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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   31826 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I'm reposting a top level comment that got posted yesterday, because I don't think it got enough discussion.

Historic flooding in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Whole towns washed away. People retreating to their attics as water levels rise. People losing everything.

Tragic. Horrific. But this is the Culture War thread so I am going to ask the insensitive question, what does this mean for the election in <40 days?

My first thought is that there is a certain irony that these states are among those that just limited the forms of ID allowed at a voting booth. Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.

Rural areas that were wiped out will have a harder time finding their polling location under the mud and timber. Mail-in voting will be difficult without a mailbox.

People are going to watch the Biden-Harris's administration to see how they respond.

Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red? Buncombe County, one of the hardest hit, went 60% for Biden in 2020.

I want to add, as I commented, I am beyond frustrated by the federal response. Biden just put out a press release today, over 5 days after it happened, and he just sounds so tired and apparently has a cold. That being said, he says a lot of the right things even if the delivery is bad.

But why has it taken so long to get things out there? As another commenter said, why aren't planes and helicopters air dropping supplies and Starlink in?

And if there has been a major relief effort, where is the news on it? The left controls pretty much the entire mainstream media, so where are the videos of airlifted supplies? I know internet is out, but people on X have shared plenty of videos of waters washing away homes etc.

I'm just shocked at how poor the response has been, though I guess I shouldn't be. Also man, those videos really are something to watch. Reminds us how fragile things really are if Nature decides to make us face her wrath.

I think we’re lead by incompetent people. We just plain lack the ability to solve any of these kinds of problems. Biden gave an interview and claimed to be leading from the beach because he’d been on the phone with Homeland Security for two hours. That’s barely trying in my opinion. What amazes me is that we have a lot of disaster relief programs out of Fort Bragg (or whatever it’s been renamed to) and nobody seems interested in using those resources at all.

Very huge issue if true.

The fact that 100% of the anons promoting this meme insist on misnaming Fort Liberty in honour of a slaveholding traitor strongly suggests that it is partisan bullshit. Unless you favour calling it Fort Bragg in honour of Braxton Bragg's noteworthy contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War, which I suppose would kind of make sense.

  • -10

Being a traitor is underrated. George Washington was a traitor to his King.

And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him, and in general monuments to him in the United Kingdom are discreet and found in places associated with his family.

FWIW I am with Cecil Rhodes on this point - the American Revolution was an avoidable mistake on the part of the British, and had it been avoided we would have seen earlier and more complete Anglosphere supremacy, which would have been a net benefit for humanity.

That seems...well, not to go full Jared Diamond, but do you (and/or did Cecil Rhodes) really think that America would never have eclipsed Britain and striven for hegemony, or that Britain would have let it come to pass without resistance?

Cecil Rhodes favoured reforming the British Empire to be a federation of equals with all parts of the Empire represented in the Imperial Parliament. (Rhodes' views on how this incorporated non-whites are a matter of dispute.) He spent a lot of money promoting constitutional Irish nationalism and Home Rule, hoping that an internally self-governing Ireland within the Empire would be a proof of concept. He thought that a future generation of American leadership heavy with Rhodes scholars could be persuaded to join this reformed British Empire voluntarily. In a world where Rhodes' plan happens and the Anglosphere is a loose federation including the US by 1930,

  • The structure of the federation would be designed to prevent one member being hegemonic
  • Relative power of the constituents would be such that the US would be primus inter pares rather than a hegemon in any case
  • My read is that Rhodes believed that the various Anglosphere countries were sufficiently similar that the kind of competition which makes "hegemony" a useful concept would not be relevant - for example (not from Rhodes), if the Imperial Parliament broke down into a Tory/Dixiecrat faction, a Liberal/Republican faction and a Labour/New Deal Democrat faction then which part of the federation was "hegemon" wasn't relevant because politics would be ideological, not sectional.
  • In any case, given that his political career was almost entirely in South African "colonial" politics and he made no attempt to get seriously involved with Westminster politics beyond his Irish scheme, I don't think Rhodes cared about his bit of the Anglosphere being dominant - he cared about the Anglo-Saxon master race being dominant over the lesser breeds without the law.

Various reform schemes of a kind that would have appealed to Rhodes were proposed during the lead-up to the American Revolution, of which the one that came closest to being adopted was Galloway's Plan. Supporters included Benjamin Franklin on the American side and Edmund Burke and Pitt the Elder on the British side - i.e. it wasn't a fringe position. If something like this had been done, then eventually the American colonies would have become the tail that wags the dog. But the same provisos apply with the added bonus that sectional divisions among the American colonies mean that there isn't a united "America" competing against Britain for "hegemony" at all.

And of course something what did happen with the development of Dominion status is that the Dominions gradually became de facto independent while remaining close friends and allies of the UK. I think this is proof of concept that something similar could have happened to British North America a century earlier, meaning that the "special relationship" was baked in from day one rather than being forged in the fire of WW2. The Commonwealth is exactly the sort of thing that Rhodes would have approved of, although he would obviously prefer it to be more significant to its members that it is.

Even in our timeline, where Britain and the US are separate countries without the kind of close ties that the UK retained with the former Dominions, the attempt by the British to resist American hegemony was pretty nugatory. British naval supremacy begins with a battle (Quiberon Bay in reality, but Trafalgar per schoolboy history) but it is significant that it doesn't end with one.

This is nuts. I love it, and I want to see it represented in alt-history fiction.

The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

We probably delay the English abolition of slavery, and I would expect we have a civil war over it anyway. But the export-reliant, heavily coastal Confederacy of our timeline stands no chance against peak Victorian England. Unless they're committed in India or, I dunno, Russia at that point, the war is much shorter and favors the Union.

Russia probably ends up in the same mess over the 19th century. Their problems didn't depend on Napoleonic devastation or the Continental balancing act. I don't know nearly enough about German and Italian unification to say where that derails. Bonus points if Marx gets lost to the butterflies, though I suppose something like communism was bound to happen.

And that's before we even get to renegotiating WWI.

The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

Assuming that the French Revolution and ensuing Anglo-French wars happen on schedule, North America is a theatre in the same way it was in all the previous Anglo-French wars. The War of 1812 equivalent in that timeline is a "British" invasion of Louisiana (presumably with local troops led by Jackson and a modicum of Royal Naval support). Given that the UK and allies win the Napoleonic wars, I suspect British North America incorporates the Louisiana Purchase by conquest.

But the biggest question about a "No American War of Independence" timeline is how the French Revolution is affected. As @ToaKraka points out below, the natural assumption from a US-centric perspective is that with the radical ideas of e.g. Thomas Paine discredited and the French spending less money helping the Americans, the French Revolution doesn't happen. And essentially everything in non-US political history is downstream of the French Revolution - and possibly more American history than you think is too given that the main "real issue" in the First Party System was which side the new US should take in the Napoleonic Wars. I could defend the proposition that no French Revolution means no drive to universal white male suffrage in the US. But this depends on whether we are in a timeline where the Americans were defeated or one where a deal was done - if the Galloway plan happens then Thomas Paine is a prominent British statesman by 1789 and proto-democratic Whiggery is the dominant politics of the British Empire.

But from a non-US-centric perspective, the US as of 1776 is too small to determine the fate of France. Something like the Anglo-French War of 1778 happens roughly on schedule because the British and the French have unfinished business, and the British can still run the bill up until the French cry uncle. (The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly believed was the least important theatre of a three-ocean war against France - the larger Anglo-French war was a true World War).

If I do an alt-history timeline, it would be one where Cecil Rhodes makes a miraculous recovery from his chronic disease, returns to the UK triumphant after his victories in Africa, and enters UK politics as a Liberal Imperialist. He was born in 1853 so you can easily have him in the cabinet through WW1 and alive as an elder statesman into WW2. I agree with you that the "successful Galloway plan" timeline would be a lot of fun too.

For Want of a Nail:

  • The US loses the Battle of Saratoga. France and Spain develop no faith in the rebels' ability to win the war, and refuse to provide aid, so the US then loses the war. However, Britain recognizes its errors and reforms the US and Canada into a dominion-ish Confederation of North America.

  • With no extra debt from fighting Britain in the American Revolution, France does not collapse into revolution (though it comes close after losing a war to Prussia and Britain in 1799), and Louisiana remains under Spanish, and then Mexican, control.

  • The American rebels that have not been executed for treason emigrate to form the Republic of Jefferson (Texas fifty years early). In 1816, Jefferson (led by Andrew Jackson) intervenes in a Mexican civil war to form a United States of Mexico that later degenerates into dictatorship.

  • The CNA abolishes slavery in 1841, after an economic depression with roots in London bank failures causes the price of cotton to plummet, making owning slaves uneconomical.

  • Republicanism in Europe is crushed by the failure of the American rebels, and is not revived until 1879, when, after Louis XX abdicates in the face of advancing German troops, socialist rioters in Paris execute the royal family and, aided by defecting French troops, beat back the Germans. The ensuing continent-wide wave of republican/socialist spirit in 1880 (comparable to OTL's Springtime of Nations) overtakes all the major powers except Britain and Russia.

  • Russia collapses in 1900, after losing Alaska and eastern Siberia to the USM in a conflict analogous to OTL's Russo-Japanese War.

Et cetera. The book extends to year 1970. It is written in the style of a textbook, with hundreds of footnotes and fake citations.

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