re: #572 Blind Frog Belly White

Heh.

An English friend of mine likes to tell a story about when Germany beat England in the World Cup some years ago, and a commentator said, “I guess it’s okay that Germany beat us at our National Sport, since we’ve beaten them twice at theirs.”

But seriously, there was a long thread yesterday on Twitter, that the whole point of NATO was to finally stop the wars that wracked Europe every couple decades since the fall of Rome, most recently the ones that killed tens of millions. and left millions more displaced. It wasn’t altruism or charity, and it wasn’t intended to pay us back monetarily, but rather to save millions more lives there and here.

I think Trump and many Americans don’t get why Europeans are much more adverse to war than we are. Oh it’s easy to call the French pussies but when you can talk to people who have living memories of military occupations, it’s different. We’re blessed that we haven’t had a foreign Army in the lower 48 since 1812 but we’re also sort of cursed in a way too since it ruins our perspective.