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Queen Elizabeth II has died

bbc.com

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Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#901

Post by Emma_Goldman »

dang wrote: post #466
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #240

I realise she has just died and it's unbecoming to do anything but laud the person, but this is just moral obsequiousness. She claims fealty by right of blood, reigned as the crown of an extraordinarily cruel empire, and frequently interceded in the democratic government of Britain to protect her private interests.

I'm sure an account named Emma_Goldman comes by these sentiments honestly, but please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. We want curious conversation here, not tedious talking-point battle. You mostly do a pretty good job of avoiding that, for which we're grateful, but on the other hand, (a) we have had to warn you about this before, and (b) this subthread is a classic generic flamewar tangent—j…

I appreciate the job you do and know it's hard. But I am not quite seeing this. How is a thread full of panegyrics to the Queen on the front page of HN curious and non-ideological, but me questioning whether - as one of many posters eulogized - that she was a 'moral authority' incurious and ideological?

Maybe it did fan the flames of controversy to question the deification of the Queen, but the deification of the Queen is controversial. I live in Scotland, I know. Surely the right thing is to just ban threads like this in the first place if you don't like ideology.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#902

Post by alecco »

Onewildgamer wrote: post #873
moomoo11 wrote: post #815

As someone whose people and grandparents suffered under British rule, really don’t care. British imperialism is a bloodstain that I’m not gonna just forget about because the smile behind the menace has passed.

My blood boils everytime I remember how the brits cut off thumbs of my people, the silk weavers. People underestimate the atrocities done by British empire, one tiny example is when they chopped off thumbs of handloom weavers to stop the Indian business spread within India in order to sell their goods from Manchester produced from the stolen cotton from India again, my clan of people were the silk weavers since more…

I went searching about this and the best I could find was:

https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rs5wr/did_the_b...

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#903

Post by dang »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #384

Not to mention that she was the last monarch to have any memory of WWII and served as an ambulance mechanic. Now that generation that remembered the horrors of fascism has mostly passed and we find ourselves in a period that seems to have many echos of the 1930s with a new rise of authoritarianism and fascism around the world.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769695.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#904

Post by lucideer »

dang wrote: post #520
drewg123 wrote: post #327

This is an interesting world event, but I'm confused that it is considered on-topic here on HN. I had thought that non-technical news did not belong on HN. Can somebody please clarify the guidelines as to what is considered topical?

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I'm aware commenting on moderation/appropriateness of submission is also outside of guidelines, but I think given the gravity of this event and the clear slant evident in top comments resultant from the difficulty of moderation "crap comments" it does seem worth mentioning that this doesn't feel like it belongs here in the HN community.

Statement of my own biases: from a country that suffered the horrific hand of British colonial forces, both preceding and under Elizabeth's rule and finding the comments here repulsive. Positivity can be just as "crap" as ad hominem when expressed with such ignorance.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#905

Post by kwhitefoot »

frereubu wrote: post #207
mattlondon wrote: post #131

Time to end on a high? Shall we just abandon this whole monarchy thing and time to flip over to a republic and leave the much revered queen as the last ever monarch of the UK? Seems like Scotland is going to go independent, and if Scotland do Wales will only be a matter of time so may as well just can it now?

Recent polls show support for Scottish independence dropping. Charles becoming king may affect that of course, but I wouldn't say it's at all clear that "Scotland is going to go independent". I agree on the idea of dropping the monarchy on a high though, as long as we go for a presidential system similar to Ireland rather than the USA...

Why do you need a president?

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#906

Post by hnbad »

foobarian wrote: post #579
orobinson wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. I think it’s because it really represents the end of an era. The 20th and early 21st century ushered in unprecedented improvements to quality of life in Britain but it has felt of late that that has peaked and the country is facing a serious decline: Brexit, the increasingly visible effects of climate change, the aftermath of covid, the possible break up of the union, rising costs of living, recessio…

I think humans have evolved to need rulers and hierarchy to look up to to some extent. Look at what happened to Americans -- once the UK royalty was gone it was replaced with celebrity. It's just human nature.

It isn't just human nature, though, is it?

Celebrities don't wield any power comparable to that of rulers or monarchs. We allow unbounded accumulation of wealth but that's a facet of our political and economic system.

Most social animals imbue their elders with some level of authority but this is easy to explain as an evolutionary habit to make use of lived experience and thus, hopefully, expertise. It's obvious why you'd ask the person with the most experience or the best domain knowledge for their assessment or even to lead you in that domain. It also makes sense to appoint a leader during times of war when the battlefield requires split second decisions that don't allow for consensus seeking.

But human nature is cooperative if nothing else. We resort to exclusion, hierarchy and domination/obedience only under duress, which our current system helpfully maintains perpetually.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#907

Post by kwhitefoot »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #240

I realise she has just died and it's unbecoming to do anything but laud the person, but this is just moral obsequiousness. She claims fealty by right of blood, reigned as the crown of an extraordinarily cruel empire, and frequently interceded in the democratic government of Britain to protect her private interests.

> reigned as the crown of an extraordinarily cruel empire

No she didn't, the empire was effectively over by the time she became queen.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#908

Post by tibbydudeza »

England colonized us and left the place in a mess - not hatred but ambivalent compared to my wife who prattled to the kids about it (I wanted to sleep).

She did her best in a system that does it best to rob you of being an individual - her behind the scenes limited intervention to get the Commonwealth and misguided scumbag Thatcher to at least condemn the Apartheid regime.

I hope Charles does some of his more zany things like climate change and sustainability.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#909

Post by sgjohnson »

remram wrote: post #848
sgjohnson wrote: post #442

I wonder how many of the Commonwealth Realms are going to retain their monarchies. We might see Canada, Australia, New Zealand (and the rest of them) becoming republics.

Do they have any sort of formal process to recognize the new monarch (passing a bill or something) or does it happen automatically?

It happens automatically.

> passing a bill or something

this would be absurd, because all the bills are passed in the monarch's name.

Re: Queen Elizabeth II has died

#910

Post by aa-jv »

fwip wrote: post #785

Lots of people, especially in former colonies, are justifiably glad to hear of her passing. For instance, the people in Kenya or India whose family survived the war crimes inflicted by the British under her reign.

Those of us who suffered under the White Australia (White Stolen Generation) fiasco are also glad to see this heinous war criminal perish. She was a significant component in Western imperialist desire and should have been prosecuted for crimes against humanity multiple times over.
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