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[Wayward Device]

Yay for celebrating the adoption of your bill of rights by launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Irish!  Although to be fair the US celebrated the bill of rights by launching such a campaign against the Indians.

...  Is there some sort of god of human rights that demands blood sacrifice whenever you seal a contract?

Exactly! To be honest, I thought someone might counter with "the British invented concentration camps in the Boer War", but I enjoyed your reply very much. I'd never noticed the obvious similarities before! Stupid history repeating itself (I wonder if this could be used as the basis for an argument that God is lazy. After all, we already know he likes to slack off on Sundays). That said, I reckon we would have gotten around to some horrible genocide on the Irish sooner or later. In very simple terms, it was basically a situation were we were like hmm, so what now? Can't invade France, its an awkward time. Spain? Well, its a bit further away, and powerful. Ireland? Hmm, they're just next door! Sorted! *17th century violence*. As a note for context, for quite a significant period of history (I'm gonna say roughly form just after the Norman conquest to say, um, the time when we started calling ourselves and Empire) England was the nation equivalent of that skinny little guy at the bar who's always starting fights with guys three times his size, usually winning. You know, the kind to whom the phrase "You lookin' at me, pal?" comes naturally.         

Without the English Channel, they would all have been conquered by the Romans easier.

Personally, I'm of the school of thought that says that the English nation, and therefore all the stuff that came after it (i.e. the British Empire, the USA etc) would likely not have existed without the influence of the Roman invasion and occupation. The list of technologies they brought to our fair isle is... well, fairly lengthy and dull, if I'm honest. Basically, the Romans had a huge influence. Of course, there are those who say that perhaps an even larger more powerful version of England/the British Empire might have evolved if there had been no Roman invasion, but I reckon that it would just have fostered isolationist tendencies. 

[Pnx]

Without the English Channel, they would all have been conquered by the Romans easier.

Personally, I'm of the school of thought that says that the English nation, and therefore all the stuff that came after it (i.e. the British Empire, the USA etc) would likely not have existed without the influence of the Roman invasion and occupation. The list of technologies they brought to our fair isle is... well, fairly lengthy and dull, if I'm honest. Basically, the Romans had a huge influence. Of course, there are those who say that perhaps an even larger more powerful version of England/the British Empire might have evolved if there had been no Roman invasion, but I reckon that it would just have fostered isolationist tendencies.

Well keep in mind, the English, started out as the Anglo-Saxons, who were a conglomeration of mostly Germanic slaves. The local Celts would all be pushed out or assimilated.

Then of course they get conquered by the Normans, and all the nobility gets replaced by Frenchmen, who eventually get assimilated into the English conglomerate.

I think England's formation through Roman dickery, and its conquest through Norman dickery, set the tone for the dickery England would perform in order to form Great Britain, and that Britain (in which England called most of the shots) would perform in order to become the biggest, and arguably most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

[Wayward Device]

Without the English Channel, they would all have been conquered by the Romans easier.

Personally, I'm of the school of thought that says that the English nation, and therefore all the stuff that came after it (i.e. the British Empire, the USA etc) would likely not have existed without the influence of the Roman invasion and occupation. The list of technologies they brought to our fair isle is... well, fairly lengthy and dull, if I'm honest. Basically, the Romans had a huge influence. Of course, there are those who say that perhaps an even larger more powerful version of England/the British Empire might have evolved if there had been no Roman invasion, but I reckon that it would just have fostered isolationist tendencies.

Well keep in mind, the English, started out as the Anglo-Saxons, who were a conglomeration of mostly Germanic slaves. The local Celts would all be pushed out or assimilated.

Then of course they get conquered by the Normans, and all the nobility gets replaced by Frenchmen, who eventually get assimilated into the English conglomerate.

I think England's formation through Roman dickery, and its conquest through Norman dickery, set the tone for the dickery England would perform in order to form Great Britain, and that Britain (in which England called most of the shots) would perform in order to become the biggest, and arguably most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

Basically, we learned our dickery from the best. There's also the influence of Danish and Scandinavian dickery (viking was both a noun and a verb, meaning raiding. As in  "A viking goes viking for loot in his longship"*). On the origins of the English, its amusing to note that King Arthur is not in fact an English mythological figure. He was a real Welsh king, who fought against the Saxons (arguable the largest base of groups that eventually formed the English*). The Victorian holy grail nonsense is also particularly amusing when you know that in most of the scant remaining historical records reffer to him as "the Scourge of God", likely because he taxed the early church.   

If anyone expresses a desire for some more examples of situations where you might use the word viking, I will happily oblige.

*The Angles never get the love they deserve.
     

[Zrk2]

...  Is there some sort of god of human rights that demands blood sacrifice whenever you seal a contract?

Yes. America is paying in blood for the rest of the Western world. Thanks guys!

[RedKing]

Without the English Channel, they would all have been conquered by the Romans easier.

Personally, I'm of the school of thought that says that the English nation, and therefore all the stuff that came after it (i.e. the British Empire, the USA etc) would likely not have existed without the influence of the Roman invasion and occupation. The list of technologies they brought to our fair isle is... well, fairly lengthy and dull, if I'm honest. Basically, the Romans had a huge influence. Of course, there are those who say that perhaps an even larger more powerful version of England/the British Empire might have evolved if there had been no Roman invasion, but I reckon that it would just have fostered isolationist tendencies.

Well keep in mind, the English, started out as the Anglo-Saxons, who were a conglomeration of mostly Germanic slaves. The local Celts would all be pushed out or assimilated.

Then of course they get conquered by the Normans, and all the nobility gets replaced by Frenchmen, who eventually get assimilated into the English conglomerate.

I think England's formation through Roman dickery, and its conquest through Norman dickery, set the tone for the dickery England would perform in order to form Great Britain, and that Britain (in which England called most of the shots) would perform in order to become the biggest, and arguably most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

Only to be shown up by their prodigal son, Uncle Sam -- one of the simultaneously biggest humanitarians and biggest dicks in human history. If we could invent a bomb that dispense life-saving nutritional supplements and Ebola simultaneously, we probably would.

[Flying Dice]

Without the English Channel, they would all have been conquered by the Romans easier.

Personally, I'm of the school of thought that says that the English nation, and therefore all the stuff that came after it (i.e. the British Empire, the USA etc) would likely not have existed without the influence of the Roman invasion and occupation. The list of technologies they brought to our fair isle is... well, fairly lengthy and dull, if I'm honest. Basically, the Romans had a huge influence. Of course, there are those who say that perhaps an even larger more powerful version of England/the British Empire might have evolved if there had been no Roman invasion, but I reckon that it would just have fostered isolationist tendencies.

Well keep in mind, the English, started out as the Anglo-Saxons, who were a conglomeration of mostly Germanic slaves. The local Celts would all be pushed out or assimilated.

Then of course they get conquered by the Normans, and all the nobility gets replaced by Frenchmen, who eventually get assimilated into the English conglomerate.

I think England's formation through Roman dickery, and its conquest through Norman dickery, set the tone for the dickery England would perform in order to form Great Britain, and that Britain (in which England called most of the shots) would perform in order to become the biggest, and arguably most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

Only to be shown up by their prodigal son, Uncle Sam -- one of the simultaneously biggest humanitarians and biggest dicks in human history. If we could invent a bomb that dispense life-saving nutritional supplements and Ebola simultaneously, we probably would.

Or rig aid packages so that they explode after a random number of items have been removed.

It's like Russian Roulette for malnourished children!

_{That was horrible.}

[Wayward Device]

Or rig aid packages so that they explode after a random number of items have been removed.

It's like Russian Roulette for malnourished children!

_{That was horrible.}

 In the interest of fairness, they also dropped bombs that exploded into brightly coloured children's toys...that exploded when picked up, but only enough to mangle limbs. That more than made up for it! 

[Fenrir]

Yay for celebrating the adoption of your bill of rights by launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Irish!  Although to be fair the US celebrated the bill of rights by launching such a campaign against the Indians.

...  Is there some sort of god of human rights that demands blood sacrifice whenever you seal a contract?

No, it is the law of the Conservation of Evil.

[RedKing]

Or rig aid packages so that they explode after a random number of items have been removed.

It's like Russian Roulette for malnourished children!

_{That was horrible.}

 In the interest of fairness, they also dropped bombs that exploded into brightly coloured children's toys...that exploded when picked up, but only enough to mangle limbs. That more than made up for it!

In fairness, cluster bomblets were brightly colored so that people would see them and *avoid* them. It didn't dawn on them that children might be drawn to bright dayglo yellow-green, or that children would regularly be in warzones. Perhaps if we had designed them to look like Brussel sprouts...

[Leafsnail]

I thought it wasn't so much children in warzones as "children in a place that was a warzone 5 years ago".

[Pnx]

It's why landmines and cluster bombs are now forbidden by convention in most of the developed world, and quite a chunk of the undeveloped world.

The US of course is all "fuck you" to the treaties forbidding them. But of course they tend not to use cluster bombs or land mines very much because they're imprecise...

[lordcooper]

Yeah, can't risk missing those hospitals.

[Flying Dice]

Can't risk missing all that Lebanese infrastructure, either.

[Wayward Device]

Or not destroying enough of it.

[Jackrabbit]

Funny anecdote I heard two days ago from a 40 year Australian Army veteran. He's flying along in a gunship with the rest of his squad and then suddenly, out of nowhere, the two Gatling guns on the side of the gunship lock on to a target on the ground and spit 50 thousand rounds at it, terrifying the hell out of everyone. Then an American voice comes over the radio:
"Sorry guys. Looks like that guy won't be welding any more."
The guns are set to automatically return fire, and they define enemy fire as flashes of light from the ground. Apparently, this time, they'd wasted an Iraqi welding his car. Not the biggest fan of how America fights wars, let me tell you.

So there's an interesting and irrelevant anecdote for you.