Kroney

He's a useless, fat-faced fantasist. Salmond, I mean. Not Bester. I've no idea what Bester looks like, but to be that chippy I suspect it might involve a tricorn hat, a blue coat and about 250 years of temporal dislocation.

It's this sort of attitude that's given the gamer side a bad name. Consider her as a person with thoughts, feelings and opinions first, THEN use her as fantasy material. #bettertogether

I'm afraid you're terribly mistaken, I show no tolerance at all. I do humbly apologise if my meaning has been misconstrued. If it's any comfort, I have done some further research and I don't much care for the hysterical rage-screeches of the lumpen mockeries of femininity on the other side, either. Both sides of the argument seem to be dominated by utter laughable embarrassments of people. It is my unshakeable conviction that the worst offenders from either side get locked in an arena and forced to fight to the last person standing, who should then be shot. If only one side's withered-up husks could be persuaded to mate with the desperate onanists of the other, perhaps the situation could be salvaged. Alas.

Agreed, having a wobbly rage over how much side boob other people are comfortable with is indeed a waste of your time.

This seems to have largely passed me by, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that it's a controversy caused by a literal ton of fat, sweaty, socially inadequate man-flesh wobbling in rage over women requesting that they don't get treated as, what I shall euphemistically call, off-the-wrist material and whom should grow the hell up and stop acting like a bunch of virginal online autists.

Don't use "Brits" when you mean "English". Yes as far as I know it could be still be part of the Commonwealth if it wanted to, but I'm not sure about points like what currency would Scotland use and would they be part of the EU? They would still be part of the Commonwealth, yes. Salmond wants to continue using a Bank of England backed pound sterling. Literally everybody with anything to do with the Treasury or the BoE has said this wouldn't happen. Salmond has repeated they'd use it and refused to entertain a second option. So nobody knows what Scotland would use. They would probably be eventually admitted to the EU, but senior EU people have been quoted as saying that effectively Scotland would be a new country and would therefore have to reapply to join. There's something of a waiting list. Incidentally, the Yes campaign is only ahead in one opinion poll and even pollsters openly say that their polls can't really be taken as gospel.

It's funny how the British in the thread are the ones who clearly care the least. Basically The Scottish are heavily working class. This tends to produce a lefter, more socialist attitude. They have consistently voted for the Labour party since the last referendum on a similar issue since '79. The UK as a whole has returned a heavily Conservative bias, interspersed with a Labour party that's swung so far to the right of its traditional position that it really has no business having the same name anymore, which more closely matches the politics of the wealthier South East. The South East could practically be a country in its own right, driven by the wildly disproportionate economic power of London. Elements in Scotland feel they're being stuck with Tory governments despite consistently voting Labour. Secondly, to see the UK as one country is massively misunderstanding the situation. As the post-imperial era marches on, the four countries within each find they have less and less reason to stick together. Devolution has been slowly gathering pace to match the increasing feeling of nationalism since the Thatcher era. Each country now has its own parliament/legislative assembly, with varying degrees of power. Currently the only real glue holding the UK together is money. England generates by far the most due to its far larger population and, again, London. Those taxes subsidise the smaller economies in the other countries, at least theoretically. The SNP clearly feels it can do better than Westminster in providing for Scotland's people. Thirdly, there's Alex Salmond. He's a glory-hunting toad-faced moron with no idea how he's going to fund anything post-independence and is playing on a largely implanted-by-Victorians Scottish racial memory of Scottishness. How much traction he's gaining is up for debate, but the current crop of public school charm vacuums heading up to Scotland to demonstrate just how massively out of touch they are with the average voter, particularly the average Scottish voter, probably won't do him any harm at all.

They'd never do it. The Mars factory is in Slough, they'd starve to death.

Invade Yorkshire

Who cares? If they vote for independence, we should just re-conquer them. If they vote to stay, we should kick them out of the union out of spite and then re-invade anyway.

Typical communist.

Haha what? You sure there, chief? You know how there's only a finite amount of money, right? You know that to make the poor less poor, the rich would necessarily have to give some of that up, right? What we're talking about here is you, an American right-leaning (I assume) Republican, clearly and openly advocating that the "American system" is all about resource sharing as opposed to naked capitalism. It's a see saw, for one side to be high up, the other side has to be low down. Otherwise, if you balance everybody in the middle, you've got socialism. It might not be what you want to project America's system as being, but that's a whole hell of a lot different from it not actually being America's system.

This is a great idea, except religions are for medieval peasants and I f'ing love a good steak.

It's not, no. Though you could be forgiven for thinking it, given the state of Hackney. Hackneyed comes from a common type of horse, which I guess then grew from "commonplace" to "overused". It's pretty great, except when some fool shuts down half the city for a bike ride.

Well, basically the problem is that the Empire fell over. Since that happened, the whole world's gone to hell. You lot (meaning Johnny Foreigner in general) have proven yourselves incapable of self-rule and seem to need us to do it for you.

The Thames would have been pretty similar in the early nineties. As Monte says, you could almost go swimming in it, these days (were it not for the lethal under-currents). There's fish in there and seals and all sorts. Even a whale not so long ago, though that didn't end well. As for rats, I knew a guy that lived in Hackney a while back. He heard a scratching in his kitchen, figured he had a mouse and put a humane trap down. Next morning he goes into the kitchen to find a foot-long, black as night, red-eyed, bastard-great sewer rat staring up at him. He decided to put it down and stabbed it with a kitchen knife. That just made it angry. With that thing screaming and thrashing around, it took him five more stabs to kill the thing. Londoners didn't ignore them out of complacency, they ignored them out of fear.

Nonsense. One of the fringe benefits of a city that grew organically. There are woods in London, fields, parks and classic village greens. All because it's 25 miles-odd square of small villages that got eaten up by development hundreds of years ago. Hard to imagine that kind of growth in a city today. I read somewhere that if you go by the number of trees per square mile, London can be classified as a forest. Try here for beer http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/george-inn/, just down the road from London Bridge tube.

Chelsea, very nice. In which case you'll be within spitting distance of Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge. Lots of touristy things to see around there. The museums are all along Cromwell St just to the north of you, around South Ken station and Buck House is just up from there. Good place for a base.

There are some other interesting markets if you want to nosy at some less touristy areas. Brick Lane's cool if you like markets and don't mind hipsters. Camden market is rammed, but people seem to want to see it the once. Petticoat Lane's right near the City and is a far less tourist-heavy place. Sells a lot of ****, mind.

As another Londoner, I'd strongly advise avoiding Piccadilly Circus. If you've been there before, this'll be old news to you, but it's literally just a traffic junction. Westminster Bridge is a nightmare, you'd be better advised to approach the Houses from the south, and then walk back south and find another bridge to cross. It's the traffic, more than anything else. If it were a straight tank up a clear road it wouldn't be nearly so bad. Unfortunately the roads around London are a car park and the M1's always got roadworks. You could try going the other way and sit on the M6 car park for a while, I suppose. It takes more twice the time to get North of Birmingham than it does to get from there to Scotland.

You can spot which guys are from the larger colonies when they say things like "Scotland is within driving distance of London". Yes it is, as long as you don't plan on coming back the same day. Or seeing anything the same day, as it'll take you six or seven hours to get up there.

Here's something to do in London: When on the Tube, make sure you have your ticket before you try to exit through the barriers, as blocking off a gate whilst digging through your bag is the leading cause of violent death amongst tourists.

Well, I did the same thing I do every 4th July. I dress up as John Bull and spend my time apologising to every foreign national I see for letting you lot off the leash.

He's right about thing, though. The British do indeed hunt in packs. Won us an Empire, that. Gawd bless 'er Madge.

Russians are pretty bad. They come over, you have to call the army out to get rid of them and then they're all "what? we're not even here".