Hi 172. This is a Peruvian Engineer making coments about Fujimori. I think that is not very kind from you to block my IP. I think that in politics, there are many opinions; no one cam imposs an opinion. We have to make the efforts to agree in a political issue like Fujimori´s page. For my contribuitons I have received adjetives and insults from the user "viajero". Lets make the effort to be objetive.
I will appreciate unbloking any IP address on the Fujimori page.
Regards,
Agosto 14 2003, Lima Peru
What-ho... you might want to cast your eyes upon Boxer Rebellion. Hopefully your righteous anger will kindle into a mighty blaze which will cleanse it of the stain of POV. Graft 14:17 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I will sooner or later get around to writing a Great Depression (United Kingdom) article I'm still doing some research. Changing the subject, just out of interest 172 which country are you from. I've always assumed that youre a Brit G-Man 23:28 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks. Yeah it is strange that royal pages seem to attract the weirdest of contributors. One thing I found strange when researching royalty academically is how well it works in terms of bonding people to a state.
Having started out as a republican, I found myself in my studies concluding that monarchies actually work better than republics! It is as if people personally have an emotional attachment with a monarchy that they rarely have with a republic's president. So whereas presidents tend to for the most part be boring ex-politicians, monarchs produce a personal bond and human identification that seems to transend political loyalties or intellectual reasoning. For example, when Prince William ascends the British throne, people will know him. Many will remember when he was born, his childhood, his dignity on the death of his mother, his first girlfriend, his wedding, his children, etc. They will see him as a friend (even though they never met him) in a way a President Neil Kinnock, a President Tony Blair, a President John Major can never hope to match. So as a personification of a state, a monarch works far better than a president. Put simply, a monarch feels like a friend for life, a president an acquaintance for a term of 5 or 7 years.
Indeed curiously, because it is a lifetime vocation, not a term of office, more people will meet a monarch that can ever hope to meet a president. Personally I know Irish presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese because I interviewed them. But I have met the Prince of Wales, the late Princess of Wales, Prince William, the Duke of York, etc not from seeking them out but because I happened to be in the right place at the right time when they attended a function. And they aren't even my country's royal family! (Actually I have met Bill Clinton as often as I met Mary McAleese!) It is hard to explain but that human aspect seems to be the special something that presidents lack. I remember my grandmother, an avowed Irish republican who kept a picture of republican Padraig Pearse in her prayerbook, remembering hearing about the death of King George VI and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, remembering the birth of Prince Charles, etc. I remember Ireland quite literally stopping to watch Charles and Chronicle reporting visits by the King and Queen of Spain to a local historic site, Newgrange the same week as a visit by President Cossiga of Italy. Cossiga got 10 people and coverage on page 19. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia got page 1 and hundreds of cheering people!
Similarly while I have an academic knowledge of Mary McAleese's job as President of Ireland, I know far more about Queen Elizabeth; her superb mimickry (which apparently is genuinely first rate. I know that one top British satirist who, having seen her at a dinner party 'doing' Margaret Thatcher, said that if the monarchy was abolished tomorrow, he would hire her for her TV show, such is her talent). Though not very highly educated, 50 years of 'doing the boxes' (ie reading cabinet and foreign office papers. She has spent 3 hours a day, 365 days a year since February 1952 reading all the crucial documents, confidential briefings, cabinet minutes, notes from ambassadors, etc) has made her probably the world's most well-briefed person on international affairs, able to give Blair advice based on something Churchill, Truman, Macmillan, Thatcher, Kennedy, de Gaulle, Brezhnev, Trudeau, Gorbachev and hundreds of world leaders have said to her; she is for example very close to Nelson Mandela, has been briefed by Bob Geldof and Bono on African debt relief and has been doing the boxes since before Blair was born!) While she rarely intervenes in debates, when she does not merely Tory but Labour cabinets have been known to listen carefully and even do u-turns on the basis of what she says. (In 1976 and 1979, the Callaghan and Thatcher cabinets did u-turns on policy towards Rhodesia based on her advice. The Lancaster House agreement that created Zimbabwe came because of her role in reigning in (no pun intended!) Thatcher's pro-white opinions!)
Monarchy is really really strange in that regard. In theory it is undemocratic and out of date. In practice, with the right monarch, it works far better than any presidency, a conclusion in my studies I never expected to reach. It is unlikely, for example, that a Spanish president could have stopped the 1981 coup the way King Juan Carlos did. He was able to call on symbolism, history, personality etc to say to the coup leaders 'no' and have wavering army officers do what "the King" says. It is unlikely that any British president could draw the crowds to his lying-in-state that Britain's Queen Mother did (or keep working until after their 100th birthday, which that astonishing woman did. A journalist colleague of mine, an avoided republican, was physically exhausted trying to keep up with the Queen Mum (then 99) at a public function. He is 43!). Or draw the 1 million + that turned out for the Golden Jubilee celebrations in the Mall. (It is reckoned 10 million people were involved in some Jubilee related event. That's one in every five in Britain.)
You only have to look at the vast crowds drawn to the funeral of Empress Zita of Austria. She died in the late 1980s. Her husband left the throne in 1918!!! Or the public mourning for Queen Maria José of Italy, who died only a couple of years ago. The Italian monarchy was abolished in 1946! Or the crowds that flock to King Michael I of Romania every time he returns home. He lost his throne in 1947. The hundred thousand people who went to see the arrival home of Crown Prince Alexander to Serbia, the election of Simeon II to become his country's prime minister (by a landslide) or recent opinion polls that suggest 40% of Russians want a return of the tsar as a constitutional monarch. Even the incompetent meddlesome exiled King Constantine II of Greece is a live issue in his former kingdom, with 1/3 of people in 1974 voting to keep him even after he had provoked a disaster. Even after they stripped him of his personal property and passport, called him Constantine Gluckberg and 2/3 of the population voted for a republic, political leaders go mad at the prospect that as a former one time Olympian, he might visit Greece for the Olympic Games!
Which gets back to the fundamental point, why do the royal pages draw such weird contributors? I suspect it is because of that strange personal aspect of monarchy. People don't really care what Article x or y of the US, Irish, French etc constitution says about a president's powers. But because of the personal aspect of monarchy, whether you are for or against monarchy, you feel you know things about it. So Royal Prerogative isn't something to do with stuffy law, it is to do with royalty, and, sure doesn't everyone know about royalty, good or bad? Divine Right of Kings, ditto. Henry VIII and Queen Victoria were people not institutions and so you think you understand them and all about them. It engenders personal feelings in a way clinically cold republics rarely can do. Occasionally a president may indeed achieve that (Robinson in Ireland, Pertini in Italy, Weisacker in Germany, Havel in the Czech Republic) but it is usually a once off. Whereas it is constant in monarchies. From Elizabeth I (the faerie Queene) to Mary, Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette in France to Zita in Austria, the personality response draws on human emotion. (How many songs are there about presidents, and how many about famous kings and queens? And through that, royalty, however much they make no sense intellectually, engender a response even on the pages of wiki, where pages on royalty draw contributors who think they instinctively know facts. Even when, as Hlavec's contributions show, they actually don't have a goddamned clue what they are talking about. Well, that's my theory anyway. lol FearÉIREANN 04:04 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I know. I just defended you on the vandalism in progress page. Just remember, don't let PP set your emotional agenda. That was Vera Cruz's trick. (Not that I'm good at following that instruction myself, mind!) It is all too easy for Adam to pull the "poor poor me" trick. Be clinically neutral, so that anyone coming to the page can see that. It is a deep pity that Adam, who is a bright intelligent chap, after weeks of good work as PP, is slipping back to old ways. (Is he bored being the good boy and wants to start some fights again, and have the fun of being banned, re-appearing, being caught again, rebanned, etc?) I'm disappointed having trusted him so much that he has let himself down again. Let him in his own time disintergrate. When it happens everyone will see it and it will be 'bye bye Adam' again, except this time for good. lol FearÉIREANN 04:26 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Abe - please email me so that I have your email address. I really need to send you a critical note but I don't want the world to read it if possible. Use the "email user" function on my user page. --mav
Yes youre right the British Monetary Crisis article is indeed POV dross, and the (obviously not British) writer has made several glaring factual errors. Perhaps it should be renamed something like "Monetarist explanations for the Great Depression" or something similar. That said, I'm sure most monetarists would wince at the content of that article. Have you got any ideas on what to do about it?.
Changing the subject, Tampa, Florida hey, I didn't think you were American (a Canadian perhaps) because political outlook/views like yours are hardly common in America, you must be quite a rare breed G-Man 18:20 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Very interesting comments! I'll get back to you about them. I've done a bit of a rewrite of the opening of the Catholicism page. The opening paragraphs were almost incomprehensible, not to mention monumentally wrong, and some new user came along and made them worse by far. It is hard anyone could do an article on Catholicism and not mention things like Apostolic Succession, the Vatican, etc. It is a bit like doing a history of the USSR and forgetting Stalin. Have a look at the rewrite and see what you think. I think it reads far far better and is far more accurate. FearÉIREANN 00:34 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I was putting this tongue-in-check bit on the Temp page when wiki went live again. Its about Fred-ipedia. You might enjoy it.
I've temporarily protected New Imperialism. The reasons are on its talk page. FearÉIREANN 14:43 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
There's a vote at the Village Pump (Jeez it sounds funny saying that, parish pump politics and all that!) on PP linking to the New Imperialism page. You might be interested in casting a vote.
Will you protect Chavez before you go? I would but I am a contributor to the text there and the text that idiot is trying to remove is mine so I cannot do the protecting. FearÉIREANN 15:23 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hi - when you protect a page, can you add it to Wikipedia:Protected pages, please? There's no automatic log of protected pages, so this helps to keep track of them. Cheers--Camembert
I'll take a look when I get home, Abe. First, work. (Alas.) Tannin