It's Official: Queen Elizabeth is no longer hot.

[Derp53]

ahhh the english with their bad teeth, terrible food food, and ugly women jk, tho those might've been reason's for the american revolution, i wouldn't be surprised if they were

[Eltee]

Then you just had to invade and try to steal out sugar maples, eh! A step too far!

[Derp53]

Then you just had to invade and try to steal out sugar maples, eh! A step too far!

cause without our syrup were terribly grumpy the morning

[Dark Lord Cam]

Then you just had to invade and try to steal out sugar maples, eh! A step too far!

No, we just wanted your huge tracts of beautiful land full of unicorns and rainbow farting faeries. What? All you've got is snow and mounties? You're terrible.

[Eltee]

My aunt and cousin are Mounties.

[leroybrown]

They were Englishmen who decided to become Americans because they weren't being treated like Englishmen any more.

"The English are coming, the English are coming!!!"
"Looks like Paul's been drinking again."

[Velothi]

Well, decent point. Let this Daughter of the American Revolution (true story) expand that it was not really tea taxes. The colonies were being heavily taxed on several things (tea included) due to debt the British incurred fighting the French and Indian War, and did not find it just to be taxed without representation. There was also the issue of soldiers being able to be quartered without warning or invitation in a family's home, which included using their resources and being in their space...and you have to take into account that the colonists at the time were a generation or two removed from the motherland and had their own culture and dialect - and thus were starting to forum their own personality and identity. Things were very tense by the time you had the Boston "massacre," where young British soldiers, who were relatively new and not particularly well trained, shot into a crowd (by accident, most likely) and killed some citizens. Goes on from there, of course. The Boston Tea Party was just a symbolic thing done by some drunken Sons of Liberty.

My ancestors were involved in all of this.

Admirably, my cousin John Adams - later to be our second president - was the lawyer who defended the British soldiers of the massacre, not because he necessarily had allegiance to the crown but because it was the right thing to do.

Author Jeff Shaara wrote two great books about the revolution, Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause. They're long but amazing and rather fair to both sides. I really loved them.

You forgot the Quebec Act, which was likely the most important cause of the Revolution. Or mentioning Nathaniel's Rebellion.

More likely than not the taxes were seen in a negative fashion because there was a new identity created between the National (colonial) bourgeois and Imperial (british) bourgeois. Both of them in competition where the Imperials had to cut off land to limit the Nationals.

That and Nath's rebellion was more or less despicable.

[davidjgreen12]

So how did we get from QE2 to the American Revolution?

Don't answer that, I don't want to know!

As a Brit I'm a great admirer of the US constitution. BUT, the one part I think the founding fathers got seriously wrong was to combine the office of Head of the Executive with that of Head Of State.

Here in Britland we keep the two very seperate. QE2 is the Head of State and does nothing except keep the constitution ticking over, hold parties and generally go around being nice to everyone. Meanwhile our elected Head of the Executive (aka Prime Minister) does all the controversial stuff which we can scream and complain about.

Today many democratic countries do it the Brit way. Even non-royal ones like Ireland, Germany, etc. They just substitute an elected non-controversial President for a Monarch and leave the politics to the PM, Chancellor, etc.. If we did get rid of the monarchy here then we'd almost certainly do the same.

Queen Jordan? Yeccccch! King David of the House of Beckham I say!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Wolf]

Relevant to this history lesson:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6- ... erica.html

Disclaimer: It's a Cracked.com article.

Spoiler:

That seriously made me incredibly un-proud of my very visibly English (and therefore Viking) heritage. I feel like the world missed out on an incredible society of physiologically and socially advanced human beings. The only solace I get is the fact that many foundational parts of the US Constitution were apparently based on Native American ideals.

[Oathbreaker]

Relevant to this history lesson:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6- ... erica.html

Disclaimer: It's a Cracked.com article.

Spoiler:

That seriously made me incredibly un-proud of my very visibly English (and therefore Viking) heritage. I feel like the world missed out on an incredible society of physiologically and socially advanced human beings. The only solace I get is the fact that many foundational parts of the US Constitution were apparently based on Native American ideals.

I already knew most of that because it's actually part of my heritage but... cracked.com explains it in a much, much more entertaining way. Thanks be to this thread for showing it to me.

[DorostheConqueror]

Who believes any of those myths? "Lies My Teacher Told Me: the Internet Idiot Edition". And how do you have a Columbus-myth gripe session without mentioning the one pervasive myth that schools STILL routinely get wrong: the myth that he "discovered the world was round"? You could say "too easy", but there's a helluva lot more people who believe that than there are who believe that Columbus was a dirt poor shmo.

Also, where the hell are the sources for this "Native Americans got shipwrecked in Holland in 60 BC" nonsense?!?! If I remember correctly... hang on...

Yeah, that was lifted straight from "Lies". It wasn't true then, it isn't true now, and the "source" the Cracked writer links doesn't even BEGIN to justify itself; it merely repeats an unsourced claim and moves on... which, appropriately, was exactly what the author of "Lies" did, too.

Oh, Cracked. Cracked, Cracked, Cracked. Writing an article about how everybody's dumb and how we're all suckers for historical myths, then casually inserting a trendy revisionist whooper like that one. I am disappointed in you, Cracked. I expected more from you, knowing your rigorous standards of accuracy and integrity. Oh no, wait, sorry, I was thinking of SomethingAwful.


More like, BUTT-Cracked, amirite?

[Wolf]

Uh. Sure, Doros.

At any rate, I wasn't aware that half of those were myths. I disregarded the "Indians in Holland" thing because it was briefly mentioned, but which lies, specifically, are you talking about, again?

I also find it ironic that you seem to take pleasure in debunking things that try to "educate the stupid people", and yet you do it in exactly the same way. I may just be perceiving it wrongly, but it's almost like instead of knocking someone off a pedestal, you try to sharpshoot them from your own pedestal that is, I assume, higher than theirs.

[DorostheConqueror]

And where do you think I got that attitude from? Like the writer of that god-awful piece, I grew up on crap like LMTTM. The whole point is to snipe people off pedestals by debunking stuff.

Well, actually, it was James Randi and a boyhood subscription to Skeptic Magazine (thanks, episode of the Simpsons where Lisa reads Junior Skeptic!) that really got my curmudgeony-skeptic thing started, but I read the snarky Zinn-ite "kill your parents" stuff too. I learned my lesson... and perhaps I learned it too well".

Anyways, Lies My Teachers Told Me is a book that was, and probably still is, all the rage in freshman dorms the country over. Basically, it's a list of half-truths and outright fabrications (and possibly even some stuff that really IS accurate, but which didn't fit the trendy revisionism of mid-90s academic sociology), presented in a conspiratorial, "this is the sort of stuff THEY don't want you to know" tone. It's actually a pretty good book, and it provides a number of delightfully patronizing tidbits with which you can irritate your friends, such as:

"The Pilgrim's didn't REALLY land on Plymouth Rock!" (in fact, they didn't even land in Plymouth; they made first landfall in Cape Cod, almost thirty miles away)

It's fun. Next time you're in Plymouth, try it out!

Like I said, most of that stuff is pretty common knowledge, at least if you're the sort of boring geek who enjoys studying history. I could have a skewed view here, of course- the "Indians got wiped out by a plague" thing is a common thesis in Jared Diamond's books, for example, who is another popular "trendy 90s hist-lit" author. He's probably a major source for whatever the writer of this article didn't lift directly out of LMTTM, but... sure, I'm willing to concede that maybe not everyone here has read his work. You, for example. Still, that doesn't mean that you're stupid, or even misinformed- it probably means you just don't care enough about that particular incident in that particular time in history to bother reading up on it. Hell, there's probably a ton of crap I don't know about the civilizations of 9th century Kazakhstan, but that doesn't mean I believe myths, it just means I don't know anything, period. Big difference.

Nor is there ANY excuse for the author of this article to parrot the "Indians in Holland" thing. He pulled it off a book which pulled it off "Lies"; that's three iterations. Three separate authors who should have checked their sources, yet not one of them bothered to investigate this, frankly, astounding and (if it were true) earth-shattering revelation. And all three are positioning themselves as "revisionist authorities", the sort of historians who (according to the non-cynical theory) critically examine received truths and try ever so hard to separate historical "facts" from historical "fiction". What kind of debunker can't even debunk his own nonsense? A lazy one, I guess. In case anyone's curious, this "Indians landed in Holland" thing seems to be trending mighty hard right now (could it be because of this very Cracked article?) and this is the most indepth look at the claim I could find. tl:dr summary: don't trust people who tell you not to trust people.

[AddictedtoMorrowind]

Wait, wait, wait, Queen Elizabeth is no longer hot? How could you say that to your fantasy wife!

[Wolf]

I actually learned to be skeptical of things... I'm not sure when-- but I'm a bit less versed in it. If someone tells me something that makes some logical sense in an area where I know just about as much as Anita Bryant knows about marketing brand loyalty, then I'm willing to believe them simply because I don't have any knowledge in my head that contradicts it. I may, of course, be skeptical if it's a sociology professor teaching me quantum physics, but not enough to call him out on it-- mainly because I wouldn't have any rebuttal.

And I actually like the attitude that you have to a certain point; it's through-provoking and challenging. I just personally get a little rasped when you target someone for being hypocritically high-horse and execute them while riding a high-horse-- like some cosmic lesson about irony, I suppose.

[umadbro?]

You know Queen Elizabeth is now hotter than ever...right?...anybody?...am I the only one?

[DorostheConqueror]

And I actually like the attitude that you have to a certain point; it's through-provoking and challenging. I just personally get a little rasped when you target someone for being hypocritically high-horse and execute them while riding a high-horse-- like some cosmic lesson about irony, I suppose.

Good. Good.



Now you're beginning to see the Power of the Dark Side!

But it's not really ironic at all. It's just honest, honest and inevitable, the natural endpoint of bitter, cynical postmodernism. We're all products of our society, and once our society has fully embraced the arrogance, aggression, and reflexive anti-authoritarianism of people like Prof Leowen, what happens then? My problem is I'm too self-aware, and the tools I've received are designed to destroy the very foundations my teachers strove to build. I act like them, I know them, because I am them. And who better to kill the Buddha?

Plus being ironic is totally hip and gets you chicks. Hence my tl;dr summary, which you should probably not trust.

[Wolf]

Well, I have to say my respect for you just spiked a little. I'll keep in mind that you know exactly what it looks like the next time you punch a mirror.

Also, props for Palpatine. Made me laugh.