Whatever. It was a comparison. You were wrong, were called on it, and got snooty rather than retracting your statement or rewording it. No skin off my nose.
You were theorising that two ‘races’ of British people existed - a tall slender race with lots of head hair and a short husky bald race. This bears an awful similarity to theories of superior and inferior races, like that of Aryan ubermenschen and Semitic untermenschen, even down to the particular physical characteristics you used to separate your two ‘races’.
Another example of supposed superior and inferior races was the Belgian perception of two separate races of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Once again, the fraudulent separation was made on grounds of height, slenderness and so on (apparent head size, “africanness” of facial features).
I never used the phrase “less-than-human”, but your theory proposes a clear split between generally desirable characteristics (tall, slender, head hair) and generally undesirable characteristics (short, stocky, bald) that smacks of racial theories like untermensch-ubermensch and Hutu-Tutsi.
You tried to be sneaky.
Your word, untermensch, translates in google as “under human being”.
And is further defined here.
You used it in an oblique referebce to Phil Collins, which you wrongly attributed to me.
Nowhere in the OP do I talk about race. That seems to be all you can talk about.
I take it you mean I was sneaky about your comparison? No. You said you made no such comparison. Now you admit you made such a comparison. No sneakiness or snarkiness involved. Let’s just leave the matter where it lies and get to the real issue.
Untermensch and Ubermensch translate as “underman” and “overman”, roughly. They’ve also been translated as “subhuman” and “superhuman”. The words have some real historical and philosophical baggage that can’t really be understood with a quick google definition. However, I think your references to a tall, slender physical type with nice hair and a short husky bald physical type fit extremely well in this historical and philosophical sense, along with the silly concepts of an Aryan-Semitic split and a Tutsi-Hutu split.
You talked about Phil Collins, and you called him short, bald and husky. This is in your OP. Where’s the incorrect attribution? And as I recall, I referred to Phil Collins as “Phil Collins”, for example in my post 56 - hardly an “oblique reference”. If you think I’m making this up, read the thread again, or call a mod.
Also in your OP, you talked about two separate “physical types” in Britain. My contention is that one may call it race or physical types, but it boils down to the same thing - one group of people with desirable characteristics, one group with undesirable characteristics. This is very similar to the Aryan-Semitic split and Tutsi-Hutu split.
I think I see where you are coming from now. You are asking if the present population of England is the result of past immigration into that lang of two recognizably distinct ethnic groups or “races”. Given that there are large populations in England from various European countries, form Africa, from the Indian Subcontinent, from Asia (north and south), and probably quite a few other places, wouldn’t it be fairly obvious that the answer to your question is “No”?
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I’ll go look at your other comparisons in a bit.
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I’ve got a better idea; how about if you set out a comprehensive set of objective descriptors for your two basic types? - I think we’ll find that, while we can find people that fit either category really well, we’ll also find people that almost fit in one category, but have one or two features from the other category, people that sort of fit in one category, well, more than the other and people that don’t fit very well in either.
England is not an island. And I can’t take seriously any suggestion that it has somehow managed to produce two distinct types without any inter-breeding with the rest of the British Isles or Europe as a whole. Or do these two types cover the entire continent?
However; my intensive overnight research has indeed drawn the definite conclusion that there are two types of English people.
The male type.
The female type.
Further research is required to determine if this remarkable state of affairs is peculiarly English, or something we can see in other populations.
While the question as a whole is a bit ridiculous - if there were only two types of male one would spend half the time trying to remember where you’d last seen the person - I would agree that you tend to get large numbers of skinnier, effete chaps, and large numbers of bigger, balding blokish blokes too. But surely that’s down to hormones and lifestyle.
All this speculation is negated by the wealth of types in between the two categories - which in my eyes seem to equate simply to ‘wuss’ and ‘hard nut’ - which surely exist in all countries. After all, all the women over here are the afore-mentioned ‘English Rose’…I wish…
I think there is a modicum of confusion in the OP which hasn’t been helped by the amount of people only joining the discussion to have a dig at mangeorge.
The comparison to Peru doesn’t help as that seems to be referring to distinctly different races where as the two original subjects mentioned (Phil Collins and Tim Henman) are both primarily caucasian.
The differences in their build is probably mainly just due to different body types explained here.
Continuing the comparison to the Peru statistics here is a link showing recent (last few years) census information that says that the Ethnicity breakdown of England and Wales is 91% white, 4.4% south asian and 2.2 % black.
What I think the OP was really trying to get at was the genetic ethnic history of the English people. Due to the amount of times in history that England has been invaded (Roman, Germanic, Danish and Norman) and conquered there exists a very complex array of appearances.
To conclude, if you took a random sample of English, primarily caucasian (to simplify the process) people they would no more split into two simple categories than if you took a random sample of northern american caucasians.
Maybe someone with relevant expertise can expand on the Genetic history of the English people.
I certainly would not be surprised if it has been (or is in the future) shown that there’s geographic clustering still present, eg of Viking ancestory in the North East. Regionally-specific surnames are often still to be found strongly grouped in their original locality.
(And I believe Godwin’s Law applies to Atticus Finch’s misreading of the OP)
Your ‘theory’ that there are only two types of males in England.
How do e.g. black or Chinese people born here fit in to your ‘theory’? Or do you have some weird definition of ‘English’?
Charles has around 50% non-English ancestry. Do explain how this makes him ‘English’.
So my Scottish genes count as ‘English’, huh? You do know the difference between England and Britain, right?
We agree TV programs are generally unscientific. Yet apparently that’s where you get your evidence from, since you’ve never been here.
The point is that the Upper Classes do produce offspring with the proles, whether they acknowledge it or not. you said they didn’t.
For the purpose of this discussion, such as it is, the subject of Prince Charles brings very little to the table. He is, to a significant extent, the result of a centuries old pan-European exercise in inbreeding. Fortunately, the cult of royals only marrying other royals seems to be largely disappearing.
Ah, but there you go again. You, not me, are labeling the shorter, more prone to balding, and huskier (ammended to "rounder headed btw) traits as undesirable.
You’re pretty good at this spin stuff, but not that good.
The oblique reference is where you insinuated that I referred to Collins as untermensch, in a context that clearly relates to the nazi meaning of the word. Little footnotes don’t negate that insinuation.
We, in the US, have ( )-american, often simplified to american. Do some people in England refer to people of mixed ancestry as ( )-english? Charles must then have around 50% english ancestry, and lives in England so I think of him as english. I used him as an example because he’s pretty well known.
Not evidence. I’m asking, not telling. I gave movies as an example of how limited my info was. That’s why I asked, not told.
If I said that the UC didn’t produce offspring with the proles, I didn’t realize it. That would indeed warrant a :dubious:. I have read that many of these offspring were either not acknowledged, sent off to the colonies, or whatever.
Basically, no. The issues of identity and ethnic background in this country are far too complex for people to accept the black-and-white presentation of blank-English.
(An exception to this rule is ‘Black British’, used in statistical monitoring and suchlike, but not a term people generally use to describe themselves.)
There’s a problem here. The OP is seeing some general physical traits and equating them to ethnicity. There’s not basis for that. There are wide ranges of physical types in any ethnic group that hasn’t been isolated.
