ToreBear said:
Well the Brits vs. Europe is a common theme in their media and discourse. So it's quite normal for British media to rely on badly thought out stereotypes. I watch a lot of English language news channels. My favorite is AJ English. And though they are quite good, the UK discourse on Europe is quite prominent. This is not strange as they rely on UK or UK educated journalists to a large part. Their views are often based on what is written in English and often in uk papers, so they carry the stereotyping with them.
Areas were this has annoyed me are:
- The financial crisis, where UK problems seem to be minimized compared to the rest of Europe. It's a kind of UK bad, but Europe worse argumentation. Usually they think about Greece or something, and ignore that Europe has many countries much less affected than the UK.
One has to understand the contortions GB went through over whether or not to adopt the Euro, and the utter inability of Britain, like most countries, to see beyond its own shores in terms of cause and effect. At the moment they are having what feels like an eternal debate about 'austerity' - whether the way out of the current downturn is to cut back, and lower taxes, or to stimulate. The entire conversation takes place as if the GB recession is entirely caused by and soluble in the UK. As if Lehman never happened.
In that sense, the Eurozone crisis was a one story pony - "thank god we stayed out". Anything not fitting that narritive is ignored.
So the UK narrative is a bit, self absorbed one might say. This might also have been the case if French were more global, and it was French discourse that dominated. Though personally I think it would not have been so bad, as the French consider themselves part of Europe, while in the UK, this seems to be only grudgingly admitted when reminded of facts of geography.
The French don't just think they are part of europe; they think they run it, along with the germsn. The Germans provide Das Geld, and the french the panache. Bunkem, of course, but it's an issue of national self image, and the re-writing of the WWII and beyond history. Occupation left a scar. As an Irishman, trust me on that.
As for the Brits, there's an old newspaper headline that rather sums up how the English, in particular, see the world.
"Fog over Channel. Continent cut off"
think about that, for a second.
The anglo saxon thing fits into the discourse, but I think it has been much less in recent years. IMHO this happened because anglo-saxon was used a lot in describing the successful economic system in the UK, with anglo-saxon banking etc. After that system went belly up, the wording, might for many bring up associations with this system, and hence be less favored.
THe use of "anglo-saxon" as a finance model has always been assumed to be a french, rather than a British or american, thing - the british would always have used words like thatcherite, reagonomics, free market and laissez faire. Indeed, many of the senior Edinburgh bankers at the heart of the system would be quietly amused to hear themsleves considered "anglo-saxon". It wasn't a self designation.
As for doping IMHO the UK is probably the cleanest in the English speaking world(big generalization by me of course). But I also think there are big differences between the sports. It would not surprise me if there was a lot of doping in rugby for example, since as team sports go there is much less testing than individual sports, and it does not seem like such a technical game.(I've never seen a hole game, nor do I know the rules so please don't shoot me if I'm talking out of my a**
)
Also the UK, appears to have had a media which would do anything for a story, and I would think a doping story would sell a lot of papers. Hence if there was big time doping somewhere, I imagine the media would have gotten a sniff of it and pursued it in the name of clean sport(selling more papers
).
Hard to tell. Rugby is obviously a dark spot - has been since ~Rugby League's ascendency in the eighties. Soccer has a world wide problem seldom discussed. Cricket's vices are more balltampering, matchfixing and fraud than doping...with the exception of Afridi and Chris Gayle, there are few exceptionally famous big hitters, and indeed, outside T20 or Ireland at Bangalore style miracles, baseball style slugging is actually of limited utility in cricket. They are very different games, with very very different skill sets. I'd say recovery drugs among fast bowlers is an issue worth considering.
**** as i noted earlier, there is a deeply puritanical public instinct in GB, more so maybe than Ireland, where there is more sympathy for the 'cute hoor' and the 'fly boy', whose clealry a cheat, but does right by 'his own' (which also explains a fair amount of McQuaid's residual support among the older ones - he is almost uncannily reminiscent of a certain type of Fianna Fail minister, like a Ray Burke, or worse a michael Lowry)
A michael Lowry would simply never be tolerated in GB. Oh, they have plenty of crooks, same as everyone else - but getting caught in Gb is a different game than in Ireland, or was until recently. Culturally, its probably linked, historically. with the various religious strands in europe...there's a phd to be done there on modern public and private morality as a function of inherited quasi religious bias - with Ireland - the most protestant catholic country in europe right in the messy middle; more fundamentally, it's linked to the absolute glee newspapers feel when they have somebody famous over a barrell...see Giggs, Ryan; Terry, John; flintoff, Andy
In Ireland DJ Carey leaves the wife for another woman, goes bankrupt, and frankly, it's forgotten in a couple of months - he's still the legend of hurling. Giggs is the most successful footballer in GB history, and imogen thomas and his sister in law will follow him to his grave.
My long 2 cents worth. Sorry if I stepped on toes.
Step on more. Offensive honesty beats offensive sarcasm every day of the week.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram