fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2569 ]

[ SECRET POST #2569 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2569 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[The Little Mermaid]

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03.

[Star Trek: The Next Generation]

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04.

[Team Fortress 2 and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert]

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05.

[Fresh Meat]

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06.

[Attack on Titan / Shingeki no kyojin]

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07.

[Skin Horse]

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08.

[Jon Richardson/Sarah Millican]

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09.

[Elementary]

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10.

[Saint Young Men]

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11.

[Game of Thrones]

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12.

[Arrested Development]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 052 secrets from Secret Submission Post #367.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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"Backwards"? So the US, with its right-wing politics, many states' refusal to allow abortion, its gung-ho, "fuck yeah! America!" nationalism, is progressive. Its appalling history of genocide and fact that it took decades longer than us to abolish slavery and started a civil war over it means that America is progressive. The increasingly tight measures its intelligence agencies are taking to limit privacy are progressive. The fact that I see "liberal" used much more as an insult by Americans than Britons means that the US is progressive. The fact you have no political equivalent to the Labour Party and "union" is a dirty word means the US is progressive.

I'm seeing a small problem or two with your argument here.

Make snide jokes about our supposed repression and our class system - yours is still alive and well; make another "white trash" joke and then say otherwise - but don't call us backwards.

We may have had some stupid Prime Ministers, but our people never allowed George Bush into power. We may have a traditional monarchy, but their power is most certainly waning.

I'm not usually a patriot, but damn, this makes me want to write a sternly-worded letter. I don't care if you're trolling, I needed to say this. We may do it fondly, but Brits regard America as the embarrassing cousin nobody invites to weddings.

Is this pasta or are you just massively replying to the wrong post?

Massively replying to the wrong post. It's addressed to the OP, as you can probably tell. It is my fault, but I can't be bothered to re-post and it'll stir less wank tucked away in a subthread of a subthread.

Because goodness knows stirring wank was the last thing you wanted when you posted this, right?

Misfire.

Everything you said became invalid the minute you assumed Brithater was an American. Americans are way down at the bottom of the list of people with reasons to hate the British.

This is true. But if you look at the demographic of this comm, American anons are the majority. And hell, I'm usually a Brit who hates the British, but something about this post got up my nose.

Hey, there's a few of us colonials on here, too, y'know.

(no subject)

mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com - 2014-01-15 10:36 (UTC) - Expand

lol where are you from, I've seen plenty of AMERIKUH FUCK YEAH folks going on about foreign shows ~invading us~

y'all motherfuckers did run a massive and deeply repressive and exploitative colonial empire for like a century and a half - one of the largest and most successful in history, which caused the deaths of a shitload of people. and yet you're still willing to pop off about the glorious progressive legacy of Britain, and throw words like "genocide" at other countries like the US.

just goes to prove that British society as a whole is still enormously hypocritical, but then I guess that's why you guys were so successful at conquering, murdering, and stealing from most of the world for so long. because you're vicious lying murderers.

This coming from an American is deliciously ironic.

TBH that was more or less a more pithy way of summing up my initial reaction to reading the post I replied to, so

Are you actually going to play that game?

What about the US's long and nasty history with slavery, which was abolished decades before in Britain than in the US? What about the US's backwards-ass current social policies in comparison to Britain? And even with all that, the US is still more progressive than many places (even if it's behind the curve with the western world). Britain is several steps ahead of us...I don't get how you can call them "backwards" tbh.

Try looking at what the country and its people are TODAY, not in history. If you do that, you'll find enormous faults with just about everyone.

Edited 2014-01-15 01:52 (UTC)

i didn't call them backwards, that was someone else in a different subthread. i wouldn't use that language even if i agreed with the judgment.

that said, i think it's pretty rich of you to call me out for looking at the past, when that's literally exactly what the post i was replying to did. i don't think the US is perfect - i think it's deeply, deeply flawed, with a long history of repression and injustice and conquest and colonialism, which i reject and i criticize. but what does grind my gears is seeing someone from a country with a strong, rich history of oppression and injustice and conquest criticize the US & defend Britain in a way that completely elides every bit of that history, simply ignores it and leaves it behind in favor of self-righteous condemnation.

(no subject)

diet_poison - 2014-01-15 04:06 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2014-01-15 04:23 (UTC) - Expand

Pssst, guess which of the two countries isn't an imperialistic world power right now?

yr point would have a lot more validity if they hadn't explicitly invoked America's "history of genocide" (which is honestly 90% of what I was responding to, the other 10% mostly being the bizarre blanket assumptions).

listen, i'm not saying America is or was fantastic. but it seems to me incredibly hypocritical for a Brit to talk about how America's history means that it's backwards and evil, while managing to completely ignore the deep, totally fucked history of the British doing awful shit. it's completely ridiculous.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2014-01-15 03:53 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2014-01-15 03:57 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2014-01-15 04:26 (UTC) - Expand

You do realise that all the things AYRT pointed out are current problems in America, right? Whereas you're getting mad over historical events for Britain. Apples and oranges, little troll.

lemme just quote a little something here

Its appalling history of genocide and fact that it took decades longer than us to abolish slavery and started a civil war over it means that America is progressive.

it would be one thing if it was just present day events. but i would hope that, when referring to the past, the massive history of heinous, evil shit Britain has done would have given the person who started this subthread pause before talking about the past misdeeds of America. but nope, it's "look at how awful the evil, unevolved Americans are! unlike us Brits, lovable and cheeky, eh wot, never done a thing wrong, sun never sets on the glorious British empire, uplifting the savages." fucking shit. it's almost unbelievable, in the sheer arrogance of it.

Speaking of killing and stealing...

Shh, stop making sense here.

I didn't get the sense that OP was addressing the US specifically, but yeah, if Britain is "backwards" then what is everyone else?? They're one of the most progressive countries in the world, I think.

Depends on the issue, tbh.

True, but taken as a whole...I still stand by my assessment

many states' refusal to allow abortion

Wait what? Some states have very, very strict limitations, but they allow them.

FYI the reason that there's "no political equivalent to the Labour Party" is pretty much entirely an accident of the different political structures of the two countries. It's not really a sign of anything else. The thing is that you can't really have effective third parties in the US, because you have a presidential system instead of a prime ministerial one. In a parliamentary system like the UK uses, you can form coalitions in Parliament to support the Prime Minister. You can't do that in the US - once the President is elected, he's elected. And there's not much use to forming coalitions in the legislature - in practice, people pretty much tend to be driven to caucus with one side or the other.

What this means is that, instead of forming third parties and then building coalitions in Parliament, American political groups build coalitions on the party level and the election level. So, to put this in practical terms, where in the UK you have unions and labour groups forming a third party, in in the US, labor groups and unions were absorbed pretty quickly into the Democratic Party and it became more or less the party of the unions (along with immigrants, minorities, women, and before 1948 or so, Southerners). It's true that there's no Labour Party but it's not because the Labour Party constituency never existed - it's because politics just don't work the same way.

That said, it's true that there have been substantive differences in the historical course of the representation of the thing - I would say that's because America is just fundamentally a more populist country than the UK, in a lot of ways. And it's also true that the unions have declined in power over the last 30 years or so, but then you could also say that about the UK and the modern Labour Party, Tony Blair not exactly being the favorite child of the hardcore socialists.

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