Racing Turtles

Actually your society is the freaks for shooting everything that moves and burning half your "nature reserves" every year so that upperclass dandies can eat leaded pheasant. North Americans are the well adjusted ones here, your country has become a desolate suburban lawn in island form

my opinion as an american is that we spend way too much time trying to save african megafauna and nowhere near enough time making fun of the english for turning an entire island--which was once a hazelnut food forest--into a goddamn lawn.

bill bryson once actually wrote down in a whole book and got published that the english were superb gardeners and i about threw the book out the window i was that outraged. the english!!! the fucking ENGLISH. them? that's who you want to laud? the english

the

THERE ARE A GRAND FUCKING TOTAL OF ZERO STAPLE CROPS ORIGINALLY OR EVEN PRIMARILY CULTIVATED BY THE ENGLISH. NONE OF THEM. NOT POTATOES NOT WHEAT NOT TURNIPS NOT RYE. THEY GNAWED THEIR ISLAND DOWN TO A NUB FOR NOTHING. THE WOLVES AND BEARS ALL GONE FOR NOTHING. THE WILDCATS AND BIRDS AND MUSTELIDS AND INSECTS, GONE IN THEIR THOUSANDS, FOR NOTHING. FOR SOME SHEEP. FOR

THEIR MAIN AGRICULTURAL EXPORT IS FAMINE

anyway the english approach to agriculture, biodiversity, and environmentalism is roughly on par with a dog's approach to someone else's homework and everywhere in the world that has inherited their cack-fisted disdain for nature has suffered immensely. i can't overstate enough how bad things have been and still are.

please make fun of them. it's the least they fucking deserve.

wales is renaming another national park to a welsh name instead of the english name and again all the english people (including MPs) are like "well nobody here is gonna call it that" as like a smug own and its like..okay? you don't have to? but we will because it's our country you dummy. we aren't forcing you to do anything

I think what really annoys me is that we are simply renaming it only after THE ENGLISH RENAMED IT. and now the torygraph is saying its "cultural marxism" to name it a welsh name - its a welsh mountain range! you guys tried so hard to wipe out our language and still are and you're sooooo mad about a little name change of some mountains. it's the native language, we can call it whatever we damn well please. you can call them the second of the seven shitholes of the world and I don't care, I will call them Bannau Brycheiniog

I thot Oliver Cromwell died

My brain nearly short circuited once looking at the tiktok of an English kid who argued up and down that there was no colonization because Ireland was already part of England...because the king had declared Ireland part of England and declared himself king of Ireland... therefore making him the king of his own land and not a colonizer. He also HONESTLY seemed to believe that during the Revolutionary war the British were JUST trying to free slaves and defend Native American land.

The English and more generally the Brits learn nothing about their empire and colonialism. It is currently not compulsory for primary or secondary school students to be educated on Britain's role in colonisation. European teachers of mine at our Scottish University did a survey asking British students what they knew about colonialism by their government and they knew nothing. Nothing. Colonialism had happened and it was bad - when, where, how and to what extent none of them knew. The Empire was something positive or neutral in their mind but they had no idea what it meant effectively. We French and German people knew much more than they did, and that's something given colonialism is very little covered in Germany and still not extensively covered in France (though it's the subject of multiple History and Geography lessons from middle school to high-school and the main subject of one module in philosophy). I was in an international British section in my French high-school, and my French British History and Geography teacher had to constantly correct and question the official lesson plans he was supposed to follow to give us the bigger picture. So I wasn't even shocked when my classmates discovered in Irish literature class that Ireland was Britain's first colony, and that the bloody methods of plantations were tested there before being exported to America.

Discovering how bad the History and Geography curriculums are in Britain really opened my eyes on many consequences of this lack of awareness of the nation(s)' past, directly reflected in today's politics. And this comes from someone educated in the second former colonial Empire in the world - which means it's also in my government's interest not to mention the subject too much.

I know people make fun of the American education system but damn.

victorians were so funny they were like WOMEN talk to MEN in southern europe 😤 and they EAT in the open air. like. OUTSIDE 🤮 and they even stay in the SUN and get a SUNTAN 😰 and it’s because they’re C*THOLIC WHORES. anyway this is totally unrelated but i’m going to spend six months touring italy

According to the Irish Times, in the new Lord of Rings series on Amazon, the Hobbits are Irish charicatures and the Dwarfs are Scottish charicatures.

It also notes that the Men have Lancashire accents while the Elves are Upper Class British, commenting that "Somehow the Victorian caste system has been smuggled into a 21st-century American fantasy series."

Just a little reminder:

the name tyler sounds like it was first used post-ww2 like maybe 1960 until you find out it literally meant “guy who lays tile” (tile-er) 11th century england to refer to people that built houses. and then you read it as tile -er for the rest of yourlife

does piper mean guy who lays pipe

I know this is a sex joke, but... do people genuinely not know that a lot of surnames stem from professions? Tiler/Tyler became the surname for somebody who laid tile. Piper became a surname for somebody who played the pipes. Archer, Brewer, Butler, Carpenter, Clerk/Clark, Dexter, Farmer, Fisher, Mason, Miller, Potter, Sawyer, Sheppard/Shepherd, Smith, Tanner, Taylor/Tailor, Weaver... People later started to give old family surnames as first names, and then over time, many of those became popular as first names in their own right. Is... is this not known?

a fun fact: germanic jews were forced en masse to adopt last names only a couple centuries ago, for tax reasons. before then it was just ‘dude son of guy’. so mostly the rabbis made everyone’s last names up themselves because they were the logical guy to do the census paperwork.

so that’s why ‘jewish names’ are so like that. goldstein (gold rock), goldfarb (gold colored), goldshmidt (goldsmith). three or four hundred years ago some tired rabbi ran out of ideas. you get tons of jews who are just something-thal because -thal means valley and that’s where they were when they got named. my favorite traditional jewish surname is just klein, small, because three hundred years ago some rabbi looked at a local guy and wrote down ‘shorty’.

Fun Also Fact: Taxes may have also been the reason the English got lastnames, too! “may have also been” because there’s some debate about if it was THE cause, but their popularity lines up chronologically.

The usual story is that, after William the Conqueror did his Thing, he commissioned a big census of his new Territory(The Domesday Book) and, since everyone was named off a not terribly long list of church names which, in practice, was shorter cuz ppl didn’t like picking the obscure and ill-omened ones(not allot of Barnabuses or Hezikiahs or Judases, if you can believe it :T), the clerks tasked with doing the census found themselves in need of a way to distinguish between ppl with the same names. So, professions were an easy go-to: John the Brewer becomes “John Brewer”, John the fisherman became “John Fisher”, John the Farmer becomes “John Farmer”(or John Fields, or John Tiller, or John Peasant, or John Planter, or John Gardener, or John Rowe: there were allot of farmers so allot of farming-surnames). Before that the English distinguished btwn ppl with the same names conventionally, through nicknames (Short John, Longjohn, John-down-the-way, Angry John, etc etc etc), and some of these ended up becoming surnames too, but they were just that: nicknames. It wasn’t until the Normans gave these names bureaucratic significance through the need to tell who to tax what(and if they paid it) that they became something passed down, one gen to the next, in England.

I love how you guys are discovering spicy Hungarian paprika, and yes it is super good! But as a Hungarian I feel like it's my duty to mention that paprika hendl is simply german for our national dish paprikás csirke and it is Not made with spicy paprika. It's got sweet paprika. Jonathan Harker is unfortunately just british.

My friend Jonathan Harker met a man who could control wolves with his mind and thought "I can't tell if this is normal or not for foreign real estate dealings."

While all of Europe is responsible, I think it’s also important for people from the UK to acknowledge the particular and direct culpability of our government in what has happened in Israel and Palestine - mostly because it never is. Politicians don’t mention it, the media never mentions it, they tell you nothing about it in school, no one talks about it. I was just saying exactly the same thing about India, but if you ask an average British person if they think their country did a good job of ruling Palestine you’ll get a blank stare, maybe they’ll pull a massively uninformed opinion out of their arse, I doubt many could tell you exactly when it was. But the fact is that when Britain assumed control of the Holy land in 1918 both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were relatively minor concerns, and when we left in 1948 there was a civil war raging between those two sides. All of the important seeds of the conflict were sown and took root while Britain was in charge. The first major Palestinian uprising of 1936-39 was an anti-colonial struggle against the British Empire. 

But today, watching the news, British people are like ‘wow guess we’ll never understand why Jews and Arabs just naturally hate each other’… just like those Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan, and those Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland’….. and all of those other places on earth where the legacy of British occupation and partition is division, violence and misery. The Empire is not a distant memory we can feel vaguely proud and nostalgic about (as most British people apparently do) it was a global crime of almost unimaginable proportions and it’s still (in some cases quite literally) blowing up in our faces. 

“Man who put bread in toaster outraged and horrified that the bread is now toasted, blames Shifty Foreign Types”

Oh, and Sherlock Holmes was invented by a Scot.

Gothic churches originated in France.

Japan has the world’s oldest monarchy.

Fox hunting is disgusting and evil and nothing to be proud of.

‘More pubs than Ireland’…Ireland’s population as of 2016 was 4.773 million. England’s in 2011 was 53.01 million. No fucking shit does it have more pubs. Did you know that America has more bars than the UK?

Me, standing upon the white cliffs of dover as we systematically torch everything in england in the hellfire that is brexit: At least we have the cheeky nandos, that stalwart bastion of superior english culture

That would make a fantastic video