Also as a non native English speaker, I used to find “all but” super weird too. Particularly since there’s also “everything but” where the words mean very similar things but the meaning is exactly the opposite.

Don’t worry, let’s keep making no effort and maybe this time things will change!

Really? Is that really what it’s about? Or is there any chance that it might be about a country invading and trying to conquer its neighbor?

Ah yes, good guy regularly elected politicians ordering random strikes on civilian shipping, bad guy US complaining about this totally reasonable and peace-loving behavior.

Yo mama legal in Switzerland

There is no law of the universe which says that a civil war must end in “unification.”

It seems to me that the Taiwanese are moving on. Why can’t the mainland Chinese move on? Why do they let their former enemy still control themselves like this? Why do they let Taiwan hold this power over themselves? How can such a large, wealthy country of over a billion people be so obsessed with a small country of only twenty million?

How petty the mainland Chinese must be if they cannot move on from a small island after three quarters of a century.