My spellcheck pulsates in impotent frustration, but I don’t care. An Equater is a person who equates. In this context, which I get to decide because it is my post, an Equater is a person who is not content to compare something bad done by a liberal democratic government to the very much worse things done by despotic governments in order to shame the former into better behaviour, but who insists on going from comparison all the way to equation.
Since the death of Her Late Majesty, there have been many occasions when the British police reverted from their recent tendency to exceed their legal powers while stamping down on those who say rude things about illegal aliens or the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag, in order to return to their traditional role of exceeding their legal powers while stamping down on people who say rude things about the monarchy. Or even on those who film other people saying rude things about the monarchy: in this tweet, a documentary filmmaker called Rich Felgate writes, “Yesterday I got arrested whilst filming a @JustStop_Oil supporter holding a banner on the pavement near the coronation route. I’m a filmmaker and had my @BECTU press accreditation visible around my neck. Police deemed this to be “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance”.
That is bad. Dammit, it almost looks similar to what you would expect to see in a communist country. Similar, much too similar for comfort, but no one with any respect for the millions murdered by communism would say “identical”.
Meet Dr Charlotte Proudman:
Spot the difference. pic.twitter.com/AEzvOb4NDk
— Dr Charlotte Proudman (@DrProudman) May 6, 2023
In case the tweet disappears, it shows the crowds at the coronation and the crowds at some North Korean state rally and says “Spot the difference.” As many have pointed out, the difference is what happens to those who do not wish to participate in the event.
Proudman is a Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she “researches and lectures on gender inequality under the law”. She was declared ‘Advocate of the year’ in the Women in Law Awards of 2023. Surely the claimed inability of a prominent barrister and academic to discern any difference between the North Korean regime and the UK must be hyperbole prompted by a momentary spasm of emotion. Surely she cannot be this stupid twic… Oh.
One thing the monarchy has going for it is that British Republicans really are some of the worst and stupidest people imaginable. Charles at his worst is better than any of them on their best days.
Fear not, Nats. If that happens, I have a screenshot of Proudman’s display of fluorescent idiocy & can replace the linked tweet with an identical snap thereof 😉
So true Martin. I really dislike Charles III but if the republicans can’t even get me on their side, they really are a useless shower of shit 😀
Dr Proudman was answered correctly – the difference is that in a Marxist country the crowds are compulsory (forced) and here the crowds are voluntary (free).
This is the difference between tyranny and freedom that a “Researcher in Gender Inequality” (i.e. Frankfurt School Marxist Claptrap) would not understand.
By they way, there is discrimination based on sex (not “gender” please) in the United Kingdom – discrimination against MEN, in everything from the education system, to health care (especially mental health care – which is based on assumptions that may apply to women, but do not apply to men), and the vicious Clown Show that is “family law”.
There is a rich and commendable tradition of lunacy amongst the faculty of Oxford and Cambridge. But Dr Proudman’s effort is not the sort of entertaining lunacy one looks to see from genuine eccentrics. It’s the dull, workaday, hackette lunacy one expects from wimmin’s studies types – neither entertaining nor indicative of any capacity for individual thought. If she was researching quasars, or badgers, or Etruscan poetry, I’d be wiiling to cut her some slack. But she’s a gender studies lawyer. Doesn’t get more banal than that.
Off with her head, Chuckie boy.
Bells a’ringing – isn’t this the same barrister who raised a fuss a few years back, claiming every sort of sin and strife because someone commented on her picture on LinkedIn?
I may have the details awry. Old age eats memory cells. But I’m pretty sure of the name.
So now she’s fled the hurly-burly of the Uxbridge Magistrates Court for the groves of academe, specializing in (what else?) ‘gender inequality’. Quelle surprise.
llater,
llamas
Just a small point – but I think we misdirect if we just point our scorn at “women’s studies.”
It’s all forms of victimology that are to blame. Women’s studies, black studies, hispanic studies, gender studies, fat studies . . . entire departments now devoted to proving that the biggest victim of this awful society is ME ME ME.
Surely she cannot have been this stupid twice?
More than twice as just 2 days ago she was trending with this poorly though out snidey comment:-
What a beautiful photograph of white male privilege and entitlement. Sums up who rules our country.
The excellent community notes system quickly responded with:-
For 134 of the last 200 years the head of state of the United Kingdom has been a woman.
P.s. Llamas. Yes, it is she.
I’ve only just noticed the irony of someone whose claim to fame was being triggered by a response to her own photo getting all snarky about another photo.
bobby b – as you know the various “victim” “studies” (sex, race, whatever) are Marxism’s answer to the logical refutation of the Labour Theory of Value.
As an economic theory Marxism depends on the Labour Theory of Value – without it “surplus value”, “exploitation” and the rest of the theory collapses. So what to do after the Labour Theory of Value is shown, logically shown, to not make sense – to be utterly wrong.
One approach is that of Lenin and Stalin (still taught in the Soviet Union when Mr Putin was young) which is basically shut your eyes and put your fingers in your ears and pretend that the Labour Theory of Value has NOT been logically refuted (shown to be non-sense) – this is basically the “la, la, la, I am not listening” response which finally collapsed in 1989 (more than a century after the Labour Theory of Value had been refuted). The “la, la, la I am not listening” response to the Labour Theory of Value lasted a very long time – but it could not last for ever.
However, there is another response – another road for Marxism to take. And this is the “Frankfurt School” or “Cultural Marxist” response (at this point the left start screaming “Anti Semite” and I reply by telling them to stop being liars). Which started way back in the 1920s – but only really took off in the 1960s.
The Frankfurt School “Cultural” response is to stop talking about industrial workers – and start talking about racial minorities, women, sexual minorities (and so on) as victim groups, victims of “exploitation and oppression” that, no-surprise, only Collectivism can save.
This is where the “black studies”, “women’s studies”, “queer theory” and all the rest of the “Critical Theory” (which sounds like Critical Thinking – but is the opposite) Frankfurt School Marxism, comes in.
Today this stuff has an iron grip on the education system and media and just about every other cultural institution in the Western world.
The “long march through the institutions” is basically over and the “ideological hegemony” is essentially achieved – and achieved with the help of some of the largest corporations and richest individuals on the planet.
Economics can not help here – as this stuff is not really an economic theory, it is more like a toxic mist.
We have reached the point where we have “Admirals” in dresses pretending to be women, and we have advertisements for the United States military which are designed (yes designed) to disgust and alienate anyone who might be prepared to die to defend the United States.
When Congressman B. Carrol Reece (1st Congressional District of Tennessee and Chairman of the “Reece Committee”, really a subcommittee, in the early 1950s) first started talking about the cultural influence of Marxism, it was in its early days.
Now it has a stranglehold – and not just on the United States.
I’d like to be a republican but then I hear the words “President Blair” in my head and Charles doesn’t seem so bad any more.
Quite so, Fyrdman, it’s the only thing that stops me going full Cromwell.
I’d like to be a republican but then I hear the words “President Blair” in my head and Charles doesn’t seem so bad any more.
Apart from the entertainment, and there’s no doubt that the British monarchy puts on a good show – way better than the dire republican efforts (eg the US)- the monarchy benefits from the natural currents of politics. Which are negative.
Actual politicians do stuff, or fail to do stuff, and since governing is difficult, they accumulate negatives in the public mind. They also have to dissemble a lot, which has the same effect. And since the average voter is thinking “is that lot worse than the other lot ?” rather than “Wow ! This lot’s plans for the port logistics system are fab !”, he who has the least negatives wins the election.
But Liz Windsor and Son can dodge most of those negatives. Cos they don’t do anything. Sure some folk hate ’em just for being rich and posh, or for the scandal du jour that leaks out, but leaving aside the most rancid lefties, they’re OK for most people. Low negatives. Partly that’s because The Firm has been well managed for the past 70 years, of course. The new CEO does not fill one with confidence.
Anyway, the point is – keep your negatives low and the public will clap and cheer. Because they like having something to clap and cheer. Grey faced lawyers and nutty harridans lecturing them from their TVs – there are enough of those already. Let’s have a guy wearing a silly hat, sat upon a horse, mumbling nothing very much, plus a few good tunes in Church. Who’d swap that for Theresa May or Keir Starmer ?
A pox on all their houses… Authoritarians of any stripe inevitably decline into serving as an entertainment, while “what works” gradually supplants them with something that does, indeed, work.
I’m not much for the monarchy, nor am I one for any of the sillyness surrounding substitutes filling that vacant space inside the heads of my fellow (well, presumably…) humans. It’s all a waste of time, and resources.
Whether it’s the faux nobility of most republics, or the original breed of monarchy, the whole thing reeks of assumed and utterly nonexistent virtue. How many monarchs over the course of history actually demonstrated any such thing even remotely approaching “virtue”, and how many were venal thugs self-aggrandizing themselves into flights of lunacy?
The fact that you can say the same thing about a lot of elected “leaders” isn’t a testimony to the idea that any of these systems actually, y’know… Work.
Sod the lot. I’m becoming more and more of an anarcho-syndicalist as time goes on. I wouldn’t get on a knee for King Charles any more than I’d kowtow to the President of the United States, most of whom have been utterly worthless bastards during my lifetime. All of these hierarchical systems derive from essentially baseless sources of legitimacy and virtue; all you have to do is play the game well enough, and then the rest of the stupid monkeys will put you in charge of things, regardless of whether you’re fit for purpose. Hell, in most cases, I can make a pretty good case that merely being the sort of monkey that “wins” these things automatically implies your inherent unsuitability and fitness for purpose… Joe Biden, anyone…?
So, yeah. Not a fan. Of any of it. You want “pomp and circumstance”? You’ve got something wrong with your headspace and timing. If you are the sort of idiot that is prey to this sort of thing, well… You are, I am afraid, part of the problem. Actually… All of it.
OH!
All this time I thought she was a parody account. Like Ann Lesby. I was enjoying the character’s satirical posts. I had no idea this was a real person.