Re: Royal toadying
Posted: Wed Mar 13, 2024 8:34 pm
There was a time, not that long ago, when mainstream-news consumers pitied people who had succumbed to the sprawling conspiracies of QAnon. Imagine spending your days parsing “Q Drops,” poring over cryptic utterances for coded messages. Imagine taking every scrap of new information and weaving it into an existing narrative. Those poor, deluded, terminally online saps. What a terrible modern affliction.
And then some of my friends became Kate Middleton truthers.
In January, the British Royal Family announced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, had needed surgery for unspecified, noncancerous abdominal issues, and that her recovery would take longer than originally expected. She would therefore not resume public duties until after Easter. For several weeks, that explanation sufficed. But by late February, half the internet seemed to be speculating over her whereabouts, using the favored format of conspiracists everywhere: just asking questions. An absence is filled with puzzlement—what aren’t we being told?—and then larded with a garnish of suspicion. Why are they hiding the truth from us?
In the past few weeks, my WhatsApp groups have been taken over by friends wondering what is wrong with the Princess of Wales. American acquaintances, perhaps assuming that my Britishness gives me some mystical connection to the Windsors, have started texting me for updates. Everyone has a theory. Everyone wants to know.
But it’s more than that: Everyone also seems mystified by the simple fact of not knowing. We have become so used to smartphone surveillance, oversharing on social media, and the commercial harvesting of life events for content that the prospect of remaining uninformed about the state of a stranger’s intestines now seems like a personal affront. On March 4, a grainy photograph of Kate traveling in the passenger seat of a car with her mother, Carole, began to circulate, but it did not stop the speculation. Did her face look weird if you zoomed in to 20 times magnification? (Yes, but then so would anyone’s.) Where was Prince William? (Maybe with their kids?) Was the photo staged, as in Weekend at Bernie’s? (Come on.) Just to add fuel to the fire, that picture was not widely circulated in Britain. Again: What aren’t we being told? Why are they hiding the truth from us?
Over the weekend, the frenzy intensified when Kensington Palace released a photograph, supposedly taken by Prince William last week, of Catherine with her three children. Within hours, TikTok was full of momfluencers earnestly discussing the clumsy signs of editing on Prince Louis’s patterned sweater. Someone on X (formerly Twitter) put the photo in an online tool that deemed it AI-generated. Someone else claimed, in a post that went viral, that the photo had been taken in November, based on the family involved wearing the same clothes that they did on a trip to a food bank—edited to be different colors, for some reason. Another person jumped in to say that the shrub behind them was suspiciously green for early spring in England. And—oh, look—she didn’t appear to be wearing her wedding ring.
These assertions sounded plausible, and the sheer volume of them was self-reinforcing. But when I stopped to think, my brain somehow rewired itself. Why did I instantly believe in such a thing as an online tool that can precisely calculate the probability of a photograph being AI-generated? Why would Kensington Palace cunningly edit a white sweater to be navy—and then leave telltale signs of fakery, such as Princess Charlotte’s impossible sleeve? When I read a suggestion that Kate’s face had been lifted from her Vogue cover portrait, the spell broke. Maybe the faces looked the same … because they belonged to the same person?
No one will be more concerned about the extraordinary arrest in Paris yesterday of flamboyant bachelor Francois-Marie Banier, who is accused of fleecing the L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt of £850 million, than film-maker David Rocksavage, a.k.a. the Marquess of Cholmondeley. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... quess.html
Youngian wrote: ↑Sun Mar 17, 2024 6:48 pm This conspiracy stems from her hubby being in a lavender marriage but in reality living with a ‘flamboyant bachelor’ and high class swindler in Paris. The Mail was on the case back in 2010.David Rocksavage, is that "peggy's" trade name?
No one will be more concerned about the extraordinary arrest in Paris yesterday of flamboyant bachelor Francois-Marie Banier, who is accused of fleecing the L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt of £850 million, than film-maker David Rocksavage, a.k.a. the Marquess of Cholmondeley. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... quess.html
Andy McDandy wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 9:48 am It's up there with a piece I saw in the Times when lockdowns began - how to ensure your kids get the best home tuition from the servants. Even with the parents and kids all locked up together, the idea of doing something as common as looking directly after them was...ugh.I don't pay £46,000 in school and adventure camp fees and expect to have to meet my offspring!