{"id":26818,"date":"2014-07-15T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T05:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26818"},"modified":"2014-07-14T14:11:21","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T19:11:21","slug":"qotd-king-george-iiis-minor-fit-of-barking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/15\/qotd-king-george-iiis-minor-fit-of-barking\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: King George III’s minor fit of barking"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a painful thing to confront someone whom one is accustomed to respecting, and to tell that person they are barking mad. Usually one avoids it, or dismisses the other\u2019s strange behavior as \u201ca difference of opinion,\u201d and speaks platitudes about \u201cthe importance of diversity,\u201d however when a person is going, \u201cArf! Arf!\u201d right in your face, there is no way around it. This includes governments, when they become barking mad.<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson knew this, when he quilled the Declaration of Independence, listing King George\u2019s barking mad behaviors, however there has been a recent, revisionist effort to show that King George the Third wasn\u2019t all that bad, and his blue urine wasn\u2019t due to porphuria, and his spells of foaming at the mouth were but minor episodes, especially when he was young and was busily losing the American colonies. (I think this may in part be due to the fact that porphuria is hereditary, and certain people don\u2019t want the rabble giving Prince Charles appraising looks.)<\/p>\n

The argument states that, if you could get an audience at his glittering palace, King George was quite lucid, and even charming, and that the points he raised, about the government\u2019s right to tax, are valid to this day. There is even some reproach towards America and Jefferson for failing to understand King George\u2019s points.<\/p>\n

However taxation was not the issue. Taxation without representation was the issue. When one looks back with twenty-twenty hindsight, the solution to the problem seems simple: Simply give the thirteen colony\u2019s thirteen elected representatives in Parliament. It seems like such an obvious thing, to give Englishmen abroad the same rights as Englishmen at home, and seems so conducive to unity and the expansion of an unified kingdom, that to switch the subject to the-right-of-the-government-to-tax seems a sleight of hand bound to stub thumbs, to lead to schism, and to create discord out of harmony. It was, in fact, a barking mad thing for King George to do.<\/p>\n

Caleb Shaw, “Barking Mad \u2013 A rave, prompted by facing insane heating costs”, Watts Up With That?<\/em><\/a>, 2014-07-14.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is a painful thing to confront someone whom one is accustomed to respecting, and to tell that person they are barking mad. Usually one avoids it, or dismisses the other\u2019s strange behavior as \u201ca difference of opinion,\u201d and speaks platitudes about \u201cthe importance of diversity,\u201d however when a person is going, \u201cArf! Arf!\u201d right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,84,7,41,13],"tags":[906,396,458,506,118],"class_list":["post-26818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-mentalhealth","tag-monarchy","tag-parliament","tag-revolution","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Yy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26819,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26818\/revisions\/26819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}