Someone probably does. I believe that the cultural practice of preferring coffee to tea began in the British colonies at the time the United States started to cease to be part of the British Empire as a side effect of boycotting tea to avoid paying a tea tax. (This is a pretty well-known episode of American history within the United States.) I was boycotting the boycott. Refusing to drink tea is a signaling thing in the United States to let people know that you are not in agreement with the government of the United States as to which side constitutes the actual enemy in most wars the United States fights. It more less means “I was an anglophile on my route to becoming a Bob Dylan fan, and I make a point of singing, at least, the first verse of “Chimes of Freedom” loudly and publicly every May 1, July 4, and September 2.” By “more or less,” I mean, I’m a musician so that’s how I now express some of the same things that I used to express by refusing to drink coffee before I had enough confidence to just sing “flashing for the warrior, whose strength is not to fight; flashing for the refugee on the unarmed road of flight” whenever I see someone wearing a uniform that I deem offensive. Relatedly, refusing to drink coffee while still drinking caffeine is a fairly radical refusal to participate in mainstream culture that an enormous number of second-and-third-tier trendsetters recognize as a common signal used by first-tier trend-setters. For instance, most hipsters are at least vaguely aware that many of the most influential people who call the shots and set the trends in their subculture are some subset of the people who are not actually hipsters but who interact with the fringes of hipster culture and who have also spent at least a few years saying, “I DO NOT DRINK COFFEE. i drink tea.” (“No thanks, I drink tea,” is completely different.) To become a first-tier trend-setter in hipster culture, you have to be a non-hipster who has learned how to do a super-hipster thing for the right reasons, and one of the most obvious and easy ways you can do that is to express a disdain for Starbucks that is more menacing/intimidating than it is merely contemptuous (but is also at least as contemptuous as the typical hipsters’ ability to express disdain). Hipsters are not formidable people, but they respect formidable people; and they disrespect people’s whose power is derived from social structures. There is at least one venue that I used to go primarily to consume tea, where hipsters still go primarily to consume Jazz. The comment that you responded mostly consisted of me cryptically calling a few shots. The comments I’ve posted today consist of cryptically taking victory laps for all the shots called in that comment ten years ago; while calling some shots for the next ten years. I occasionally interact with hipster culture to inform hipsters about what types of aesthetic preferences they are going to help spread in the next few years. All the minor celebrities I interact with respond to all the comments I direct towards them and ignore all the comments I make about them. For instance, Scott Siskind always replies to the comments I post on his blogs that I want him to respond to. And when I go to less wrong meetups I figure out whose worth talking to by saying, “I learned Scott’s last name from the blog that I sort of vaguely remember as being named after an octopus long before I confirmed it by asking ’how many Jazz pianists who performed in Carnegie Hall can possibly have a brother named Scott who has practiced psychiatry in Michigan.”
Coffee culture in America doesn’t have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn’t last (after all, Americans—infamous smugglers in general—were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.
(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky—as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)
Do people actually believe that no one in England drinks coffee at all?
Someone probably does. I believe that the cultural practice of preferring coffee to tea began in the British colonies at the time the United States started to cease to be part of the British Empire as a side effect of boycotting tea to avoid paying a tea tax. (This is a pretty well-known episode of American history within the United States.) I was boycotting the boycott. Refusing to drink tea is a signaling thing in the United States to let people know that you are not in agreement with the government of the United States as to which side constitutes the actual enemy in most wars the United States fights. It more less means “I was an anglophile on my route to becoming a Bob Dylan fan, and I make a point of singing, at least, the first verse of “Chimes of Freedom” loudly and publicly every May 1, July 4, and September 2.” By “more or less,” I mean, I’m a musician so that’s how I now express some of the same things that I used to express by refusing to drink coffee before I had enough confidence to just sing “flashing for the warrior, whose strength is not to fight; flashing for the refugee on the unarmed road of flight” whenever I see someone wearing a uniform that I deem offensive. Relatedly, refusing to drink coffee while still drinking caffeine is a fairly radical refusal to participate in mainstream culture that an enormous number of second-and-third-tier trendsetters recognize as a common signal used by first-tier trend-setters. For instance, most hipsters are at least vaguely aware that many of the most influential people who call the shots and set the trends in their subculture are some subset of the people who are not actually hipsters but who interact with the fringes of hipster culture and who have also spent at least a few years saying, “I DO NOT DRINK COFFEE. i drink tea.” (“No thanks, I drink tea,” is completely different.) To become a first-tier trend-setter in hipster culture, you have to be a non-hipster who has learned how to do a super-hipster thing for the right reasons, and one of the most obvious and easy ways you can do that is to express a disdain for Starbucks that is more menacing/intimidating than it is merely contemptuous (but is also at least as contemptuous as the typical hipsters’ ability to express disdain). Hipsters are not formidable people, but they respect formidable people; and they disrespect people’s whose power is derived from social structures. There is at least one venue that I used to go primarily to consume tea, where hipsters still go primarily to consume Jazz. The comment that you responded mostly consisted of me cryptically calling a few shots. The comments I’ve posted today consist of cryptically taking victory laps for all the shots called in that comment ten years ago; while calling some shots for the next ten years. I occasionally interact with hipster culture to inform hipsters about what types of aesthetic preferences they are going to help spread in the next few years. All the minor celebrities I interact with respond to all the comments I direct towards them and ignore all the comments I make about them. For instance, Scott Siskind always replies to the comments I post on his blogs that I want him to respond to. And when I go to less wrong meetups I figure out whose worth talking to by saying, “I learned Scott’s last name from the blog that I sort of vaguely remember as being named after an octopus long before I confirmed it by asking ’how many Jazz pianists who performed in Carnegie Hall can possibly have a brother named Scott who has practiced psychiatry in Michigan.”
Coffee culture in America doesn’t have much to do with the Revolutionary War. The rise of coffee is much later than the American Revolution. The brief boycott didn’t last (after all, Americans—infamous smugglers in general—were smuggling plenty of tea because of the taxes, so sourcing tea was not a problem) and there was enormous consumption of tea consistently throughout: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_tea_culture#Colonial_and_Revolutionary_eras In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that American tea was overwhelmingly green tea in the 1800s, and one of the biggest export markets for green tea worldwide.
(This was really surprising to me, because if you look around the 1900s, even as late as the 1990s, black tea is the standard American tea; all iced tea is of course black tea, and your local grocery store would be full of mostly just black teas with a few token green teas, and exactly one oolong tea if you were lucky—as I found out the hard way when I became interested in non-black teas.)
Well, they have something they claim is coffee here...