Former US President Bill Clinton in North Korea

North those pictures are from a place called wooton basset, it's become a hotspot for what we call "grief tourism". Sure there are a few who go and lay on the "grief" with a spatular but rest assured, we are on to them and they recieve their criticism.

public mourning is seen by the vast magority of the English as attention seeking of the most unsavoury kind. Even with the diana shit most people were screaming "get a grip" at the idiots crying their eyes out over someone they didn't know. While there are a few that do it it's still considered very un-English.

Most Englishman have only ever cried twice. Once when their dog died and once when thier team lost the FA cup final, certainly not over some old tart who forgot to "clunk click".

 

Stox when did you become the worldwide spokesperson for the English people? How would you know what being "English" is anyway? You live in London lol

Anyway you can't really categorise everyone into England to do simply "English" things because the north and south are so divided they might aswell be two entirely different countries. Spend a week in Bristol then a week in Manchester, they are worlds apart in my opinion.

 

yeah northerners do live like animals, i'll give you that. But "Englishness" isn't something that can be diminished just by living on run down estates and drinking strong, cheap lager on park benches at 10am.

You know the saying "everyone has a friend in their group who nobody likes, and if you don't think you do, then it's you" well the same applies here, if you don't know what Englishness is then you are one of the unfortunate few who doesn't have it.

 

Lol, you're a strange person i'll give you that. "Northerners do live like animals".....

The working class pretty much define English culture today

Drink tea every day, moan about the weather no matter if its hot or sunny, moaning in general, going down the local to watch arsenal play, etc etc can be considered "english" by me, but someone else might consider englishness as watching rugby, camping in the woods and sailing.

I don't know when you became an authority to tell people what is English and what isn't because it is subjective, and again, you can't really talk about being "English" as London is almost totally void of any English culture at all, it's a neutral international city.

 

like i say, if you don't know what it is you haven't got it. Restating that you don't know what it is does nothing for your case. Englishness isn't some twee cliche, it's a philosophy.

i'm guessing you are second or third generation immigrant thraxed. am i right?

 

I'm all British(I think, it depends on if my Irish part is from norther or southern Ireland, huh?). LOL
1/2 English, 1/4 Irish, 1/4 either Scottish or Scotch-Irish. I think this is why I think stox is brilliant half the time and an asshole the other half of the time.

 

No, but ages ago my dads side of the family came over from Ireland to escape the famine. (As millions of others did)

Hampshire born and bred, i come from a small village.

You're just so up your own ass you think you speak for everybody.

I guess anyone north of Watford aren't English either? Wanker

Nobody spends their day thinking "I'm English, what do English people do" Like me, they just try to earn a living and then have it large in town at the weekend. That is at least 60% of the population i bet. We don't sit around pondering how to be British...that's incredibly vain and sad.

 

See you are still failing to get it. it's not about "what you do" it's about "how you think". But like i said, if you don't have it you wont understand. I'm just sorry that you feel compelled to keep proving my point.

 

Talk about class

 

Seems to me, our only solution is to bring some table red, some good weihenstephaner helles, some good strong bitter, some stout, and some highland malt. Throw it in a tub, slosh it around, and toss it back. Then we'll talk.

 

Here's an interesting point that goes some way to explaining how much more depth, culture and identity we have over Americans. We have a pot plant older than your country.

 

It must be really big by now!

 

John Fowles is my most beloved novelist, if I had to choose.

Englishman, whose fine fiction and essays all speak, to me, of what he liked to call "Green England," a kind of sylvan sensibility that has its cousin in the saying, "inside the heart of every Frenchman, beats a peasant." Cousin, but with a decided difference...Robin Hood, not Rabelais.

John loved "Englishness" as much as he loathed what he called "Britishness," a slow decline in porridge, I'd offer, which he likely dated (from the Magus), from the time borne "of that grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria."

From Daniel Martin. I'd be hard pressed to capture a better image of both our cultures; in the voice of Jenny, the protagonist's paramour, in a faux-diary (Chapter - "Second Contribution"):

"What I've decided I like about America....is that they simply don't understand this awful English attachment to defeat and loss and self-negation...You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed. It's a nation of automata piling down the freeways in search of a life that isn't worth having anyway.**** ... California is the future and England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo. I was hating America and feeling hopeless about home. Then slowly tiny things dawn on you and you see you've got America a bit wrong: that perhaps all the stupidity and the tastelessness and the inequality and the violence and the conformity are just the price of keeping a national energy alive. They exploit themselves so foully in so many minor ways, one's we'd never tolerate at home...how they've bred their fruit and vegetables to fit Madison Avenue notions of what they ought to look like. Huge Red-A-for-apple apples tasting like sugary sponge. Gigantic insipid tomatoes, huge flavorless lettuces. The heresy that size and looks are everything, all other values nothing....the woman who told me she had to drive thirty miles in wherever-it-was for "butcher's meat," as if it were some fantastic delicacy...that lovely decal. Supermarkets save time. But for what?****

And yet there's a sort of forwardness, an independence, a lack of servility. A hope. At least the will, if not the means. The way they use English, instead of letting it use them. Things we have no notion of. So I begin to see it as a choice of how you pay the bill. At home we do it by being apathetic and hierarchical, by clinging to the past. Here they do it by looking forward to a dream world, where everyone succeeds, everyone's rich and happy. Horrors like the supermarkets and the freeways and the smog and the sprawl are just incidents on the road there. The wagon-trail myth. Today's problems aren't problems, but proofs of tomorrow's new frontier. You drive on, at all costs. With us, you make do with what you are. They're eternally stuck in the first few pages, when we reached the last chapter ages ago."

I think this is about an apt breakdown of what I know of both our cultures. The last, my emphasis, is a maxim, or should be.


****[when I first read this, it really struck home - as I've long had this saying bouncing around in my mind, "where are we running? And why are we running towards it so damn fast?" No one stops to ask - why the hell are we kicking out more and more, with less and less meaning behind it?]

 

Well this thread started talking about Clinton bringing home those two women...so I say BRAVO to Bill and think those two women will be grateful for the rests of their lives...it was sweet!!!

 

Talk about not having a substantiate response to my points

 

Well played sir.

BILL . CLINTON . IS .

The Most Interesting Man In The World.

 

I've yet to see you make one.

 

Do responses like that normally work when you're having discussions elsewhere?

Unfortunately for you, I can put the points that you didn't see back in your face again with a simple copy and paste. :sad face for you:

Do you need help reading that? Just let me know and I can send you a link to software you can paste that in and it'll read it for you. Now if you can't see the point I made in there then perhaps it's time to recognize that you aren't qualified to have discussions with grownups?

Oh that's right, this is another joke. I'm being punkd right? You're really not that stupid. You're just pretending! Good one dude. You got me....

 

Let me know when you are ready to make a point.

 

An interview and comments from the 2 journalists http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ged-across-North-Korean-border-in-arrest.html

1. They were led across the North Korean border by their Chinese guide.

2. They didn't realize this, then scurried back to China.

3. North Korean soldiers chased them back into China then dragged them back to North Korea.


Wow. Was their collusion in this whole mess? Was it some level of collusion on behalf of individuals who are getting payments re: North Koreans leaving their country for China?

Could the Chinese government be involved?


Frankly, I'm glad Bill Clinton arrived in N Korea and helped free these women.

I think N Korea is totally untrustworthy. Regardless no US policy has been successful in getting responsiveness from N Korea over many decades. In addition, clearly the Chinese are N Korea's protectors in many ways.

Its a very frustrating situation in view of the fact that N Korea has developed nukes, is immensely armed, and is ultimately a Nuts/volatile nation.