651–660 of 1001 posts
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizab...
It's weird, I've never considered myself a "royalist" but this news has affected me quite strongly. I just burst into tears unexpectedly on hearing this news and I don't quite understand why I feel so very sad. I guess I have grown up and lived my whole life (as a Brit) seeing and hearing the Queen, singing "God save the Queen" etc, and this news made me suddenly feel very old, very nostalgic, with the sense that all…
Perhaps it's because the world is in such turmoil these days and we just lost one of the most (if not the most) stalwart figures on the world stage. I'm not British but that's how it hits me.
As a Brit I'm not a huge fan of the royal family on principle, but Queen Elizabeth has been such an excellent head of state for us you really can't fault her. People like to make out her life was easy and that it's not fair that she inherited such a privileged position, but I think the exact opposite. Her life seemed like living hell to me. Every day for the last 70 years she's had to serve this largely ungrateful co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
meanwhile, Irish Twitter and TikTok have been absolutely ablaze with celebration...
Twitter is an echo chamber of edginess and not indicative of the average person in the real world. It's like wondering what 4chan thinks of this.
For now, at least. I think we are all underestimating just how much Twitter impacts public perception. Not just on topics, but how people feel, act, and interact with others. Twitter seems to have a cancerous negativity it inflicts on its users.
Fun facts: - She ruled for 30% of the time since the American Revolution - She oversaw the largest reduction of landholdings of any empire in the history of the world. Notable because it was also one of the most peaceful transitions in history -- Australia, Canada, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, etc. - She oversaw the loss of Sterling the world reserve currency and the rise of another (the USD, EU).
Technically this occurred with the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 [1] several years before Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne.
As a Brit I'm not a huge fan of the royal family on principle, but Queen Elizabeth has been such an excellent head of state for us you really can't fault her. People like to make out her life was easy and that it's not fair that she inherited such a privileged position, but I think the exact opposite. Her life seemed like living hell to me. Every day for the last 70 years she's had to serve this largely ungrateful co…
As a Brit I'm not a huge fan of the royal family on principle, but Queen Elizabeth has been such an excellent head of state for us you really can't fault her. People like to make out her life was easy and that it's not fair that she inherited such a privileged position, but I think the exact opposite. Her life seemed like living hell to me. Every day for the last 70 years she's had to serve this largely ungrateful co…
> People like to make out her life was easy and that it's not fair that she inherited such a privileged position, but I think the exact opposite. Her life seemed like living hell to me. Every day for the last 70 years she's had to serve this largely ungrateful country, and she did so without complaint. Even in her 90s she took her duties extremely seriously, and I respect the hell out of her for that. She wasn't doin…
There seems to be a reflexive, emotional and partly irrational hatred of the UK monarchy spending heavily and having assets and money, along with certain public benefits (which by the way are carefully circumscribed) by people who barely bat an eye at the fact that the absolute largest sources of resource and tax spending on a vast range of immensely expensive but often wasteful and even pointless things are perfectly modern government institutions that have nothing to do with monarchs. It's an absurd sort of blindness.
What the UK government spent on the idiocy of the Iraq War alone far exceeds all public funds given to the Monarchy in decades, but hey, let's complain about Elizabeth and the castles that have been in her family for centuries.
I was born in the UK, in 1963. Because of my step-father's love of first-wave UK punk, the first thing I did on hearing this news was to play the Sex Pistol's "God Save the Queen". It is remarkable how much the Queen's standing has improved during the time since that song (1977). My (UK) family are (as far as I know) staunch republicans, but the last couple of decades have seen all of us soften our disgust with the m…
> We might still want the whole concept destroyed I am not well versed about republic vs. monarchy apart from my limited experience, which might be more than many people, but not as valuable as someone that have studied that and can pitch in. Coming from BR, have lived in AU, NZ, and UK, and traveled a lot, I would take monarchy over a republic any day, extrapolating on that, and just looking at the current state of…
Look at the HDI: https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...
Look at the top ten countries. How many are a constitutional monarchy? Which of them would you rather live in? :-)
All: please don't post flamebait, including ranting against monarchy or railing against "the nobility" like it's 1770. Such reflexive comments are not on topic here. We want curious conversation. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . This story is on topic because it's a major historical event and history has always been on topic here. If it doesn't produce an intellectually curious respons…
> please don't post flamebait, including ranting against monarchy or railing against "the nobility" like it's 1770. I am kind of curious about what this means exactly. Is any criticism of the monarchy off limits? Is the purpose of this thread for people to air their positive thoughts about this lady? For example, I find non-British people that are genuinely sad about her passing to be pretty bizarre. It’s a fascinati…