Like…I haven’t seen you say anything in favor of having a king, or of having this king in particular?

I have but you haven’t been paying attention. If you don’t have a King, people will create one. The US technically doesn’t have a King, but they’ve created on in Donald Trump in all but name. You don’t seem to think about any potential of a politician doing the things that you mention in all of these hypotheticals, but you worry greatly about an actual King doing them. And that’s the problem, a politician can become a tyrant without anyone noticing. If the King became a tyrant everyone would notice.

You label the King as a “genocidiers, looters, and pedophiles” even though he has not personally done those things. His brother has done some crimes, and he’s being prosecuted. When will Donald Trump or any of the billionaires in the US get prosecuted? Probably never.

And are you accusing the King of everything his ancestors have done? Sounds to me like you really believe in lineage stuff way more than I do. Seems unfair to judge someone for what their ancestors did. If there was no King would you be devoting time to researching what Mark Carney’s ancestors did and unfairly judging him for those things?

The monarchy acts as an emotional lightning rod for many people. All the emotional garbage whether it be grievance over things from the history books, nostalgia, or just a love of pomp and pageantry gets focused on the monarchy who are apolitical. That separates the emotional garbage from politics. Allows people to think about the actual policies the politician is proposing rather than some historical grievance or how “Presidential” they look. Americans keep voting in old coots out of nostalgia for some good times when Ronald Reagan was President. We still get a touch of that with Justin Trudeau benefiting from nostalgia over his father, but you’ll have a tough time arguing people had loyalty to him like he was a King.

Americans feel like they’re supposed to be loyal to the President and because of that they won’t remove a President from office even when he commits egregious crimes. The Prime Minister gets some degree of respect for the job, but a vote of no confidence is something much more likely to happen as it won’t seem disloyal to the country. For those that feel they must show subservience to a person to prove their loyalty to the country we have a King who’s apolitical. In the US, the subservient must show loyalty to the President since they have no king.

There are many many reasons to have a King, not least of which was the reason Pierre Trudeau brought up: It would take a lot of effort to remove the King and it wouldn’t really change anything. Why bother removing the King?

The only reasons you have to go through that effort is hypotheticals (which would also apply to a President) and your belief that there’s something wrong with the Royal lineage. Which is… hmmmm.

You’re overestimating the value of laws. Laws don’t create civilization, the civilization creates laws. The jungle is always there, we just generally avoid it because going to the jungle means our survival is down to just our abilities and judgement. It’s far preferable to stay in civilization where we have our best chance of survival.

Your hypothetical examples all depend on people being weak willed in the face of a constitutional crisis. If people are weak, there being a King or not a King makes no difference. The US has no King, but people are weak towards Trump, and it’s the same result as your hypotheticals, just different titles.

And why would the King risk his cushy life to do any of these things? Why would someone who is in a position like that for the rest of his life risk it all for some short term gain?

So corruption can happen in a republican, and it seems to me it’s more obvious when someone doesn’t give royal ascent, and it’s very unlikely a King who has guaranteed housing in a palace for life being waited on hand and foot would risk that for a small bump in his stock portfolio. It seems you’re imagining the King behaving like a corrupt politician, but you’re not explaining how replacing the King with an actual politician makes that less likely to happen? If anything a term limited politician is more likely to do any of these hypotheticals, get that money in the limited time they’re in the position to get it. And the people that voted for that politician are more likely to look the other way than if a King started doing shenanigans.

By this logic, why have laws at all?

Laws are needed for a civilized society. but civilization is a safe area we’ve created for ourselves in a dangerous jungle. When we step outside of our civilization we’re in a lawless place and we’re just surviving based on or abilities and judgement. There’s no legal way to eliminate the jungle, it will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother to have nice things when living in our civilized society.

A lot of these hypotheticals and real world scenarios are just people going out from civilized behaviour to the edge of the jungle. Whether it’s a King making commands or a President ignoring the court, these are things that shouldn’t be done based on the norms and laws of our civilization. So we’re in jungle rules, we have to figure out how to deal with the problem based on just our abilities and out judgement.

I see your point that “if we all agree he has no power, any exercise will clearly be a problem” … except the monarchy is in constant contact with the governor general. You won’t know why the GG makes her choices.

Parliament would know. Their job is to represent the will of the people. If the GG or King weren’t doing as they were told by Parliament, the PM has able opportunity to say to the country “that’s not what I wanted them to say.”

Or consider this situation: https://donshafer1.substack.com/p/the-day-37-british-columbia-mlas . Imagine the King has business interests in BC and would benefit from this financially. He calls the GG, who calls the LG of BC to say “get this moving.” If the LG (or GG) went public, she’d lose her job. So she’d quietly do it.

There were 50 MLAs that voted against that. How would the LG be able to do this quietly without the 50 people that voted against it knowing about it? When legislation gets royal assent, it’s done so publicly. Someone reads it out in Parliament and the Governor gives it a nod. It’s all a formality really, but who would be the person in parliament reading out legislation that didn’t pass to a Governor in the first place? You’d have to have the Parliament’s Clerks in on the scheme and not have them leak it to the the representatives, And they would be fired if caught doing any of this. Laws obviously have to be published so people like your self can use them in court. How would a GG, LG, or the King himself be able to do something without the elected representatives who voted against it knowing about it?

There’s a lot of process and ceremony involved in this: https://www.ourcommons.ca/procedure/our-procedure/LegislativeProcess/c_g_legislativeprocess-e.html How would you slip some secret laws through all of that process?

And I think you have it backwards. If something like this were to happen, there would be no more King. Even if the King were to force laws to come into being somehow (don’t know how it would happen, so it wouldn’t be the normal process, therefore very obvious) people would know and either the King would have to undo the action and abdicate or we’d just cease to be a monarchy. We’d be in the jungle and we’d be acting on our abilities and judgement.

You say “if the king oversteps” and my point about law and norms and all that is that they shape perception about whether a particular thing is overstepping.

You mentioned before that most people don’t even know about these things. Why is that? Because the norm is the King does as the Parliament wants.

I think you have a very idealistic understanding of what we call democracy these days…if a 60/40 split happened like I talked about earlier came up, you think there would be mass mobilization?

This is what I mean about the people having a strong will. If they do, then yes. If the don’t then we lose democracy.

Again I go back to the example of the US. Them being a republic makes no difference. If the people don’t have the will to stand up to a tyrant, then there will be tyranny.

A crisis doesn’t occur without a context…it would be about something, and certainly something that one side thinks it can win on. I think you imagine any constitutional crisis would be immediately and unanimously handled in a democratic manner by everyone involved, no matter their interest in the underlying matter that lead to the crisis…we’d just all be on-side and do the right thing…I think that is extraordinarily naive!

Sure, but what does the existence of the monarchy have to do with any of that? Trump is a continuous constitutional crisis, doesn’t seem like eliminating the monarchy prevents any of that happening. If anything having a monarch makes it more obvious when there’s an abuse of power. Americans don’t understand that Trump is undermining their precious constitution, I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Americans know the President should have some power they just don’t know which powers he shouldn’t have. We know our head of state is supposed to only be a figurehead. It’s more obvious when someone is taking some power when they’re supposed to have none than someone show’s supposed to have some power taking more than they should.

If the King overstepped, there would just be no more King.

If the King did anything in your hypotheicals, we’d just say “the King is not of sound mind” and either the King would have to abdicate, or we’d elminate the monarchy. No rational King wants to be the one to end the monarchy, and since any action by the King would result in the end of the monarchy, any action by the King would therefore is automatically considered the actions of someone not of sound mind, and therefore should be ignored. If the King didn’t abdicate due to no longer being of sound mind, we’d end the monarchy.

The population having a strong will doesn’t mean we’re going to break out a guillotine or whatever. It just means being willing to vote, protest, call your MP, etc. It means actually caring about the institution of democracy. If it came down to the King saying one thing, and the parliament saying the opposite, which would the people consider legitimate? Maybe a lawyer could argue that the King’s orders are technically legitimate, but if people care about democracy, they can just ignore the legalisms. That’s how it goes in a constitutional crisis.

Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but it’s not lawyers that protect us from tyrants. It’s just having an educated population that won’t accept tyranny. Americans, are accepting of tyranny, so they’re descending into tyranny. There’s nothing lawyers can do to stop it, because the lawyers on the Supreme court, the lawyers in the DOJ, and the laywers in the GOP are going along with it. The law doesn’t prevent tyranny it’s people not willing to go along with tyranny that prevents it.

We have a King and we won’t go along with the King’s commands unless they come from parliament. We’re aware of the King we know who he is, we know what to watch for. Americans didn’t have a King, but they made their President into a Kings. Most of them don’t even know it happened because they didn’t know what to look out for. They know the President has power, but don’t know which powers he should and shouldn’t have.

We have a King and we know what power he should have: none.

People upset about the monarchy don’t have any real problems in their lives.

Congrats, you must have a real easy life if you’re doing the revolutionary cosplay thing over the fucking monarchy LOL.

The King-Byng affair was in a different time when the Governor General was someone from the UK. So British person overruling the Canadian Prime Minister was a big part of the controversy there.

Now that the Governor General is Canadian it’s kind of a nothing burger. A ceremonial position appointed by the PM. The Julie Payette situation was the only time there’s been any potential for anyone outside of the country might have to do something and that would’ve only been if Trudeau asked the Queen to fire her. But it didn’t come to that so whatever.

You’re a lawyer so you’re going to have a tendency to think about hypotheticals about things that aren’t codified into law. But right now we’re all witnessing the US that has all kinds of protections against these kinds of hypotheticals just ignore those laws. Hypothetically a US President couldn’t abuse power and be completely corrupt because he’d be impeached. The laws say so. But that isn’t happening.

It’s obvious now that the only protection against tyranny is the will of the people. If the King abused his position, we would remove the King from power. Unless we lacked the will to do that. If the King knows he’d be removed from his position if he abuses that position he won’t abuse his position since he doesn’t want to be the guy that ends the monarchy. Right now, no one in the US is being prosecuted for Epstein stuff despite their laws. The brother of the King is being prosecuted.

We see a republic where there’s basically an aristocracy that’s above the law and we see a monarchy where the King’s brother is being prosecuted. As a lawyer do you think evidence from the real world is stronger than hypotheticals?

Seems to me it doesn’t really matter what you put into the laws, if the will of the population is weak, the law will be ignored. In the end you have no choice but to trust the people when these hypotheticals arise.

Authoritarian forms of government will be unstable when there’s no clear line of succession. It’s the reason why monarchies come about. It’s not like people don’t understand that it’s extremely arbitrary, it’s just that it’s better than the alternative: civil wars whenever whoever is in power dies. It’s an agreement among various lords that it’s better they just accept that person over there that’s the son of the King will someday be King rather than having a civil war when the King dies.

And sure civil wars would still happen, but most of the time the succession would happen without bloodshed. When there’s no line of succession, it’s just constant power struggles when the leader dies.

Of course democracy is a far better way to determine who will run things, but that requires a literate population to work. Which didn’t exist throughout much of human history. Sure, there were republics throughout history, but they’d usually become monarchies when the illiterate masses would decide they liked that Julius guy (he threw the best parties!) and hated that Brutus guy who killed him, even if the Julius guy was becoming a tyrant.

So monarchies suck, but they’re better than civil wars. So when the population becomes too dumb, it sucks, but it’s better than the alternatives.

A lot of people have a tendency to want to show loyalty to their country by showing subservience to some rich arrogant asshole that surrounds themselves with gold. See the how a significant percentage of the US population think of Trump for example.

If there is no King the subservient portion of the population will create one. It’s better to have a King that doesn’t have any actual power so that won’t happen. The subservient part of the population don’t really care that their King has no political power, they just want to bow to someone to prove their loyalty to the country and see some pomp and pageantry. For a lot of people the concept of a country is too abstract to understand so they need some person to do all kinds the ceremonial stuff so they can express their loyalty to the country by showing loyalty to that person.

Similar to how having a separation between government and religion, it’s a separation between government and all the ceremonial pomp and pageantry stuff.

Sure, I wouldn’t directly care if there was monarchy was eliminated, but a lot of other people would. And those people would start voting in some wealthy asshole to rule over us like a king. And that’s something I definitely don’t want. So just give the subservient types someone they can bow to so it doesn’t impact the rest of us.

Yeah but did those scientists ever point the James Webb Telescope at that creepy house at the end of my street?

That’s why it used to be not orange, obviously.

Ok now apply the same kind of criticism to the anti-liberal memes you’re consuming on the internet. Who do those benefit? Who benefits from dividing people?

Where does this stuff originate from? Some millionaire trust fund baby influencers on youtube or twitch? Why is this Hasan guy on the front page of a website owned by Jeff Bezos?

Keep on repeating the bullshit that Jeff Bezos wants you to about liberals being the real enemy. You’re soooo much smarter than everyone else LOL. You’re really “fighting the power” when you consume the content the billionaires want you to consume.

Yeah I’m not into that kind of thing. Rogue One was weird enough trying to be Saving Private Ryan while having the toys I played with as a kid on the screen. And I find it kinda find it boring when shows spell out what they’re about instead of having a deep subtext so I tend just get annoyed by plot holes since there’s nothing else to think about.

Isn’t all of Star Wars about fascism?

It’s just all emotion and no rational thought now. People just go into outrage mode when certain topics are mentioned.

Really it opens a channel to criticize ICE without needing to logon to X to do so. But that’s bad because preventing communication is good?

Of course I doubt ICE will care about criticism directed towards their account on bluesky. But that means things said on the internet don’t have much of an effect on things, which means it doesn’t matter whether they’re on bluesky (or any other forum).

Mostly it’s about some weird belief by some about controlling what is being said on the internet gains power. You’d think the events that have happened would have proven this wrong, but still people continue to be upset about things being said on the internet and want some power over those things.

Really words on the internet don’t matter as much as people think, and the idea of blocking unwanted information is annoying at best and can lead to ignorance. What matters is the horrible acts ICE is doing. We should want more light being shown on them, and welcome any potential channel of discussion.

Wanting to prevent discussion indicates you feel you’re in the wrong. ICE is indicating they want discussion, while those that are outraged by ICE being on bluesky are indicating they don’t want discussion on ICE. Why would anyone want to make is seem ICE is in the right while they’re in the wrong? It’s people not thinking and only reacting emotionally and handing ICE a W because they are raging instead of thinking.

The real news here is Juilan Assange still exists? People still think he’s relevant?

To me the whole thing is stupid.

They should just flat out tell Trump they’ll give him the stupid medal at the end of his term if he doesn’t bomb any more countries.

Kinda like how the US, UK, and the Soviet Union were not aligned before the 1940s?

Alignments can change when there’s a common enemy. Sure those alignment changes may be temporary but they can last long enough to see a country bombed flat and the leaders dead in a bunker.

You’re obsessed over ideology but that’s mostly irrelevant in geopolitics. If it’s in the best interests of a bunch of countries to work together to destroy the US economy, those countries will work together regardless of ideology or internal politics. In WWII the UK had a government of national unity with both the Labour and Conservative in a coalition. Perhaps the US is incapable of having political parties working together for the common good of the country, but not every country has the same weaknesses the US has.

And countries can always go back to being adversaries for bullshit ideological reasons after the enemy is destroyed like the US and Soviet Union did after WWII. So animosity between countries can be put aside temporarily.

If Trump thinks he can be an existential threat to a large number of countries in the world, it’s a FAFO situation.

Yup. Sadly the US has handed the 21st century to China without a fight.

I remember what some Hong Kong dude said to me once… “China is the future, and it’s a bleak future”.

And so long as the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth, what’s going to deter them?

I think the answer to your question is contained within the question. Americans are greedy people and a coordinated effort by China, Japan, and the UK could sink the US economy.

But I doubt that would even be necessary. Why kill someone intent on suicide? The US economy will likely collapse on it’s own if it continues on the path it’s on. I’m not talking about some recession like in 2008, I’m talking a collapse you’ve never experienced. Something similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Also if you were going down the military strike route, an aircraft carrier would be stupid. Trump has broadcast to the entire world what the achilles heal of the US is and it isn’t the aircraft carriers. It’s something that’s dug up from the ground and needs to be processed by refineries.