In general, from my humble experience, I would say that we Brits are (in comparison to Americans) rather stand-offish, cynical and sarcastic. We also seem to have a problem with others success.

See, and that's so weird....the Brits that I've personally known were all very friendly, and very chatty.  !  Seriously.  Two of them had the low key personality that one would expect of a Brit, but they were both very chatty and friendly, anything but standoffish.  One was male, one was female, but both were vegetarians, and mad for Indian food.  Considering that neither of them knew the other but had traits in common I guess I could have come away from my experiences making (positive) generalizations about British people...."British people are friendly, talkative, Indian cuisine loving vegetarians!"

You shouldn't pigeon hole people either, but I do......but would hate the thought of someone doing that to me. So it's basically one rule for me, one rule for the rest of the earths population.

In general, from my humble experience, I would say that we Brits are (in comparison to Americans) rather stand-offish, cynical and sarcastic. We also seem to have a problem with others success.

Well I live in England, and I love it. It's quite different to America in that people seem unfriendly to each other and it takes 5 years to get to know your neighbours name. But the thing with English people is that they have a different style of living than Americans. American's have a outward mobility about them, that most British people don't have. So over there people have a type of "f*ck you if you don't agree with me" attitude. But over here mobility is limited, and most people end up living in the same town they grew up in. So over here, people may bitch about their neighbours, but they eventually learn to get on with each other.

The problem with generalized statements about "Americans" is that it's never accurate.  Never.  America is huge, and with all that land comes an endless variety of "Americans." North, south, east and west, with subdivisions within subdivisions.  The west coast...and the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and just the general "west."  But not to be confused with the midwest.    Within California alone there's a night and day difference between Southern California and Northern California...............to the point where there was a serious movement years back trying to petition that Northern Cal break off from SoCal.  But they didn't (and probable still don't!) want to be connected to SoCal anymore.   Then there's the "northern" U.S. - The north, versus the "NorthEAST" - New England, which is very different from New York and New Jersey.  And then there's Maine, who just does its own thing, a seemingly separate entity away from the entire northeast, so much so that it may as well be part of Canada and Nova Scotia.   Then we have the south, which is a huge thing in itself, with its own sub categories.  The deep south.  The mid-Atlantic region.  The Ozarks.  The Appalachians/Blue Ridge Mountains.  Then Florida, which is something else entirely, considering it's been settled by a predominance of New Yorkers and New Jerseyians and all "The Islanders" from the Caribbean.    Ever hear of Southern Hospitality?  Doesn't remote resemble whatever you've described about "Americans" here.   Since moving to Virginia I've been quite astounded by how friendly and polite and well mannered everybody is.  Men that stand there holding doors open for everybody, lots of "ma'ams" and "sirs."  I saw a lot of that friendly helpfulness in the Pacific Northwest as well.   Here there's an air of chivalry behind it, whereas there it was casual and mellow, (in the PNW they pretty much bend over backwards to help and be friendly, it's surprising, but nice).   Big urban metropolises - New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A. Miami, small towns, mid-size cities, rural, suburban, people of every color - white, black, red, brown, yellow and mixed, extremely rich penthouse dwellers on 5th Avenue NYC and gated ocean mansions of SoCal, Miami and Long Island, to suburban midwestern tract homes, to barefoot and living in shacks in the Appalachians and dusty border towns of Texas/Mexico.   Point being, there is no one set stereotype for what an "American" is going to be like.    So general stereotypes never fit.  (stepping off my soapbox now, thank you...)

There's another side to Britain, in that the emotional awareness in people seems to be quite high, but emotional language skills are quite low. So British people do care, but before they make the effort to get to know you, they need to see your dark side first. Once someone pisses you off, but stops to give you the time of day later, then they trust you. And although they may not like to speak you ever, they need a nod or some sign of acknowledgement that they exist for them to trust you.

We do have yobs on the street on the weekends, but if your emotional radar is in good working order, you'll have no problem. It's just that alcohol has been for a long time, the only socially acceptable way of expressing your feelings, so for dissaffected youths, Friday and Saturday were fight night.

But once Englishers reach 50 they chill right out, and don't care about the law, they only care that you treat the people around you with respect. The other thing is, most British houses are designed so long ago, that the sound insulation is so poor, that you can hear your neighbours arguing and having sex. British people have so little privacy, that they really value and fight for the privacy that they do have. So I'm not surprised that so many people ripped the chips out of their bins, it a very British form of revolt.

I think I can probably speak for most people here in the UK when I say that we really are right at the end of our tether.

You certainly speak for me there! Me and Mrs Me are desperately trying to get out of this country, along with millions of others.

Its not just the big things, it happens on a local level too, we had a road here with beautiful trees lining it for a mile or more, they just lopped everything of ALL the trees, leaving just short bare stumps. I could have cried, it was just plain rape of beauty.

And when they do roadworks round here, they make sure that the 'short cuts' have roadworks, too, so that everything stops, organised chaos. (In line with Government plans to get more cars off the road, but with no alternative means of transport, as a solution)

Did you know that burglars no longer have to go to court, unless they have been CAUGHT burgling several times?, naughty boy, stop breaking into peoples houses, putting them in absolute fear, stealing posessions they have worked all their lives to afford, and laughing at the helplessness of the common man.  The only people who go to jail are those who take the law into their own hands, by tackling the burglars, IN THEIR OWN HOMES.

We went to the park, our car got stolen, and was used in a ram raid robbery on a bank, and the police told us where I could find the car, when I got there the car was totally burned out.
They never caught them.  A bit pointless anyway, because the prisons are full of OAPs refusing to pay King Richard's council tax.

I could go on and on, but I just wanted to get some of it off my chest. Rant over.

I have noticed an acceleration of "everything being backward" in the UK. for example
Criminals human rights get more media attention than victims.
Honest people are  targeted more and more for stealth taxes, speeding fines, council fines etc while criminals, open psycopaths, rapists etc are given short stays in jail because british jails are full.
Young career criminals know that they will not be sent to prison

The same thing in Brazil, now the same everywhere...
In places like Swiss and Finland maybe not, I am not sure.

I have noticed an acceleration of "everything being backward" in the UK. for example
Criminals human rights get more media attention than victims.
Honest people are  targeted more and more for stealth taxes, speeding fines, council fines etc while criminals, open psycopaths, rapists etc are given short stays in jail because british jails are full.
Young career criminals know that they will not be sent to prison, while old age pensioners who refuse to pay council tax increases are jailed.
Political correctness gone crazy so we all lose human rights.
Government and Councils bringing in spy technology by stealth rather than debate it, hundreds of thousands of school children had been fingerprinted without their parents even knowing and people finding chips in their bins only after they have been delievered.
CHAV culture suits the establishment,  they are good customers of big business from big pharma to designer clothes and offer an exuse for more control and social engineering programs and bizzare criminal laws.
I feel noble indignation when i think about what is happening rather than anger which is hopefully less of a loosh snack

I hear you Barefoot.

It used to wind me off the ****ing clock. Make me really angry. But now... I have to take a deep breath, realise that the reason it's happening is not because the world / country has gone crazy, but it's simply the chosen method of TPTB to bring things to braking point.

Instead, I find myself getting angry with others around me, and those close to me for not seeing it. I shouldn't, because we are all at different points in the waking up process. Some of us in denial, but theres a reason for everything.

It dosn't take a rocket scientist to realise that at the very least, the immigration thing has been allowed to happen, more likely positively encouraged. The knock on effects and "solutions" to this "problem" are numerous. We have many, many intelligent (left brain only I'm afraid!) people in power making these desicions, but somehow, they just can't come up with any logical answers.

I have of late toyed with the idea of turning things around when trying to wake people up i.e. explaining the agenda FIRST, and then pointing out why such mad answers are suggested.

Whilst I'm on one....

I was recently pulled over in the centre of town. (I was done for 3 offences, and would love to give details but I won't. BUT it did end up being a serious 2 fingers to 'the man' and me getting off scott free!)

Whilst I was there for an hour+ with everyone gauping and staring, the officers were taking every opportunity to scream (sometimes quite aggressively) at people talking on their mobiles whilst driving. It was obviously "offense of the month". As I stood watching, it dawned on me just how far down the road we are here, it's all about the control.

An interesting point (regarding control) that Mr Icke made whilst travelling is that it's only when you visit another country that has a different way of doing things that it really hits you. In France, the police will come knocking on your door to check you have an ID card if you've just moved there. Been that way since the war apparently.

I think I can probably speak for most people here in the UK when I say that we really are right at the end of our tether.

Obviously simple labels have been rendered obsolete.

XD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav

So really it seems that the word "Chav" started there - rather than the culture.  Perhaps this just shows that the UK isn't any different to the rest of the world.

At the very least now, when you hear reports of roaming gangs of thugs in the UK, you know what sort of people are being talked about.  Not really thugs and not really gangs.  Just groups of chavs.  They've just got much the same reputation as the punk culture of the 70's / 80's I suppose.

He lives in Morrisville, North Carolina - I am not at all sure what it is like there though.  Whilst in the UK he did travel around a lot.  He avoided many of the large cities (though he did go to Dublin), and he saw a lot of the countryside of Yorkshire and Northumberland which really is awe inspiring.  He even said he thought people in the UK were far nicer than Americans – that kinda surprised me, as my experience is the opposite.

I think it’s possible to get a good feel for a place in a weeks stay.  But it will also depend a lot on what you have to compare it to.

Yes there are millions of "Chavs"...they originated just 20 miles from where I live, and our town has become somewhat of a refuge for them.  Though their town of origin is "Chatham"...(some believe their space-ship from planet chav crashed there).  Seriously though - their "style" seems to very quickly be assimilated by other youths.  But it isn't a "jeans below the waist" look...cloest thing you guys have in America to "Chavs" is what you call "Wiggers".

This is a far more acurate look at "chavs" dispite its humors angle:  http://www.chavscum.co.uk/

Well, I checked out the Chavs link, and watched one of the YouTube videos listed on that link, "How to be a Chavette."  I'm doubtful that the Chav style originated 20 miles from where you live.  The whole look (well, the girls that I saw in that video anyway) is just your generic hip hop street look, which has been going on in America for years now.   In the video, you see the girls with a long string of hair hanging down on both sides of their faces - well that's what the "Chollas" were doing over a decade ago in urban areas of America.  It's the hip hop gangster look.  (Chollas was slang for mexican gangster girls in SoCal)  11 years ago, in '95 when I was roommating with this group of people in SoCal, one of the guy's girlfriends named Daylene had a Mexican gangster cholla chick sister from Las Vegas that was visiting the house.  The sister had the exact same thing with the two long strands of hair hanging down.  While she was visiting she got Daylene to re-do her look to be more gangster, so then Daylene starts walking around with long hair strands hanging down like that too, affecting the "I'm hard" gangster look, like the way the girls jokingly pose in that video.    Here in America all the hip hop gangster wannabes wear hoodies and baggie clothes, and the girls all "scrap" their hair back just like the girls in the Chavette video demonstrated, and do their makeup the same way.   I don't think there's particular place of origin for this look, no city or country that can have the "claim to fame" for it.  It unfortunately just seems to be the by-product of the urban street thug wanna-be image presented and glorified by the music industry, shown over and over on MTV and other programs that in turn program the youth masses to run out and emulate it.   

What's funny is now that I'm thinking about it, the original purpose for girl gangsters to pull their hair back was when they were going to be fighting other gangs.  They pull their hair back skin tight so there's nothing for the other girls to grab onto, they vaseline their faces up to protect against knife cuts, and if they're really good, they conceal razer blades under their tongues.   Girls fight nasty.    But yeah, that's a very old school urban gangster girl thing to do......Not something that originated in England by white suburban girls.

Anyway, not professing to be the social cultural expert or anything, I'm just not thinking that the Chavs thing is a unique creation of England.  It's just a general style that's now worldwide thanks to the media perpetuating it.   Anyway back to Big Brother in the UK! 

Thanks for the feedback, Marcus and Barefoot Doc.   Figured it was best to actually ask people from England what the "Big Brother situation" is there, versus just taking the word of an article which can often times distort things - playing up certain things, while playing down others, and so on.

There was a British guy named Dean at one of my former temp jobs, he was 27, and had lived in the Sherwood Forest area.  He said that in England, there are people everywhere.  You just can't seem to get away from people no matter where you go, and yeah, the Sherwood Forest area had a lot of crime and thugs that were jumping people all the time.   What's funny is that this other guy who worked there was like, "I've visited Sherwood Forest...." sounding wistful about his travels.

That would be close to Nottingham, the larger towns and cities seem to have the most problems with thugs.
There is is still plenty of countryside in the UK to escape to and your never more than 70 or 80 miles from the coast wherever you live and far less than that to open countryside.

I have noticed an acceleration of "everything being backward" in the UK. for example
Criminals human rights get more media attention than victims.
Honest people are  targeted more and more for stealth taxes, speeding fines, council fines etc while criminals, open psycopaths, rapists etc are given short stays in jail because british jails are full.
Young career criminals know that they will not be sent to prison, while old age pensioners who refuse to pay council tax increases are jailed.
Political correctness gone crazy so we all lose human rights.
Government and Councils bringing in spy technology by stealth rather than debate it, hundreds of thousands of school children had been fingerprinted without their parents even knowing and people finding chips in their bins only after they have been delievered.
CHAV culture suits the establishment,  they are good customers of big business from big pharma to designer clothes and offer an exuse for more control and social engineering programs and bizzare criminal laws.

I feel noble indignation when i think about what is happening rather than anger which is hopefully less of a loosh snack

There was a British guy named Dean at one of my former temp jobs, he was 27, and had lived in the Sherwood Forest area.  He said that in England, there are people everywhere.  You just can't seem to get away from people no matter where you go, and yeah, the Sherwood Forest area had a lot of crime and thugs that were jumping people all the time.   What's funny is that this other guy who worked there was like, "I've visited Sherwood Forest...." sounding wistful about his travels.   

I said, "Oh yeah?" to him.  Pause.  "D'ja get mugged? "    Everybody around us cracked up, (him too) but especially the British kid.    Couldn't help asking that after hearing what Dean had reported!  But yeah, Dean was the opposite of your coworker Marcus, in that he reported that he never realized what it felt like to be "home" until he came here to the U.S.  Said the people were friendly, it's beautiful, lots of wide open space - still was trying to get used to all that open land, versus how things are in Europe - just very different, and he loved it, and was never going back.   I'm curious as to where your American coworker came from Marcus.  Do you happen to know?  If he's from some large urban city (which are typically dirty, crowded, and lacking in life force energy) then yeah, any place in England would beat that.  But there's just so much nice here...it all depends on where you live.   

Wow......in America, you don't f**** with the police.   Seriously....going after a cop with a knife??  You just don't do that.  They're armed to the nines here.  Rifles in their cars.  Automatic handguns on their holsters, along with batons, tasers and pepper spray.  The police here are a scary, well respected entity.  I mean, they all have the same look for the most part - usually very tall and big.   At LEAST 6 feet tall.  And the way they carry themselves and walk is something else.  It's the "cop walk." Cops always scare me and get my heart racing.  Couldn't even IMAGINE going after one with a knife.    That's just nuts.   On a completely unrelated sidenote, I have mental "cop radar," which enables me to "feel" when cops are within about a mile of me when I'm driving.  It says something about the vibe they're giving off most of the time if I can feel them like that.   It's an ability that I can shut on or off, and I developed it back in Florida when I was driving around for 6 months with expired tags.  I lived off of Broward Boulevard, which houses the Ft. Lauderdale police department, and the area is just crawling with cops as a result.  But I managed to evade them and never once got caught, thanks to my internal cop radar.  I'd feel them and change lanes and position myself all the time according to where I could feel cops hidden within traffic, so as to dodge having one suddenly right behind me.  Too many times to count I would have wound up with a cop right on my tail, seeing my expired tags, but which I avoided.  And I have witnesses to this too.  Tell me that isn't weird though.  Makes me wonder.

Thanks for reporting this too.   Not only does it seem that many Brits aren't hearing about these options, but we're not hearing the full story here in America either.   Again, if we were to go strictly by the picture that Alex Jones and Company paints, things look pretty scary in England.   So yeah, I'm glad to hear a more well rounded view and both sides of the issue.

That's a cool story.    It's inspiring, makes one wonder what we could do if we only tried a bit harder to make a difference.  Sometimes it all seems so futile, like things are so much bigger than what we, the little person, could ever hope to tackle.   

Very true.  Both there and here in the U.S. as well.  People living above their means, then having to work multiple jobs to keep up, going into the endless circle of debt.

Very true as well.....

Incidently would a neo mag work on a implanted chip as well?

I tried  neodymium magnets on my works buiding pass that allows access to the building, i just left the neo mags overnight (10 stacked 3/4 inch diameter) on top of the card and it did not work after and i had to get a new pass.
But i dont know how else you can be sure of frying the chip without some kind of sensitive meter.
I think i will just remove any chip from my bin manually just to make sure.
Here is another method.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2 … apper.html

It depends where you live, its not like that at all where i am and most of the teenagers i see are decent people.

Did you Brits hear about the microwaving of RFID embedded paper money thing a while back?

That was America's little rebellion for about a week. Then down the memory hole....... no one cares anymore.

That is how they always pull this shit. They know most of us have the attention span of a fruit fly.

Marcus.. it still blows my mind the coppers are not armed there, you said

"it really isn't any different to those people that claim America is full of fat, gun-toting dim-wits"

Wanna know who most of those people are here? The cops.

And what about the knife ban thing?

You guys must understand, to an American, things like that, and the banning of chocolate and chips
?!?!?!? is quite bizarro.

I wonder also if you guys were aware that elpresidente shrubbo has legal jurisdiction to incarcerate or eliminate dissenters anywhere in the world under the latest 'provisions'....

See here: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1004-35.htm

The shouting telescreen is literally the most in-your-face citizens-need-govt-to-be-their-parent crap I have seen to date.

I don't mean to come across with an attitude of superiority here at all, the ways and means of surveillance just have different names and faces with different nations respectively.

Things will (d)evolve uniquely with regard to where one lives, you guys have the knife ban, we can't bring fingernail clippers on an airplane.

Stupid, ridiculous, demeaning, unnecessary, condescending insanity.

Alright..... I'm done                        J