Oh yeah, and another thing about us: we manage to piss the rest of Europe off like America manages to piss the rest of the world off! Don't know how we do it!
Does hooliganism ring a bell. As you English cannot hold your liquor because of the lame ale you drink at home, the English that go mainland go drunk easily and start being hooligans. Next to that most English have some kind of superiority feeling, almost as bad as the Germans and the French. So go figure...
By the way, i like the English, i really do.
Yeah, that's definitely a big part of it - I don't think it's actually got
that much to do with whether we can take our beer or not though. It's more of a cultural thing - every culture has a way of being pissed off with the world and thus perpetuating it by not contributing as a useful member of society; however, most other nationalities (with some exceptions, although they tend to be laregely confined to more specific minorities than in England; most of the English who are violent tend to be fairly typical working class with some sort of resentment, though ethnicity or anything else tends to be purely incidental - it can affect pretty much any group with some sort of resentment) will rarely let it be some sort of national phenomenon. Every culture has a few people that want to get violent, and there's unfortunately not much that can be done about that; however, the English as a group tend to have something in their personality - whether it's part of the "island mentality" or not I don't know, although I think it is - that makes them generally more aggressive, and thus want to assert superiority over others as a group mentality, rather than individually (which everyone has; just look at the success of the free market, where success is the driving force - whether money is involved or not, and it usually is, every success that you gain must be at someone else's expense. It's the competitive drive in all of us surfacing in a way that is (mostly) good for the community, because it drives all of us to excel.). Those who aren't bothered about asserting superiority in the overly antagonistic way as others just don't tend to get rowdy at all; for example, I drink because it's fun to get drunk and have a dance and/or a chat with people, not because of any particular communal anger; if you drink because it's fun (and it is, mostly - even if you start to lose control, there's nothing lost if you're just drinking and chatting with friends), that's OK in my book, rather than drinking to get drunk - with the implication that you'll think about WHY you're getting drunk afterwards, or what you're going to do once you get drunk.
I think that every nationality has some sort of superiority complex. It's just that the English as a group try and assert it more than others. I personally do not see any attraction in hooliganism whatsoever - what is being violent to anyone else going to prove? Ever? - but some people see it as a way to assert their superiority complex on others, since they often don't get the chance to try and show their worth in the regular comings and goings of the world. However, there is still a vague feeling of being reserved in England, as anyone who comes here will notice - if anyone's ever seen "Trigger Happy TV" (basically a series of sketches where one major thing that it's mocking is the
complete lack of British reaction to something totally outrageous and ridiculous), you'll know how inert the British can really be - and the drinking gets rid of that. They forget that violence doesn't solve anything, and get aggressive. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen when people are sober, but I think that no matter how well people could hold their drink in England, people would drink until they lost their inhibitions, with the results you see every now and then.
BigMac, I think you like the English more than I do to be honest; I like specific British people - quite a lot of specific British people, as it happens, and pretty much anyone who I have or haven't met who doesn't annoy me is fine in my book - but "The English" as a group only tend to come to the foreground when they're doing something that makes me truly ashamed of my nationality.
Adam
Poll
