(September 19, 2017 at 8:03 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:(September 19, 2017 at 7:58 am)bennyboy Wrote: Even slavery was a sign of greatness. One culture was so far advanced in technology that it was essentially able to rape all the others, world wide, at will. Great.
lol, you really like hiking in minefields, don't you, Benny?
Slavery is endemic in human history, and not always practiced by powerful societies. Indeed, it is very often internal to a society, so that it is not an expression of one society's strength relative to another, which is how I read what you're saying.
Oh yeah.... Portugal gets credit for that slavery business in the US... we kinda took those guys from Africa and sold them to you... or some middle-man...
And then we saw how wrong it was and were the first country in Europe to officially abolish slavery.... just because we had no slavery in Portugal, it doesn't mean that the slave trade had to stop!
See? Great!!
We also have one of the greatest ever aqueducts. Great!
A Portuguese dude invented the lobotomy and got a Nobel prize for it! Great!
While you 'murricans were fighting in Vietnam, just sending cannon fodder over, we were fighting in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. 3 to 1! HA!
One can make up any metric for greatness... and a few of those lead to a Portugal that is greater than the US.
Which goes to show that the word is meaningless... but the common folk run with it! and vote and pay and that's what counts.
