Whinging ( was Whining) from foreigners.

> Freedom ain't free. If the French (or anyone else)

That sentence sounds like a pretty good whinge from a Foreigner to me. What do
you think, Derek, me good mate? 4 out of 10 on the snivelometer? **

> Life ain't all hanging out in cafes,

..it's not? (apart from the cancer-sticks) Say it ain't so!
Actually, any group whose life consists mainly of hanging out in cafes and
drinking cheap wine (poetry optional) sounds as if they've got a pretty good
thing going, more power to em I say.

Which brings us to on-topicness.

There's been enough Xenophobia ( no, that's not the right word - phobia
implies fear, and for all his faults, the FMA isn't afraid of no steenking
Frenchmen
wiz outrageous accents) - as I was saying, enough Xeno-whatever on this
list to show that in 150 years time, it's not totally beyond the bounds of
possibility to have 4 major and quite a few minor powerblocs stupid enough to
be at daggers drawn.

I can imagine some net-traffic in 2180 from a combat engineer in the
Caliphate claiming Saddam Hussein won the Gulf War, because he was still in
power afterwards and the Coalition gave back all their territorial gains in
Iraq in order to make peace. And because SCUDs easily penetrated the vaunted
US Patriot missile shield. And being contradicted by citizens of the NAC, who
point out that Iraq invaded Kuwait, was thrown out, and that the Coalition
thereby achieved their war aims, and only the Kurds ended up with the short
end of the stick. While having someone from the OU remark on the stupidity of
it all, and request an end to inflammatory topic names. (HINT!!)

Because in 2180, 1990 will be as far back in time as 1812 is from today.

So keep that in mind in all discussions.

** For the hard-of-thinking, or those just too damn tired of this whole
schlemozzle,

> At 01:22 31/05/02 +1000, you wrote:
What
> do you think, Derek, me good mate? 4 out of 10 on the snivelometer? **

Alan

I'll pay that, and the rest of your post:)

Cheers

> I can imagine some net-traffic in 2180 from a combat engineer in the

At the risk of starting all the flame wars again, I'm not sure that that's
good supporting evidence for him having "lost" though... after all, he has
outlasted most of the leaders of his opposition.

You can imagine the net can withstand the combined assualt of mankind's finest
stupidity for THAT long?!?!

> At 03:48 PM 5/31/02 +1000, you wrote:
What
> do you think, Derek, me good mate? 4 out of 10 on the snivelometer? **

So the French consume wines, while we Americans produce whines, eh? Fair
enough, fair enough....

But in any case, folks, is there a light at the end of the tunnel here? Other
than that produced the usual flames, I mean. An active killfile has
managed to reduce a good bit of the nonsense that reaches my In-box
these days, but there hasn't been much in the way of ON topicality over the
past few days.

Can we just take a break for a day or two? Resist the impulse to throw more
fule on the fire, agree that we're *all* a bunch of damned ignorant foreigners
from somebody's point of view, and more on to more productive things.