Anglosphere

Preposition - perhaps that's because the legal minimum age for alcohol in Europe is 18. Anyway, smoking and drinking can be evil, sure. But sex? Oh lordy.

By the way, the US does NOT use the Parliamentary system. Most large countries do, in one form or another. The best way to explain this would be to see where Prime Ministers are the Executives, so not the US or France, but Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia and of course, Blighty. I suppose the list could be longer but I can’t be arsed.

There is often a debate that rears its invariably boring head about the UK's House of Lords, which remains unelected and appointed. Personally, I think it's better this way, because the life-peer system takes the usual vote-getting bollocks out of the situation. Obviously, it's technically not democratic...

Ignoring Adam, as we all do, another big factor is the export of people from the mother country to the colonial country. One of the reasons the British and their descendants were able to overrun most of North America despite early competition from the French and the Spanish and the Dutch was sheer force of numbers. The British had excellent reasons to move to the colonies in great numbers; there were economic and population pressures at home that encourage a steady exodus of able bodies.

The Spanish mainly had outposts in Florida to keep British ships at bay -- they were far more concerned with shipping and trade from their possessions further south. They owned New Orleans for a time, too, but again, concentrated more on it as a port and less as a base for spreading out.

The French never sent many people to North America at all, and preferred to use it as a trading base rather than a place to send lots of French people to live. They preferred to be fur traders and trappers and cultivate connections within the indigenous Indians rather than move there en masse. The Indians greatly appreciated this, which is why they were often allied to the French in war; they could see that the British colonists were actively encroaching on them and displacing them at a far greater rate than the French.

The Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam pretty early on, as they were also more in the trade business than the settlement business, and they were embroiled in naval wars elsewhere with the British and had no real way to defend their colony when the British showed up.

Australia was never a contest; the Aborigines were no match for the white settlers. Nor did other European powers contest the British there.

India was an exception to the rule. The British were not able to move in and displace the native population, which was already well-established, far more populous, and much more technologically sophisticated than the native peoples of Australia and the Americas. Rather than replace the population wholesale, the British in India merely inserted themselves at the top of an already well-established social system and exploited it economically. The British also could not tolerate the climate or the indigenous diseases of the region -- another reason not to go in great numbers.

The Spanish and Portuguese simply found little European competition in their South American adventures. The big battles at that time were for Africa, the Caribbean, and North America.

I think it's not so much the P system, but rather the common law.

The governmental system used in the US is not parliamentary, but evolved out of the simplified system that had been established by the Crown during colonial times, which usually consisted of a royal governor, a legislative council (almost always bicameral), and a court system. As the colonies were all independent of each other and had been established and organized under different charters, there was a good deal of variation in governance among them, and that had to be compromised upon once they had thrown off British rule.


http://www.usahistory.info/colonial/government.html

The early Americans were also a little ticked off about parliamentary practices at the time, and had no wish to duplicate them. Nor did they have any desire to invent a new aristocracy or royalty. There had been little contact with either during colonial times -- no monarch had ever visited in close to two hundred years of colonial history, and there had been little room for a leisured class.

There had been little contact with Parliament during the colonial period; most governance had been confined to the local system described above, and checks and balances had already been long established in various colonies, including blackmailing the royal governors into compliance with the legislature by withholding their paychecks. Direct dealings with Parliament didn't come until it began imposing taxes on the colonies after the French and Indian War (for the first time in colonial history). It bypassed the colonial governments to do this, which was perfectly legal but not at all in keeping with long tradition, and caused a series of major uproars that eventually led to the revolution. As Mark Twain once observed: "Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment."

«The Spanish mainly had outposts in Florida to keep British ships at bay»
«The French never sent many people to North America at all, and preferred»
«The Indians greatly appreciated this»
«The Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam pretty early on, as they were also more in the trade business than the settlement business»
«Australia was never a contest»
«India was an exception to the rule»
«The Spanish and Portuguese simply found»
«The early Americans were also a little ticked off»

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It was so simple?

The British/Americans also exhibited a fantastic eye for a trade - Louisiana Purchase, NY, Alaska... I remember reading how one of the English generals (don't recall any names), after winning a battle against the Native Americans (I forgot u guys still call them "Indians") , said to them "I'll just take land from you that I can walk in a day". And so he got himself a few miles out of it.

The next generation of soldiers was not so 'humble' - the next time somebody used that line also used relay runners, winning most of Penn, Ohio, etc. Nice.

Jasper says:

***Does this make sense?***

Yes, Jasper - it makes perfect sense.

***With all of this in mind, in American cities you can definitely find people drunk in public, but you're not likely to ever see those same people ever go to Europe***

I suppose I'd be just a wee bit surprised if there weren't any blootered bods falling about on the pavements (sorry, sidewalks) of your cities.....I've seen them in American films, and once again I mention Alcoholics Anonymous which did first come into existence in the United States did it not, so there were obviously sufficient numbers of pissheds falling about the place over there for them to get together for the purpose of sorting themselves out once and for all, and I'm sure they were not always indoors when they did all that falling about in a boozy stupor.

By the way, the word "stupor" - I've just realised something....we Brits spell it "stupor".....how strange....why not "stupour" I wonder? Favour, labour, honour, parlour, candour, fervour.....but it's "stupor"! My dictionary says it's derived from the Latin "stupere" which, it says, means "to be aghast". I don't quite get that...you're in a stupor, in a haze of semi consciousness, half dead to the word...and you're aghast? Surely "aghast" means to be in a state of amazement, shock, horror....hardly the same as being quietly and serenely semi comatose just because you had a couple or twenty nine Bellhavens too many is it?

Undoubtedly there is a different attitude to alcohol between here in the UK and in Europe generally and over there in the United States, although there has definitely been a sharp decline in lunchtime drinking in the pubs at lunchtimes during the working week in the UK simply because employers have imposed quite draconian rules and regulations against drinking during working hours. Even in my own profession - journalism - there has been quite a sea change in the culture of "drinking on the job" for which the profession was quite notorious at one time, as many stories were unravelled in pubs, and much information was gleaned in the jovial, genial atmosphere of busy city pubs, especially.

All of us who went to uni know full well how much drinking goes on in those bastions of learning and studiousness........it's part and parcel of uni life, and very few esape unscathed, so to speak. I know I never did, that's for sure - it's like a huge net that draws you right into the whole culture of parties and booze and pubs and ..well, orgies, let's face it.....something had to counteract all the bloody hard slog we had to put into our studies. Not many of us escaped those horrible mornings in the lecture halls when we had to endure some demon inside your head pounding away with a sledge hammer, and feelings of nausea in which you felt you were going to throw up all over the bloke sitting in front of you who no doubt was going through the same thing. It was not something I was used to doing before going to uni. All because you had another great time the night before, but at 19/20 and at uni it was expected of you and you did it. Your fees were being paid and as long as you always had a few quid to spare in your wallet, mostly, for me, obtained through enduring the rudeness and crassness of loopy old ladies or wheezy old geezers and all sorts of other customers you were serving at a very busy checkout till down at Tescos on a Saturday or Sunday for most of your time at uni, then you really didn't give a flying fluck anyway. You worked hard and you played hard, even if you got hammered out of your brain now and again in the process. As I say, all part of the uni experience.

I'm 27 now and all that seems aeons ago...it's different now, I'm in the serious business of earning quite a good and enjoyable living and I have got to keep my work and my leisure time separate, and my leisure time does involve a certain amount of drinking....but within limits. I know when I've had enough, and so do most of the mates (and a few others) I associate with. We go down the pub, be it up home in Edinburgh, or in London.....it's no different.

I find that gay pubs are far, far less likely to be the scene of fights or drunken brawls or arguments and that's a fact, and many straight women actually enjoy being in them as they know they can feel safe and secure and free from harrassment, and the drunken loutishness seen in straight places.

Anyway, drunken brawling in pubs is hardly a 21st century thing. The playwright often associated with ghosting the works of William Shakespeare - Christopher Marlowe - was stabbed to death during a drunken brawl in a tavern in Deptford, now an inner city suburb of Greater London, but then a small riverside village on the outskirts of the city, way back in 1593.

I spent this weekend with my grandparents here in Herefordshire, as I've spent most of the time having a really great time at the Big Chill Rock Music Festival at Eastnor Castle, four miles from their home here - it's over now for another year, and with tickets costing £145 for the three days it tends to attract a somewhat different kind of fan-base to that of the Glastonbury Festival, for example - and although there were thousands of people attending for the whole weekend, not only from all over the UK but also from many other countries, it was extremely enjoyable, good fun, fantastic entertainment, amazing provisions of all kinds, including food and drink - there was no trouble that I saw involving drunken behaviour. I did not have to pay the £145 as for me I combined pleasure with work. All weekend I only saw two PCs strolling about through the crowd looking as if they were ready to join in the jollities.

As ever the drunken louts who sully the name of Britain not only here in the UK itself, but also anywhere they go abroad, even in the USA - remember, Florida is a very popular holiday destination for Brits - really are only a minority of the overall youth of this country - the culprits are invariably in the 18 - 30 age group.

Club 18 - 30. Notorious for organising low cost holidays to very many parts of the Continent, especially to Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc. Very cheap flight deals from most UK airports to destinations all over Europe - fly from Edinburgh to Malaga for abourt £50 return on some deals.

http://www.holidaycitysuperstore.com/young_and_lively_holidays.phtml?gclid=CLew-Jy_l5wCFdYB4wodumJvew

Stag weekends very popular to many cities in Europe from the UK - populardestinations now are those cities in the former Eastern Bloc former Communist countries which badly need Western money - Prague, Budapest, Buchaest, Tallinn, Riga, Bratislava, Vilnius, etc.

In the UK it is supposed to be illegal to sell alcohol to someone who is obviously drunk, but quite often the greedy landlords/landladies think of the money more than the law. The same goes for all those places abroad who make huge sums of money out of pissed up, rowdy Brits, so in effect you could say they are partly responsbile for those drunken Brits using the National Monument in the main square of Riga, Latvia, honouring the dead of wars or of Communist pogroms, as a vomitarium as well as an urinarium, or that Greek woman in Malia, Crete, now regarded as a heroine by the Greeks, because she poured her sambuca over a drunken Brit's naked genitals and set fire to them after he had made lewd advances towards her and then pulled his trousers down in front of her while blind drunk.

Next weekend I will be on the Continent, visiting Paris, Cologne and Prague, and in Prague especially I will watch out for any evidence of pissed up British stag weekenders - and avoid them like they had the plague. According to the long suffering residents of that really beautiful city they really are a plague!

An American journalist who has lived in the UK for a long time - Janet Daley, of the UK's Sunday Telegraph newspaper:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/5995447/The-real-reason-for-all-those-louts-on-holiday.html

We never see the drunken American equivalent, which both Uriel and Jasper confirm really do exist, over here in Europe, but I suppose the reason for that is because we are just so far away over here, unlike the situation for our own drunken louts, who may not be habitual drunks at all - they are not - just Binge Boozers - mostly at weekends or when away on holidays, and all those European sunspots and fun sunfest fiesta destinations are really very much closer to hand for us than it is for bingeing Americans both our American friends tell us about. As I say you can often fly to Greece or Spain for less than a train ticket from Edinburgh to Aberdeen if you get one of those many cheap deals.

Most of the youth of Britain are great - as always, its the rotten apples who get all the publicity. I have a great time out with my mates having good times in the great atmosphere of our pubs and of our good clubs away from the dross - a good time and we don't get drunk - merry, sure! - paralytic? Never.

The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain are currently performing at the annual Promenade Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, in London. I have tried to get tickets to go to one of them this year but with no luck, not even for the famous Last Night of the Proms on 12 September this year, and I an't spare the time to queue for the standing positions in the main auditorium. I have seen the NYOGB playing at the Usher Hall, back home in Edinburgh, and the lads and lasses come from all over the UK, including Scotland of course, with several of them coming from Edinburgh. I love them playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1. They have a ew conductor - 33 years old Vasily Petrenko, a Russian from St Petersburg, who has lived in the Uk for some time now, and was formerly with the Liverpool Symphony Orchestra.

Vasily Petrenko conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain at the Royal Albert Hall, London, yesterday Saturday 08/08.09:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00m66nz/BBC_Proms_2009_Prom_31_National_Youth_Orchestra/

I came back to my grandparents from my Rock Festival now they are out at the first concert in Hereford Cathedral of the 2009 Three Choirs Festival, which alternates each year between the three cathedrals of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, all about 16 miles distant from each other, in the form of a triangle!

That's all I'm going to say about Britain's Binge Drinking culture (among the minority who het majority coverage!) here in this Forum. I blame the Labour Government who promise all, but do sod all, and who think more of the revenues they see rolling into their coffers in the form of all the taxes paid by pissed up louts vomiting and peeing in our streets and, even worse, in those on the Continent, a government which has fostered a culture of selfishness and crassness and lowering standards of public behaviour in the form of neddishness (Scot) and chavness (Eng.) among certain sections of British society.....the Club 18-30 thing again.

Mmmmmm....here is one of the replies to that Janet Daley article....from a person down there in the Basque area of Northern Spain... Really, in spite of our well publicised Binge Drinking culture, the UK really isn't that bad a country at all in many ways! I always knew that...in spite of the oiyts spoling it, and a discredited Labour Government, I really wouldn't want to live anywhere else, to be honest with you.

***Why do people in the Med think that Brits are uneducated and brutish? Well because the UK is the most important sender of tourists in the whole of Europe and among the top five in the world. britons travel abroad much more than americans, french germans dutch or swedes do. It would be really valuable if we could know the real percentage of Britons and other citizens involved in bad behaviour and crime and then compare it with other countries.

Regarding the US, that is really a frightening nation. Their murder rate is over 10 times the UKs...please, remember that the UK is the most densely populated nation in Europe, and still it has a lowish murder rate, low burglary rates, the lowest road death rate and one of the lowest death rates at the workplace in the whole world, and that wouldn't be possible if people were so unruly violent and aggresive as some readers express. Have any of you driven in France or Spain?? That is really scary and frightening. Having visited the UK and many other countries, I realise that you seldom see any policeman or woman in the UK even in big cities, neverthe less traffic and people flow around troublefree. Reckoning that there yobs causing problems I assume that they must be taught what their parents haven't. I would also raise taxation on alcohol straight away. Nevertheless, I am unmoved and think that the UK is probably the safest and most civilised and polite country in the world. By the way why do so many expats try to teach their ex citizens about how fortunate are they abroad and what a great decision they made when leaving those gracious islands? Why do they even bother is they are so safe and happy in sometimes terribly remote and by the way violent countries? Are they really sure of their decision? They look so unsure.

mikel arregi
euskal herria, basque country
mikel arregi
on 09 August 2009
at 11:00 PM


PS: heather here in Herefordshire for the whole of this past weekend has been splendiferously gorgeous.......clear blue skies most of the time, plenty of sunshine from dawn to dusk, dead calm - not a leaf stirring on the trees, and temps hovering around 25C by afternoon. English weather at its best, and the gentle countryside of Herefordshire is absolutely beautiful. A fantastic weekend of fun.

Back to London tomorrow....only takes 2.5 hours by train from Ledbury to London Paddington....there'll be hundreds of lads and lasses from the Festival on the train...should be interesting....

I didn't mean heather! I meant weather! There is no heather to be found in Herefordshire - only in mountainous regions of the UK.

<<<
What's with all the *drinkers* out there? When I was little everyone frowned on drinking. At school, people came in to discuss the dangers of drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. They said that abstinance in all vices is the only way to live. They rewarded people that pledged to never drink alcohol or smoke. My friends would dump out their families' wine bottles, discard their cigarettes. There were plays that showed the evils of smoking and drinking and sex. After all of that education, I find it hard to believe how anyone could ever consider smoking or drinking. Maybe older people that were already addicted. But not for people that know better. That's why it always shocks me to see someone from Generation Y do it. But it's even worse in Europe, where I saw people that were UNDER 21 drink! >>


The problem is there is TOO much anti-smoking propaganda these days. No kids are ever going to believe that crap and since the ones who are inclined to start smoking are usually to some degree 'anti-establishment', the more you make them think you don't want them to smoke, the more they want to.

I had a friend who was appalled that her parents smoked pot. She made it her business as a child to confiscate their stashes whenever she found them. By her teen years, needless to say, she had amassed quite a little stash of her own. And, you know, one day she tried it, and what do you know! -- liked it. By the time I knew her, she AND her mom could be found in the living room, passing the pipe around the circle of friends.

Seems to me people are much more conservative as young children, and loosen up as they get older, are exposed to more things, can see more sides of the issues, and start to think for themselves. I know that was the case for me.

Uriel,

There is no absolute on this. Some people become more conversative.
I was conversative, then a lot more liberal in college and I've swung back toward being conservative although not as conservative as my parents and not as conservative as most conservatives would like me to be. I'm not a fan of Rush Limbaugh, for example.

I guess I'm moderately conservative.

Although it's probably a stereotype, you've probably heard of liberal guys who suddenly become conservative when they have a daughter;)

Hmm. What am I? My friends say I'm conservative...but I'm not like, say, a Republican. While I oppose many things that liberals believe in, I am very pacifistic. I don't like some of the things that businesses are doing to the environment, but I don't like governments meddling in other aspects of business--and anti-trust stuff. However, I dislike software patents, and draconian copyright laws. I also strongly oppose things like capital punishment. So what am I? Liberal or Conservative? (I always think of myself as just being Sensible.)

Most people don't fit into a neat little mold in real life. They just vote the way they can agree with most, without necessarily toeing every party line. I consider myself fairly liberal in terms of social issues and the environment, but have no problem with the death penalty. I think copyright is sacred, business should be regulated, and gun ownership regulated within the bounds of common sense, but by no means abolished. And I will breed or not breed as I see fit.