It occurs to me that a confounding factor here is that powerful men abusing less powerful women is a crime that has historically been overlooked or easily explained away or played down, and the victims blamed more than the perpetrators. Therefore in this case there are good reasons to be censorious.
But in general being censorious and self-righteous about other people is a bad thing. Saying that people like me wouldn't do something horrible is a solid first step towards both generalising that all the people like them would and towards tolerating people like me doing horrible things (because we wouldn't do something horrible, therefore if we did it it's not horrible).
One also needs to be wary of the scapegoating process, where the conflicts of the group are blamed on one member.
But this is clearly a hard case given that people like Epstein and his circle generally have too much moral impunity not too little, and are generally beneficiaries of the thought that 'people like me don't do horrible things'.
Sigh…you people need to be careful what you post. It is mostly supposition.
All this moral indignation gets a bit tedious and helps nobody.
Do you honestly expect Andrew to denounce Epstein or spoken up for “victims”? Has it occurred to you that he may not see them as “ victims@ or see any reason to denounce his reported “best friend”?
And before you respond: I hold no brief for either Andrew or any of his tribe going back several generations.
No I don't honestly expect Andrew to denounce the convicted sex traffickers, the man charged but died in prison nor do I expect him to say anything to acknowledge the victims.
I am perfectly aware what he thinks of the victims and by his actions we know what he thought of his friends.
Someone raised the question of the age of consent. In the US, the unrestricted age of consent ranges by state from 16 to 21 (19, 20 and 21 are rare). The federal age of consent, is, I believe, 18, relevant if people cross state lines. The whole issue is confused by matters such as "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions, parental consent, court consent, whether one party is in a position of authority over the other, and so on.
@Nick Tamen@Dafyd fron my perspective, someone like Epstein who sexually exploited many people would have some kind of inclination towards that. I don't think it's too controversial to suggest that particular crimes do involve a person being inclined towards particular activity, rather than a crime you might get involved in for eg financial gain. I think it's reasonable for people to state that they genuinely don't have any inclination towards crimes which would involve such inclinations.
I feel extremely confident in saying that I have zero inclination towards sexually exploiting anyone, and I don't understand why owning that ostensibly good trait is apparently a bad thing. Sorry, I think I am a better person than Jeffrey Epstein and I would strongly resist any religious framework that would suggest that we (me and Epstein) are both equally bad sinful people. Sorry but the stories of our respective lives just makes it very clear that that's not true.
...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God...
My italics.
Yeah, but that isn't saying that everyone is equally as sinful - nor does it say that all sins are equal in badness. Being rude to someone isn't equally as bad as sexual exploitation, or do you think that it is?
How do you think survivors of sexual exploitation feel about their abusers being equated in terms of sin to those who haven't sexually abused anyone?
Sorry, I think I am a better person than Jeffrey Epstein and I would strongly resist any religious framework that would suggest that we (me and Epstein) are both equally bad sinful people.
I have tried to avoid saying anyone is “equally bad” here. (Without going to back to look, I’ll apologize if I didn’t successfully do that.) Rather, I have tried to frame it as “equally deserving of God’s condemnation.” That is not, I do not think, the same as “equally bad,” but instead is a reorientation of what is being compared. I think anytime I find myself thinking “well, at least I’m not as bad as that person,” I’m at danger of letting myself think I don’t need God’s grace just as much as the person I’m considering myself better than.
I’ve never killed anyone. But I have known and even worked with people who have. Those experience have taught me not to think I’m “better” than they are.
I haven’t directly exploited anyone either. But I have participated in and benefited from political and economic systems that are built upon the exploitation of people and of natural resources, and for much of my life done so without giving it much if any thought.
Jesus’s admonition about pointing at the speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in our own seems relevant here to me.
We're probably better off (Christian or not!) to avoid doing comparisons between ourselves and other people regarding who is the "better" person. I mean, we can't see most of their lives, let alone see into their hearts; we haven't got most of the info we'd need to judge.
FWIW, those Bible verses are also meant for a different purpose than setting us up to judge people, even ourselves. The "all have sinned" verses are generally there, not to tell us that all sins are equally horrible or equally whatever in the eyes of God (which frankly makes him look like a lunatic to a lot of people), but rather to say that if you've got even a little bit of sin, you need God's help--just as a person with a single bubo is in the same boat as the person who's utterly covered with the marks of bubonic plague. So God's not saying "Shoplifting is in all ways equal to rape and murder," but rather "Stop wasting your time comparing your symptoms to somebody else's, and comforting yourself because you look better--you're still at risk of death. Rather, get yourself to the healer right away."
Sorry, I think I am a better person than Jeffrey Epstein and I would strongly resist any religious framework that would suggest that we (me and Epstein) are both equally bad sinful people.
I have tried to avoid saying anyone is “equally bad” here. (Without going to back to look, I’ll apologize if I didn’t successfully do that.) Rather, I have tried to frame it as “equally deserving of God’s condemnation.” That is not, I do not think, the same as “equally bad,” but instead is a reorientation of what is being compared. I think anytime I find myself thinking “well, at least I’m not as bad as that person,” I’m at danger of letting myself think I don’t need God’s grace just as much as the person I’m considering myself better than.
Those without your direct knowledge of the mind of God have to make do with judging anti-social or criminal behavior by its likely results and effects on others, not according to some idiosyncratic cosmological schema. It might be self-interested, but most of us have a greater interest, both personal and as a moral matter, in whether murder or human trafficking is condemned, legally and/or socially, than in whether someone else is wearing mixed fiber fabrics or laboring on the sabbath. If God exists she's perfectly capable of working out who to condemn (or not) without our input on the matter. I'm less concerned about those who think they don't need the grace of the Christian God than I am about the arrogance of those who think that suspending any kind of moral judgment makes themselves more godlike.
First, who's suspending any kind of moral judgement? I'm trying to avoid passing summary judgement on my neighbor in the sense of "You're a horrible person, much worse than me," which is a) not my duty--I'm not a judge! and b) a waste of time. I am NOT refraining from judging the actions themselves, or having opinions about how they should be punished, or coming up with schemes to discourage other people from repeating them in the future. That kind of moral judgement is common sense.
Second, why the nastiness toward those who hold off passing summary judgement on their neighbors? How do you know it's arrogance that makes them do so, and not (for example) a clear-sighted realization that they aren't fitted to do that sort of thing, and had better tend to their own knitting?
Sorry, I think I am a better person than Jeffrey Epstein and I would strongly resist any religious framework that would suggest that we (me and Epstein) are both equally bad sinful people.
I have tried to avoid saying anyone is “equally bad” here. (Without going to back to look, I’ll apologize if I didn’t successfully do that.) Rather, I have tried to frame it as “equally deserving of God’s condemnation.” That is not, I do not think, the same as “equally bad,” but instead is a reorientation of what is being compared. I think anytime I find myself thinking “well, at least I’m not as bad as that person,” I’m at danger of letting myself think I don’t need God’s grace just as much as the person I’m considering myself better than.
Those without your direct knowledge of the mind of God have to make do with judging anti-social or criminal behavior by its likely results and effects on others, not according to some idiosyncratic cosmological schema . . . .
I might be inclined to respond if I thought you are at least trying to engage with what others are actually saying. But your consistent spinning of what other shipmates say to provide a preferred target for your attack gets tiresome.
First, who's suspending any kind of moral judgement? I'm trying to avoid passing summary judgement on my neighbor in the sense of "You're a horrible person, much worse than me," which is a) not my duty--I'm not a judge! and b) a waste of time. I am NOT refraining from judging the actions themselves, or having opinions about how they should be punished, or coming up with schemes to discourage other people from repeating them in the future. That kind of moral judgement is common sense.
Second, why the nastiness toward those who hold off passing summary judgement on their neighbors? How do you know it's arrogance that makes them do so, and not (for example) a clear-sighted realization that they aren't fitted to do that sort of thing, and had better tend to their own knitting?
Out of curiosity, what's the difference between judgment and summary judgment? In the case of executions the summary form is one that's done without trial. I've always been suspicious of extending practices that are thoroughly necessary safeguards in a judicial environment to everyday actions and decisions. Individual people are allowed to make judgments and decisions without prior direction from the legal system. Indeed, waiting for the legal system to grind its way to a conclusion is a form of moral abdication.
It might be self-interested, but most of us have a greater interest, both personal and as a moral matter, in whether murder or human trafficking is condemned, legally and/or socially, than in whether someone else is wearing mixed fiber fabrics or laboring on the sabbath.
But working on the Sabbath and mixing fabrics are not things that most of us here, and in fact, most Christians(besides absolute biblical literalists) would consider to be wrong.
OTOH...
Suppose a building-inspector is hard-up due to gambling debts, and so takes a bribe to allow a substandard building(of a type he is unlikely ever to enter) to go forward, rationalizing that the chances of collapse are still pretty minimal, and that bookie is starting to get pretty menacing with his phone calls. The building stays up for a couple of uneventful decades, before being torn down to make way for a freeway.
Some time after the building is gone, the now-retired inspector sees a news report about the arrest of a serial killer in his area, and yells at the TV "That's the kind of scum we need to eliminate from our society!!"
Okay, so obviously, the inspector is nowhere near as bad as the killer(he wasn't actually trying to kill anyone, plus nothing happened anyway), and no rational court system would punish them equally. But does the inspector REALLY have the right to imply that the two of them are in a totally separate moral category? After all, he WAS willing to run the risk of needless death and carnage, just to get a bookie off his back.
I personally love how the concept of karma, as a neutral mechanic of cause and effect, removes the necessity for me to wrestle with the bipolar question of sin and redemption, justice and forgiveness.
It's a simple and elegant system. If I want justice, then I must hold the pain of the wound and reincarnate to see justice extracted from my adversary.
This is IMO the deepest meaning of "judge not lest ye be judged". If I hold someone to my standard of justice, I am creating the conditions by which another will hold me similarly accountable. We all get to experience the consequences of our decisions and get to feel everything we do to others done to ourselves.
If I want redemption, then I forgive myself and my adversary and release us both from the cycle of cause and effect. Forgiveness is the only thing that shifts the cycle into neutral. (Forgiving doesn't mean the same thing as reconciling btw).
Something as heinous as human trafficking cuts deep into the emotional body. It may not be possible to heal from its horror far enough to forgive in the same incarnation it is inflicted. Certainly it wasn't possible in Virginia Giuffre's case. I feel like their story is only partially known and will continue until all their causes and effects have been fully felt on both sides.
None of us knows how their story ends. We can use the mechanisms of human justice to investigate and decide how AMW should be treated for the rest of his life, but the final chapter of his story and that of those he may have wronged will not be known in this incarnation I am afraid.
Dear Master, Christ, guide them and be ever present with them in their paths as they walk down their lives in their woundedness towards the forgiveness peace and ultimate redemption that awaits them in the mansion of Your Father.
It might be self-interested, but most of us have a greater interest, both personal and as a moral matter, in whether murder or human trafficking is condemned, legally and/or socially, than in whether someone else is wearing mixed fiber fabrics or laboring on the sabbath.
But working on the Sabbath and mixing fabrics are not things that most of us here, and in fact, most Christians (besides absolute biblical literalists) would consider to be wrong.
Well, the standard being advanced here seems to be that we should base our moral judgments on whatever we think displeases God, so if you think God disapproves of labor on the sabbath (it's on some kind of list I think) then that's "equally" as bad as other things you think God disapproves of, since God apparently doesn't make distinctions beyond a simple binary.
Suppose a building-inspector is hard-up due to gambling debts, and so takes a bribe to allow a substandard building(of a type he is unlikely ever to enter) to go forward, rationalizing that the chances of collapse are still pretty minimal, and that bookie is starting to get pretty menacing with his phone calls. The building stays up for a couple of uneventful decades, before being torn down to make way for a freeway.
Some time after the building is gone, the now-retired inspector sees a news report about the arrest of a serial killer in his area, and yells at the TV "That's the kind of scum we need to eliminate from our society!!"
Okay, so obviously, the inspector is nowhere near as bad as the killer(he wasn't actually trying to kill anyone, plus nothing happened anyway), and no rational court system would punish them equally. But does the inspector REALLY have the right to imply that the two of them are in a totally separate moral category? After all, he WAS willing to run the risk of needless death and carnage, just to get a bookie off his back.
You could certainly take that position since the serial killer actually harmed people for their own personal gratification whereas the building inspector only potentially put people in harm's way. You could even take the opposite position, that the building inspector is worse because he was willing to risk the lives of a lot more people than even the most diligent serial killer could murder for his own financial gain and he simply got lucky that no one was harmed. What I find disheartening is the kind of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ reaction of claiming to be unable to make any kind of distinction between these two cases because their God wouldn't make any distinction either. That seems like a moral abdication.
It might be self-interested, but most of us have a greater interest, both personal and as a moral matter, in whether murder or human trafficking is condemned, legally and/or socially, than in whether someone else is wearing mixed fiber fabrics or laboring on the sabbath.
But working on the Sabbath and mixing fabrics are not things that most of us here, and in fact, most Christians (besides absolute biblical literalists) would consider to be wrong.
Well, the standard being advanced here seems to be that we should base our moral judgments on whatever we think displeases God, so if you think God disapproves of labor on the sabbath (it's on some kind of list I think) then that's "equally" as bad as other things you think God disapproves of, since God apparently doesn't make distinctions beyond a simple binary.
Suppose a building-inspector is hard-up due to gambling debts, and so takes a bribe to allow a substandard building(of a type he is unlikely ever to enter) to go forward, rationalizing that the chances of collapse are still pretty minimal, and that bookie is starting to get pretty menacing with his phone calls. The building stays up for a couple of uneventful decades, before being torn down to make way for a freeway.
Some time after the building is gone, the now-retired inspector sees a news report about the arrest of a serial killer in his area, and yells at the TV "That's the kind of scum we need to eliminate from our society!!"
Okay, so obviously, the inspector is nowhere near as bad as the killer(he wasn't actually trying to kill anyone, plus nothing happened anyway), and no rational court system would punish them equally. But does the inspector REALLY have the right to imply that the two of them are in a totally separate moral category? After all, he WAS willing to run the risk of needless death and carnage, just to get a bookie off his back.
You could certainly take that position since the serial killer actually harmed people for their own personal gratification whereas the building inspector only potentially put people in harm's way. You could even take the opposite position, that the building inspector is worse because he was willing to risk the lives of a lot more people than even the most diligent serial killer could murder for his own financial gain and he simply got lucky that no one was harmed. What I find disheartening is the kind of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ reaction of claiming to be unable to make any kind of distinction between these two cases because their God wouldn't make any distinction either. That seems like a moral abdication.
Right. I was just providing what I thought was a better example than mixing fabrics, because none of us here would consider the fabric-mixer to be in the same moral category as someone who directly harms others, so there's no dilemma in saying that the fabric-mixer, qua a fabric-mixer, has the right to criticize Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. In that comparison, the moral difference between the two is one of kind, not degree, whereas between the crooked inspector and the serial-killer, I'd argue it's one of degree.
As far as I know, Andrew was not accused of having sex with women provided to him by Maxwell and Epstein after they were accused of trafficking. (I be could be wrong abut that of course.)
The issue after they were taken to court was that he didn’t break ties with them. And then apparently stayed in touch in a friendly manner for longer than he said he did.
Ah. Thank you. I would not have thought of that one.
On more recent comments, I'm not convinced one can claim a great deal of virtue or moral credit for not having committed the sins one is not tempted by rather than those one is.
Also, yes, everyone has to make moral judgements to help develop within themselves the moral parameters to live a good life and that is going to include evaluating the deeds of others. Nevertheless, beyond that, to what extent is it my - or anyone else other than a court of law or God's - role to judge or to ostracise someone we're none of us likely to meet anyway? Or, even if it is, to judge or to ostracise others who come to a different conclusion or adopt a different approach?
As far as I know, Andrew was not accused of having sex with women provided to him by Maxwell and Epstein after they were accused of trafficking. (I be could be wrong abut that of course.)
The issue after they were taken to court was that he didn’t break ties with them. And then apparently stayed in touch in a friendly manner for longer than he said he did.
Right. And AFAIK, failing to break ties with a publically exposed scumbag is not a crime, and, one could argue, not even morally wrong(*).
But Mountbatten Windsor DID reach a settlement with Virginia Guiffre, presumably with the intent of keeping details of their association out of court, so we can surmise that, at the very least, it would have shown him in a pretty unflattering light.
(*) Unless we want to condemn every loving parent who keeps up contact with a child exposed for heinous crimes because "He's still my son, and nothing can change that." Granted, as a non-parent myself, I've often thought I personally would just throw any serial-killing kid of mine right under the bus.
It might be self-interested, but most of us have a greater interest, both personal and as a moral matter, in whether murder or human trafficking is condemned, legally and/or socially, than in whether someone else is wearing mixed fiber fabrics or laboring on the sabbath.
But working on the Sabbath and mixing fabrics are not things that most of us here, and in fact, most Christians(besides absolute biblical literalists) would consider to be wrong.
OTOH...
Suppose a building-inspector is hard-up due to gambling debts, and so takes a bribe to allow a substandard building(of a type he is unlikely ever to enter) to go forward, rationalizing that the chances of collapse are still pretty minimal, and that bookie is starting to get pretty menacing with his phone calls. The building stays up for a couple of uneventful decades, before being torn down to make way for a freeway.
Some time after the building is gone, the now-retired inspector sees a news report about the arrest of a serial killer in his area, and yells at the TV "That's the kind of scum we need to eliminate from our society!!"
Okay, so obviously, the inspector is nowhere near as bad as the killer(he wasn't actually trying to kill anyone, plus nothing happened anyway), and no rational court system would punish them equally. But does the inspector REALLY have the right to imply that the two of them are in a totally separate moral category? After all, he WAS willing to run the risk of needless death and carnage, just to get a bookie off his back.
Yes, I think this is a difficult moral problem to untangle given that the difference between the building inspector who gets away with it and a building inspector in the same situation who doesn't appears to be luck.
But in normal usage, we tend to think that there is moral culpability attached to a person who is sloppy, but much more to the person who is sloppy and unlucky.
To consider a different example: an airline pilot who is drunk is deplorable. A pilot who is drunk and manages to kill passengers is worse.
A properly cognisant legal system recognises this. The drunk pilot doesn't get a pass even if he can show nobody was hurt.
The murderer I think is in a different moral category. Assuming the pilot above was sloppy, the murderer is deliberate.
There's a lot of grey complexity here, but it seems to me that most people would put a person who sets out to kill others in a different category to the sloppy but unlucky person who ended up being a killer.
I feel extremely confident in saying that I have zero inclination towards sexually exploiting anyone, and I don't understand why owning that ostensibly good trait is apparently a bad thing.
You tagged me, as if you think you're disagreeing with me directly, but you don't say whether you're responding to anything specific in my post; so I don't know whether you're responding in a spirit of "Yes, that's true but on the other hand," or, "No, that's wrong."
I am also confident you don't have any inclination towards sexually exploiting someone. At the same time, I'm equally sure that a lot of people who have sexually exploited people are just as confident that they have no such inclination as you are.
To be honest my concern is less whether it's true that one person is better than another as with whether it's in any way constructive to think so. I don't think it's healthy or makes for happiness in a society to have lots of people thinking they're better than other people; I think it leads to regressive politics; and therefore it's better if nobody does it even if they individually might be justified.
Spiritually, evaluating oneself by comparison to other people for better or worse seems to me to be counterproductive.
To consider a different example: an airline pilot who is drunk is deplorable. A pilot who is drunk and manages to kill passengers is worse.
Is he actually worse, or is he just less lucky?
If, to pick another random example, you go and stand in the middle of a city with a semi-automatic rifle and fire a bunch of shots up in the air, you are being reckless with other people's safety. But you're being the same reckless whether or not your bullets kill anyone. I don't see that you can be morally more or less culpable based on random chance.
At the same time, I'm equally sure that a lot of people who have sexually exploited people are just as confident that they have no such inclination as you are.
Think of everyone who's ever surfed amateur porn on some random websites, where it's pretty much impossible to tell if the model knew these photos were going to be published, or if she was just fooling around with her boyfriend one night and then he decided to post the pictures in revenge for some perceived slight.
If the surfers continue in these viewing habits after they become aware of the general possibility of non-consensual display, how much better are they than the asshole boyfriend?
I personally love how the concept of karma, as a neutral mechanic of cause and effect, removes the necessity for me to wrestle with the bipolar question of sin and redemption, justice and forgiveness.
It's a simple and elegant system. If I want justice, then I must hold the pain of the wound and reincarnate to see justice extracted from my adversary.
This is IMO the deepest meaning of "judge not lest ye be judged". If I hold someone to my standard of justice, I am creating the conditions by which another will hold me similarly accountable. We all get to experience the consequences of our decisions and get to feel everything we do to others done to ourselves.
If I want redemption, then I forgive myself and my adversary and release us both from the cycle of cause and effect. Forgiveness is the only thing that shifts the cycle into neutral. (Forgiving doesn't mean the same thing as reconciling btw).
Something as heinous as human trafficking cuts deep into the emotional body. It may not be possible to heal from its horror far enough to forgive in the same incarnation it is inflicted. Certainly it wasn't possible in Virginia Giuffre's case. I feel like their story is only partially known and will continue until all their causes and effects have been fully felt on both sides.
None of us knows how their story ends. We can use the mechanisms of human justice to investigate and decide how AMW should be treated for the rest of his life, but the final chapter of his story and that of those he may have wronged will not be known in this incarnation I am afraid.
Dear Master, Christ, guide them and be ever present with them in their paths as they walk down their lives in their woundedness towards the forgiveness peace and ultimate redemption that awaits them in the mansion of Your Father.
AFF
But that is not how karma works in dharmic religions. Karma is about your reincarnation reflecting the extent to which you have or have not fulfilled your (general your) dharmic responsibilities in life - and this could be as small an issue as not getting married. It also posits that suffering is punishment for your previous life's lack of dharmic achievement - I don't see how a system where disability is a punishment for sin in a previous life is better.
At the same time, I'm equally sure that a lot of people who have sexually exploited people are just as confident that they have no such inclination as you are.
Think of everyone who's ever surfed amateur porn on some random websites, where it's pretty much impossible to tell if the model knew these photos were going to be published, or if she was just fooling around with her boyfriend one night and then he decided to post the pictures in revenge for some perceived slight.
If the surfers continue in these viewing habits after they become aware of the general possibility of non-consensual display, how much better are they than the asshole boyfriend?
Neither is good, but the boyfriend is clearly worse since he betrayed her trust. A stranger who has no kind of relationship with her can't hurt her like her boyfriend can, because betrayal needs a pre-existing knowledge of each other.
"Saying that people like me wouldn't do something horrible is a solid first step towards both generalising that all the people like them would and towards tolerating people like me doing horrible things (because we wouldn't do something horrible, therefore if we did it it's not horrible)."
I can see that such a slippery slope exists - eg, thinking that you (general you) couldn't be racist because racism is something horrible people do, and you're not horrible so you can't be racist. Where I struggle is the apparent lack of distinction between material harms and other kinds of harm.
Neither is good, but the boyfriend is clearly worse since he betrayed her trust. A stranger who has no kind of relationship with her can't hurt her like her boyfriend can, because betrayal needs a pre-existing knowledge of each other.
Yeah, but, in conjunction with the pre-existing relationship, this particular betrayal also requires people like the surfer to look at the photos, otherwise there's no violation of the woman's privacy, as intended by the boyfriend.
But that is not how karma works in dharmic religions. Karma is about your reincarnation reflecting the extent to which you have or have not fulfilled your (general your) dharmic responsibilities in life - and this could be as small an issue as not getting married. It also posits that suffering is punishment for your previous life's lack of dharmic achievement - I don't see how a system where disability is a punishment for sin in a previous life is better.
Exactly why I don't adhere to the dharmic religions. I completely disagree with the concept of karma as some kind of punishment/reward system. The Hindu caste system is utterly repulsive to me.
Buddhism is just meh to me - very kind and compassionate but no life. If Samsara ends up being me sitting under a tree smirking at some internal vision, I can't see working that hard to end up immobilized.
So it seems there are quite a few religions I disagree with in terms of how reality/divinity works, not just Christianity.
I'm more Platonist than any of those. And he got his ideas from his school in Alexandria. It's no coincidence that the early adopters of Christianity were the Greeks. Plato's wisdom school had a problem. You could become wise enough to do as little damage as you could in future lives, but there was no way to fix the mess you created before. Christ solved that for them.
At the same time, I'm equally sure that a lot of people who have sexually exploited people are just as confident that they have no such inclination as you are.
Think of everyone who's ever surfed amateur porn on some random websites, where it's pretty much impossible to tell if the model knew these photos were going to be published, or if she was just fooling around with her boyfriend one night and then he decided to post the pictures in revenge for some perceived slight.
If the surfers continue in these viewing habits after they become aware of the general possibility of non-consensual display, how much better are they than the asshole boyfriend?
Yes, that's another difficult framing. I think in general we tend to associate unknowing use of otherwise acceptable images to be less bad than knowing use, and in turn that's less bad than producing and distributing the images.
But there's obviously a lot of grey. It's hard to imagine that the consumers of those images are totally unaware of their providence unless they are incredibly stupid. And of course the notion of "acceptable" images is extremely slippery. We tend to have a mostly shared understanding of what is unacceptable but even otherwise entirely benign things can be disturbing.
I think I would agree that we are all tainted in some sense. We've probably all had some interaction with the Henrietta Lacks cells even if we don't know. We might have even been the beneficiaries of even worse things.
But even there I don't think that it is correct to say that we are all as morally responsible for the terrible injustice to the Lacks as those who initially made the decision to use the cells without permission.
Buddhism is just meh to me - very kind and compassionate but no life. If Samsara ends up being me sitting under a tree smirking at some internal vision, I can't see working that hard to end up immobilized.
AFF
I meant Nirvana. This is what I get for posting before morning coffee. Half awake senior moments.
Neither is good, but the boyfriend is clearly worse since he betrayed her trust. A stranger who has no kind of relationship with her can't hurt her like her boyfriend can, because betrayal needs a pre-existing knowledge of each other.
Yeah, but, in conjunction with the pre-existing relationship, this particular betrayal also requires people like the surfer to look at the photos, otherwise there's no violation of the woman's privacy, as intended by the boyfriend.
I'm going to strongly disagree with this.
If you go and fire your gun in the air in the middle of a city, harm is only caused if someone happens to be standing in the "wrong" place when physics does its thing. But the betrayal here is you firing your gun in a place where it's reasonable to assume someone might get hurt: whether or not you are lucky and get away with it doesn't alter what you did, or your culpability for it.
Similarly, if you attempt to share pornographic images of your ex with their work email list, for example, then you're an obvious piece of shit. If the work email list has filters or something that prevents the email being sent, then the harm done to your ex is much reduced, but you're still exactly the same amount of shit.
The betrayal is posting the images, not in whether anyone happens to see them.
As far as the ethics of being a casual viewer of revenge porn on some website goes, I think I'd apply the "reasonable person" test.
To the extent that looking at porn at all is a moral failing, the person would be guilty. If you take the view that looking at consensual porn is fine, but looking at porn that is coerced, exploitative, or non-consensual is a problem, then the degree of culpability of the porn viewer would depend on the extent to which a reasonable person could / should expect that consent was lacking. I imagine an amateur sex tape willingly posted to a porn site, and an amateur sex tape recorded for private use and then posted against the wishes of one of the participants look pretty much the same...
I rather like the idea that Charles has discovered he still has some levers to punish wayward relatives with his own form of imprisonment.
It does rather sound like he is being placed under "house arrest".
As to him jetting off to Dubai or Bahrain or some otherwhere to become somebody else's problem, he will always share the royal family's blood and name. He will always be a "family problem".
Also - he knows what he knows and can name other names. I wonder if he will ever be tried in a constitutional court.
AFF
Does a constitutional court exist in the UK? We don't have one in Canada-- I think that there is one in France, but I don't see him as falling under its jurisdiction.
I have no idea. However, having moved at a minion level in circles where I observed folk prominent in the media (music, sports, or literature) as well as in political life, there is never any need to recruit carnally-available admirers. About them stand circles of young(ish) folk of all genders greatly desirous of becoming close friends. Recruiting a harem? ha! Fighting them off is the issue!
A professional hockey play with whom I was once related by marriage told me that they had security at their hotels to ensure that a night's sleep. I queried the veracity of this, and he recounted how, in Sudbury teenage girls (in Canada the age of consent was then 16 or 14-- I forget which) offered the desk clerk $100 for the room key-- and $100 went quite a way in the 1980s. Coaches would drag players away from after-game parties as Temptation was there in spades. Discussing this years later with an activist on sexual assault and stalking issues, she said that in her high school years, "puck bunnies" would often find themselves in situations out of their control-- as we recently saw with the trial of several athletes in London, Ontario.
At political party events, any passably fair MP or minister would have easily 3-4 intense young polisci undergrads standing close and bright-eyed, fuelled with a few drinks. Most ministers had a staff member running interference (or, on their own bat, dragging the politician away to safer grounds). I can give examples from all three parties.
Like it or not, groupies (all possible genders are candidates) are there for the asking. One need not recruit, but simply see a dinner invitation extended. Memoirs recount how members of Edward VIII's staff resigned in the face of his behaviour on royal tour. Like him, Andrew is clearly at fault for not seeking mature relationships, but I would also ask what his security or staff were doing--at Pierre Trudeau's state funeral when he represented the Queen, he skipped the reception to head off to "a private meeting" to the fury of the Mounties who had to track him down as his British security had no idea. Or why his father had not dragged him off by the collar to have a paternal discussion on princely behaviour. By the time it got to the Epstein level-- which would have been known to security staff-- there was no excuse for allowing it to continue.
So while there we have a posse of the irresponsible or lackadaisical, I continue to blame the celebrity culture which enlivens the popular press, and brings practical immunity to the wrongdoer-- I assure you that we only see the tip of the iceberg.
Does a constitutional court exist in the UK? We don't have one in Canada-- I think that there is one in France, but I don't see him as falling under its jurisdiction.
No, it doesn't. I was also puzzled by that phrase. It's an alien concept to UK legal thinking. There is quite a strong sense of some bits of law being 'constitutional' but anything 'constitutional' is dealt with in the ordinary courts There also aren't really constitutional crimes.
FWIW the story of Andrew MB reminds me somewhat of the downfall and exile of the Archduke Ludwig Viktor,the youngest brother of the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary.As a young man he was interested in the arts,although he did have a number of military titles. Again as a young man he was seen as witty and charming and full of, at times ,malicious gossip.
This came abruptly to an end one day when he made an unsuitable advance towards an other man in a public bathhouse.
The monarchy could not accept this public humiliation and so Ludwig Viktor was sent to take a cure at Meran in Tirol. After that he was exiled to his residence at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg and never again took part in public life.
Like the suicide of the Emperor's son at Mayerling nothing was ever said publicly about the real reason why Ludwig Viktor was banished. He did however outlive his brother,the Emperor and outlive the fall of the monarchy,dying early in 1919. There was no burial in the Habsburg crypt of the Kapuziner church in Vienna. He lies at rest in the small local cemetery near Schloss Klessheim.
FWIW the story of Andrew MB reminds me somewhat of the downfall and exile of the Archduke Ludwig Viktor,the youngest brother of the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary.As a young man he was interested in the arts,although he did have a number of military titles. Again as a young man he was seen as witty and charming and full of, at times ,malicious gossip.
This came abruptly to an end one day when he made an unsuitable advance towards an other man in a public bathhouse.
The monarchy could not accept this public humiliation and so Ludwig Viktor was sent to take a cure at Meran in Tirol. After that he was exiled to his residence at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg and never again took part in public life.
Like the suicide of the Emperor's son at Mayerling nothing was ever said publicly about the real reason why Ludwig Viktor was banished. He did however outlive his brother,the Emperor and outlive the fall of the monarchy,dying early in 1919. There was no burial in the Habsburg crypt of the Kapuziner church in Vienna. He lies at rest in the small local cemetery near Schloss Klessheim.
I don't think these situations are at all the same. It doesn't sound as if the man Ludwig Viktor approached was harmed by him in any way. Being locked away because you are gay or bisexual is not at all like anything Andrew is accused of.
I expect many people are tired of AMW and his behaviour, which reminded me of the last verse of one of Edward Lear's alphabet poems:
Z said, 'Here is a box of Zinc! Get in, my little master!
'We'll shut you up! We'll nail you down! We will, my little master!
'We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'
Good ol' Lear, once again rhyming a word with its own fucking self.
Eh? Master rhymes with disaster - the two lines form a sort of coda to the rest of the poem, rather than a direct link to the preceding line.
I can buy that.
(For the record, I quite like The Owl And The Pussycat, though that might just be more enjoyable memories of reading it than actual enjoyment of the poem itself.)
FWIW the story of Andrew MB reminds me somewhat of the downfall and exile of the Archduke Ludwig Viktor,the youngest brother of the Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary.As a young man he was interested in the arts,although he did have a number of military titles. Again as a young man he was seen as witty and charming and full of, at times ,malicious gossip.
This came abruptly to an end one day when he made an unsuitable advance towards an other man in a public bathhouse.
The monarchy could not accept this public humiliation and so Ludwig Viktor was sent to take a cure at Meran in Tirol. After that he was exiled to his residence at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg and never again took part in public life.
Like the suicide of the Emperor's son at Mayerling nothing was ever said publicly about the real reason why Ludwig Viktor was banished. He did however outlive his brother,the Emperor and outlive the fall of the monarchy,dying early in 1919. There was no burial in the Habsburg crypt of the Kapuziner church in Vienna. He lies at rest in the small local cemetery near Schloss Klessheim.
I don't think these situations are at all the same.
@Forthview didn't say the situations were the same. He said the current situation reminded him of the historical one, I would guess because both involved removal of a prince from all public duties and from public life, stashing him away somewhere. I can easily see why he was reminded of Archduke Ludwig Viktor.
Plus, at the time, the Archduke's behaviour was unacceptably scandalous. Ironically, if it had merely involved young girls, no one would have minded. Mary Vetsera was only 17, after all.
Comments
But in general being censorious and self-righteous about other people is a bad thing. Saying that people like me wouldn't do something horrible is a solid first step towards both generalising that all the people like them would and towards tolerating people like me doing horrible things (because we wouldn't do something horrible, therefore if we did it it's not horrible).
One also needs to be wary of the scapegoating process, where the conflicts of the group are blamed on one member.
But this is clearly a hard case given that people like Epstein and his circle generally have too much moral impunity not too little, and are generally beneficiaries of the thought that 'people like me don't do horrible things'.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/andrew-lose-privilege-taking-falklands-medal-too-much-4018480
Nothing like being “ perfectly aware” , is there?
Yep, paywall there but one gets the drift….
I feel extremely confident in saying that I have zero inclination towards sexually exploiting anyone, and I don't understand why owning that ostensibly good trait is apparently a bad thing. Sorry, I think I am a better person than Jeffrey Epstein and I would strongly resist any religious framework that would suggest that we (me and Epstein) are both equally bad sinful people. Sorry but the stories of our respective lives just makes it very clear that that's not true.
...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God...
My italics.
Yeah, but that isn't saying that everyone is equally as sinful - nor does it say that all sins are equal in badness. Being rude to someone isn't equally as bad as sexual exploitation, or do you think that it is?
How do you think survivors of sexual exploitation feel about their abusers being equated in terms of sin to those who haven't sexually abused anyone?
I’ve never killed anyone. But I have known and even worked with people who have. Those experience have taught me not to think I’m “better” than they are.
I haven’t directly exploited anyone either. But I have participated in and benefited from political and economic systems that are built upon the exploitation of people and of natural resources, and for much of my life done so without giving it much if any thought.
Jesus’s admonition about pointing at the speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in our own seems relevant here to me.
Flippancy and insults are not ISTM pertinent here.
The Bible FWIW does remind us in more than one place (IIRC) that none of us is perfect.
FWIW, those Bible verses are also meant for a different purpose than setting us up to judge people, even ourselves. The "all have sinned" verses are generally there, not to tell us that all sins are equally horrible or equally whatever in the eyes of God (which frankly makes him look like a lunatic to a lot of people), but rather to say that if you've got even a little bit of sin, you need God's help--just as a person with a single bubo is in the same boat as the person who's utterly covered with the marks of bubonic plague. So God's not saying "Shoplifting is in all ways equal to rape and murder," but rather "Stop wasting your time comparing your symptoms to somebody else's, and comforting yourself because you look better--you're still at risk of death. Rather, get yourself to the healer right away."
Agreed.
Those without your direct knowledge of the mind of God have to make do with judging anti-social or criminal behavior by its likely results and effects on others, not according to some idiosyncratic cosmological schema. It might be self-interested, but most of us have a greater interest, both personal and as a moral matter, in whether murder or human trafficking is condemned, legally and/or socially, than in whether someone else is wearing mixed fiber fabrics or laboring on the sabbath. If God exists she's perfectly capable of working out who to condemn (or not) without our input on the matter. I'm less concerned about those who think they don't need the grace of the Christian God than I am about the arrogance of those who think that suspending any kind of moral judgment makes themselves more godlike.
Second, why the nastiness toward those who hold off passing summary judgement on their neighbors? How do you know it's arrogance that makes them do so, and not (for example) a clear-sighted realization that they aren't fitted to do that sort of thing, and had better tend to their own knitting?
Out of curiosity, what's the difference between judgment and summary judgment? In the case of executions the summary form is one that's done without trial. I've always been suspicious of extending practices that are thoroughly necessary safeguards in a judicial environment to everyday actions and decisions. Individual people are allowed to make judgments and decisions without prior direction from the legal system. Indeed, waiting for the legal system to grind its way to a conclusion is a form of moral abdication.
But working on the Sabbath and mixing fabrics are not things that most of us here, and in fact, most Christians(besides absolute biblical literalists) would consider to be wrong.
OTOH...
Suppose a building-inspector is hard-up due to gambling debts, and so takes a bribe to allow a substandard building(of a type he is unlikely ever to enter) to go forward, rationalizing that the chances of collapse are still pretty minimal, and that bookie is starting to get pretty menacing with his phone calls. The building stays up for a couple of uneventful decades, before being torn down to make way for a freeway.
Some time after the building is gone, the now-retired inspector sees a news report about the arrest of a serial killer in his area, and yells at the TV "That's the kind of scum we need to eliminate from our society!!"
Okay, so obviously, the inspector is nowhere near as bad as the killer(he wasn't actually trying to kill anyone, plus nothing happened anyway), and no rational court system would punish them equally. But does the inspector REALLY have the right to imply that the two of them are in a totally separate moral category? After all, he WAS willing to run the risk of needless death and carnage, just to get a bookie off his back.
It's a simple and elegant system. If I want justice, then I must hold the pain of the wound and reincarnate to see justice extracted from my adversary.
This is IMO the deepest meaning of "judge not lest ye be judged". If I hold someone to my standard of justice, I am creating the conditions by which another will hold me similarly accountable. We all get to experience the consequences of our decisions and get to feel everything we do to others done to ourselves.
If I want redemption, then I forgive myself and my adversary and release us both from the cycle of cause and effect. Forgiveness is the only thing that shifts the cycle into neutral. (Forgiving doesn't mean the same thing as reconciling btw).
Something as heinous as human trafficking cuts deep into the emotional body. It may not be possible to heal from its horror far enough to forgive in the same incarnation it is inflicted. Certainly it wasn't possible in Virginia Giuffre's case. I feel like their story is only partially known and will continue until all their causes and effects have been fully felt on both sides.
None of us knows how their story ends. We can use the mechanisms of human justice to investigate and decide how AMW should be treated for the rest of his life, but the final chapter of his story and that of those he may have wronged will not be known in this incarnation I am afraid.
Dear Master, Christ, guide them and be ever present with them in their paths as they walk down their lives in their woundedness towards the forgiveness peace and ultimate redemption that awaits them in the mansion of Your Father.
AFF
Well, the standard being advanced here seems to be that we should base our moral judgments on whatever we think displeases God, so if you think God disapproves of labor on the sabbath (it's on some kind of list I think) then that's "equally" as bad as other things you think God disapproves of, since God apparently doesn't make distinctions beyond a simple binary.
You could certainly take that position since the serial killer actually harmed people for their own personal gratification whereas the building inspector only potentially put people in harm's way. You could even take the opposite position, that the building inspector is worse because he was willing to risk the lives of a lot more people than even the most diligent serial killer could murder for his own financial gain and he simply got lucky that no one was harmed. What I find disheartening is the kind of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ reaction of claiming to be unable to make any kind of distinction between these two cases because their God wouldn't make any distinction either. That seems like a moral abdication.
Right. I was just providing what I thought was a better example than mixing fabrics, because none of us here would consider the fabric-mixer to be in the same moral category as someone who directly harms others, so there's no dilemma in saying that the fabric-mixer, qua a fabric-mixer, has the right to criticize Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. In that comparison, the moral difference between the two is one of kind, not degree, whereas between the crooked inspector and the serial-killer, I'd argue it's one of degree.
The issue after they were taken to court was that he didn’t break ties with them. And then apparently stayed in touch in a friendly manner for longer than he said he did.
On more recent comments, I'm not convinced one can claim a great deal of virtue or moral credit for not having committed the sins one is not tempted by rather than those one is.
Also, yes, everyone has to make moral judgements to help develop within themselves the moral parameters to live a good life and that is going to include evaluating the deeds of others. Nevertheless, beyond that, to what extent is it my - or anyone else other than a court of law or God's - role to judge or to ostracise someone we're none of us likely to meet anyway? Or, even if it is, to judge or to ostracise others who come to a different conclusion or adopt a different approach?
Right. And AFAIK, failing to break ties with a publically exposed scumbag is not a crime, and, one could argue, not even morally wrong(*).
But Mountbatten Windsor DID reach a settlement with Virginia Guiffre, presumably with the intent of keeping details of their association out of court, so we can surmise that, at the very least, it would have shown him in a pretty unflattering light.
(*) Unless we want to condemn every loving parent who keeps up contact with a child exposed for heinous crimes because "He's still my son, and nothing can change that." Granted, as a non-parent myself, I've often thought I personally would just throw any serial-killing kid of mine right under the bus.
Yes, I think this is a difficult moral problem to untangle given that the difference between the building inspector who gets away with it and a building inspector in the same situation who doesn't appears to be luck.
But in normal usage, we tend to think that there is moral culpability attached to a person who is sloppy, but much more to the person who is sloppy and unlucky.
To consider a different example: an airline pilot who is drunk is deplorable. A pilot who is drunk and manages to kill passengers is worse.
A properly cognisant legal system recognises this. The drunk pilot doesn't get a pass even if he can show nobody was hurt.
The murderer I think is in a different moral category. Assuming the pilot above was sloppy, the murderer is deliberate.
There's a lot of grey complexity here, but it seems to me that most people would put a person who sets out to kill others in a different category to the sloppy but unlucky person who ended up being a killer.
I am also confident you don't have any inclination towards sexually exploiting someone. At the same time, I'm equally sure that a lot of people who have sexually exploited people are just as confident that they have no such inclination as you are.
To be honest my concern is less whether it's true that one person is better than another as with whether it's in any way constructive to think so. I don't think it's healthy or makes for happiness in a society to have lots of people thinking they're better than other people; I think it leads to regressive politics; and therefore it's better if nobody does it even if they individually might be justified.
Spiritually, evaluating oneself by comparison to other people for better or worse seems to me to be counterproductive.
Is he actually worse, or is he just less lucky?
If, to pick another random example, you go and stand in the middle of a city with a semi-automatic rifle and fire a bunch of shots up in the air, you are being reckless with other people's safety. But you're being the same reckless whether or not your bullets kill anyone. I don't see that you can be morally more or less culpable based on random chance.
Think of everyone who's ever surfed amateur porn on some random websites, where it's pretty much impossible to tell if the model knew these photos were going to be published, or if she was just fooling around with her boyfriend one night and then he decided to post the pictures in revenge for some perceived slight.
If the surfers continue in these viewing habits after they become aware of the general possibility of non-consensual display, how much better are they than the asshole boyfriend?
But that is not how karma works in dharmic religions. Karma is about your reincarnation reflecting the extent to which you have or have not fulfilled your (general your) dharmic responsibilities in life - and this could be as small an issue as not getting married. It also posits that suffering is punishment for your previous life's lack of dharmic achievement - I don't see how a system where disability is a punishment for sin in a previous life is better.
Neither is good, but the boyfriend is clearly worse since he betrayed her trust. A stranger who has no kind of relationship with her can't hurt her like her boyfriend can, because betrayal needs a pre-existing knowledge of each other.
I can see that such a slippery slope exists - eg, thinking that you (general you) couldn't be racist because racism is something horrible people do, and you're not horrible so you can't be racist. Where I struggle is the apparent lack of distinction between material harms and other kinds of harm.
Yeah, but, in conjunction with the pre-existing relationship, this particular betrayal also requires people like the surfer to look at the photos, otherwise there's no violation of the woman's privacy, as intended by the boyfriend.
Exactly why I don't adhere to the dharmic religions. I completely disagree with the concept of karma as some kind of punishment/reward system. The Hindu caste system is utterly repulsive to me.
Buddhism is just meh to me - very kind and compassionate but no life. If Samsara ends up being me sitting under a tree smirking at some internal vision, I can't see working that hard to end up immobilized.
So it seems there are quite a few religions I disagree with in terms of how reality/divinity works, not just Christianity.
I'm more Platonist than any of those. And he got his ideas from his school in Alexandria. It's no coincidence that the early adopters of Christianity were the Greeks. Plato's wisdom school had a problem. You could become wise enough to do as little damage as you could in future lives, but there was no way to fix the mess you created before. Christ solved that for them.
AFF
Yes, that's another difficult framing. I think in general we tend to associate unknowing use of otherwise acceptable images to be less bad than knowing use, and in turn that's less bad than producing and distributing the images.
But there's obviously a lot of grey. It's hard to imagine that the consumers of those images are totally unaware of their providence unless they are incredibly stupid. And of course the notion of "acceptable" images is extremely slippery. We tend to have a mostly shared understanding of what is unacceptable but even otherwise entirely benign things can be disturbing.
I think I would agree that we are all tainted in some sense. We've probably all had some interaction with the Henrietta Lacks cells even if we don't know. We might have even been the beneficiaries of even worse things.
But even there I don't think that it is correct to say that we are all as morally responsible for the terrible injustice to the Lacks as those who initially made the decision to use the cells without permission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
I meant Nirvana. This is what I get for posting before morning coffee. Half awake senior moments.
AFF
I'm going to strongly disagree with this.
If you go and fire your gun in the air in the middle of a city, harm is only caused if someone happens to be standing in the "wrong" place when physics does its thing. But the betrayal here is you firing your gun in a place where it's reasonable to assume someone might get hurt: whether or not you are lucky and get away with it doesn't alter what you did, or your culpability for it.
Similarly, if you attempt to share pornographic images of your ex with their work email list, for example, then you're an obvious piece of shit. If the work email list has filters or something that prevents the email being sent, then the harm done to your ex is much reduced, but you're still exactly the same amount of shit.
The betrayal is posting the images, not in whether anyone happens to see them.
As far as the ethics of being a casual viewer of revenge porn on some website goes, I think I'd apply the "reasonable person" test.
To the extent that looking at porn at all is a moral failing, the person would be guilty. If you take the view that looking at consensual porn is fine, but looking at porn that is coerced, exploitative, or non-consensual is a problem, then the degree of culpability of the porn viewer would depend on the extent to which a reasonable person could / should expect that consent was lacking. I imagine an amateur sex tape willingly posted to a porn site, and an amateur sex tape recorded for private use and then posted against the wishes of one of the participants look pretty much the same...
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
Does a constitutional court exist in the UK? We don't have one in Canada-- I think that there is one in France, but I don't see him as falling under its jurisdiction.
I have no idea. However, having moved at a minion level in circles where I observed folk prominent in the media (music, sports, or literature) as well as in political life, there is never any need to recruit carnally-available admirers. About them stand circles of young(ish) folk of all genders greatly desirous of becoming close friends. Recruiting a harem? ha! Fighting them off is the issue!
A professional hockey play with whom I was once related by marriage told me that they had security at their hotels to ensure that a night's sleep. I queried the veracity of this, and he recounted how, in Sudbury teenage girls (in Canada the age of consent was then 16 or 14-- I forget which) offered the desk clerk $100 for the room key-- and $100 went quite a way in the 1980s. Coaches would drag players away from after-game parties as Temptation was there in spades. Discussing this years later with an activist on sexual assault and stalking issues, she said that in her high school years, "puck bunnies" would often find themselves in situations out of their control-- as we recently saw with the trial of several athletes in London, Ontario.
At political party events, any passably fair MP or minister would have easily 3-4 intense young polisci undergrads standing close and bright-eyed, fuelled with a few drinks. Most ministers had a staff member running interference (or, on their own bat, dragging the politician away to safer grounds). I can give examples from all three parties.
Like it or not, groupies (all possible genders are candidates) are there for the asking. One need not recruit, but simply see a dinner invitation extended. Memoirs recount how members of Edward VIII's staff resigned in the face of his behaviour on royal tour. Like him, Andrew is clearly at fault for not seeking mature relationships, but I would also ask what his security or staff were doing--at Pierre Trudeau's state funeral when he represented the Queen, he skipped the reception to head off to "a private meeting" to the fury of the Mounties who had to track him down as his British security had no idea. Or why his father had not dragged him off by the collar to have a paternal discussion on princely behaviour. By the time it got to the Epstein level-- which would have been known to security staff-- there was no excuse for allowing it to continue.
So while there we have a posse of the irresponsible or lackadaisical, I continue to blame the celebrity culture which enlivens the popular press, and brings practical immunity to the wrongdoer-- I assure you that we only see the tip of the iceberg.
Z said, 'Here is a box of Zinc! Get in, my little master!
'We'll shut you up! We'll nail you down! We will, my little master!
'We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'
Good ol' Lear, once again rhyming a word with its own fucking self.
This came abruptly to an end one day when he made an unsuitable advance towards an other man in a public bathhouse.
The monarchy could not accept this public humiliation and so Ludwig Viktor was sent to take a cure at Meran in Tirol. After that he was exiled to his residence at Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg and never again took part in public life.
Like the suicide of the Emperor's son at Mayerling nothing was ever said publicly about the real reason why Ludwig Viktor was banished. He did however outlive his brother,the Emperor and outlive the fall of the monarchy,dying early in 1919. There was no burial in the Habsburg crypt of the Kapuziner church in Vienna. He lies at rest in the small local cemetery near Schloss Klessheim.
Eh? Master rhymes with disaster - the two lines form a sort of coda to the rest of the poem, rather than a direct link to the preceding line.
Anyway, enough about AMW. It might be said that his exile to the wilds of Sandringham equate to being shut in a Box...
I don't think these situations are at all the same. It doesn't sound as if the man Ludwig Viktor approached was harmed by him in any way. Being locked away because you are gay or bisexual is not at all like anything Andrew is accused of.
I can buy that.
(For the record, I quite like The Owl And The Pussycat, though that might just be more enjoyable memories of reading it than actual enjoyment of the poem itself.)