellular radio is both technically unfeasible, and practically bleeding stupid for reasons I need not reiterate. They are not designed to collect and concentrate energy at GHz frequencies, so they don't have the built-in vulnerability that the idea exploits in the intended targets, and should be OK (not denying it would be wise to check).

should be pointing out that the 14th amendment almost certainly makes the 'debt limit' unconstitutional

Pointing it out is a great way to "feel good". But at the end of the day the Treasury Department has to operate under existing laws. (Want to buy a bond that may be rendered worthless in a few months by a SCOTUS?) And those laws have rules about which monies MUST BE PAID. And there are laws on the books about how much debt can be issued. When those numbers on the charts cross things will get ugly.

It's not a case of "you just have to put metal around something" - I've tried putting a mobile phone inside a metal biscuit tin with a metal lid and wasn't very surprised to find it still worked, and the metallic foil handbag/pocket liner things you can get on ebay are basically not much less of a joke than the hats.

I tried this years ago, and I found a way to block the mobile phone signals: put it in a bucket filled with salt water! Of course if you want to use the phone again, use some kind of water-proof bag, otherwise it's very secure forever.

I used something like 10 % salt, by weight. So a 10-litre bucket and maybe a kilo of salt did the trick. With fresh water the phone rang when I called it, with salt water it did not.

Of course this might not be the most practical solution to blocking mobile phone signals.

With fresh water the phone rang when I called it, with salt water it did not.

In WWII sub crews doing training on the Great Lakes were surprised that the radios worked when under water. Given that 99.9999% of their experience had been in ocean waters.

So that's a way you could lose your licence, with a closely managed and essentially internet-connected medical condition. But if you're not under such close observation, such as a lot of people in the early stages of dementia, I understand that you can still self-certify that everything is fine and keep your licence.

It is often good to do things that feel good and interpreting the fourth clause of the fourteenth amendment to mean that debts must be paid is an originalist interpretation, and the current creepy dominance make lots of noise about being 'originalists'. I would also set things up so that the Treasury Department is able to mint several trillion dollar coins within moment of being given the go ahead: https://www.businessinsider.com/debt-ceiling-solution-mint-a-trillion-dollar-platinum-coin-2023-5

Unfortunately all the Democrats have done so far is ask the Republicans to 'play nice'.

I understand that you can still self-certify that everything is fine and keep your licence.

A friend who grew up in Maryland and who finally had to move his parents away from there due to age issues, said that the state had a process where anyone could anonymously report someone as unable to drive and the state police would show up and require a driving test. I'm sure there were a few hoops involved but still it seems a good idea. (Along with a process to keep people from abusing the system.)

The point here is merely to transmit enough power at a specific frequency for an aerial tuned to that frequency (which the aerials inside phones are) to send enough of it onwards to the most sensitive part of the circuitry to fuck it up.

Which fucks up the increasing number of safety-critical systems that rely on 2G/3G/4G/5G cellular comms.

Anyway, it's not necessary.

For about the past decade iOS has had a setting option to not ring or vibrate for incoming calls or texts if it's in a moving vehicle (traveling at over 40mph, I think). This is possible because phones are also GPS receivers.

All that's necessary is to mandate that this feature defaults to always on at speeds over about 20mph, unless the phone is traveling along a railway line or is airborn.

(It needs to be possible to turn it off, eg. for vehicle passengers or in event of an emergency, but just flipping the default to "on" solves the problem of drivers being distracted by incoming connections.)

I can see a lot of issues in the details but yes, this is better than radio interference.

Radio interference in the US can quickly get you a visit from federal officials if someone notices and complains. And blocking cell signals will get you noticed in a hurry.

For a while when there were only a few frequencies and people refused to believe it was a problem, lots of churches and theaters would buy jammers (mostly from Israel for some reason) to silence phones during services/productions. That it blocked things like alerts to firemen and EMS personnel were brushed off till a visit form the PTB. The practice seems to have slowly mostly vanished.

I meant to ask. Did similar occur / still occur in the UK / EU / Oz / Elsewhere?

340 Para 3 - Yes, and if the individual handset happens to be on the other frequency cluster?

Re: '... conking out for a word or two occasionally'

If it's only every once in a while, try some word association. I'm guessing that there are likely very many neural paths in your memory to whatever correct word you're searching for. And for most adults, the memory of an everyday event/item/word often has a couple of unique 'odd ball' (funny/emotional) memories as well. So if the ordinary/blah search doesn't get the result, try the weird/funny/emotional path. Singing helps here too - because it uses a different path. 'Knockin' on heaven's door' by Bob Dylan is kinda depressing but might be useful if you want to recall 'door'.

Something else - just like physio rehab for getting the legs working again after an injury by doing a lot of repetitive exercises for weeks, same thing for relearning (putting back and reinforcing retrievable memory) words. The reason for the emphasis on repetition is that your brain doesn't reinforce/save connections that aren't used often enough and/or didn't arouse a strong emotional response (esp. fear, amygdala).

The above is oldish advice/info from when my mother had a series of strokes. Not sure how this has changed since.

Alternate?

anonemouse @ 327
Correct: Belfast Gt Victoria St to Dublin Amiens st ( as it was then )
HINT: It's much easier to remember the Dublin original names { Amiens St / Kingsbridge / Westland Row ... & Harcourt St }
-
@ 330 ... Who then backed democracy against a fascist coup, yes?

The law distinguishes between "held" and "mounted" partly because only "held" is possible to enforce at all, and partly because it's hard enough to get the public to believe it's a problem at all even when you do have an obvious factor to use as an argument, never mind trying to put over an argument based on technical details about brain function.

Yeah, well, if we're going by actual evidence then we should be banning children, at least when being ferried by their own parent. This is hardly new data…

Monash University researchers have found children are 12 times more distracting to a driver than talking on a mobile phone while at the wheel

https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/children-more-distracting-than-mobile-phones

odd constitutional echoes, such as the fact that we have a Royal Navy but we a British Army (loyal to Parliament, and not under royal command)

Not quite… the Army swears an attestation oath to be loyal to His/Her Majesty, Their Heirs and Successors; while Royal Navy Officers are not required so to attest…

…urban legend being that this is due to their loyalty being unquestioned ;)

As others have pointed out, the historical anomaly about Royal Navy vs British Army comes from the old raising of Regiments, and purchase of Commissions; individual Regiments were Royal (or not), but the monarch remains most definitely the Commander-in-Chief. Not Parliament.

Throw in other stuff, like “which side did your mob back, during the Civil War / Commonwealth / Restoration / Glorious Revolution”, and it’s a patchwork of seniority and tradition…

iOS has had a setting option to not ring or vibrate for incoming calls or texts if it's in a moving vehicle

One of the first things I turned on when I got my new iPhone was check that that feature was turned on.

Martin,

Your purported link does not work, as it is missing the URL.

JHomes

HINT: It's much easier to remember the Dublin original names { Amiens St / Kingsbridge / Westland Row ... & Harcourt St }

Is it? For who? They were renamed the year after your trip; I suspect those who've spent the 57 years since calling them Connolly, Heuston, and Pearse think differently. (I didn't list Harcourt St station's 'new' name since it doesn't have one; it was closed in 1958.)

If I talked about London as if Kilburn was full of Irish navvies you'd think I was cracked, wouldn't you?

@ 330 ... Who then backed democracy against a fascist coup, yes?

Which says something about how that particular monarch felt about fascism and nothing about how fascists feel about monarchy, which was the actual point.

Charlie Stross @ 313:

As I keep repeating: the monarchy gives the fascists a pretext.

(Remember that nice Mr Mussolini, and his relationship with the Pope and the King? Or Kaiser Wilhelm II's approval of Hitler?)

I just don't see how taking away the "pretext" NOW is going to stop the fascists since they've already grabbed power? I think it will be a case of New Boss, same as the Old Boss ... only worse; no longer restrained in any way.

paws4thot @ 323:

Well, FWIW I had to use Wikipedia to find out when Chuck III was born, and that he does not (presently at least) have an "official birthday". The level of my interest can be gauged by my not linking the Wikipedia page.

I'd have to look it up if I needed to have the actual date, but I remember from having looked it up before that he's less than a year older than I am - and that's close enough for purposes of most discussions.

Charlie Stross @ 326:

This is what makes Ron DeSantis so scary. And he's not the only one. (RDS understands how US politics works, as well as what his base wants and how to con them into voting for him. Assuming he didn't over-play his hand with the Disney fight, he has a good chance of picking up the nomination ...)

Maybe. But Ronda Satan doesn't have the pleasing personality or people skills of Donald Trumpolini ... or even Ted Cruz.

Charlie Stross @ 339:

Among many many other things Biden, Schumer, et al, should be pointing out that the 14th amendment almost certainly makes the 'debt limit' unconstitutional

Yeah, but if you were the Democrat party would you want to bring that case before the current SCOTUS?

"Are you feeling lucky, punk?"

The sad irony is a primary driver behind holding the convention that led to the new Constitution was fear that the U.S. Government under the Articles of Confederation would be forced to default on the national debt from the American Revolution.

All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

The national debt being 32 trillion means the government borrowed that much through sale of debt instruments, mostly bonds. If the owners of those bonds seriously think there'll be a default due to Republican interference with the debt ceiling, they'd be looking at losses in the trillions, possibly tens of trillions. Banks and hedge funds would go under, big ones. Lots are overseas, but the majority are right here in the USA. Not going to happen, phone calls would be made, campaign finance support pledges revoked, choke chains would be yanked. This is so well understood by all the billionaires and their minions that they can have fun sitting back and watching the public panic, see how much political leverage they can extract by threatening the equivalent of "cut social benefits or we'll blow up America's top ten cities!" Uh, yeah, that could happen....and you'd still be real rich guys after all that too, wouldn't you...woo, I'm so scared, let's do whatever they say. Not. Democrats should just play the game of chicken, see who caves in first, since "burning down the house" won't mean the government gets torched until after a whole lot of billionaires go bankrupt. Think the Koch family, Sam Walton's heirs, the Tech Bros, all your favorite moguls will just passively let decades worth of their accumulated wealth vanish in a puff of smoke? Dream on. Be fun to hear some of those phone calls.

You don't bring the case at all, nor do you respond to it. You print the money and you pay the bills. If SCOTUS does anything to cause a financial apocalypse (they won't*) you make a speech and explain that if you don't ignore them and pay the fucking bills the world economy crashes. (Plus other consequences.)

* If, against all logic, SCOTUS causes a market crash, then for all practical purposes they stop being the third branch of government. They've already made the mistake of voting against Roe V. Wade, which killed all the good will they've created since the mistake of "separate but equal" in Plessy V. Ferguson and that's nothing compared to an avoidable mistake that causes ten percent of the U.S. to lose their jobs.

AIUI implants that talk do so by means of low-frequency inductive coupling between an implanted coil and a coil held in the right place outside the skin.

My neighbor's pacemaker connects via Bluetooth. You can see it on your phone's list of nearby Bluetooth devices if you're close enough.

Rereading Accelerando for the Nth time. That is all.

361 - I couldn't even have told you which month Speaker to Plants was born in (it was literally years before I was born).

366 - And this is a good thing why?

Ah, well ... it looks as if, just like last time, in 1953, it's going to absolutely piss it down on Saturday.

anonemouse
It's mainly because I'm a railway "freak" & the station names are (were) linked to their operating companies & routes.
I mentioned Harcourt St, because it's on the (reopened) route that is on the LUAS tram system, ok?

Monarch's "official" birthday is usually in early June, for the Trooping the Colour ceremony (ish)
NOT to be confused with the continental/catholic(?) habit of having a "Name-Day". Which is a major plot-point in "Fidelio" ...
"Der König's Namenfest is euch!" - it's used as the excuse to release the prisoners from their cages, & followed by the Gefägnerchor.

Troutwaxer
NEVER underestimate the power of human stupidity, particularly if there are "religious" or other absolutist-doctrinaire "reasons" behind the emotions.
No actual thought is involved.
So I'm not sure I believe Keithmastartson @ 364, either, for the same reasons.

Occasional mild and transitory aphasia is a normal part of growing middle-aged or old; I have it from time to time -- "what's so-and-so's name?"

When it gets serious is when you forget all your nouns and adverbs. All of them, all the time. That's usually a sign of underlying damage.

I despise the USA's Republican Party and everything they stand for this century.

Ooooooh, they've been contemptible ever since they enacted the 'Southern Strategy' about 60 years ago.

That's usually a sign of underlying damage.

In the US the message that gets out is if such happens to you get someone or 911(999) to get you to a hospital ASAP as you are very likely to be having a stroke. And time counts. Seconds count.

Think the Koch family, Sam Walton's heirs, the Tech Bros, all your favorite moguls will just passively let decades worth of their accumulated wealth vanish in a puff of smoke? Dream on. Be fun to hear some of those phone calls.

Until not too long ago I was in your camp. Now I'm not so sure. There are at least 3 if not 5 or more R's in the House who just don't give a damn. At all.

Kochs or Waltons going broke? Well they should have planned better.

My brother is in this camp. And a brother in law is close to being there. One is middle class. The other wealthy.

Those 3 to 6 R's are truly willing to wreak the economy to "fix" (in their minds) the US government.

These kinds of folks in Congress have been around for 13 years now in hard core form. (Tea Party anyone?) And longer. But most of the time the party in power had enough spare votes to ignore them. But with the R's only having a 5 vote majority, McCarthy is stuck and has to go along with their craziness to get any votes to pass.

Personally I see lots of possible outcomes. One is McCarthy gets booted as Speaker (the crazies demanded the right to call for this daily and got it). And either a clump os D's vote with the R's on some pre-argreed 60 votes in the Senate after putting a different R in place. Maybe with the call to vacate the chair rules being changed at the same time. OR 5 R's wipe out their careers (maybe) and do a similar in the other direction and make Hakeem Jeffries the speaker. This discharge petition option with the "fake" bill the D's put in place 2 months ago makes this possible to some degree.

Any of these will make the next 18 months crazy and very dysfunctional. There's still the coming budget where the crazy R's want to do similar things. And there are likely a dozen other scenarios that may play out with almost as good a chance.

As to the Treasury and Biden just ignoring the debt limit issues, well all that will do is flood all the federal courts and the SCOTUS rocket docket with dozens of emergency suits. And with likely stays against such actions.

And Charlie if you want me to shut up about this just say so. We're off the topic of Monarchy. Of course Trump trying to become a king, maybe from jail, is still happening.

Re: '... get you to a hospital ASAP as you are very likely to be having a stroke. And time counts. Seconds count.'

Agree.

My earlier comment was intended as a 'helpful trick' to help find that word that a person just can't remember at the moment. Another memory trick is if you're looking for your keys, glasses, etc. keep saying that word out loud as you're looking esp. if you're going from room to room. Your brain* adapts very rapidly to changes in its environment unless you 'tell' it to stay focused on something.

*'Brain' is more than self-awareness.

AI as a public utility ... your thoughts?

Since AI is happening, I was wondering how it could be incorporated into daily life - ideally - as a public good. Thought folks here might have some ideas.

I think the below can probably be adapted to any region.

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-scientists-high-resolution-poverty-big.html

'Scientists create high-resolution poverty maps using big data'

... The team created three machine learning models that were trained to determine not only a place's average wealth, but also its standard deviation. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a more accurate picture of the wealth distribution within each populated area. "We wanted to know how wealth varied within an area, or if there was inequality," points out Espín-Noboa.

The models were trained to learn correlations between the demographic data and IWI scores and the features extracted from data and images provided by public sources. "They learn, for instance, that a specific wealth value correlates to a specific set of features," says Espín-Noboa. "Next, we tested the models by asking them to predict the wealth of different areas."'

To me what this map also illustrates is how the pols/corps are keeping their promises. I'd like to see where each pol actually lives in relation to their constituency, ditto for corp CEOs in relation to where their employees work and where their buyers are.

Food security is another area that I'm very concerned about and was wondering how AI could be used to help make food production more local and less reliant on shipping. (Shipping is at least 17-18% of total fossil fuel consumption/CO2 production - so food production/CO2 is very much intertwined.)

And - since there are quite a few amateur (and maybe even certified) historians here: How did society incorporate each major new tech: lessons learned (good and bad).

Agreed completely, and I think one could easily trace the current ugliness of the Republican party right back to Nixon.

I equally hate the Democrats, however, for so perfectly playing the role of the enabling, abused spouse. (IMHO we'd have had a much better time of things if Johnson had arrested Nixon for interfering with the Vietnam war.)