Well, the Brits fucked up their language so thoroughly that we’re still, over 200 years later, working on sorting it out. We’ve eliminated most of the superfluous "u"s and many of the horribly confused s/z issues, but there’s a ways to go yet. I once insisted my boss write out the material represented by “Al” on the whiteboard in my office. He wrote “Aluminium.” Obstinate old codger.
As to the military, maybe we could have universal healthcare if we didn’t need to keep an army big enough to protect the roughly 40 slackers across the pond, including the one with the song about ruling the waves!
Joking aside, I have done a lot of travel and hosted a lot of foreign colleagues, and I have found the “ugly American” behaviour from all nationalities. The worst is an Italian doctor I know who does nothing but complain about how the Italian-American food is all wrong; and I don’t mean the commercial crap, I mean the stuff that people serve in their homes. The fact that it has diverged from the original is simply unacceptable to her, and she’s frankly obnoxious about it. I’d expect more… couth from someone as educated as that. Even to her opinion that we serve the food in the wrong order. I’ve always wanted to mail her a toilet and tell her she can complain about the food once she’s figured out the advantages of that particular plumbing fixture.
Remind her that tomatoes, peppers, corn, and potatoes all came from this side of the pond before the Italians got their filthy, delicious fingers on it. Somewhere in South America there is an aboriginal eating an Italian meal for the first time and saying how the Italian dishes are done all wrong.
What do you mean “when”? The slide is in full effect! A superpower in its prime doesn’t allow a diplomatic mission to be wiped out a la Benghazi with the only response being petty internal partisan recriminations. No, a real world power moves a massive army from Bombay to Abyssinia on 280 ships, complete with 44 war elephants, camels and mules to drag heavy guns hundreds of miles inland over mountainous terrain, builds a railway and ships in locomotives to help move the army, and builds a port complete with pier, lighthouse and warehouses to bring down Thor’s Hammer on whoever affronts the dignity of its diplomats. Ladies and Gentlemen, the British Expedition to Abyssinia:
No doubt the railway’s still in use for moving bauxite out and mercenaries in. Britain, fuck yeah!
But we only need 22 more to get a perfect score and achieve +5 trade and +5 Anglo cultural enrichment bonuses!
And what’s more, Napier and his men left without annexing any part of Abyssinia or having any gain in mind. Pure aim.
It was one of the most difficult campaigns in history.
Mind you, the railway in the Crimea didn’t end so well.
Oh come on, are you taking this thread seriously? There’s more than a little tongue-in-cheek in here. Comments about Doenitz, Scumpup’s obsession with the size of the US military and comparative sizes of countries, the Americans sorting out the English language, and so on. The Britain, fuck yeah! and comments about bauxite and mercenaries didn’t clue you in, finally?
There must be some cross Atlantic difference in meaning of “stomping.” Losing six ships to the Argentine Air Force, with more saved by the fact that the Argies had issues getting their bombs to actually explode, doesn’t count as stomping on this side of the Atlantic. A wins a win but let’s not get smug about it.
Umm… You have noticed that Britain is sort of… Islands? Yeah, there is a tunnel to France, and ferries to a few other places, but mostly we have to fly to get overseas too.
Sure, once you’re on the continent, it’s possible to get lost in Belgium and wind up in Holland, but this is about the English, and we don’t want to share our thread with those demned Conintental types.
