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Scylla Rhiadra

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Everything posted by Scylla Rhiadra

  1. Scylla Rhiadra
    The point I've been making, and that you keep ignoring, is that the power of royals resides in their wealth, popularity, public profile, and cultural influence. Allow me again to ask you: would people care what Charles thinks about things like architecture and aesthetics or alternative medicine if he were not a royal? Pretty sure I know the answer.
  2. Scylla Rhiadra
    If it was irrelevant, why do you keep harping on (erroneously) about Magna Carta? The British constitutional system took nearly a millennium to get where it is now. It is enormously complicated -- much much more so than your reductive understanding of the current power of the monarchy acknowledges.
  3. Scylla Rhiadra
    So innocent and naive. It's a bit adorable. Never change, Phil. 😄
  4. Scylla Rhiadra
    The first British PM to rule by consent of parliament -- indeed, arguably, the first PM period, in the modern sense -- was Sir Robert Walpole, who was Prime Minister from 1721 to 1742 -- about 500 years after Magna Carta. Walpole, like modern PMs, relied upon support in the House of Commons for his power. Before him, the "chief minister" of the realm, generally the Chancellor, was appointed by the monarch.
  5. Scylla Rhiadra
    Kinda my point, Phil. Raising taxes, incidentally, has always been the prerogative of parliament. Indeed, for centuries, it was pretty much the only major power that parliament did have. Do you really believe that people listen to what Charles has to say -- about, for instance, public architecture, or homeopathy -- because of his brilliant mind and trenchant insights into these things? Would his views have the same impact, and attract the same number of adherents, were he, say, you or me? That's power, Phil. The same kind of power that the George Soros or the Koch brothers wield in the US. And it's all about money.
  6. Scylla Rhiadra
    Phil, I'm sorry, but you need to do some serious work on understanding the history of the English / British political system. Magna Carta was an important document in British legal and constitutional history, but it most certainly did not end the direct power the monarchs had over the political system. Not even cutting off the head of Charles I did that. I could provide you with literally hundreds of examples, ranging from the Plantagenets through the Tudors and Stuarts. They have never had unfettered power -- the reason why Charles I got his head cut off was because he tried for that -- but it was decisive until at least William and Mary's Revolution Settlement and the Bill of Rights, and remained substantial if much reduced until well in the 19th century. As for Andrew -- well, he certainly consorted closely with one of the most notorious sexual predators of the past century. But we'll probably never know his own exact culpability because he's too powerful and important to be investigated and, probably, charged -- as an ordinary citizen likely would have been long before now.
  7. Scylla Rhiadra
    I'm sorry? Where did I say this? I said that the royal family had been amassing wealth for centuries at the expense of their nation. That is a simple historical fact. I did not suggest that the current royals or corrupt. (Or, I suppose, that the Tudors, Stuarts, et al. were "corrupt" either, as they simply used the legitimate mechanisms of power at their disposal.) I'd be happy to provide evidence of that, ranging from Henry VIII's despotic behaviour, to Charles II's secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV. I suppose one might argue that Andrew is almost certainly ethically corrupt. But I prefer to think of him as just plain monstrous.
  8. Scylla Rhiadra
    You either have an enormously naive notion of how "power" works, Phil, or you are living in an alternate reality where wealth means nothing more than gold-plated toilets. I'll ask again -- which of us influences more people? Charles, or me? And if your answer is the former -- but only because Charles is sooo much more bright and articulate than I am -- I will block and mute you forever.
  9. Scylla Rhiadra
    I suppose that a somewhat similar situation pertains to Canada, although that might have changed since we repatriated the British North America Act in the 80s. I'm not sure. There is no shortage of idiots here who think that our First Nations people get "special treatment" that should be denied them. I guess they want to share around the undrinkable water supplies, terrible unemployment, and high suicide rate? But I think -- I want to think -- that public perception and understanding of the real state of things for our indigenous populations has changed enough in the past 30 years that that is not the majority view.
  10. Scylla Rhiadra
    Depends rather on how you define "powerful," Phil. No, they don't get to choose the PM anymore. They actually haven't done that since the early 18th century. But they have enormous influence and wealth, and both of those things equate to power in any cultural context. People listen to them (for some reason), and they have money and time to devote to things they care about. Want to compare my social, political, and financial clout with that of the Prince of Wales? Who do you think is more "powerful," of the two of us? Sometimes the things the royals throw themselves behind are good things. The point is that there is no particular reason, other than an accident of birth, that they should wield that kind of power.
  11. Scylla Rhiadra
    /me hurriedly puts her phone down. What? WHAT? Don't look at me like that!
  12. Scylla Rhiadra
    This is a really brilliant approach.
  13. Scylla Rhiadra
    You do have my sympathies, for what it's worth. I presume you have spoken to this person about your dissatisfaction?
  14. Scylla Rhiadra
    I am afraid you have no recourse. LL will not involve itself in disputes between residents, and the entire economy of SL is built upon a sort of free market caveat emptor principle. There are no mechanisms to resolve this kind of issue, except occasionally in instances of very obvious fraud -- which this pretty clearly isn't. It sucks, but that's how it is here, and always has been. You pays your money, and you takes your chances.
  15. Scylla Rhiadra
    It's not the slightest bit in bad taste, Gopi, nor, I think, are you to blame for the timing. On top of which, you aren't slagging him: you express your admiration for him. I see absolutely no call to criticize you for this. The royals are an immensely privileged and powerful family that has spent literally centuries amassing wealth at the expense of their nation, and who are even now still on the public payroll. And some of them -- hello, Charles! -- are quite comfortable using their position to articulate ideologies and critiques of British culture. God knows, it's a job I wouldn't want. But discussions about them, and, yes, even criticisms, are entirely fair game. They are public figures, and the institution that they represent very much a matter of public interest.
  16. Scylla Rhiadra
    And some of them (Andrew) quite likely belong in jail.
  17. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yeah, it does a bit, now that you mention it. 🙂 Yes. I'm not into breaking rules for the sake of breaking them: rules exist, in theory at least, to help us live together in a mutually respectful way. But questioning them? Yes, always, absolutely. Even the good ones need to be constantly interrogated to ensure that they are still good.
  18. Scylla Rhiadra
    Yep! That's why I used a projector in this pic to "put on my makeup" -- so that it would extend beyond my face and on to the wall behind. That is, it's "outside the lines." (My friend and island-mate @Eva Knoller joked that I looked as though my makeup had been applied by a toddler. And she's not wrong!)
  19. Scylla Rhiadra
    "Stay within the lines" (or "colour within the lines," or other variations) is an English idiomatic phrase that refers, literally, to children crayoning in colouring books, but metaphorically to the idea of remaining rule-bound and, by implication, traditional. So, questioning that means questioning "the rules" -- about appearance, makeup, aesthetics, art, gender . . . whatever. Clearly, in this pic, I haven't coloured "within the lines." I'm also playing a bit with the idea of "lines" because there are two projected onto my face, a red one and a black one.
  20. Scylla Rhiadra
    I'm going to suggest a slightly different take on this, which is not entirely applicable to your situation as you've described it, but which nonetheless I think is worth thinking about. In general, I agree with most of the comments above. I would not myself respond in public to a creep who IMed me at a club for a number of reasons, the most important being that it does produce a toxic atmosphere, drama, and so forth. And it's not fair, if there is a DJ and/or host, to put them in a position of having to deal with it. Having said that . . . one of the reasons that obnoxious little creeps can get away with being obnoxious little creeps for so long is precisely because there is a sort of code of silence that we all too often accept as the "proper" way of handing these things. At the risk of comparing big things with small, it's what often happens in work places, for instance, where someone is continually and serially harassing women: the victims often decide it's easier and, most especially, safer to just deal with it on their own. And unfortunately, understandable as that is, it does nothing to make that workplace safer and less awful a place for other women. So, ok . . . as I said, big things with small. A guy being creepy in IM, even consistently often, is clearly not the same thing as someone harassing women in their RL workplace. But the same principle applies, at least a bit. If people aren't called out for their crappy behaviour, then they are essentially being enabled to continue it with impunity. In a slightly different context, I might well respond to such a person publicly, because this kind of behaviour, while not "dangerous," can certainly poison a community. And talking about it publicly might well embolden others to speak out about their experiences with said creep if they hear me do it. It can create drama, of course, but it can also lead eventually to the termination of that kind of ickiness. And I actually think that that's better than everyone quietly suffering in silence. One thing though: it's not sufficient to simply say "You're a creep." If you call someone out publicly, you have to do so in a reasonable, rational, and informative way (without, obviously actually posting their IM publicly, which would be a violation of the ToS and CS). Take the high road. Demonstrate by your response that this isn't a he-said-she-said situation, and that it's not merely airing a personal dispute. Address it instead as an issue of community standards and the ethical dictates of civil interaction with others.
  21. Scylla Rhiadra
    Thanks Nalates! And yes, we'll take what we can get, tree-wise. 🙂
  22. Scylla Rhiadra
    The idea for this picture was initially suggested to me by the so-called "Sea Henge," a Neolithic archaeological site in Norfolk that featured at its heart the stump of a tree buried upside-down, as though in offering to an inverted world of the dead beneath the ground. The site was possibly (probably?) a mortuary centre. One possible updated meaning for the inverted tree seemed to me as a sort of emblem of our increasing inverted relationship with our natural environment -- a troubled relationship that was only beginning in the Neolithic. What if burying a tree upside down represented at a symbolic level also a kind of burial of the natural world, a representation of our strangely backward attitude towards an environment that we are literally killing? The next step -- imagining the inverted tree as a flaming warning beacon -- was an easy one. We are burning our forests, hundreds of square miles at a time. Will the light shed by their dying flames be sufficient to illuminate our self-destructive idiocy before it is too late?
  23. Scylla Rhiadra
    How are you on horned headdresses and furry capes?
  24. Scylla Rhiadra
    The same person who elsewhere on this board asserted that BLM was a conspiracy of "communists" in league with "big tech." Not one of our more astute, thoughtful, or compassionate fellow residents.
  25. Scylla Rhiadra
    I think they've finally cleared the Suez Canal. Maybe you can see if all those involved there are free to help?
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