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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Yes.

Less flippantly, do I need an explanation for gravity to prove it's effects? Are 250 years of history not enough?

If you're claiming only this specific idea of gravity could do x, probably yes. The US was a huge mostly empty resource heavy new frontier. It's why we called it the New World. I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.

If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.

I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.

Excuse me, counter-factual?

I think he's saying essentially rerun American history but have the Quebecois either end up in control of the greater USA or just replace the 12 Colonies with roughly-equivalent Francophones.

If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.

You know, this is the same argument I saw in a random youtube video ages ago, about why North America is an OP starting position for a civilization. They made all the usual arguments about natural resources, fertility of the soil, and a few I'd never heard before about how especially navigable America's waterways and coasts are.

Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.

So excuse me if I don't entirely buy the argument that anybody living in America would have been as great as The United States. History shows there were, and they weren't.

Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.

I think reality is actually more complicated than that. There's reason to believe that the North America that the European explorers saw was essentially a postapocalyptic wasteland. There's good archeological evidence there were very sophisticated societies in North America (as there were in South America when Cortez arrived) that had collapsed – Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.

Now, I tend to agree with you that these nations likely would not have been as great as the United States if they had not collapsed or been overrun, but this is for moral reasons as much as any other: the Cahokians, like the Aztecs, appear to have practiced human sacrifice. As simple as it is to say that being "too stupid to have invented guns," is slightly more important than whether or not you practice human sacrifice, I tend to think that European success (including in the sciences) was due in no small part to their religious outlook, which was upstream of their culture, which in turn produced the scientific method.

TLDR; American Lore is even cooler and more hardcore than you were taught in school (and if you ever get a chance to go to a North American mound, I highly recommend it).

Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.

Fascinating reading.

Political, economic, or cultural problems may also have contributed to the community's decline.[61] Thomas Emerson and Kristin Hedman argue that Cahokia's large immigrant population was a factor in the city's ultimate fragmentation, as differing languages, customs, and religions obstructed the creation of a cohesive Cahokian cultural identity. Analyses of Cahokian burial sites and the associated remains have also shown that many Cahokians were not native to the city or its immediate surrounding region. These immigrants were sometimes buried separately from native residents, a possible indicator of weak integration along ethnic lines.[32] It is likely that social and environmental factors combined to produce the conditions that led people to leave Cahokia.[62][56]

It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?

Cahokia seems to have been completely abandoned before contact with Europeans.

Eurasian diseases absolutely wrecked the Americas and the Australias. Making up a huge amount of the initial suffering/damage/deaths inflicted.

Like it's always struck me as kind of stupid when people try to whataboutism Australian history since unless they somehow had an impermeable bubble until the invention of vaccines there was no way that that exchange wasn't going to lead to 90% of Australian Indigenous dying horribly of smallpox et al.

I mean, asian diseases ravaged Europe for centuries, we dont hold China morally culpable for the black death.

Second, without the benefit of hindsight there was little way of knowing who's diseases would be worse for who on first contact.

That said, smallpox is gone, and syphilis is still going strong, so maybe notch one for new world diseases.

It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?

Many good examples in Southeast Asia. One of the examples that comes to mind for me is the Khmer capital of Angkor, which at its height in the 13th century boasted a population of approximately 900,000 people (London at that time had a population of approx 80,000; Angkor's population was over 11 times larger). It's likely to have been the most populous city in the world during its heyday. There isn't consensus about the causes of the empire's decline and the city's eventual abandonment; some explanations I've seen relate to increasing competition by neighbouring kingdoms such as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya who would regularly conduct raids and incursions onto Khmer territory, others stress the effect of environmental shifts that resulted in poor harvests and clogging of the canals that irrigated the city, causing out-migration from the area. Certain other hypotheses suggest that elites freely moved elsewhere to take advantage of burgeoning trade networks accessible from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The coup de grace that spelled the end for Angkor was when the Thai sacked and burned the city in the 15th century, at which point the remnants of the Khmer court moved south to Phnom Penh.

Funnily enough this would later happen to the Thai as well in an act of historical karma - the city of Ayutthaya eventually ended up amassing a population totalling 1,000,000 around 1700 (one of the world's largest cities at the time) but they were then sieged by the Burmese Konbaung dynasty in 1767 and destroyed. It's a less compelling candidate than Angkor though, since the city was not fully abandoned and is still a provincial capital.

Sure, but there is a large gap between no-one else can do it and anybody else can do it.

Your claim was no-one else, my claim is likely someone else. I don't claim it is everybody else.

The French kind of did, though. There weren't as many of them as the English, but they were a sizeable minority population. Paul Revere was the son of a French settler. "It could also be done by some close cousin populations who were literally involved in the real life one that actually happened" is a pretty thin expansion.

Sure, but with an absolute position i only need a thin expansion to disprove it. And of the if the French could and so could the Spanish, then it seems like the Ottomans could have and so on and so forth.

France, Spain and Portugal had different objectives in establishing their colonies than England. They were establishing extractive colonies, with the goal of sending ressources back to Europe. England, sent people with the goal of expanding. While the early americans were building farming capacity, the french were going hunting for pelts deep into North America with the natives, and the spaniards and portugese only were interested in maintaining as many people as were necessary to keep the slaves under control. Of course when push came to shove (so to war) the english colonists had a large advantage by then.

Are we invisible? We're still here! Quebec is a large province with what, 8 millions of population? It's not just an historical eccentricity that some people and places have french names and a few people have learned french; the first language and the one everyone is expected and indeed in many cases forced to learn, is french. We've maintained as much control over our own affairs within the canadian confederation as we could short of independance. We fight and struggle as every western country to maintain our culture against globalism, with the extra difficulty of the political weigth of the canadian structure which finds us mightly inconvenient, and the juggernaut of American culture, but we are, so far, still here!

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