I want to believe.
Lincoln gets assassinated right before reconstruction, so a reactionary, pro-Southern Johnson takes over and mucks it all up. America misses its best chance to advance toward European-style social democracy.
assassinations by "lone wolfs" are definitely the analog here. lots of alternative histories. of course, lots of lone wolfs out there all thinking the same thing, for reasons. so the next 12 alternative universes might just be delayed by a month or twelve
great point! tbh most of these "dramatic pivots" in history merely serve to reveal how fragile the apparent situation was. Dialectic materialism.
yeah, I remember some friends back in the day really hating on Glenn Beck, and I always figured that if not him, someone else would rise up and fill that space. I'll have to google "dialectic materialism" later. got to step up my theory game
Truman becoming VP because FDR wasn’t doing great by that time and didn’t make it to the convention to fight for his incumbent pick, soviet sympathizer and “progressive” Henry Wallace. It’s a crazy story that convention.
No Cold War, more rural development, European post-war welfare state in the US, etc.
reading into it it becomes more complicated, FDR was convinced to side with Byrne towards the run up, who was basically a new deal segregationist.
but a wallace presidency is definitely my go to sleeper pick for alternate history.
why am I not surprised FDR sided with a fucking segregationist
Wallace got shittier in his later years, though. Cold War propaganda is a helluva drug.
A guy wanted a sandwich after failing at work. Next thing WWI.
No, the assassin missed his queue, so he went to a cafe for a sandwich. Then, the archduke's car parked at the very same cafe.
The assassination of Franz was a comedy of errors. Didn't they have more than one pistol and a hand grenade all fail to go off before someone managed to merk him?
Yeah, but it looks like it's not true :( at least the sandwich part.
"All that stuff belongs to Germany, which just had war declared on by Britain because Britain was friends with Belgium, which was being trespassed by Germany in order to get to France to kick France’s ass because France was friends with Russia, who was getting ready to kick Austria’s ass because Austria was getting ready to kick Serbia’s ass because someone from Serbia shot the leader of Austria’s ass. (Or, actually, he shot him in the head.)"
Yeah, but that was just the trigger. The gun was already loaded and cocked.
Nov. 2nd, 2016 - Chicago Cubs break The Curse of the Billy Goat opening a rift in space-time and causing our universe to collide with H E L L W O R L D.
This is 100% true and I saw Hamilton in Chicago during that week.
And people didn't buy enough WiiUs.
it was a lame public prototype of the switch that was marketed like shit and no one bought them
It wasn't a bad system; it just failed to catch on because Nintendo blew their wad marketing the original Wii to people who couldn't give a shit less about console gaming, so when they came out with a new, completely separate system with almost the same fucking name -- without, for instance, "Super" thrown in there to distinguish it from its predecessor -- people just assumed that it was a tablet peripheral for the original Wii. It's also really problematic to name a gaming system after a line from Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist, Nintendo. Jesus Christ.
The wiiu had a bad marketing job. Shit that was 2012 election. Never mind.
I don't know how I confused the November of being drunk in trailer parks with cosplay nerds and the November being drunk watching Cubs fans being a mess.
When the Haitian people were slaves up until they weren't and killed all the imperialist honkie bastards.
Spain was way overextended in 1588 and the armada had no chance of winning (it was a storm that scattered the fleet, btw). England didn't achieve naval hegemony for another 120 years.
Shout out to the Stamford Bridge Viking who was the OG "NO PASARAN" guy.
For those of you who don't know, the Viking and the Saxon armies met at a choke point where they had to cross a narrow bridge to fight each other. Some giant viking Sonofabitch is like "Fuck you limey scum", gets a big fucking axe, and preceeds to solo the English army on the bridge for about an hour. He kills like forty Englishmen because they can only come at him one or two at a time due to the narrow bridge. Eventually the English stick a hobbit with a spear in a barrel, float it on the the bridge, and stab the axe-viking in the nards. But for about an hour that guy was the God of War and no one could get past him.
i was that viking in a past life no i will not explain
BDE viking boi
Hmm. Interesting thought, but we really can’t know for sure. The normans were also from Norway originally but they were masters at adapting their culture to the local culture, which is part of why they reigned so long. So my guess is that the Norwegians would also would’ve adapted similarly over a long period of time. Vikings had several holds in Scotland for example and their merging with the Picts and other ethnic groups kinda created the current Scottish culture, which is mostly similar to the original with a little bit of the Norwegian culture in small things. The language would be the biggest difference. English is derivative from old English before the invasion, but it was then highly influenced by the French of the Norman upper class. Instead my guess is English would no longer be a part of the Latin language with mixed Germanic languages, but a purely Germanic and Scandinavian type language.
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war... Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
I've flipped back and forth on this movie. A year or so ago I thought it was reactionary fanfic for right wing terrorist. Now I wish I could organize my comrades half as well as my man Tyler
I think that's part of the big problem with Fight Club, by mashing so much legitimate greivance and effective strategy into Durden, it glamorizes his shittiness to people who don't understand that it's satire, or if you do understand that it's satire, it delegitimizes a lot of criticism and methodology by having it attached to this total prick.
How was he right wing? He blew up the credit card companies.
He was def sexist tho so maybe that's what you mean. Yeah actually, huge misogynist.
Yeah, I think that's the part of the movie that made me think it was right wing reactionary nonsense. That and just being a lib at the time
yeah if durden had been a feminist he'd have been badically a kinky maoist. I don't think i remember him saying any homophobic shit, but i haven't watched it in a long time and the last time I did was with a vibrator so i was mostly just paying attention to brad pitts body and meat loaf
Didn't he beat the gay coded guy to a bloody pulp? Or am I reading too much into that?
Yeah, it was jared. Not sure. They call him beautiful and he was blonde, but otherwise don't remember anything about the character that stands out as gay coded. So :shrug:
could just be toxic masculine stuff not wanting to be a “pretty boy” dork and wanting to be a tough rough man
Yeah, that's definitely the surface level read. Not like Fight Club was otherwise subtle
yeah i know it is, I just don’t see the gay coded stuff necessarily is all.
Reading too much into that. He honored Meat Loaf who was clearly bear coded.
Also Tyler Durden is bisexual. I’ve decided this because he’s hot and a fictional character I can project lust upon.
on a more subtle scale, Woodrow Wilson got the flu in 1919, which apparently made him paranoid and exhausted him, possibly contributing to him conceding to Clemenceau's demands for The Treaty of Versailles which in turn contributed to some Not So Good things down the line
During the second week of April, an exhausted Wilson gave up most of the demands that he had been pressing Clemenceau to meet. The President accepted the demilitarization of the Rhineland and its occupation by France for at least fifteen years, along with an open-ended process for calculating Germany’s reparations bill. In the judgment of Margaret MacMillan, the author of “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World,” an authoritative account of the postwar negotiations, Clemenceau suddenly found himself with “the best possible deal for France.” Infamously, the achievement was a Pyrrhic one. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, and which ratified Wilson’s concessions, proved to be a settlement so harsh and onerous to Germans that it became a provocative cause of revived German nationalism during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and, eventually, a rallying cause of Adolf Hitler.
Barry considers in his book whether Wilson might have been a more forceful and stubborn negotiator in Paris if he hadn’t contracted the flu, and whether, therefore, the history of the twenties and thirties in Europe might have turned out differently. He is appropriately skeptical of such counterfactual speculations; we cannot know what might have happened if Wilson had remained healthy and vigorous, only “what did happen,” as he writes. “Influenza did strike Wilson. Influenza did weaken him physically. . . . precisely at the most crucial point of negotiations.” Nazism’s triumph over Germany was caused by much more than the blowback from the Versailles Treaty, yet there can be little doubt that the treaty’s punishing terms, including the highly visible French occupation of German territory, did help Hitler to mobilize and narrate German grievances. Lloyd George, who had opposed, in particular, the French occupation, later concluded in a memoir that the “odious accompaniments of such an occupation of German towns . . . had much to do with the fierce outbreak of patriotic sentiment in Germany, which finds its expression in Nazism.”
then Wilson got a stroke 6 months later
also not a pivot but in an extraordinary coincidence both Adams and Jefferson died on July 4th 1826
The Chinese demand for silver is basically what drove Europeans to "discover" the Americas. The Ming dynasty started minting silver coins in the 14th century and by the 15th century their own local supply was insufficient. They traded with Japan for some of their silver, but the real deposits were in the Persian empire. The Muslim and Chinese world developed extensive trade, but the backwards Europeans only got to eat the Muslim's scraps. Simple Eurpeans wanted access to Chinese high quality goods, so they went looking for trade routes that went around the Muslims, instead they found massive mineral deposits in the Americas.
Even for centuries after Spain and the Europeans established colonies extracting resources, they were still just trying to get more access to Eastern markets. It wasn't until probably the Opium wars that in the 19th century that China wasn't leading the world. Even that was literally a war to open up Chinese markets. China arguably drove much of the world's history for longer than Europeans have.
Source: The Origins of the Modern World by Robert Marks.
Russia leaving the continental system. The poles beating the ottomans at Vienna
One time I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, but it was just a fart.
If Andropov lived we very likely have seen the USSR survive (and thrive) into the present day.
And another one, I think Marcus Aurelius choosing his idiot son Commodus to succeed him was one of those moments too. Before then emperors just found someone really competent and "adopted" him to become the next emperor (like if Bernie adopted AOC or something). That decision set off a new precedent of just letting your bio kid be emperor, now matter how incompetent they were.
If Andropov lived we very likely have seen the USSR survive (and thrive) into the present day.
How so? I don't know much USSR history so I'm curious to know, especially since I hear a lot of people give geopolitical and economic reasons for the collapse that seem hard for one person to overcome.
Short answer, Andropov had a plan to root out corruption and to make very necessary reforms to the economy. He died and Gorby came in and left the corruption alone while not pursuing "good" economic reform. Gorby basically just pushed the "self-destruct" button on the Soviet economy.
I see, and I take it that even if one believes the USSR was facing impending collapse or at least liberalisation, Gorbachev definitely accelerated the process it seems
Of course, it's hard taking it upon ourselves to catch up on a history education that is actually critical and free of liberal idealism. Thanks, and each one teach one!
