@on the cusp

NRA defenders are demanding that we not count the second one because it happened after a graduation so they weren't technically students anymore.

I only heard about the one in Texas.
Royalty has outlived its' usefulness, if it had any in the first place.

@on the cusp It is starting to feel like a goddamn shell game. Watch the Tv, Watch the Tv, which tv has the truth.... Awww, didn't win this time, want to try again?

Never bringing up the fact that none of the TVs actually have truth in them.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU7rqB9E_0M]

A quick Google search for "school shootings May 18" shows only the one in Texas.
We are so fucked, aren't we?

@Big Al they will continue to support the system, because they believe that they too will one day be privileged.

I've gotten pushback from people saying that I'm "Ruining the Fairytale Wedding" and other bullshit involving kuhmbaya crap. "Oh isn't it wonderful that little POC girls can now dream of being a princess?"

I'd rather ALL the little girls not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, thanks. I'd rather all the children not have to worry about a cop deciding that they're a "Threat" for the crime of walking down the fucking street.

Fuck em, I know which side I support in the class war.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Y7in-04Ng]

royal weddings happen only every once in a while.

I can think of nothing more ridiculous and foolish under the circumstances than maintaining a monarchy system. By the circumstances I mean the class war being waged on the planet of which the peasants are losing badly. Those paying attention to this inane wedding spectacle are undoubtedly the same people who fall for all the lies and propaganda keeping the class system in place.

But in the end, the political system in this country is just as atrocious relative to maintaining a class system. It shows how difficult it is to get people to understand that a political system, just like any system, can be changed.

Why are they still doing this? Why are we still doing this?

@Nastarana our business.

Just like the US media fetes The Saudis. Nothing bad ever came of that... except decades of war.

We see only the airbrushed, perfectly polished personas. We can see the exact same mentality towards Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and (God help us) Donald Trump.

They CANNOT be challenged, or argued with. It's disrespectful, and they give SO much back to us with their charities! /snark

And the "Man of the people" bullshit is just like when Putin runs around with his shirt off. It's a goddamn appeal to the national character of the country. Of course, it works on a lot of people. Hell, we even had Tories in this country during the revolution.

that is none of our business. Royalty tends to be supported, I think, by people who want to be able to maintain their own positions in a relatively stable hierarchical class structure without themselves having to work very hard.

As for the The Dress, I will say that the wedding dress worn so long ago by Diana, Princess of Wales was, IMHO, and I am an accomplished seamstress if I do say so myself, was a masterpiece of the designer's art. Also a design which not very many women could have successfully worn.

Ms. Markle seems a decent enough young woman, if not a great beauty, but then neither is her future sister in law. Both of the young Windsors, perhaps remembering the debacle of their parent's marriage, seem to be choosing brides whom they can love and live with rather than trophies to please the public and the media.

@UntimelyRippd But then I think the war affected him far more strongly than he admitted. He made his heroes the working class who aspired mostly to Hearth and Family.

I find it sad that so many associate beauty, art and spirituality only to the elites, because the poor are too busy scrabbling for survival to successfully spend their waking time PROMOTING their work.

concerns and enterprises of the "regular folk" is always a refreshing reminder of just how horrible our socioeconomic arrangements are

Monarchy can easily be debunked' but watch the faces, mark the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead even famous prostitutes or gangsters.

Outside of his WWI service (which, as with Tolkien, pathetically failed to teach him anything about the nature of aristocratic or "meritocratic" vanity) C.S. Lewis probably never broke a sweat in his life; nonetheless he cheerfully -- even indignantly -- exalted the condemnation of armies of workingmen to lives of backbreaking labor raising the glorious edifices whose designs sprung forth from the minds of the elites; backbreaking labor that was typically rewarded with inadequate and dismal diets, vermin-infested shelter from the elements, and so on. Heavens! These odious proles recognized no greater merit in the triumphal arch than in the row of pebbles? Well, did he similarly suppose that they could not recognize the merit in a varied diet of meat, eggs, dairy, vegetables and fruit, versus a diet of bread, oatmeal, hard cheese and the occasional apple? Somehow, the small comforts and beauties that have always been potentially economically attainable in the esthetic experiences of the masses of people just don't add up to an aggregate that outweighs the grandiose vanities of the elites. Thus, in the modern era we get billion-dollar bridges to PEI and the Isle of Skye -- bridges whose primary effect is to undermine whatever it might have been that set places like PEI and Skye apart from the mainlands from which the bridges extend -- while the proles in Michigan no longer get even their annual agricultural/industrial festival (i.e., the State Fair).

On a related note, it fascinates me that the vanities of these elites typically involve a dismissive and/or reckless destruction of the extraordinary beauties that sprung not from the minds of human beings, but that they profess to believe were The Creation of the entirely singular genius that they worship so fervently and violently. We hear a lot of noise about "the natural order" when they are trying to control people (women subject to the authority of men, and so on), but they exhibit no similar devotion to the natural order when they are busily damming rivers, polluting the atmosphere, and paving the meadows.