Obama Snubs the Brits

[quote]
SpartanX wrote:

Vint Cerf isn’t British, ARPANET wasn’t British, Al Gore isn’t British :p. [/quote]

No, but Tim Berners-Lee, who actually did invent the World Wide Web, is.

[quote]pushharder wrote:

Stupid newbie ass, you don’t even realize your replying to an American.[/quote]

Well, a boy who can’t distinguish the World WIde Web from the Internet, Britain from England, or a transvestite from a woman, shouldn’t be expected to be able to distinguish an American from an Englishman.

[quote]SpartanX wrote:

…The USA has never been an ethnically ‘English’ colony… [/quote]

Gosh, you are absolutely correct. The United States of America was never an English colony. You are a brilliant individual, Sparky.

However, the political entities that eventually became the first States, namely New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were for the most part ethnically English colonies, with admittedly some Dutch and Germans here and there.

Which is all beside the point anyway. Tom asked me to name cultural achievements of Britain, I offered the United States. We weren’t talking demographics here, Sparky.

But whether you like it or not, until about 1783, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence, i.e. the folks who invented the U.S.A., were all Englishmen and British subjects.

Hence my statement stands.

[quote]pushharder wrote:

Ignorant statement of the year for PWI.[/quote]

And yet, my spider-sense tells me that he’s going to outdo himself very soon.

[quote]dhickey wrote:

you forgot one.

Lee–Enfield - Wikipedia [/quote]

My god, you’re absolutely right.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
tom63 wrote:

Name for me a great cultural achievement of Great Britain other than Shepherd’s Pie

Well, let’s see now. Here’s a short list:

The steam engine;
The steam locomotive;
The internal combustion engine;
The jet engine;
The universal joint;
The Land Rover;
The electric motor;
The submarine;
The periscope;
The torpedo;
The depth charge;
Portland cement;
The fax machine;
The gas mask;
The tin can;
The light bulb (Edison only perfected it);
Coordinated assault using armored vehicles, light infantry and fighter-bomber aircraft (Germany only perfected it);
The periodic table of elements;
Penicillin;
Monty Python;
Benny Hill;
Rubber bands;
Thermos containers;
Toilet paper;
The sewing machine;
The vacuum cleaner;
The lawn mower;
The Bessemer process for producing steel;
Television;
Viagra;
The World Wide Web (without which, we wouldn’t be having this conversation);
And finally, the world’s greatest cultural achievement ever, conceived by a bunch of tax-evading, gun-owning, freedom-loving Englishmen: the United States of America.[/quote]

Good ones! but I would argue he was not talking about inventions, but old buildings and a hoity toity attitude of Europe is so much more refined.

We have John Browning, Bill Gates, Tom Edison, George Washington Carver, and Eli Whitney.

Of course we also have bourbon, Jenna Jameson, the atom bomb, and the blues.

Hell, the English rock explosion would have never happened without Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson.

John Browning trumps the Lee Enfield. 50 caliber machine gun, 30 caliber, the 1911, and the Browning automatic rifle were pretty cool.

“Whatever happens, we have got
…the Maxim gun, and they have not”

[quote]tom63 wrote:
John Browning trumps the Lee Enfield. 50 caliber machine gun, 30 caliber, the 1911, and the Browning automatic rifle were pretty cool.[/quote]

Absolutely. Hey, do we get to count Hiram Maxim as one of our own, or not? He was born in the States, but had British citizenship when he invented the Maxim gun, which did a hell of a lot to aid British real estate acquisitions in Africa.

[quote]tom63 wrote:

We have John Browning, Bill Gates, Tom Edison, George Washington Carver, and Eli Whitney.

[/quote]

Fun fact about Eli Whitney. The bastard boned Gen. Nathan Greene’s widowed wife.

mike

Relevant.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/toby_harnden/blog/2009/03/12/no_need_for_dvds_the_gifts_barack_obama_could_have_given_gordon_brown

Care to prove that? The largest percentage English have ever constituted in US history is 48% thats declined ever since.

[quote]SpartanX wrote:
However, the political entities that eventually became the first States, namely New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were for the most part ethnically English colonies, with admittedly some Dutch and Germans here and there.

Care to prove that? The largest percentage English have ever constituted in US history is 48% thats declined ever since.[/quote]

I’m assuming that you got that 48% figure from Wikipedia, which is in turn quoting Meyerink and Purvis, whose methodology is faulty.

These gents, using figures from the 1790 census, tell us that out of the total population of 3,929,326, there were roughly 2,500,000 people of British birth or ancestry (62% of the total population). Of this number, approximately 1,900,000 were “English” (47.5%) as opposed to Welsh, Scottish, or Scots-Irish (Irish Catholics were not included in this demographic).

Now, even if you could accurately estimate ethnic ancestry from the 1790 census data (which you can’t), it doesn’t follow that the proportion of English to other ethnicities wasn’t higher than 47.5 percent at any other time. Certainly, the proportion of English to Dutch in the total colonies was much higher before 1664, when New Holland became the British colony New York (New Holland was called New Holland for the same reason that the northern colonies were called New England: there were mostly Dutch people in the former, and mostly English people in the latter. Go figure).

But the 1790 data can only give us a terribly imprecise estimate, as the census did not actually ask people their ethnicity in 1790: any ethnic identities were extrapolated after the fact by geneologists, by assigning the head of each household one, and only one ancestry based on the presumed origin of their surnames. Even by 1790, many colonists had been in America for five to seven generations, with ancestors from many different countries.

And for the last fucking time, the demographics of the colonies make not a farthing’s worth of difference to what I said originally. To wit:

The United States of America was invented, not by the Huguenots, nor the Dutch, nor the Spaniards, nor the Prussians, nor the Africans, nor the Swedes, nor the Jews, nor even by the American Indians, but by men like Ben Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the “Fathers of our Country,” who were, whether you care to admit it or not,

[center]Tax evading, gun-owning, freedom-loving Englishmen.[/center]

[quote]Magarhe wrote:
Yeah Britain is a mess. Easy to see why people would want to start anew with USA. But now hundreds of years later USA is a bit of a mess. Time to start again?[/quote]

Likely. We’ll see how the next few years go.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
tom63 wrote:

Name for me a great cultural achievement of Great Britain other than Shepherd’s Pie

Well, let’s see now. Here’s a short list:

The steam engine;
The steam locomotive;
The internal combustion engine;
The jet engine;
The universal joint;
The Land Rover;
The electric motor;
The submarine;
The periscope;
The torpedo;
The depth charge;
Portland cement;
The fax machine;
The gas mask;
The tin can;
The light bulb (Edison only perfected it);
Coordinated assault using armored vehicles, light infantry and fighter-bomber aircraft (Germany only perfected it);
The periodic table of elements;
Penicillin;
Monty Python;
Benny Hill;
Rubber bands;
Thermos containers;
Toilet paper;
The sewing machine;
The vacuum cleaner;
The lawn mower;
The Bessemer process for producing steel;
Television;
Viagra;
The World Wide Web (without which, we wouldn’t be having this conversation);
And finally, the world’s greatest cultural achievement ever, conceived by a bunch of tax-evading, gun-owning, freedom-loving Englishmen: the United States of America.[/quote]

You forgot to mention how a little island, for a time, claimed 40% of the earth’s land mass as it’s empire. THAT is no small feat.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/could-obama-be-just-too-awesome/

Maybe Obama is just too awesome for the British to comprehend?

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
You forgot to mention how a little island, for a time, claimed 40% of the earth’s land mass as it’s empire. THAT is no small feat.

[/quote]

Along with having a language which, once spoken by only three million people, is now spoken by over half the inhabitants of this planet.

Of course, all of the things I listed above allowed them to accomplish both of these things, much as the sarissa lance and the Macedonian Phalanx allowed a tiny Greek-speaking backwater province to acquire the largest empire ever seen, and spread Hellenistic culture and language from Egypt to India.

The Romans merely perfected Greek accomplishments, and took over the old Macedonian Empire when it declined. Roman military science, architecture, religion, philosophy, government, and even the Latin language was heavily influenced by the Greeks.

So I guess you could say that just as the Romans owed homage to the Greeks for all of their cultural achievements and doing all the empire-building groundwork for them, so do we as Americans (the modern-day Roman Empire) owe the British for the same.

[quote]hedo wrote:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/could-obama-be-just-too-awesome/

Maybe Obama is just too awesome for the British to comprehend?[/quote]

LOL! And they should bring him Frankensence and Myrrh, too!

Maybe that is the reason for the crappy gift in return: Brown’s failure to give something really on the right level.

Merely a pen made from timbers of the same slave-trade-fighting ship that Obama’s desk is made from just isn’t the appropriate respect.

[quote]tom63 wrote:
aussie486 wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:

mainly dumb septics looking for some culture because they were brought up in a culture vacuum.

Wow, you a really one ignorant prick, why don’t you do us all a favour and go and drink a bucket of bleach.

Yeah, like the average Brit is in a museum all day. I like this inferior culture attitude. You have Dickens, we have Frost.

Name for me a great cultural achievement of Great Britain other than Shepherd’s Pie
[/quote]

I’d go with fish and chips instead of shepherds pie.

I’m not going to start listing works of literature and art from Britain, it’s a waste of time.

I was making a joke. Obviously one that struck a nerve. I love the US. I spend plenty of time there and I work for an American Company therefore I am talking with Americans most of the day.

US tourists in the UK do make me laugh though. They get totally freaked out by the age of everything and spend their whole time telling you that their family comes from some obscure village in yorkshire.

Other than the Aristos I know very few Brits that could tell you about their family past 3 generations. Most Americans tourists that I have met can trace their roots back to the dark ages.

When I tell people that my appartment in London was over 200 years old, they just can’t relate.

[quote]JamFly wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:

As for the Queen, she is there to bring in the tourists, mainly dumb septics looking for some culture because they were brought up in a culture vacuum.

Pretty childish post really.[/quote]

You offended for the royalty or for the Yanks?

At the basic level its true though. I am on principal totaly against the concept of a royal family as head of state, but from a business point of view, they make money for the country by attracting tourists and help international relations with certain countries that are still impressed by the pomp and circumstance.

[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:

When I tell people that my appartment in London was over 200 years old, they just can’t relate.[/quote]

Unless, of course, they come from New England, where 200- or even 300-year old houses are by no means unheard of.

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:

When I tell people that my appartment in London was over 200 years old, they just can’t relate.

Unless, of course, they come from New England, where 200- or even 300-year old houses are by no means unheard of.

[/quote]

Then I take them to the tower of London and point out that it is older than most of the Pyramids in Latin America.

[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:

When I tell people that my appartment in London was over 200 years old, they just can’t relate.

Unless, of course, they come from New England, where 200- or even 300-year old houses are by no means unheard of.

Then I take them to the tower of London and point out that it is older than most of the Pyramids in Latin America.[/quote]

Or you could take them to Canterbury cathedral, which is 400 years older than the Tower. Built almost a thousand years before the first Englishmen set foot on Roanoke Island.