Sophistry and hypocrisy. Perhaps.

[caddyman]

Well, there we are. A new Royal Baby. As far as I can tell from the media coverage, absolutely nothing else happened in the world, yesterday. The normal run-of-the-mill events that arise in a global population of over 7 billion souls paused and the world held its collective breath. Or something along those lines.

The main hilarity of the day was looking at Twitter and wondering if you could guess from the various feeds, if you didn’t know already, which of the US and the UK is the monarchy and which the republic. The US feeds were full of awe and wonder, while the UK ones were generally either ignoring the event, or taking the piss. This is entirely as it should be.

I did have a slight tongue-in-cheek (on my part at least) spat with a friend when he grumbled on Farcebørk about yet another useless parasite born to a life on the dole. Well, he’s a republican, so that’s fair enough, but he’s also a socialist, so I had to pick him up about the fact that state hand outs are what it’s all about if you’re a socialist. I suggested that they could, if he preferred, take back the Crown Estate and live off that instead of receiving the reduced amount the government allocates them having abolished the Civil List (which was the pay off for the Crown Estate in the first place).

The response was predictable outrage. “You’d prefer them to live off stolen property instead?”

Well, why not? That’s what we all do in a capitalist society, isn’t it? Certainly if your viewpoint is socialist, all property is theft; all labour is stolen from you by the faceless oppressor. If you own your own house, someone somewhere, even if in the remote past was dispossessed for the freehold to come available, eventually, to you.

And he is English but living in America. I suspect you only have to go back a little over 300 years to find some indigenous tribe that was thrown off the land his house is built on. If they’re lucky, the tribe was relocated to the shittiest place available locally and given enough booze to drink themselves into oblivion. More likely, they were rounded up and shot, or died of starvation because of heroes like Buffalo Bill wiping out their food source.

Be a republican by all means, but don’t blame the Royal Family for living a better socialist lifestyle than you do, with bigger and better state handouts. It’s not fair.

I may or may not mean most of this post, before you go off on one.

Comments

[snorkel-maiden.livejournal.com]

I had someone on Twitter complaining that we were supposed to swear fealty to the sprog, which made me laugh. I pointed out that he's overestimating the respect that most people have for the Royals- it's more of a sort of fond derision, in my experience. Like an embarrassing uncle at a family party.

[agentinfinity.livejournal.com]

I've observed far more mindless obedience to US presidents, certainly.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

"so I had to pick him up about the fact that state hand outs are what it’s all about if you’re a republican. "

I think you meant socialist in that sentence?

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I must edit that.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Oh - and the Royal Family can have the Crown Estates back and live off it, as long as they also use it to fund the trappings of government and defence; that is, after all, why they handed it over in the first place for the Civil List - so they didn't have to anymore.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

My final sentence pertains at this point, but yes.

[agentinfinity.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell these days, republicanism largely seems to be the annoyance of the middle classes that the upper classes have ring fenced a part of the wealth of the nation for themselves, so it can't all be munched up in the rampant neo-liberal greed-fest. (Or the smugness of American republicans that they can munch up all the wealth). Luckily all working class people have been reclassified as middle class so we can all join in the greed-fest.

*puts on Happy Greedmas hat decorated with pictures of John Locke and Adam Smith* win!