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Monarchy aye or nay?

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Re: Monarchy aye or nay?

Postby Anon. on Sat Mar 12, 2011 2:44 am

Haunted wrote:EDIT: Here's one. If Charles had been born with some form of severe mental disability/retardation should he still automatically become the head of state for the UK? Where do you draw the line??


You don't draw the line and yes, if he had been born with some form of severe mental disability he should still be the head of state. In that respect the hereditary principle is the most inclusive of all (except for Roman Catholics). If he were totally incapable of performing the limited essential functions of state, there would be a Regency - but then, the Regent would just be whoever was next in line. I think the headship of state falling to whichever random oaf happens to be the son of the previous one is still better than having a regular succession of divisive political presidents (e.g. USA) or apolitical nonentities (e.g. Canada). At least if there's a bad one in the offing the country has a few decades to brace itself for the ordeal.
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Re: Monarchy aye or nay?

Postby ben1938 on Sat Mar 12, 2011 5:09 pm

Royalty and their Tail-Wagging-Lapdogs


I have wondered most of my life about the adulation aimed by many people at Royalty and other humans born with titles. In most of these pseudo-democratic states they have been reduce to puppet characters, who’s primary function seems to be waving at their subjects. They apparently also sign new laws into place much like cheque signing machines.

I have watched a couple of very interesting TV documentaries about a breeding program started fifty years ago in Siberia where many farmers breed silver foxes for their pelts. Scientists discovered that when going near or touching the cage, some foxes would charge violently others would shrink back and another group would just sit there. They decided to breed the seemingly tame foxes and in about ten years produced silver foxes acting very much like pet dogs.

I realized then that this was nothing new. Homo sapiens had been genetically altered for tameness for thousands of years. All during history criticizing royalty or other titled individual would always result in some kind of punishment; sometimes torture and death. The infamous rack, and being drawn and quartered comes to mind, which was of course the standard reward for criticizing a British King until about two hundred years ago

Many years ago I told a colleague, who habitually praised the Royal family to the sky that he reminded me of a tail wagging lapdog. He didn’t get angry but rather stared at me with a confused look and then replied that he was not a tail wagging lapdog.


I then asked him why his tail was wagging.
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Re: Monarchy aye or nay?

Postby Hennessy on Sat Mar 12, 2011 11:48 pm

ben1938 wrote:Royalty and their Tail-Wagging-Lapdogs


I have wondered most of my life about the adulation aimed by many people at Royalty and other humans born with titles. In most of these pseudo-democratic states they have been reduce to puppet characters, who’s primary function seems to be waving at their subjects. They apparently also sign new laws into place much like cheque signing machines.

I have watched a couple of very interesting TV documentaries about a breeding program started fifty years ago in Siberia where many farmers breed silver foxes for their pelts. Scientists discovered that when going near or touching the cage, some foxes would charge violently others would shrink back and another group would just sit there. They decided to breed the seemingly tame foxes and in about ten years produced silver foxes acting very much like pet dogs.

I realized then that this was nothing new. Homo sapiens had been genetically altered for tameness for thousands of years. All during history criticizing royalty or other titled individual would always result in some kind of punishment; sometimes torture and death. The infamous rack, and being drawn and quartered comes to mind, which was of course the standard reward for criticizing a British King until about two hundred years ago

Many years ago I told a colleague, who habitually praised the Royal family to the sky that he reminded me of a tail wagging lapdog. He didn’t get angry but rather stared at me with a confused look and then replied that he was not a tail wagging lapdog.


I then asked him why his tail was wagging.



Sometimes you come across arguments that are so wilfully archaic and totally unrelated to reality you just have to stop and look at them for a while. It's become very common for me to not read a lot of the arguments on this board because generally they are written by some very clever people on very specific subjects which I have only a passing interest in (like a variation on the theme"is there a God" for example). I could read yours though. I could read it like I could read a child's playbook lying amongst a stack of broadsheet newspapers. I was going to end there and let the others rip you apart like that cow in Jurassic Park that gets fed to the raptors, but I won't be as thorough as they are and I just want a little bite.

pseudo-democratic states
- I believe you're referring to the UK and most of the other crowned democracies in Europe. Frankly I find this baffling, you're talking about a good chunk of the world defined by Freedom House as "free" whereas I think you'd like to note a good many of the countries starting with "Democratic Republic of" or somesuch other don't quite get that honour. You're talking about Sweden, Norway, Denmark - almost the whole gamut of Scandinavian social democracies - as well as Holland, Spain and the UK, that's a lot of Western Europe you just defined as "pseudo-democratic".

Who are we squaring off against? The USA? France? Leaving aside the rise of the executive president in America and the French love of Gaullist-style president I don't believe the President is even directly elected by the people in the USA, and the French system of government is about as bureacratically nepotist as it can be without their political class ossifying into a grace and favour governing class. As it is those countries have suffered from a far greater amount of political instability in the last two hundred years, especially whenever the elected leader has decided to go for a open-top car ride or to the theatre or even to and from their own elections. The French may labour in the belief their government is more accountable, and perhaps it is when an upset section of the population is expected to follow in the noble tradition of taking to the streets, but I prefer my cobblestones to be in a neat configuration approximating a road surface rather than stacked with a couple of burning cars along a boulevard

Examining the alternatives then we see "democracy" is quite a tricky thing to pin down, but if France and America can be called "democracies" merely because they have a president sitting atop a protesting pile of his fellow countrymen while our more sedate but ardently democratic form of government nominally has an unelected buttock to support then I cannot in truth see the difference.
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Re: Monarchy aye or nay?

Postby jollytiddlywink on Sun Mar 13, 2011 12:06 am

ben1938 wrote:All during history criticizing royalty or other titled individual would always result in some kind of punishment; sometimes torture and death. The infamous rack, and being drawn and quartered comes to mind, which was of course the standard reward for criticizing a British King until about two hundred years ago.


Well, ben1938 isn't a history student then. Or if he is, he's rather bad at it.
First of all, the actual punishment was being "hung, drawn and quartered." It was reserved for people guilty of treason. It was certainly not doled out to any old peasant who opined that the king was a bit of a twit, not least because a police force that could listen out for such criticism didn't exist until after you say such punishment stopped. And before you suggest that punishment "always" descended on people guilty of rebellion or other such treasonable activities, remember that more than one English king came to power having overthrown a previous king by force. Do the Wars of the Roses ring any bells? 1688? The Norman Conquest?
How about Oliver Cromwell (and his warts)?
John Knox wrote a tract called "The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women" but was not brutally put to death by either Queen Elizabeth or Queen Mary, to whom the title referred.

ben1938 wrote:Many years ago I told a colleague, who habitually praised the Royal family to the sky that he reminded me of a tail wagging lapdog. He didn’t get angry but rather stared at me with a confused look and then replied that he was not a tail wagging lapdog.

I then asked him why his tail was wagging.


Oh, aren't we witty? <_<
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