Remedial course in American History!!! The town I grew up in was settled in 16 16 or 1623 by the Dutch, but was a Native American settlement before that, off and on for thousands of years. Great Britain was created in 1707 .

it is. Even wikipedia knows this: The British Isles are a group of islands off the northwest coast of continental Europe that include the islands of Great Britain and Ireland and over six thousand smaller isles.[7] There are two sovereign states located on the islands: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom) and Ireland (also described as the Republic of Ireland).

“Their political divisions are temporary and annoying”.

What a splendid piece of condescension from a citizen of a country with not even 240 years of history!

Hat tip!

By the accents, they are mostly from the English Midlands. This shows one of the negative aspects of having a passport-free travel zone between the Republic of Ireland and the UK.

Yeah, exactly!

When PZ and I did the Steel Cage Death Match Framing Slapdown at the Bell Museum a couple of years ago in which we went up against Chris Mooney and that other guy, people in the audience were actually angry with us because we were all polite. We even went so far as to mutually point out good points that the other side was making. We were, in fact, civil.

How else would we be?

People need to understand better that this literature thing …. which is now manifest in blogs and other on line formats … is an old tool used for centuries by scholars and other debaters, both amateur and master. When you read an essay that is rather biting and intense you are not seeing a person. You are reading an essay written by a person.

Can you imagine if Babe Ruth struck everything and everyone with great force all the time, like he hit the ball with that wooden bat ever time? That is what people who read spirited debate and then expect the debaters to be screaming maniacs are assuming.

I do remember a debate in Trinity college Dublin(TCD), in 2007 where Irish Muslims debated Omar Brooks (aka Abu Izzadeen, and Anjem Choudary. One of the Irish Muslims, speaking with a Dublin accent, summed up Choudary’s ideology as “..a mental illness”.

It helps that the Muslims in Ireland are comimg from a very diverse range of backrounds. In Germany, the Muslim population is overwhelmingly Turkish/Kurdish. In France, overwhelmingly ex-colonial North Africa. They tend to form ghettos. In Ireland, quite a high proportion are married to non-Muslims.

And there is a large Shia population in Dublin. Shias tend to question more.