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Evolution: Do you Get it?
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Islam: tolerating intolerance?
The Cedars of Lebanon
The Big Problem
Pollyanna Meets Captain Kirk
Does God Bless America?
Ticket Touts
Paedophilia is Not a Crime
Kill the puppy dogs
23 Sperm Curry
Satanic Verses
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Evil and the Satan Hypothesis
Give Peace a Chance
Christianity and Civilization
How not to be eaten by aliens
I think that there is a basis in fact behind most stereotypes and prejudices, they are over generalization rather than lies. Like it or not black men run faster, box better and have longer dicks. On average. Also, on average, they perform less well in academic and IQ tests. Heresy but true. The problems come when people say things like *all* blacks are... because that crosses the line. I think that denying the truth reduces your credibility. It is one thing to say that I doubt any black man will win a swimming gold medal in the next century, it is quite different to say they should not be allowed to swim because they are genetically unsuited to it. Same goes for my challenge to the feminists; if a woman ever wins a SINGLE Formula One Grand Prix race I will have her name tattooed on my arse. That is posted on my website. But I freely acknowledge that my wife is a much better driver than me.
My attitude to this has changed. I now know that a black man has already won a swimming gold medal. I am also starting to think that the twentieth century dominance of boxing by blacks had more to do with social factors than genetic factors, at least to a bigger extent than I thought when I originally wrote these letters. Sixty years ago Jews filled the boxing gyms in London and several did well in title fights, these days hardly any Jews box in Britain. Now we have a significant number of huge East European giant boxers. Who comes through in boxing depends to a significant degree who is training. Many people start to train to box for self-defence and self-esteem and they stick with it if they do well and no better opportunities come up. Now Britain is seeing a crop of young British Asians coming up through the ranks. Unfortunately these days many young men who in previous decades might have taken up boxing for self-defence and respect instead simply carry weapons. |
Anthony NestyOlympic Swimming Gold Medalist
|
Many gypsies are thieves, almost certainly a much higher proportion than other groups, but that is 100 miles from saying that all gypsies are thieves. I was going to put a million miles, but then I remembered, 100 miles is a long way. You try walking it.
Accents.
I hate Manchester accents because they were the accents the kids who beat me up in school had. So the Gallagher brothers strike a raw nerve with me. I could walk to where they were born, it is only a short bus ride away. I think Birmingham accents are a little comical. I find it strange that you would try to sound English when you talk. Most pop and rock singers from this side of the Atlantic seem to me to be feigning American accents. I have talked to people at work about it (thick people) they say that everybody sounds American when they sing. Utter bollocks.
Bye,
Martin
Back to that hundred years/hundred miles thing, I thought you might be interested to know that the house my grandparents lived in was built in the thirteenth century. Sandstone blocks, timber frame, wattle and daub work inside. A beautiful house known as Saltersley Hall farm. It was named after the salters, who rested their horses there as they carried salt from the south of the county. My grandfather was no aristocrat, he bought the farm through an agricultural mortgage, he earned the money for the deposit by mining silver in Canada, not owning the mine, pure proletarian wage slave.
Apart from the brief Canadian escapade he lived and died within one day's walk. As most English people do. In most English towns today you will find that more than 80% of the people whose surnames are place names will live within thirty miles of that place. Surnames have been fixed for about seven hundred years, but that's not really a long time. In 1984 a bogman was discovered less than half a mile from my grandparents farm, he had been ritually sacrificed and dumped in a peaty pool, at about the time of the Roman invasion. That's only 70 or so generations ago. He looked just like my geography teacher.
Keep cheerful,
Martin
 |
I wasn't entirely serious with my complaints about Robin Hood (which should be pronounced as two equally stressed words not one word with all the stress on the first syllable, as all Americans seem to say it). I understand about the needs of the box office, you should know how I think. But there is a resentment caused by American films and the way they treat British subject matter. There seems to be a very strong anti-English slant. The Scottish and Irish are freedom loving patriots oppressed by the evil English, very black and white. The truth was a lot more murky and less well defined. We resent the way a director can paint a partial version of history which then gets so much exposure that it becomes the only version. Partial history told by very far from impartial film makers becomes the accepted version, or at least defines the lens through which the story is viewed for several years to come. |
As far as “English Americans-c'mon!” I don't know if you see that I have a point here or not. The English were a significant contribution to your country's population and development. But where is the pride in being an English American? There seems to be an enormous snobbery in saying how long ago your ancestors first arrived in the New World but not much pride in where they came from. Your upper class accents are very close to middle class English accents, closer than any other region or class, but those people seem to take pride in their American identity, very little is left over for pride in their roots. Am I wrong? Try picking up your 'phone book and seeing if you can find any social clubs with “English” in the title, I'll bet you find far more with Irish, Spanish, African or Polish. It might just be me but it does rankle. I am not sure why.
Bad accents; the worst accent ever in the history of Anglo-American relationships has got to be Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins, even worse than in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I find the Hollywood career of Bob Hoskins to be quite unbelievable, are there no short fat balding American actors? How do you rate his accents? Then there is that woman in Frasier, who is a posh southerner trying to play working class Mancunian and coming off very strange indeed. The most unrealistic thing is that she doesn't sound American. I got accused of sounding American after staying only three months. My uncle took his English bride to Canada and they sounded totally Canadian after two years.
One of my wife's relatives stayed in California for two years and they took their young daughter and I have heard her accent shift and then return to “normal”, in a couple of weeks. But when my daughter was playing with her when she first came home my daughter had begun to speak with an American accent after THREE HOURS. She listens to American accents on the TV all the time but knows not to copy them except in play, but she had obviously learned enough to switch into a different mode after three hours of play with a slightly older child. We mimic very easily and adjust to our surroundings. I am sure this goes beyond speech and goes into thinking with foreign accents too. When I am writing my E mails and webpages I think in a special mid-Atlantic mode. I use some Americanisms that I would not ordinarily use and I drop all traces of regional dialect. Quite the opposite of what that woman in Frasier does.
The Day the Music Died; In response to your earlier e mail I will try and clear up this thing about what upset me. I didn't cry much at the time of his death because I don't. I accept death very easily. I cried later because of a mixture of reasons that fed off each other and chased around until the dam burst. I felt sorry for Yoko, Sean and Julian. I felt sorry for the loss of the talent and the potential. I felt sorry that he died when things were just getting together again for him, he was making music again and happy. I felt sorry for myself in losing a hero. I knew within seconds of the news that I couldn't be a Lennon fan anymore because the whole world loves a dead idol. For the months before I had a real hero, a bit of an arsehole at times but creative and thoughtful. A good kind of hero, not perfect, and alive. I hated the whole posthumous number one record circus that I could predict within a minute of the news.
Just think how different our culture would be if there was a fat old Elvis and Hendrix around now and David Bowie and Elton John had died in the mid seventies.
Perhaps the main reason I cried was the realization that I had spent nearly twenty years in self imposed silence. I didn't want music to hurt me so I avoided it.
So the American Socialist might be coming to England but is worried about high taxes. There's no answer to that. I suppose the main thing to remember is that you won't notice anything. So much is different that it will just be one other little factor. Climate, lifestyle, class structure, values and culture. You will not really notice tax.
Robin Hood again. Errol Flynn was great, you can't beat a Tasmanian to play an English hero. I have just thought who would be the perfect Robin Hood, Sean Bean, because the real Robyn Hode was a working class South Yorkshire gang leader. Most of the story is myth and story-telling of later years. Perhaps in another hundred years that film will become the definitive version of the story.
I will have a bit of free time on Sunday and I have got Monday off. On Tuesday I fly out to Germany for a couple of days. I get to visit an oven factory. I also expect to get a lot of sausages and beer too. I won the "holiday" at work for selling Neff ovens and hobs, which was easy because they are good and I knew what I was talking about. Considering that we have exchanged so many words I know bugger all about you. My wife was asking me a few details such as how old you were, where you worked, what you did for a living, whether you were married. Women think these things are important apparently.
BUGGER: verb, to insert one's pork cannon into the chocolate starfish or to make friends with barnyard animals, Southern style. My little dictionary simply says "sodomite, vulg. slang, unpleasant person or thing- slang, tire ruin, complicate.
Quotation; Tensing Norgay, first words uttered on the summit of Everest, 1952 "We done the bugger" (True)
To ruin or tire "I'm buggered", "Well you've buggered that up then"
Alexander the Great "That knot will be a bugger to undo, oh bugger it, I'll slice the bugger." (Probably not true)
Buggery (as in unnatural intercourse with animals) is punishable by life imprisonment. But the word has been soften by over-use to the point that my five year old son can use it without too much censure.
I know that most Americans are German. I see your point about the Anglo Saxon and Viking thing to a point. I suppose it all comes back to 100 years being a long time over there. My family oral history goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century on most sides and then it all vanishes into the mists.
I suppose that this family history would be the same in America, the English Americans would not be able to go back very far to the old country, if at all. The only people who keep longer records are the illiterate and the landed.
As for my Norman roots, yes I do think about them. Willett is a Norman French surname. Whether the name came over on the man or was added to the man by his master I cannot tell, surnames were not fixed in those days. The other names in my history are all English, Anglo Saxon.
Well got to sign off. I fly out to Germany tomorrow. Sausages to eat and beer to be drunk. I am going with a party of total strangers apart from one bloke I met once, and he is a prize arsehole. To ensure that I have a good time I will just have to eat and drink anything that is free.
My spellchecker knows an arsehole and a bugger when it sees one, did I teach it that or was it uncle Bill Gates?
Germany
How was Germany? Civilized.
Like England but better. Just about everything was better. I now realize why I liked America, because it is like Germany but the people speak English. The place was much cleaner and tidier. Even the graffiti was done more neatly. I was very impressed.
I saw a lot of Germany in a short time. We were put up in a very nice hotel in a rather ordinary town, not a tourist town, and I walked around a bit and saw real life. I was very impressed with the river that ran through the town, there were no shopping trolleys dumped in it, not even one. I cross a river every day on my way to work and it is full of rubbish most of the time. There were large ashtrays outside buildings and they were used, there was only about a tenth of the litter I would expect to see in England, or America. The food was good and wholesome. The beer was excellent and from local breweries. I had pils beer and cloudy wheat beer. Very good. The waitresses were terrific, attentive but efficient and not at all stuffy or obsequious. Nice arses too.
The hotel room was one of the cleanest I had been in and everywhere there ware large expanses of real wood, but the hotel was just average, not a particularly upmarket place. There were storks and buzzards. Familiar trees and weeds and flowers and birds and some new ones too. They had rivers too. BIG rivers. I stood in Heidelburg castle and looked down across the Neckar valley and across the Rhine valley, enormously far across. The Rhine valley! Awesome. The scale of it. From the ground it was so wide, from the air it was amazing too. I suppose you have seen big continent-draining rivers before and are immune to them, or maybe something like that can never fail to impress. I remember seeing the Danube from the air but the Rhine was better still.
The factory I visited was very modern and well conceived. The people were working hard and seemed happy and well motivated, the management seemed genuinely concerned about their welfare and talked of difficult times in the past when they had laid off staff with what seemed to be genuine concern for their workers. There were robots and lasers and craftsmen too. There was automation and computer control and concern for the workers. I was very impressed that they loaded their ovens directly onto railway containers inside the factory. Later that day I saw pictures of Auschwitz on CNN and I remembered the juxtapositioning of railways, ovens and German efficiency.
About twenty or thirty times during the brief time I was there I asked myself how these people ever managed to lose the war. I saw a bit of German TV in my room, there was a German version of a Jerry Springer type show. Why men like fat women or something of the sort, the audience was so very well behaved, the agenda seemed the same but there was no hysteria. I don't think they were swearing, they certainly didn't bleep anything out. I was also very impressed with how genuinely peaceful and single minded they were. There is no great simmering resentment about losing the war. They want to get on with the peace and prosperity. The beast in Germany is dead and with fifty years of democracy I cannot see it ever coming back.
Yes, I liked Germany.
Is my wife an atheist? I thought you said you have read my site? No. She isn't. My children are being brought up as Christian and I am not doing much about it. My daughter is coming up to 9 and seems to be quite a caring child and seems to be taking in the Christian stuff. As she gets older I will let her know what I believe and she will have the choice as to what she believes. My son is 5, he is too young to believe or not. He does seem interested in science, biology, space and engineering (when he grows up he wants to be a train driver or Concorde pilot, before he wanted to be a train).
I teach both my children about nature in the garden and I go on long walks with them when I can, instilling in them a respect for nature and an understanding of reproduction, from that base I will teach them evolution. I am trying to get them to be interested in biology. Instead of a storybook I showed my son a book with pictures of animals grouped in genera and classes, I talked through the ideas of how many insect species there are. We looked at rodents today, and bats and whales.
I haven't told either of my children that I do not believe in God, they have yet to ask me. Beetles are a good grounding for an education in atheism. That worked well for Darwin. Add in astronomy and dinosaurs and you have a very good basis. That is my strategy, build up the knowledge that will outflank the religious mumbo-jumbo. I will not try to indoctrinate them. I will let them find out the questions for themselves. But if they ask me any question I give them a straight answer. If they ask me if I believe in God I will tell them, if they ask why I will tell them. I think my son will find that pangolins and tapirs and three thousand species of damselflies offer more insight than his children's book of Noah's Ark.
Red Dwarf is very good. The only kind of sci-fi I enjoy is comedy sci-fi that sends up the genre as well as using it to do outrageous things. Red Dwarf is the best of its kind since The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I think we are on series 7 or 8. Have you met Kryten yet? He is terrific.
I am deeply sorry about Ainsley Harriot and S Club 7. Unfortunately in a so called free country we have to put up with them. My daughter thinks they are both great, but then she is at that certain age. My sister has told me that if ever an 8 year old girl says "You look nice mummy" you should change at once.
Thanks for the 'phone number, I may give you a call one day. But really I find e-mail so much better. I don't do real time.
England.
The class system stinks but it is not as bad as it was a few decades ago. As an American you would be honorary middle class. We don't really see any working class Americans apart from on the Jerry Springer show so you would be assumed to be professional or lower professional and granted the same status as a teacher. (Yes, as low as that.) Until you prove otherwise.
You would be able to get Camels fairly easily, in any half decent tobacconist or most supermarkets but not at every corner shop. If you have to buy cigarettes in an emergency you would have to buy Marlboro or a British brand.
Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Ben and Jerry's and M & Ms are all easy to get. Other stuff less so. If you have any particular needs let me know and I will advise if you need to bring your own. Books are not too expensive and we do have libraries that work reasonably well so you need not pay a penny if you only want to borrow them. I can borrow up to 10 books for three weeks for free. But decent books seem constantly out on loan, you just have to get what there is. Most paperbacks are between £5 and £10.
Wales.
It is nice for a holiday, but it is a bit of a backwater. When you cross the border you have to reset your watch, put it back 30 years.
You feel depressed? We have just had the wettest period for over 15 years. It has seemed to rain for a biblical forty days and nights. Everything is green and damp. Sean Connery is a master of accents isn't he? Lithuanian submarine commander, Upper class English secret agent, dragon, Norman French King of England, American professor, such an enormous range. He changes his wigs more than his accents.
“Is theory of memetics itself a meme? Even if it is correct, is it not an idea that replicates?”
Yes. Perfect analysis. But that doesn't have any baring on whether it is true or helpful. I think it is true, meaningful and a meme.
The Falklands:
In the middle of nowhere live a bunch of people who live as shepherds. There are about a thousand all together. They call mutton 365, because they eat it every day of the year. Until recently the natural resources of the islands could be summed up in one word, grazing.
The bloody Argies say it belongs to them because it is nearby. Like Cuba belongs to you, and Sri Lanka belongs to India... The parallels are very good, both of those are closer to their “mainland”.
Basically it belongs to the sheep shaggers, and they say they belong to us, so I am happy with that.
When the war broke out I was at University. For a laugh I made an Argentine flag and flew it over our student house. A bunch of what you would probably call jocks pulled it down, and set fire to it. Arseholes. (The ringleader was the son of a Royal Marine officer who was later blown up by an IRA bomb.)
When the war began to become real I realized it was me who was the arsehole.
War is a nasty business even when you manage an away win. It was a close thing. We learned a lot about it. We learned that sending jet bombers to bomb the runway, with two mid-air refuelling did less for the war effort than the crudest weapon we used, bayonets.
I remember overhearing some Tory students talking about it a few months
afterwards. One of them said
“ Of course, you know what would have happened
if they had hit one of our big ships don't you? We would have done a big
white job on Cordoba... that's Polaris, there was one within range within
five days of the balloon going up”
I don't know who his sources were but that is one bit of gossip I will never forget.
After the war the locals and the garrison used to get on rather badly. The locals were given the nickname of "Bennies" after a character in a British soap who was borderline retarded. The Army were not pleased and issued an order that the Islanders were not to be called Bennies, under penalty of court martial. Then the soldiers called them "stills" Why? Because they were still Bennies.
The story that the island was populated by the descendants of one shepherd and his ewe is a malicious lie. He had hundreds of ewes. I've never heard of the Berkshire Moors, are they a rugby team perhaps?
When you do make it over here you must get together with me and Martin Burn for a proper session. We can go to a pub, get quite a few beers down our necks and you can cadge some fags off Martin. Then when we are pleasantly merry we can retire for some traditional English food, curry or kebabs probably.
Many Americans think that British beer is served warm, not true. It should be served from a cool cellar, at a temperature that allows the yeast to remain active but is still refreshingly cool on the palate without being so cold that you cannot taste anything but cold bubbles.
The English/British thing is easy to remember. In England the two are seen as meaning pretty much the same, and no great harm is done by getting them the wrong way round. In Scotland or Wales just try to remember that they may be British, but they are not English. I imagine I would have similar problems in Alabama if I called the locals yanks.
Flying the Union Jack upside-down does get a reaction from a certain quarter. It is possible to spot when it is done wrong. The red diagonal cross of St Patrick is peculiar in shape, it doesn't overlie the white cross of St Andrew perfectly, so you can tell when the flag is the right way up because of the broader white stripe near the flagpole. (I learned this piece of crap in the Scouts.)
Moors
There are a few good moors around to see, if you like your scenery bleak and windswept. Yorkshire has quite a few, but there are others too. I live in the flat and built-up area of the Mersey valley, but from a few clear vantage points, high buildings, bridges and so on, I can see beyond the trees and buildings to the moors in the distance. They are not too far to travel to. Even in the nineteenth century the industrial workers of Manchester could escape to the hills if they had a mind to. Many preferred not to. (I am sure you are aware of this from reading Engels and the like) It was said that the quickest road out of Manchester was in a bottle of gin.
Jocks
We don't really have jocks here. We certainly never used that title, except perhaps with the auditory equivalent of quotation marks around it. They were muscular, loud mouthed and nominally Christian patriots, I think the stereotype fits. I think they were rugby players. But at least they were at University entirely on academic merit. My University was not an old college of the Oxbridge kind. (Contraction of OXford and CamBRIDGE).
Tories
Some of them like it, some of them don't. I suppose most of them like it, or are neutral. The name comes from the earliest days of the developing two party system. The Whigs were a bunch of Scottish cattle thieves and the Tories were similar ruffians from Ireland. I suppose the modern equivalent would be your lot calling each other after LA street gangs, with the opponents picking your name.
A couple of days ago I was cleaning up in the shop, 50 TVs were showing Ainsley Harriot (in a pink shirt) to me and 50 more were on MTV. Oh what joy, guess who comes on... [S-Club 7] I thought of you.
Keep the wonder, lose the faith,
Martin