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Teaos wrote:Never liked Dune...

Never read it, myself.

GrahamKennedy wrote:

Too bad they didn't have some maker hooks.

Ahhh... Yes. The French. The world's punchline.

The funny thing is that anybody who says that the French have a poor record when it comes to warfare is really just showing their own deep ignorance of history.

Their record hasn't been that great in a hundred years or so which is as far as the average person is willing to look back IMO.

Yes, but I would expect any person, no matter how badly educated, to have heard of Napoleon.

IanKennedy wrote:Yes, but I would expect any person, no matter how badly educated, to have heard of Napoleon.

Well I guess the problem is if you live in europe and have to learn the history of your country......chances are you start around 400bc with the romans.

If you life in the U.S....you'll start around what? 200? 250? years ago? And what's more for most of the time nothing really interesting happens there and things start getting interesting with ww2 over there? (Yeah I know they are incredibly well informed and proud of their huge battles were 200 indians (excuse me..native americans) slaughters 24 other people and other epic stuff etc....... but to the rest of the world..... )

(And since I am already making fun of the U.S;))

I loved that show. The 8-bit opening was a good idea.

I think I was more upset about that ending last month than many were about breaking bad.

Atekimogus wrote:

IanKennedy wrote:Yes, but I would expect any person, no matter how badly educated, to have heard of Napoleon.

Well I guess the problem is if you live in europe and have to learn the history of your country......chances are you start around 400bc with the romans.

If you life in the U.S....you'll start around what? 200? 250? years ago? And what's more for most of the time nothing really interesting happens there and things start getting interesting with ww2 over there? (Yeah I know they are incredibly well informed and proud of their huge battles were 200 indians (excuse me..native americans) slaughters 24 other people and other epic stuff etc....... but to the rest of the world..... )

(And since I am already making fun of the U.S;))

No one in the US is really proud of the whole US vs. Indian thing. That is if they even know about it. Also the battles were much bigger than that.

Well, really all you need to know about it is large numbers of Indians wiping out small numbers of non-Indians. Or, large numbers of non-Indians wiping out small numbers of Indians. Pretty much how all parties involved conducted warfare in that situation.

Point being that by european standards this is all only mildly interesting since there where bigger and more exciting battles going on in roman times, so the first really interesting thing happening to the U.S being WW1 and WW2, in both the french pretty much sucked which lead to this stereotype.

Now I remember watching QI and one of the question was if you are in a war, which soldier you actually would want as your buddy or something similar, and historically the french were actually one of the most successfull soldiers. Now I don't remember exactly on what facts this were build, if this is purley because of Napoleon, or on their numerous cabinet wars, enemies killed or wars won, interesting fact though.

And since I am now in the most unusual position of actually defending the french, instead of making fun of them, I hereby retreat from this discussion;).

Technically it was WW1 that caused the French that downward spiral of jokes. Shitty weapons, shitty tactics and the whole trench warfare caused them to make bad desicions in between the wars. Then they practically lost WW2 before the allies had to bail them out. Some extra stuff post war and then the general opinion of that the French are stuck up.

Me personally I have dealt with their Navy. On a big joint operation I think in 2006, we shared the carrier and they decided not to listen and follow our rules and caused perhaps millions of dollars in damage to our planes from collisions in parking and moving them. That and their attitudes sucked.