The smug English

[Fuji]

@Scumpup

Hitler had bigger things to think about than the UK.

That’s kind of like saying, “I’ve got bigger things to think about than lung cancer.” Not too sharp of Mr. Gröfaz.

Following The Miracle of Post-Retreat from Dunkirk Spin Doctoring, you were in a position to fight defensively from your island and little else.

“Little else”? :dubious: Sure, other than the Med and North Africa. Oh, and Commando raids on occupied Europe, as in Norway and France. And the SOE also operating all over the Continent, with the assassination of Heydrich amongst their many achievements. There was also this thing called Bomber Command…

Germany’s concentration on the Eastern Front and goofy leadership decisions were your salvation.

Personally, I’d say Dönitz not getting his 300 U-boat fleet was really the key to Britain staying in the war until Barbarossa.

[Velocity]

@MostlyUseless

For months a couple of years ago, two English workers at my office constantly made jokes about how stupid America was regarding healthcare. This went on for many days and finally I popped a cork and suggested that if England were so fucking great, why didn’t they catch a flight back or STFU.

I would tell them, “At least our country advanced out of the World Cup group stage.”
Edit: I see, this was years ago.

[TBG]

I’d rather have a trillion too many guns than a bunch of banned porn. It may not be porn that suits my tastes, but I’ll defend it to the death, with my gun.
Wait… I don’t have a gun…

whoops

Anyway, suck it, limeys.

[Octarine]

Come on, guys! Around page 2 or so this was shaping up to be a really entertaining US/UK cage fight to the death, and then everyone started being intelligent and joking about stuff. Sheesh.

I see US-UK relations like the endless cat people vs dog people fight. Sure, cats and dogs are actually remarkably similar pets, both being cute furry mammals, and the aforementioned cat and dog people really should be teaming up on fish people or iguana people, but instead they zero in on whatever minor differences they find and rehash it again and again.

[BlankSlate]

The British have an inferiority complex, and it’s well earned.

[Filbert]

@Novelty_Bobble

At the time they were penned they were statements of fact and the writers of the time were not the type to be shy about it.

Actually, the lyric is ‘Britannia, rule the waves’, not ‘rules’. It’s an aspiration, not a statement of fact.

[BlankSlate]

Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves!
Britons buy, sell and trade the slaves.
Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves!
Britons buy, sell and trade the slaves.

[handsomeharry]

@QuickSilver

In all fairness, Americans are miopic when it comes to greater social conscience, and they do cling to guns and religion compared to most first world countries we call our friends, i.e. Canada and England, to name just two.

So while you may be right in that your English friends are being smug/rude, they are not wrong on these particular issues.

WTF are you on about, in re ‘the greater social conscience’?
That is too vague to mean anything in this thread. In short, it is a crock of shit. The Americans ‘social conscience’ does not intersect with what you want. Tough shit.

Guns are a remedy against tyranny and for self defense. We have chosen to accept the breakage to keep our weapons in responsible hands. How the UK chooses to deal with oppressive police and/or crime when the police are just as likely to kill one as a felon is, we don’t know, or care.
For socialized medicine, of course, a socialized medicine country has solved the problem. The whole of the US has not chosen that route. (Excluding Obamacare, I guess).
Point being, the UKers are being smug pricks about having what they want, saying that the US is deficient in not having what the UKers want them to have. They are ‘the Ugly Englishman’.

[foolsguinea]

@njtt

Well, America really is really, really, really stupid about both healthcare and guns. Sorry you guys are so fucked up, but it has very little to do with your country’s size, or with bears.

I’m a Yank myself, and this, so much.

As for top of the food chain, I think I’ve eaten bear, and never been eaten by one. So whatever.

(Seriously, though, there aren’t even that many mid-sized cats left in my part of the USA, let alone bears. The existence of bears in the west really doesn’t explain the failure to control after-market gun sales and straw purchasers.)

[foolsguinea]

@Jack_of_Words

You’d be most welcome. We like to laugh at ourselves. Weinvented satire [snip]

Whatever, Pavel. :rolleyes: (Voltaire and Machiavelli are trying to figure out if you’re trying to be “satirical” there.)

@Scumpup

The difference is that it’s cute when I do it.

Nothing cute about you in this thread.

@Bruce_Wayne

But, when your sitting on an island of a continent whose megafauna is largely extinct and your critical of gun culture around someone from say Montana or Alaska where owning a rifle makes more sense than not owning one by any objective standard, then not only do you look smug, you also look like an idiot.

What megafauna is there on the eastern seaboard? Alligators and dogs?

@Saintly_Loser

Apparently it’s common at Harvard for students there, American and otherwise, to kind of look down on America a bit.

Other parts of the USA, too. Especially among Anglophiles, probably.

@Tibby or Not Tibby

And, all their pets are named “Rupert.”

Those aren’t pets! :eek:

And speaking of pets, you won’t find many dogs in England. Rover and Fido and Rex and Snotsie are much too uncouth for delicate English constitutions. All you find in English homes are cats. Nothing but cats. A few hedgehogs here and there, but otherwise nothing but cats. Everyone in England has a cat and usually many. If you do run into (or better still, over) the rare dog in England, It’ll be some cat-like sissy dog, like QE2’s corgis. *Barksie warksie… *

Right, then, this is just backwards.

And, don’t get me started on those pretentious Nutty Professor upper central incisors that never fully fit inside their mouths.

I associate that with Yanks and Japanese, oddly. Or maybe just Jerry Lewis and Tojo.

@Octarine

I see US-UK relations like the endless cat people vs dog people fight. Sure, cats and dogs are actually remarkably similar pets, both being cute furry mammals, and the aforementioned cat and dog people really should be teaming up on fish people or iguana people, but instead they zero in on whatever minor differences they find and rehash it again and again.

Like in the Abrahamic religions, that which is most similar to you but not loyal to you is the most picked-at enemy, in order to maintain distinction or something.

@handsomeharry

Guns are a remedy against tyranny and for self defense. We have chosen to accept the breakage to keep our weapons in responsible hands. How the UK chooses to deal with oppressive police and/or crime when the police are just as likely to kill one as a felon is, we don’t know, or care.

Are…are you claiming that private gun ownership is decreasing killings by police in the USA? Because that’s the opposite of what the police apologists are saying in the killer cop threads…

[Your_Great_Darsh_Face]

@BlankSlate

Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves!
Britons buy, sell and trade the slaves.
Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves!
Britons buy, sell and trade the slaves.

Buy, sell and trade? Wow.

I seem to recall that the British had stopped buying, selling and owning slaves quite a few years before some less enlightened countries got around to examining the line about “all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with…” and so on.

[BlankSlate]

That moral high ground lies upon a grain of sand on the desert floor.

[Novelty_Bobble]

@Velocity

I would tell them, “At least our country advanced out of the World Cup group stage.”
Edit: I see, this was years ago.

Doesn’t matter. the OP could have confidently predicted that scenario and even the most rabid England supporter would have had to agree. Our football supporting habits are a curious blend of unwarranted hope and fatalism.

[BOOM]

@Frank

This is, at best, revisionist history. The retrieval of British troops from Dunkirk (and a large number of French troops as well) meant that Britain had a defensive ability for a land invasion. This immediately shuttered the nascent German plans for a seaborne invasion of Britain, and passed the ball to Goering’s Luftwaffe, with results known to all. Hitler did not invade the USSR until over a year later, after a possible invasion of Britain had proved impossible.

tbf, I think the Royal Navy held quite some sway in the matter of invasion - see numerous threads.

Agree, there was a tricky year between Dunkirk and Barbarossa.

[Jackmannii]

Americans are just jealous because they don’t have a nifty Royal Press Charter like the Brits.

[Jackmannii]

Not to pile on (well, maybe a little) but there’s a timely op-ed on the subject of British smugness and snobbery in today’s New York Times (entitled “British Noses, Firmly in the Air”). My favorite quote:

“The unjustly powerful and hopelessly middle-brow United States, of course, remains a British obsession, blamed for everything from “American Idol” and Black Friday, to Internet porn and obesity, as if the pub, Christmas sales, soggy fries and the full British breakfast (bready sausage, bacon, baked beans, eggs and bread fried in fat) were all imports form the old colony, where every person, Britons seem convinced, packs at least a pistol, if not a submachine gun.”

[Emtar_KronJonDerSohn]

@Bryan_Ekers

I live in a Canadian province bigger than Texas and we have single-payer health insurance and far fewer per-capita gun deaths.

Yet 95% of your country’s population huddles against our border, basking in our warm glow and pathetically hoping to blend in.

Go play some hockey or something, eh.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Guinastasia

coughirishfamineindianempireboerwarbloodysundayolivercromwell

Cromwell? While not particularly caring to defend him or the Protectorate, how exactly does he fit in here?

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Jackmannii

There is also the lamentable lack of ice for drinks, but that would be piling on.

And did Charles Ryder really drink room-temperature gin and vermouth on the train? I think…I very much fear… No! I must be misrembering.

[SanVito]

@Jackmannii

Not to pile on (well, maybe a little) but there’s a timely op-ed on the subject of British smugness and snobbery in today’s New York Times (entitled “British Noses, Firmly in the Air”). My favorite quote:

“The unjustly powerful and hopelessly middle-brow United States, of course, remains a British obsession, blamed for everything from “American Idol” and Black Friday, to Internet porn and obesity, as if the pub, Christmas sales, soggy fries and the full British breakfast (bready sausage, bacon, baked beans, eggs and bread fried in fat) were all imports form the old colony, where every person, Britons seem convinced, packs at least a pistol, if not a submachine gun.”

Sadly American idol was a US remake of a British show called Pop Idol. So we can only blame ourselves for that one. And pubs, chips and the full British breakfast are points of national pride. What a weird article.