Aram

I recently moved into a four bedroom house with a barn on 40 acres for less than a third of that. From the little I've experienced in my few trips out to that country, I think that even what is considered a very large and spacious house there would be considered by most small and claustrophobic here.

What about Cheerocracy?

worse

all vampire fiction is garbage, if only because of the vampires

behind the scenes it's probably more like gimmie that christian dry hump.

**** vampires in every form of fiction

Next step is to implement a slew of costly fashion accessory add-ons. All part of the plan.

Purkake is the best poster. The solution, of course, is to create a third state right between the two. A middle child, if you will.

My guess is this whole thing is probably about the Swiss making an easy $4.5 million.

Oh, did you say amusing? I thought you said OH GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Stop distracting J.E. from making games.

Swell?

No, they're all boobs. I drink to the mutineers, the deserters, and the French soldiers who thought hey let's wait and see if we can come up with a better idea and to hell with what they'll say about us.

So. ****ing. Enlightened.

For every good thing hero worship inspires, it inspires something equally needless and destructive. People on the losing side of a war who prolong the fighting and get more people killed needlessly do so in the quest for glory. Every suicide bomber fancies himself a hero and a martyr. Every soldier who climbs out of his foxhole and rushes against impossible odds thinking there's a chance to make himself a hero when there isn't, dying unnecessarily, is a victim of heroism. There are times, I believe, that cowardism is a far greater virtue than heroism. I drink to the cowards, the sniveling wretches, and the Sir John Falstaffs. I don't mean to say, of course, that war is always unnecessary and people shouldn't fight, and even die, for a just cause they believe they can win, but they should do it for that reason, without expecting a parade, and their deaths should be noted as we note the deaths of natural disasters--tragic losses, doubly tragic if they're preventable.

Which is precisely why it exists. "Heroism" is a concept created by war leaders a very long time ago to inspire troops or knights or whatever kind of warriors to take greater risks and make graver sacrifices. Every parade a hero ever got in ancient times was designed to get more people to sign up for the next war, and they still have the same effect today even if we do it without realizing it. I’m not saying there haven’t been some genuinely glorious sons of bitches doing some genuinely glorious things in war time, but their worship is exploitative and overshadows the fact that a couple million men just like them died face-down in mud without getting a chance to do any such things in a war that doesn’t actually need heroes--just bodies to stack against the other side’s.

I'll believe those when I see some unbiased sources.

As for German soldiers, there's obviously no way to say their cause was just, but there was not some inherent streak of villainy exclusively among German soldiers that made them different or less human than all the other soldiers on the battlefield. The German soldier would claim to be fighting for the same reason the Russian or British or American soldier would--that "duty" word again. If things like courage and sacrifice are commendable in the British soldier in the original post, they can't not be in a German soldier, and for that reason, maybe they aren't all that commendable at all.

Basing it on nothing, really, except maybe what were apparently his last words. "Duty called and duty must be obeyed." If duty dictates that you should get blown up six different times in one of the dumbest wars ever fought, **** duty. That's not a good enough reason alone.

Honestly, I have more respect for a man who looks out for himself but decides after careful consideration that he should sacrifice something rightly his own for something more important than I do for the guy in the original post, who frankly sounds blindly deluded into thinking he owed so much to something he didn't at all. If he'd been born a German, he'd have done all the same things for the opposite side and had the same dying words. His selflessness is commendable, and would be no matter which side he'd been on, but that's not a glorious life--that's not something to strive to become.

He's not very good.

In the "city map" screen, click the map icon at the bottom to switch to the world map.