"Step away from the candy and come with me, kid"

You Angle-ishmen ain't up to it . . .

. . . said the man who left the US to live under a Westminster-ish system we call Canada.

I 'd support George Washington, with great enthusiasm!!!
What I woud be very interested in doing is to use military force
to prevent the English from capturing any American prisoners.
More Americans perished in English prisons than on the battlefield.

Implicit in your question is that the blacks mean a lot more to me
than thay actually do. I don't think much about them.
Thay do not inhabit my thoughts. The American Revolution did not have much to do with them.




Competitive athletics r futile wastes of time.
I have no preference qua WHICH group of strangers
will prevail over the other group for proficiency
in running around in circles in the grass.

I have no wish whatsoever to be united with Canadia.
I choose a limited republican government with sovereignty
in the citizens, and NOT in their low life hireling government.

I think of the citizens as being real estate owners
who opt to hire a property manager to attend to day-to-day
management of our property (e.g., maintaining lights and pipes, etc.)
with some hired security guards to protect the place for us.

I might supplement this response; its a deep question, Thomas.





David

I do think that you've got a bit of a brass neck criticising the corruption in our system of government. Your system gave us Dick Cheney, Iraq and Halliburton.

You'd probably help the French invade us as well. We saved you from French aggression and you sold us out.

Or perhaps you could go back to 1940 and drop a nuke on London. That would get you the system of world goverment you seem to like so much.

??????????


When was this ????

The French and Indian War of 1754 ??

Y? For what purpose???
That sounds like wasting a nuke.





I have never supported World Government; its too dangerous.

You talk about all this with rose tinted spectacles. In 1763 American colonists were protected from French by British troops at the British taxpayers expense. You sold us out, you colluded with a hostile nation whose intention was the invasion of mainland Britain. And now you want to go back and help the French finish the job off.

The King of England was defending his property from the King of France.

We demanded Independence.



I was not aware of any French invasion of England since 1066.




U think that I want the French to invade England?? Really?

Did I say that?





David

You wanted to go back tofinish off the job. It's not about independence, it's about subjugating the British under French rule. You tried it again in 1812. And now you want to go back and inflict the terror of the Revolution on us. What price do you think we should pay for once governing some of the Eastern States of America?

The decision was conditioned on political considerations.

Excuse me, argue against what i've written, not what you think it convenient for an argyument so allege i've written. I made no mention of corruption in government at all. My objection is that your PM weilds too much power, that your PM is essentially chosen by party insiders and that your chief executive officer is a member of the legislative branch, which seriously compromises the concept of separation of powers and of checks and balances. I'll ignore your foray into personalities given that my remarks were not predicated on personalities.

Can you tell us of the occasion upon which England saved the North American colonists from French agression?

First of all, I apologise if you think I became personal, it was unintentional. We're probably a too bit attached to our own systems of government, I do sometimes get a bit emotional.

In 1997 Bernie Ecclestone, head of Formula 1, was forced to take back political donations to the Labour party, after Blair exempted Formula 1 from the ban on tobacco advertising. After Bush got into office, he seemed to reward those who bankrolled his campaign with impunity. That's the sort of thing that stands out over here when we think about American politics.

Look, let's agree to differ on this, both systems have good and bad points. I do get a bit miffed when I think that you're highlighting just the negative aspects of our system. Maybe I'm seeing stuff that's not there. If so I apologise.

Over here the 7 years war is seen as a time when American colonists were threatened by the French. The American Revolution is seen as part of the wider conflict with the French. Since the invasion of 1066, and the Norman occupation, English foreign policy has been focussed on ensuring that it never happened again. When Dave goes on about his good vs evil bollocks regarding the revolution it makes my blood boil. There are two sides to every story. I wasn't fantasising about going back in time to kill his ancestors.

Leaving asided the undisputable fact that the French had been kicked out of North America for three years by 1763, your remarks are the same sort of uninformed and self-congratulatory sneer indulged in by North's government in 1766. In 1757, Governor Shirley was replaced and Governor Pownall took his place in New England. In 1758, he wrote to the Lords of Trade (responsible for the colonies) that before that war, Massachusetts had operated on an annual budget of less than 46,000 pounds sterling, but that in that war they had acquired a debt in excess of 330,000 pounds, and had passed a plan to sink the debt in three years time--to which the people of Massachusetts consented because the plan had been passed by their elected representatives. That was a lesson lost on the governments of Bute and North after the war.

Montcalm advanced on Fort William Henry and took it from the English in 1757. The following year, colonists and Iroquois Indian allies, lead by Sir William Johnson, the American Indian agent, retook it from the French, Canadians and Indians, without the aid of the English. Before that, Braddock had, in 1755, marched off to defeat and a mortal wound near present-day Pittsburgh. The reteat of his shattered little army was covered by the Virginia militia (upon whom his troops had fired when they attempted to come to their aid in the battle), and the retreat was organized and lead by George Washington. The Abercrombie expedition, the largest military force on the continent to that time, which failed to take Fort Carillon (now Fort Ticonderoga), was supported by the militia of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticutt and New Hampshire. The expedition was supplied by the colonists, who also supplied the carters and the boatmen.

The successful capture of Louisburg was supported by colonial troops and by a host of colonial supply ships, and was supplied by the colonies. Of course, in the previous war (the War of the Austrian Succession, known in North America as King George's War), the colonists had taken Lousiburg from the French without any aid from England, but you gave it back to the French in the peace negotiation.

We fought Queen Anne's War (the War of the Spanish Succession) and King William's War (the Nine Years War) essentially on our own, although the Royal Navy snapped up as much French shipping as it could for the prize money. This crap about "protecting" us from the French has been the bullshit sneer of the English for 250 years--repeating it doesn't make it true.

Napoleon threatened to seize American shipping with the Milan Decree. This had been in response to the orders in council of Grenville's government in 1807. HMS Leopard had fired on USS Chesapeake in the same year, in a notorious incidient in which Leopard approached Chesapeake while it was taking in supplies off the Virginia coast, and Leopard showed no hostile intent, until they demanded the right to search Chesapeake for deserters. The American captain refused and Leopard, a 50-gun line of battle ship, fired a broadside into the unprepared American at a time when we were not at war. She killed two dozen Americans, then search the ship and took off four men. They were carried to Halifax where government released them back to Ameicans. For god's sake, one of these alleged "Britons" was a black man who barely spoke English. No one knows how many Americans were pressed on the high seas by the Royal Navy, but during the War of 1812, more than 2000 sailors were sent to Dartmoor because they refused to fight against their native country, regardless of what the captains who had pressed them out of unarmed American ships had claimed.

Napoleon was smart enough to rescind the Milan Decree, but the English were not that smart, and only sent an offer to partially rescind the oders in council after Mr. Madison had already declared war. Don't try to puke up some stupid argument based on a quixotic claim that we had any obligation to be loyal to a nation which had treated us with contempt and had carried it with a high hand against American shipping for two generations.

By the way, you should spare us the melodramatics. The threat of invasion by the French was very short-lived. It ended in 1805, when Napoleon marched off to Austria, abandoning the plan to invade England. The subsequent naval battle at Cape Trafalgar in 1805 ended any opportunity he would have to again theaten invasion, which is why the foolish and very courageous Horatio Nelson has a statue in Trafalgar Square. This was even before the 1807 orders in council which eventually served as a casus belli in the War of 1812. War of 1812, get it? There was no threat to invade England in 1812--Napoleon was foolishly invading Russia in 1812.

I didn't think you had become personal. That was a reference to your remarks about Cheney, et al--a crew to whom i have referred for years as Mr. Bush and his Forty Theives of Baghdad. I simply mean that my objections are to the Westminster system, not any personal animus toward, for example, Tony Blair and Jack Straw.

Nice thread de-rail, everyone. I almost forgot it was about obesity =)

We saved u from the Germen 2ice: 1ce in 1918 and again in 1944.

It has never occurred to me that the English shoud be subjugated
under the French.

Your allegations are false (not to say demented).

My grandfather came from a place called "Devon Shire, England" in the 18OOs.





David