Best Comment I've seen lately

[Casady1]

Last edited Sat Apr 15, 2023, 10:45 AM - Edit history (1)

England sent the convicts to Australia and the Puritans to America. Australia got the better deal. We got the Puritans and the crooks all in one.

[Joinfortmill]

1. LOL

[niyad]

2. sn

[walkingman]

3. To elaborate further.....In the old days when Texas was a Republic (1836-1845)

this is where all the crooks and outlaws came to escape justice, some on their way to Mexico to do the same. But many settled here and now generations later many of us are still wondering....What the hell is wrong with Texas?

[mopinko]

4. lol. my 1st hubs

moved to tx to get away from child support enforcement. he paid what he was required, but being in tx, i never could get his earnings info.
so i lived w an agreement made when he was making minimum wage, even tho he went on to make 6 figures. i did manage 1 bump in 15 yrs, but no lawyer wanted to touch it. esp as i was poor.
he also liked the no income tax. in the 80’s. suspect others are still doing the same thing.

[marble falls]

7. Imagine the trouble my wife had trying to get Texas to enforce the support payments on her ex ...

... with a French divorce.

[mopinko]

19. oh lordy. i cant even.

did she succeed?

[marble falls]

30. It started with some state worker using Google Translate. Then that worker claimed that the ....

... the amount of arrears wasn't on the document and neither were orders of support or custody. She got a certified translation and sent it in.

It went downhill from there. France has a agreement with Texas (if not all fifty states) regarding child support enforcement. Abbott did nothing to collect arrears past using it for a campaign "promise".

After two years she gave up.

As a result of the marriage my stepson has natural English, French and US citizenship. If he'd gone back France between 18 and 26 he'd have been drafted into the French Army. He had until he 18 to renounce French citizenship. He served in the US Army until he was 24. Spent time Iraq - including 13 months stop-loss added to his enlistment.

I may live here, but fuck Texas and Abbott.

[H2O Man]

26. My daughter went

to a national conference in Texas last week. I warned her that a lot of Texans hang out in Texas.

Upon her return, she called to say the conference went well. She likes that after being on her job for les than 18 months, she is frequently invited to speak at these. But she noted she prefers the ones held in states other than Texas.

[rlegro]

5. Worse part of the deal for U.S. because....

Convicts were caught and known. So they were inferior criminals. Crooks were not yet caught, nor were they always perceived as crooked, at least to the full extent. And some of that presumably had to do with their cunning and sociopathy.

[Grins]

31. They sent convicts to the American colonies, too!

Debtors prisons were full in England and they needed to get rid of them.

In the colonies they became a problem so colonial Governors got the government, not to stop, but drastically cut down on the number.

The diff may be that N.America had people who said ‘No!’
Australia did not.

[speak easy]

33. Yes they did - send convicts to America until the Revolutionary War,

After 1783 they were looking for a new outland prison. In 1788 they began a penal colony in Australia.

[TeamProg]

6. The puritans were kicked out of England, then they went to Holland and

were kicked out of Holland and THEN came to America for the “religious freedom” to oppress others.

They adopted wooden shoes and other Dutch culture before getting kicked out.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

10. i thought the puritans left Holland and came to America to escape religious tolerance.

But, I wasn't there.

[TeamProg]

11. Funny, so did they! nt

[raging moderate]

24. Those were the Pilgrims.

They were slightly different from the official Puritans. Somewhat lax by the Puritans' standards.

[TeamProg]

28. A Pilgram is a person who undertakes a journey to a sacred place as an act of religious

devotion.

The Puritans in Eurpoe became Pilgrims when they set sail.


or:

Pilgrim Fathers , Pilgrims
pl n the. the English Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower to New England, where they founded Plymouth Colony in SE Massachusetts (1620)

GOOGLE IS AN AMZING TOOL (WHEN NEEDED)

[mountain grammy]

8. Texas has the unique distinction

of being the only state to secede from two different countries because the country wished to abolish slavery.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/slavery-integral-texas-transition-from-republic-to-statehood-textbook-doesnt-tell-full-story/

[Hotler]

9. Nobody liked them back then either. Bunch of kid touchers in my book.

Christian nutjobs (Christian dominionist, America's taliban) are the threat to our democracy right now.

[Hortensis]

12. Just as an American history refresher, Georgia was originally established

Last edited Sat Apr 15, 2023, 11:11 AM - Edit history (1)

in 1732 specifically as a place to dump debtors, and other convicts but officially a debtors' colony, after VA and MD, especially, got fed up with convicts being dumped on them.

But in fact, England had always been transporting unwelcome convicts of all types except murderers in large numbers to the American colonies, beginning in the 1600s.

The convicts remained convicts, btw, and were not sent as indentured servants, which was supposed to be a voluntary form of servitude. Convicts were supposed to serve out their terms and could theoretically return to England, but of course it was almost always a one-way trip.

[housecat]

13. Did they dress up as Puritans?

[Hortensis]

18. :) My guess is most prisoners would have had enough to do

just covering their nakedness. Seriously, until industrialization made cloth affordable, it was common for people to use what they had until it was too worn through for decency or repair.

[Backseat Driver]

20. James Oglethorpe got a grant from the British to establish the colony in the Americas,

that's the whole of what I learned about Georgia and Oglethorpe in 9th grade - I guess another one of those American mythological southern colonial "builders".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Oglethorpe

[Hortensis]

21. I remembered GA from HS history because they dumped convicts there.

Period. That's about it for some years.

Poor things mostly scraped up out of the gutters of England's towns and prisons. Of course the Carolinas and other states despised GA. When German farmers came to settle later, they were appalled at the poorly developed and maintained farms. I'm guessing the people they looked down on at least deserved some credit for being survivors and descendants of survivors living on poor, hardscrabble land no one else wanted.

[Backseat Driver]

36. My folks claim we were in GA when I was very young - red dirt rings a bell and fields of tobacco

(not cotton) with a rickety drying barn in the field??? I remember stopping at some diner/dive for a potty stop with a separate signed entrance for the POC; my DH recalls taking a drink of water from the "wrong" fountain one of his family vacations on the way to FL...folks sort of quietly gasped, then chuckled, then waved off his faux pas - SMH...

Never went back to the deep South except for a quick pass through to Florida for a one-day pass to DisneyWorld with the kids and a tour visit next day to the Space Center in January, 1987 - liked the Space Center tour better. We had reservations at a Holiday Inn right on some beach, and I mean right on it, beach sand out an open side door, but it was so dreary, windy, and cold, we ran out and right back in - very unpleasant. I do remember the long, boring I-95 with the silly Pedro South of the Border joke billboards. Are they still there?

[Hortensis]

38. It wasn't meant to, of course, but your post reminded me

that those able to remember those days are aging fast and dying off and before too many years will be gone. My husband, 82, remembers. He trained on an air force base in LA.

It's so different now. By far most Americans were born after 1964, when Democratic Party's Civil Rights Act integrated that potty stop.

So strange that we CAN have someone on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, who wants to re-segregate the races. He feels having to drink from badly maintained black water fountains, if they worked at all, and all the other forms of oppression made black men and culture strong.

Likely to historians in future this hateful, aberrational creep won't seem such a bizarrely misplaced relict of those times as he does now, just part of a typically messy, dragged out end. Incredibly, though, we have a newly enormously empowered, racist, RW extremist on SCOTUS working to get rid of all our equal rights laws. Definitely out of time and on the wrong side of history. I don't doubt America will undo all his bad, just hope he'll get to watch the last of it disappear, live to choke on his bile for a bit, and then...pass.

But South of the Border and its billboards are still there, a thriving business. I'd forgotten it because we seldom drive that stretch. South of the border referred its location across the border that separated its beer sales from the dry southern state on the other side. Another thing that's changed.

[The Jungle 1]

14. All this just cause we burned a couple of witches.

Collateral damage I tells ya.
snark

[dlk]

15. Kurt Andersen wrote a very good book, "Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire"

It’s a colorful history of the many dreamers, zealots and grifters who founded our country. It helped ecplain where today’s seemingly endless array of radical extremists came from.

[Demsrule86]

16. Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how badly indiginous people are treated?

Most recently Indiginous people can't buy alcohol believing it will reduce crime. There is a strong right wing presence there. And it is a very racist country.

[peppertree]

17. In Argentina, they have a similar joke

"We're a nation of the unlucky."

"Aren't you being a bit harsh?"

"Not at all. Most Argentines have a great-grandparent, whose brother ended up in America!"

[treestar]

22. The British did send convicts to America

Just that the lost that ability in 1776, and so from then, sent them to Australia.

[plimsoll]

23. Yep.

Thing to remember is that at the time they left being a Puritan actually was a crime.

That said, you should read John Cotton, maybe they had a point?

[DFW]

25. And to make sure that none of them had an incentive to return to England

They made sure that English cuisine didn't change, either.

[republianmushroom]

27. like the posting

[Sky Jewels]

29. Comedian Greg Proops has some funny takes on the Puritans:

“I have to hear this all the time in England: "Well, all Americans are fat and stupid, mm-hm-hm-hm-hm." Really? Well, thanks for sending over the best and brightest to start the party. Maybe we can send a few freaky, Texas, militia, hate-group, gun-toting weirdoes back to your country.”

*

“My feeling is, the Pilgrims were asked to leave England. England was never funner than when the Pilgrims split, right? The people of England got a little tired of these dour, right-winged conservative psycho-Christians wearing all black, bumming people out, confusing everyone by wearing buckles on... their heads. "Is that tight enough for you, Cotton?" "Yea, verily.”

*

“How come we got the grumpy boat of bandy-legged Puritans? How come we didn't get the Italian party boat with the cappuccino makers and the gelato machine? That was the sexy boat, man.”

[OldBaldy1701E]

32. For those who are interested...

There is a very good book about the Puritans and their colonies here in the US.



She has written several books about our history and they are all worth a read or five.

[Stuart G]

34. But...........'WAIT A MINUTE'....WE GOT SOME SMART ONES TOO" DON'T YOU THINK?

[dflprincess]

35. I heard a similar comparison

The U.S. was founded by religious fanatics. Australia was founded by convicts.

Australia won.

[burrowowl]

37. LOL! Kick