Australia should remain a Monarchy

A second reason Australia should remain a Monarchy should be the most persuasive, but is officially downplayed. Many people derive great pleasure from knowing about the Royals and sharing the happiness of new births and the sadness of deaths. It is just “sour grapes” to put an end to this in disregard for what many people want. It is harmless at worst and provides excuses for public events. Depriving ordinary people of the meaning that the existence of the Royals gives their lives is anti-democratic and an attempt by one sector of society to impose its will on everyone because of an ideological obsession.

The Royals are the original Celebrities. The “cult of celebrity” is ingrained in popular culture, and in our contemporary world, popular culture rules. (Pace hipsters!-) The Royals provide a timeless standard by which Celebrity status Is compared. Putting an end to Monarchy and hence depriving popular culture its benchmark celebrities, is depriving a lot of people of a lot of pleasure in life.
When this argument is put directly to Republicans, they usually become defensive and deny that is what they are doing. They say that if Australia were totally separate from the shared British Crown, the British Monarch and the other Royals would of course be welcome here on visits, and people can still follow their antics in the popular press. However they do not seem to be able to understand that the Royals are only who they are because they are who they are. As ex-Royals or “pretenders” they would join the legions of other minor, former title holders. It is only because they are truly Royal that they have this status to begin with. In particular, because Her Majesty wears the Crown in so many countries makes Her Majesty’s “majesty” vastly greater, which magnifies the “celebrity status” of the British Royals. Put an end to all of this in a political sense, which also has an ontological validity, will put an end to their celebrity status.
The problem with this argument is that it casts the “Royals” as celebrities. It reduces their private lives at official functions to the status of soap opera. They do serve a genuine social purpose, otherwise they would be the equivalent to soldiers carrying wooden guns, and to promote their survival as a social institution because of this reason debases them and makes them appear to be just a form of popular entertainment.
If all other things were truly equal, then surely this would be sufficient to sway the argument. Then, once it is accepted, even grudgingly, that we are going to continue to be a Monarchy for at least the next century, we should stop making it a divisive issue and instead make the most of it and let it lead to social harmony. It may not be the theoretically most perfect type of ideal society, but it does work with reasonable stability and provides the opportunity for safe, gradual development within existing parameters.
All things are not equal, and there are many more logically incontrovertible arguments against the radical change to some sort of as yet undefined Republic. Consequently, this argument can be put on the back burner. Even though the general public loves its Royal Gossip, including sharing happy and sad royal events, this is not the main reason for the existence of the Crown and retaining it as the fundamental core of our Constitution.

28 people reached

The Personal Energy Bubble

The Personal Energy Bubble is the amoeba-shaped volume of energy within a person’s personal Energy Exchange System. It is like a three dimensional Venn Diagram, and with bubbles within bubbles. It is possible to imagine this mapped onto the actual world, thinking of ourselves surrounded by an aura of energy, which we are. All living things interact with their environments. Each organism is by necessity part of an ecosystem of surrounding organisms with which it lives symbiotically. These ecosystems are energy exchange systems. Energy is sometimes chemical within the molecules of our muscles, and sometimes electrical as in the nerve impulses that are transmitted down our nerve and other fibres electrically with a change in charge that moves with the speed of light.

People store energy. Wealth is a form of stored energy within a person’s PEB. Most people have a multitude of PEBs that overlap each other, but like amoebas, have “arms” that extend into places that other PEBs do not, and there intersect with other larger Sub-bubbles. Families form a combined Sub-bubble. Work is another way energy bubbles combine. For some people, Labour is their major social ontology, they have a strong Personal Labour Energy Bubble, and are hence PLEBs.
Economics is a branch of Physics because Money is a form of Energy. Energy can be stored. A lot of energy is stored as rotational momentum in spinning particles and planets. Other energy is stored by being constantly in motion, for example in a series of chemical reactions that pass electrons and hence pass an electrical charge. When it happens in a lot of fibres at the same time, they physically shorten and our muscle moves our limb.
Energy is also stored as Wealth. Income is like currents of electricity, but is a flow of money. Wealth is stored money. The capacity to create this form of energy seems unlimited, as is the amount that can be stored. Like many things, it is the changes of wealth that attract attention, not the underlying size, which cannot be known directly. The way Wealth changes with time is Income. One is the Derivative of the other. Energy cannot be created or destroyed (except using Einstein’s formula in exchange for tiny amounts of mass for a lot of energy) but it can be exchanged, including the spooky Potential Energy that we give things when we expend energy (do work) to separate masses, such as lifting up an object.
It is possible to imagine money flowing around the world between people, and storing up in pools and eddies and “old money” being thicker and bluer. The Personal Energy Bubbles are more or less blue in colour depending on the “wealth” of the individual or social group. This change in colour stores energy. Income flows around between people, like a wave of blue colouration, and happens by the second as we earn (though we only get paid in bursts) and as we use up stored assets like the jar of vegemite. When people spend less than they earn, the difference is stored as wealth. Clearly, a person’s potential for creating wealth in this way is proportional to their wealth, so it is exponential.
If anyone understood any of this, please let me know. I thought it all up a few years ago, but this is the first time I have typed it into a string of characters. e-normus

14 people reached

Recognition

The momentum is apparently there. The risk is staying on message and keeping it simple. There is sufficient public support for Constitutional recognition to avoid the Conservative watered down version of a separate document apart from the constitution. There are also those who want to go beyond removing race from the constitution and inserting a prohibition against racism, but that is going too far and specifying one "ism" in the constitution will be taken by the High Court to be the first in a list of "isms" that includes everything possible. We must find ways to move on and live together and remember the past without being captive to it and locked into ancient animosities. The Australian Constitution should start with Aboriginal ownership of Country before referring to the Crown and our national sovereignty.

Mining giant backs recognition of indigenous in Constitution

BHP Billiton will today join the campaign to include indigenous Australians in the Constitution, as Tony Abbott announces a long-awaited meeting on recognition…

theaustralian.com.au

45 people reached

Murray Woolnough Isn't "ownership" a Western concept foreign to Aboriginal conceptions of their relationship with land and country?

Like · Reply · Message · 28 May at 11:49

New Whig Isn't "ownership" what the High Court said aboriginal people did have in the Mabo case? Perhaps it could be more accurate within Aboriginal Cultures to say the people are owned by Country, rather than the other way round. It is a symbiotic relationship that goes much further than what you call a "Western concept". Some concepts are universal.

Like · Reply · 28 May at 11:53

Murray Woolnough Mmm - completely agree that "We must find ways to move on and live together and remember the past without being captive to it and locked into ancient animosities." My concern was that in trying to "keep it simple" we would be pulled towards being simplistic in specifying how all the different Aboriginal tribes related to the lands that held some kind of custodianship of.

Like · Reply · Message · 28 May at 11:56

New Whig You are right, Murray. There is always a conflict between going too far or not far enough, and trying to satisfy everyone sometimes leads to making no one happy.

Like · Reply · 28 May at 18:15

Murray Woolnough Such an important issue, though. I really hope we can make good progress on this and work to heal the wounds of the past.

Unlike · Reply · Message · 1 · 28 May at 19:24

The King of France

New Whig

There are a lot of good reasons for being a Monarchist in Australia. Foremost is security. We live in a complex, changing world with some big players with big ambitions. Our security presently is enhanced by our unwritten treaties with the Anglo community, ie english speaking peoples, due to our shared monarch. Cutting ourselves off from this link, would not be replaced by actual treaties. Perhaps it is anger at how much we sacrificed for the "mother country" a century ago in this year of remembrance. Some people would welcome us coming under the Imperial control of, for example the Chinese, or of an Islamic Caliphate. We are large in area, taking up a whole continent and many islands, but we are average size in population but far above average in wealth. This is perhaps the most important reason to stay a Monarchy, however it is one we would rather not think about, as we believe we live in a fundamentally peaceful place where we will never need to rely on powerful relations, no matter how independent we might think we have grown to be.

Meet the (rather handsome) man who claims he should be King of FRANCE

Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, 41, is the senior Bourbon claimant to the throne of France. The Spanish royal is the favoured candidate of a French…

dailymail.co.uk