Don’t get too excited: the titles have NOT actually been stripped, he has simply “agreed not to use them.”

From further down the page:

For context: Prince Andrew’s statement earlier said he had taken the decision, with the King’s agreement, to no longer use his titles. Stripping him of his titles would require an act of Parliament - a legal mechanism last used following the First World War.

and further down still:

As a reminder, Prince Andrew has voluntarily decided to stop using his titles. He will remain a prince as it is a title from his birth, as the son of the monarch, with the titles he has since lost only given to him later in life

The nonce formerly known as Duke of York also remains eighth in line to the throne.

A word of caution: do whatever you can to ascertain the actual tastes of the person for whom you are setting up this media access, because you could easily make things worse. You are setting up media for them to consume for hours on end that they will not easily be able to change or to stop. Done wrong, it is the stuff of nightmares.

I don’t want to discourage you in any way. I just want to make it clear that your FIRST task, should you choose to do this, is start with asking around that person’s friends and family about what music and media they actually enjoy, and then get them that, specifically, avoiding anything that differs from it too widely because they will not be able to change the channel or turn it off. What you love may sound like screeching gears to them, so don’t add that. Stick with what you can verify that they like.

A good place to start is their own media collection. If they’re my age, which is to say old, they may have physical media you can flip through, like CDs and books, as well as what is lying around the house, like magazines. What was on their nightstand when they went into the hospital? What was in the player when they last listened to it? When you talk to their adult children, what movies do they remember their mom loved? What song would light her up when she happened to hear it? What era of music does she love best? Was she a radio listener before she became disabled (likes variety, can stand anything that gets played) or an album/playlist listener (like curated content, and perhaps one artist or style of music in a sitting).

If you can’t find any of this out specifically, go for soothing, slow and quiet, but not melancholy, played at LOW VOLUME. Like Bach cantatas on lute, for example, or ambient guitar, not least because neurological conditions can make what used to be pleasant listening actually painful. This vanilla pudding of music may not be your taste, you might even find it repulsive, but it’s a pleasant enough change from silence, and anodyne enough at any volume that it won’t make her worse off if there’s something going on in her brain you don’t know about yet because she has not been able to communicate.

So be careful. Because again, you are about to subject this person to hours of sound on end with no reliable way to switch it off.

You’re doing a wonderful thing. But you’ve got your work cut out for you first. If you get stuck, find out her age for me and I’ll put you together a short, safe list to start with.

I do not think any elected official would go around telling any member of their constituency that they diddles their kids. Not even Trump, nor his appointed cabinet. I don’t see how the town would know about it if the adults do not tell others.

Then you are probably unaware of how proud pedophiles often are of their behavior, how much they like to find and even team up with others of the same tastes, how any iota of self-awareness they possess that might stop them from bragging is generally rendered irrelevant by both their arrogance and mountainous sense of entitlement, how much everyone who actually knows what is going on has a strong disinterest in interfering, and how much non-pedophiles do NOT want to believe or acknowledge even the possibility of the truth of such statements even when they hear or overhear it directly for themselves.

From Jerry Sandusky to Jeffrey Epstein, it’s the same story, over and over again.

In other words, these people talk, sometimes in lightly coded language but often not even bothering, because they do not believe they are in the wrong, they do not believe they will be caught, they think they have every right to do what they do, they like feeling invincible, and if you are the one person who actually has enough of a problem with it to make a stink out of all the countless others who are silently in the know, they’re sure no one will believe you. . . because if someone cares to ask, there’s nothing they can’t talk their way out of. Far too frequently, they are 100% right on all counts.

EDITED to add link that demonstrates the significant number of people that heard, saw, or knew and did nothing, or worse, quietly stood in the way of anyone who wanted to do anything about it, including making the police files go away from the first victim who reported: https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2021/08/14/lawsuit-alleges-ronald-gene-akins-preyed-on-former-basketball-players/8122541002/

You’re right. Young people are drowned in bad news. But part of this is by choice. I don’t consume any form of media in which I am unable to carefully curate my own content, meaning that Meta, X, IG, FB, and the rest are NOT feeding me that shit 24/7 because I like the dopamine hits and can’t put it down.

That’s another thing we can individually do for ourselves instead of waiting for someone else to change it for us. I do care about young people, quite a bit, and historically they as a moral group are on the right side of history. For example, it was the young people that clued the rest of us in that Israel was committing genocide, and worse still, just how overwhelmingly complicit we as a nation (US), our government and our corporations, really are in it. Even I had no idea, and I’ve been paying attention. It is the bravery of the young in openly demonstrating and protesting that has, again, showed the rest of us that there is still a sense of humanity in this nation.

But I can’t curate their media consumption for them.

And yes, I was in my thirties when Columbine happened. And the mere fact that I can pull the name of a wildflower out of my ass twenty-six years later and you know exactly what I mean by it is proof of how deeply it cut at the time. We talked about it daily and it led the news not for weeks but for months. It wasn’t 9/11, but it was close. IF anyone thinks I overreacted to the comment to which I responded above, that is nothing compared to the ostracization that person would have gotten twenty-six years ago.

That, of course, is when there was still an overriding sense of how we each contribute to our own environments, before most social media, and long before anyone got the bright idea to steer public opinion with it, much less the newest and ugliest form of the age-old divide-and-conquer strategy we’re seeing now.

I don’t blame anyone their self-preservation: as you can see from my first paragraph, I certainly engage in it myself. But self-preservation is one thing. Adding fuel to the fire with my own bored disinterest in your pain is quite another. And as you can see, I haven’t done that either.

As for my comment, to be honest I would have just downvoted and moved on, had it not been for the puppet behind them going, “Downvoted for speaking truth!” No, I downvoted because what they wrote was a lazy, dishonest, inhumane, and all around shitty thing to say, with zero truth in it at all. And instead of slinking away, I decided to say WHY I downvoted.

We can’t change the world one at a time. We have to band together. And that actually does happen, far more frequently than the “bad news” that is crafted to discourage us from starting would ever allow you to believe.

But until then, we can each think about how to improve our own experience, and take action to help ourselves that does not involve moving a Columbine-level mass killing to a lazy, bored, “just another day” comment in the language that we choose, or calling it “truth!” when someone else does it.

So let me ask you a question in return. Do you think that in general, readers are helped or collectively harmed by the normalization of horrific acts?

Old enough to know that casually dehumanizing people we don’t know is part of how we got to where we are.

We can’t change what the media does, or what society does. But we CAN change ourselves, and choose not to heap our own thoughtless words onto the pile of disinterest that makes the most horrific acts okay as long as they are done to someone else.

From the article:

Local news, Kare 11, confirmed the shooter’s name was Robin Westman, 23. Westman grew up in Richfield, and Westman’s mother worked at Annunciation school in some capacity. Westman applied in Dakota county to change their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a woman, according to court documents obtained by the Guardian. That request was granted in January 2020.

so just a normal Back to School season in the US of A

For me, it has nothing to do with country. But I am disgusted by your comment just the same. There is nothing “true” about it at all.

1. Mass murder is not normal. Mass shootings of innocents, be they children or churchgoers or shoppers or clubgoers, are never normal. Even if they happen daily – and the US may well be reaching that point – they will NEVER be anything short of aberrant in the most vile way, regardless of the country in which they occur.

In case this isn’t clear, and to illustrate just how lazy your cheap potshot is, I’d like to reframe it in terms of Gaza: the schoolchildren shot in Gaza as they run toward food, terrified to go but too hungry not to run into the shooting zone, is that too just business as usual for you?

For me, the killings of Gazans are equally as evil and unnecessary as any other murder – and murder is exactly what that is – thus I do not make low-effort cracks about them, or Ukrainians, or literally anyone who is murdered just trying to live their lives. That is my genuine position on the murder of innocents, so particularly lazy and disinterested cracks like yours stand out.

2. By calling a school shooting “normal” YOU are literally normalizing it in your own language.

3. Your apparent boredom with the murder of children is revolting.

4. Your censure toward the actual villains (the shooter, the society that missed or could not adequately address the warning signs, the corrupt politicians who flatly refuse to address the problem even after DECADES of citizens begging for some level of gun control, the culture that crushes the most vulnerable among us to the point they snap, etc) is entirely missing.

Pick one. Take a lazy potshot at THAT instead.

Hence my downvote, and I regret I have only one to give.