Brits: how much do you hate Americans

[Spray]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Welcome Spray from Sheffield, good first post. (United or Wednesday? When I was a young one I lived in S10, the Hallamshire area.)

this is wired i work at the hallamshire hospital underfrog and a bit of an owls fan dont get to go to the matches that much (job and small child stop me).which is good caus they are £20m in det and playing crap.when did you live in sheffield it chanced abit over the last 2to3 year gone all cosmopolitan,cafe and bars going up all over the place the people dont change, still down to earth northerns. i see you lived in the good part of shef,i started in the crap side Parson cross but drag meself up and out of the gutter to nether edge. if you tell me where you lived i will take some photo and put them up mi old china ,you can have a walk down memory lane? o thanks for the welcome xoxoxoBruce ,
back to the tread ive been to the states drove all around new england flu back home from boston 2 day before the nutters jumped the planes,that was scary, one experince i remenber is going in a shop (store) and the bloke behind the till thought i was german this not a very good thing to say to a englishman so i asked if he was a canadian (to even up the score) i dont now where im going with this so im going to shut up!!!!
Bob dont forget to get shut of the tv!!!!! and read a book.i would recomend 1984 by George Orwell if you cannot find it i will send it you

one last thing i hope kerry wins (sorry bush fans but i look at bush and think mmmmmmmm theres somethin not quite right there!!!!)

[wolf]

Funny, some of us here think the same about Kerry.

I probably have a spare cup of punctuation I can lend you.

[Spray]

I probably have a spare cup of punctuation I can lend you.[/quote]


no thanks ive got a cup of unpuctuation all ready

[Undertoad]

I lived there in 1977-78 when it was Full Monty country... visited last in 1992. Went to Tapton school and regularly took the 60 bus downtown to see the Blades. My step-dad at the time had a grant to compose music for the Grimethorpe Colliery band so we were there on a government grant.

[hockleyman123]

Hey Guys.

Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if you could for the most part tell the difference between a Canadian and an American's accent. I ask this because I plan on visiting London in the coming weeks, and from reading the posts on this site, am somewhat worried that I may experience negative remarks or sentiments from locals.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Welcome to the Cellar, hockleyman.
Depends on which Canuck accent your speaking, eh?
Wear a hockey cap and sew a maple leaf on your coat. If they still run away in terror, then you'll know they think you're American.

[Pie]

eh?

[fargon]

A couple of years ago my wife and I were baby sitting some collage students, and in typical British Upper Class fashion I was reminded that as an American I could not possibly understand culture or the world in general. I had to remind the brat that we Americans kicked thier asses twice, and bailed them out of 2 world wars. That may have been ugly of me but I had enough of his tirade on the stuped American. I personally have had very wonderful times when abroad, and cherish the memorys. People that have problems overseas usuly bring them on themselfs.

[Happy Monkey]

It's not that Americans can't understand the cultures of the world in general. It's that they don't care, unless it involves a war that the Americans won.

[elSicomoro]

Originally Posted by hockleyman123

Hey Guys.

Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if you could for the most part tell the difference between a Canadian and an American's accent. I ask this because I plan on visiting London in the coming weeks, and from reading the posts on this site, am somewhat worried that I may experience negative remarks or sentiments from locals.

Say "SHEH-jule," "PROH-sess" and "uh-BOOT" and you should be fine.

From my experiences with Canadians, they sound like Americans with some different word pronunciations...except those from the Maritimes, where the accents seem more pronounced (like in New England).

[Cyclefrance]

Something tells me that there is a fundamental difference of approach that might explain the frictional misunderstanding that sometimes/often develops between our two cultures.

Put simply, Americans seem to readily embrace systems and processes that improve the way goods are delivered. We Brits tend to think that while these might be good ideas, it is someone else's job to find out if this is really true and to make them work - it is certainly not ours! So the scenario is set for instant dischord

For example, you give us fast food, and we will cock it up monumentally. Not for us the desire to make things happen and to make them happen even better by looking at where we have gone wrong and then improve upon that. No, we would rather gripe at the fact that we have to open another till (point of sale) putting ourselves to all that trouble, for God's sake, just because the bloody customers can't wait a few minutes. Hence we stick to our old quaint ways of waiting on tables, writing down orders on pieces of paper in illegible handwriting, getting the orders mixed-up and then passing them to a cook (chef perhaps) who has no idea how to organise a kitchen (I'm here to cook!) - again, that's someone else's job!

So, poor cousins, you will wait interminably for a meal that ends up half cold when you get it and probably wasn't what you ordered in the first place. The reason you wait so long is because it's being sent back half a dozen times before it reaches your table, in a vain attempt by all those involved in this short yet over-complicated supply chain to get it right, sort-of, eventually.

So as an American, you must wonder at this novel way of conducting both business and life. But at least you know now why it is so expensive - we cannot possibly introduce any cost-saving efficiencies without adding another layer of bureacracy and associated incompetence. This even explains the over-expensive and overlong taxi ride - if the driver isn't going to see you again what's the harm in padding out the journey and adding to the fare. And the fare structure isn't structured in any case to encourage the driver to go for the quick and less costly option (ie wouldn't it make sense/be better to encourage doing three shorter journeys than one long one in the same time scale?) that would prove more attractive to the customer.

We as visitors to your shores will never really appreciate the US style of service and the way it is structured (I, for one, have never got to grips with the tips and taxes thing, but I am sure it is a logical extension of the compartmentalised approach to processes and life). Our arguments in support: how can you possibly get it right in so short a time? - surely you are cutting corners that can only result in a poorer end-product? We don't understand, you see, and when we don't understand we think there is something fishy going on and that then breeds distrust.

We have the same trouble with our attitude to the French only in this case they they are even slower and more resistant to change than us, and, to top it all, we have an even greater language problem. That prompts the conclusion that God knows how the Americans would find the experience of dealing with the French way of life.

Of course, being a laid-back sort of fella, none of this bothers me in the slightest, and I merely observe from a safe and unperturbed distance.

[Trilby]

so, to paraphrase: Brits hate us because of the Big Mac. That's totally fair. It's ruined my life, too.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

That Catwoman person annoyed me -- I see she's not visited this thread for over a year. Very purblind sort of creature.

She makes the usual error, too common in the Old World: she doesn't see the importance, nor the value to her personally, of breaking totalitarians by any means necessary, or indeed any means imaginable, if you want to get fanatical about it: by any means imaginable is the warcry of the fanatic. Western Europe certainly likes democracy, but do they fully understand it? They keep getting socialism into the mixture, and they suffer for it. But that's for another thread.

What these people are missing is that with totalitarianism broken and discredited, there's more room for indigenous democracies to grow and to flourish. And what do we see now? -- too damned much reluctance to uproot the weeds of totalitarianism and cast them upon the fires. After the fires, the ash heap.

Admittedly, we puzzle the world, or at least certain swatches of it, yet matters are simple to explain. We Americans understand we are locked in a war, howbeit never so peculiar. We are determinedly prosecuting this war. Some of us could really stand to offer this effort greater support. The ones who aren't doing this generally misbehave as they do because they think a Republican Administration is a greater enemy than a bunch of non-democrats who labor under a fever-dream of a Caliphate, with one of their number as Caliph. Their own words declare them totalitarians, and the actions of their friends condemn them even more. These are the enemy, dammit, not the Republican Party. The unwillingness of certain parties to acknowledge this point calls their wisdom sharply into question, and their determined unwillingness says they are not merely unwise but crazy as well.

Dealing with such obdurate blockheads is very frustrating. If you ain't gung ho, what are you but a dictator-lover? Anybody need to guess if I'm a dictator-lover?

Our self-made, self-declared enemies are enemies pretty much of everything worthwhile in mankind, and all mankind must hasten to hunt and hang all of these verkrampte imbeciles. Certain people, however, display an embarrassing reluctance to do this and excise these cancers. Take this philosophy to heart: if you aren't a representative democracy or an enlightened constitutional monarchy, you ain't shit, and as a corollary you should expect to have your bad political order exterminated and a better one erected in its place.

[Trilby]

Well, thanks to UG, I've learned my Word of the Day!

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Dealing with such obdurate blockheads is very frustrating. If you ain't gung ho, what are you but a dictator-lover? Anybody need to guess if I'm a dictator-lover?

I've pretty much given up trying to guess what you are.

Howbeit, you seem to envision democracy as 'we pick a country, destroy the goverment, and tell the people they have been liberated'.

Forgetting Saudi Arabia, which is technically an ally until we can figure out a way to remove radiation from oil, there has never been a country invaded by anyone in the past hundred years that was not 'liberated' in the view of the people doing the invading.

Another issue is that some democracies are not representative. Iraq was technically a democracy, and life was good if you were a Baathist. The fact that the goverment did not actually represent the population was irrelevent to the goverment, which had rigged the system to stay in power. Single party goverments rarely pay attention to the needs of a large majority, just enough to stay in power.

Real change comes from within. Right now the Iraqis are struggling with their goverment, partly because change was imposed on them. It would probably have been better for the US to come in to clean up a civil war than to unilaterally invade the country. In effect we tried to peddle democracy like some kind of welfare program where people just sit and wait for the check to come in the mail. As a result, the cost in lives and money continues to grow.

Having someone like you show up with a gun to liberate me without being asked would probably be the worse of two evils. The net effect would probably be similar to how the children in the MOVE and Branch Davidian compounds were liberated by the BATF and police.

As for true democracy in Iraq, we will see how many US bases remain indefinitely after the troops pull out and what happens if the representative government sends us packing and cozys up to Iran. True freedom means the freedom to make choices other people think are bad for you (or them).