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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

The subjects of King Charles the IIIrd would like to hear more of your thoughts on what they are not experiencing.

That forelock-tugging attitude is why I am glad to be the free citizen of a Republic, not the subject of a king.

Acknowledging that kings still exist and that HN readers in Canada, UK, Australia, and elsewhere still have them as a nominal head of state is a "forelock-tugging attitude" ?

Quite a rush to judgement there.

Using the term “subject” rather than “citizen” is a dead give-away. But yes, I realize royalist brainwashing starts early and is pervasive in England.

Opening your mouth to change feet doesn't add credence to your claims.

"Subjects" is the correct term here as they are not just citizens of single country.

You assume forelock-tugging attitude and royalist brainwashing where there clearly is none.

None the less no ill will is born, such ignorance is expected from those that spout of their freedumbs when they cannot even fire or prosecute their own elected civil servants.

Most Canadians I know think that Elizabeth's death was a wasted opportunity to shuck the Crown.

In NL we messed up the last three opportunities. And the circus will likely continue for at least another generation. So much for 'equal under the law'. If you can't even live by the first article of your main legal construct then it's time to revise.

Nothing stops Canada from severing those ties completely by the way, if they wanted to they could do this easily, and the same goes for Australia and NZ.

There's a good chance Australia will be having referendum on giving Charles the boot.

Give it a couple of years as we've got another one in the pipeline and we don't put them too close together.

The great thing about waiting is that demographic change would seem unlikely to favour a monarchy.

A wasted opportunity for grievance peddlers and hand wringers to steal more limelight and derail public discourse from more important things, so they can hear themselves speak and act like they're bravely engaging battle at great risk to themselves for the benefit of all others, by stamping their names on pointless political and bureaucratic machinations that achieve exactly nothing for the common person.

This is somewhat in the same vein as the argument that we can't possibly do anything of modest importance if somewhere children are starving. Amusingly this remains true even if we do nothing to ameliorate the larger problem its mere existence provides sufficient counter argument for any action. Inevitably if larger matters go unaddressed it is because we don't want to pay higher taxes to feed starving kids not because all our time was consumed by the trivial.

No, it's completely different, because this is not important at all. Evidence-free assertions of aforementioned grifters notwithstanding.

But tacitly admitting a poor cost/benefit with a reductio ad absurdum argument is not a great start anyway, because the actual situation is not an absurd one and margins matter.

Doesn't the crown cost Canadians like 58M per year over over half a billion in the next decade?

This isn't an argument though, you'd have to try to claim that a new scheme with a president (or whatever idiotic scheme the ruling class tries to foist on people) would cost less.

Stripping most of that funding from the useless crown representative and entourage would be a great idea. Could be done tomorrow with acts of parliament and executive with no fanfare and no need for constitutional grandstanding. The fact they don't gives the imagination a good starting point for how much it would cost to be a republic.

My oppressor is slightly nicer to me than your oppressor.

The thing with constitutional monarchies is that they're not even that - the UK is a democracy, so the royal family hardly does any actual governing anymore. They are mostly just insanely expensive figureheads and representatives of the antiquated concept that you are better by definition just because you come from a "noble" family.

The Monarch has tremendous reserve powers in an unwritten constitution like the UK’s, and has not been shy of abusing them elsewhere like the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975, essentially a coup against a democratically elected government. In addition to the £600M inheritance tax break Chuck the Third got on his private wealth, the Palace is exempted from racial discrimination laws among many others, and well into the 1970s it was their official policy not to hire black or brown people for anything more exalted than cleaning toilets:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/02/buckingham-p...

(They still refuse transparency on that, so it might still be ongoing for all I know)

As for democracy, the arrest of Republic protesters during the coronation shows how hollow that claim is. The UK is still a nation managed for the benefit of its feudal elite, as seen with institutions like leasehold or the fact there is no property tax on their holdings.

You’d have a much less risible case with the Scandinavian or Dutch monarchies.

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