Ordinary World 20 Oct 2018
Ordinary World
20 Oct 2018
[Wo1] A recap for the anniversary of the American and French victory at Yorktown that effectively ended the Revolutionary War.
[Wo2] Usually you add or preserve a lake to improve the view. In England they are going the opposite approach.
[Wo3] While Harry and Meghan have the press enthralled, not everyone in Australia likes the nominal ties that remain to the British Royals.
[Wo4] Horrific Story from India: At least 50 dead as train hits crowd watching fireworks in India
[Wo5] Meanwhile in Mexico: Migrant Caravan Crosses Mexico’s Southern Border
[Wo6] More on Yorktown.
Wo3: Australian republicanism is kind of weird. Becoming a republic wouldn’t really change anything except replacing a far away ceremonial hereditary head of state with a local elected head of state with much less flash. Parliamentary republics have this problem. You still need somebody to perform the ceremonial parts of government and act as a figure head of national unity. Elected ceremonial Presidents seem to be something of non-entities though. Very few people care who the Presidents of Italy, Ireland, Israel, India, Finland, Germany, and other parliamentary republics are. Constitutional monarchs are able to perform ceremonial head of state functions better because people have emotional attachments to them because of monkey brain tendencies.
I suppose the arguments over whether there should be a ceremonial monarch or a ceremonial president are about the role of rituals and traditions in government. Small r-republican minded people tend to have very little patience with the choreography of government. They want it to be all business, in the sense of being filled with self-effacing hardworking elected officials and civil servants that do what they are supposed to do with little fuss. They don’t want any pomp and circumstance be it a royal wedding or an elected mayor doing a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new subway system. There are plenty of people that love the rituals of government though and believe that serves as a way to connect the people with the government in a meaningful fashion.
The left side of politics from mainstream liberalism to far leftism suffers from hating the ceremonies of government because it creates a situation where we need perpetual parliaments, and therefore electorates, of saints. This obviously doesn’t happen in nature because people like their creature comforts, their celebrity gossip, and other humans things. The sentiment of “how dare you take your kids to an amusement park when there are all these big problems that need to be solved” makes a lot of sense to people on the leftist side of politics, especially if you go really further left. Humans don’t operate this way though.Report
Wo2: if I am reading that right, they drained the lake so it can be dredged and have repairs made to a bridge, then it will be refilled.Report