Least favorite alt-history story?

[Charles EP M.]

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OH GOD! OH JESUS CHRIST!

 

[Coiler]

Ah, yes, New Deal Coalition Retained... My views there remain the same as before:

The actual WWIII in NDCR is very, very emblematic of how it's too cliche and too divergent at the same time. On one hand, it copied rather heavily from the WWIII boomlet happening on the board at that time (which in turn copied heavily from the classic Clancy/Hackett/etc... books). On the other, it had an Arab-Israeli alliance pushing into the Caucasus, both sides crossing the "we're overrun, so we'd probably push the button" threshold (The Soviets overrun most of West Germany, then NATO takes Moscow), highly dubious and barely researched numbers on the battle wikiboxes, East Germany switching sides because of GERMANNESS (William Lind would be proud), and no doubt more that I can't remember.

 

[Skinny87]

Ah, yes, New Deal Coalition Retained... My views there remain the same as before:

View attachment 10436​

Still the second-best photoshop you've done

You know what the first one is

 

[Elektronaut]

The actual WWIII in NDCR is very, very emblematic of how it's too cliche and too divergent at the same time. On one hand, it copied rather heavily from the WWIII boomlet happening on the board at that time (which in turn copied heavily from the classic Clancy/Hackett/etc... books). On the other, it had an Arab-Israeli alliance pushing into the Caucasus, both sides crossing the "we're overrun, so we'd probably push the button" threshold (The Soviets overrun most of West Germany, then NATO takes Moscow), highly dubious and barely researched numbers on the battle wikiboxes, East Germany switching sides because of GERMANNESS (William Lind would be proud), and no doubt more that I can't remember.

The whole thing is just one endless sequence of derivative hackery. From Rumsfeldia to FAT to President Ted Bundy to probably lots of weird Alt Right fantasy tropes I'm and we're not aware of. The copypasta'ing was actually directly invoked by the author to support the plausibility of it at some points. It's why I'm trying to be scrupulous about how Rumsfeldia is pretty awful as well but from the other wing of political tendentiousness.

 

[Matt]

NDCR is still going? I thought that abomination had been put out of its misery long ago.

Short answer? Because we live in the worst timeline.

 

[Japhy]

Short answer? Because we live in the worst timeline.

Matt, you're an OTL vet. You know we could live in a worse timeline. Admiral SirJohn and Mike P could still be writing too.

 

[napoleon IV]

The whole thing is just one endless sequence of derivative hackery. From Rumsfeldia to FAT to President Ted Bundy to probably lots of weird Alt Right fantasy tropes I'm and we're not aware of. The copypasta'ing was actually directly invoked by the author to support the plausibility of it at some points. It's why I'm trying to be scrupulous about how Rumsfeldia is pretty awful as well but from the other wing of political tendentiousness.

"Look, it has to be plausible, because I stole this from Rumsfeldia" is probably my favorite defense of an implausible TL.

Matt, you're an OTL vet. You know we could live in a worse timeline. Admiral SirJohn and Mike P could still be writing too.

Now hold on a minute, I think having the Federation Party TL continue to this day would be a great thing. I think NDCR is worse than the Federation Party, because the Federation Party manages to be so bad it's good while NDCR is just a Nazi jacking off to pictures of Joachim Pieper.

 

[Matt]

Matt, you're an OTL vet. You know we could live in a worse timeline. Admiral SirJohn and Mike P could still be writing too.

Hey now, some of us are looking forward to the Lee of the Union sequel those two are working on together. In hell.

 

[Japhy]

Hey now, some of us are looking forward to the Lee of the Union sequel those two are working on together. In hell.

You joke but Mike is still alive and on Facebook.

John hasn't been seen online since 2012. Considering he was literally unable to do anything else but it that probably means he is dead.

 

[Elektronaut]

"Look, it has to be plausible, because I stole this from Rumsfeldia" is probably my favorite defense of an implausible TL.

If Rumsfeldia does it, uh, then it is not implausible. That's my understanding, anyway.

The fact that he even rips off Rumsfeld being president at the same time and there's now this monolith amongst the board of Rumsfeldia Rumsfeld honestly kind of makes me want to do a pushback against that and write something, y'know, factually-based and have Rumsfeld emerge as a muscular moderate. I admit this would also be a pushback against the continual cycle of post-1900 kids who piss themselves over the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Clintons and basically all the worst US political dynasties but can't actually come to terms with any other way of diverging US politics than Bush Over Reagan Means Paradise.

 

[Yokai Man]

If Rumsfeldia does it, uh, then it is not implausible. That's my understanding, anyway.

The fact that he even rips off Rumsfeld being president at the same time and there's now this monolith amongst the board of Rumsfeldia Rumsfeld honestly kind of makes me want to do a pushback against that and write something, y'know, factually-based and have Rumsfeld emerge as a muscular moderate. I admit this would also be a pushback against the continual cycle of post-1900 kids who piss themselves over the Kennedies, the Bushes, the Clintons and basically all the worst US political dynasties but can't actually come to terms with any other way of diverging US politics than Bush Over Reagan Means Paradise.

Do it,we need it.

 

[Hendryk]

Short answer? Because we live in the worst timeline.

If at least it was moved to the Writers' Forum safely away from the eyes of non-members, and where author fiat isn't an issue.

 

[Yokai Man]

INDEPENDENT LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA TEXAS

EMPIRE OF FRANCO-MEXICO

WALT DISNEY AS DICTATOR OF CALIFORNIA

MALCOLM X AND LINCOLN ROCKWELL AS BESTIES

FUCKING HELL

ROSWELL,TEXAS EVERYONE

THE GREATEST LIBERTARIAN WANK THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE AS A AH WEBCOMIC

THE CONGRESSMAN AND DREW LOOK LIKE FUCKING EdT COMPARED TO L.IAIN SMITH

HOW THE FUCK IS HE A PUBLISHED WRITER

HOW

 

[Hendryk]

HOW THE FUCK IS HE A PUBLISHED WRITER

His rants are a sight to behold.

The American Lenin
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@lneilsmith.org
​

It's harder and harder these days to tell a liberal from a conservative -- given the former category's increasingly blatant hostility toward the First Amendment, and the latter's prissy new disdain for the Second Amendment -- but it's still easy to tell a liberal from a libertarian.
Just ask about either Amendment.

If what you get back is a spirited defense of the ideas of this country's Founding Fathers, what you've got is a libertarian. By shameful default, libertarians have become America's last and only reliable stewards of the Bill of Rights.

But if -- and this usually seems a bit more difficult to most people -- you'd like to know whether an individual is a libertarian or a conservative, ask about Abraham Lincoln.

Suppose a woman -- with plenty of personal faults herself, let that be stipulated -- desired to leave her husband: partly because he made a regular practice, in order to go out and get drunk, of stealing money she had earned herself by raising chickens or taking in laundry; and partly because he'd already demonstrated a proclivity for domestic violence the first time she'd complained about his stealing.

Now, when he stood in the doorway and beat her to a bloody pulp to keep her home, would we memorialize him as a hero? Or would we treat him like a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up, if for no other reason, then for trying to maintain the appearance of a relationship where there wasn't a relationship any more? What value, we would ask, does he find in continuing to possess her in an involuntary association, when her heart and mind had left him long ago?

History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern industrialists who were unwilling to pay world prices for their raw materials and who, rather than practice real capitalism, enlisted brute government force -- "sell to us at our price or pay a fine that'll put you out of business" -- for dealing with uncooperative southern suppliers. That's what a tariff's all about. In support of this "noble principle", when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no more than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin that butchered more Americans than all of this country's foreign wars -- before or afterward -- rolled into one.

Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American continent -- indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction without regard to age, gender, or combat status of the victims -- and oversaw the systematic shelling and burning of entire cities for strategic and tactical purposes. For the same purposes, Lincoln declared, rather late in the war, that black slaves were now free in the south -- where he had no effective jurisdiction -- while declaring at the same time, somewhat more quietly but for the record nonetheless, that if maintaining slavery could have won his war for him, he'd have done that, instead.

The fact is, Lincoln didn't abolish slavery at all, he nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military conscription upon what had been a free country before he took over -- income taxation and military conscription to which newly "freed" blacks soon found themselves subjected right alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was truly fought against slavery -- a dubious, "politically correct" assertion with no historical evidence to back it up -- then clearly, slavery won.

Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the traditional midnight "knock on the door", illegally suspending the Bill of Rights and, like the Latin America dictators he anticipated, "disappearing" thousands in the north whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. To finance his crimes against humanity, Lincoln allowed the printing of worthless paper money in unprecedented volumes, ultimately plunging America into a long, grim depression -- in the south, it lasted half a century -- he didn't have to live through, himself.

In the end, Lincoln didn't unite this country -- that can't be done by force -- he divided it along lines of an unspeakably ugly hatred and resentment that continue to exist almost a century and a half after they were drawn. If Lincoln could have been put on trial in Nuremburg for war crimes, he'd have received the same sentence as the highest-ranking Nazis.

If libertarians ran things, they'd melt all the Lincoln pennies, shred all the Lincoln fives, take a wrecking ball to the Lincoln Memorial, and consider erecting monuments to John Wilkes Booth. Libertarians know Lincoln as the worst President America has ever had to suffer, with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson running a distant second, third, and fourth.

Conservatives, on the other hand, adore Lincoln, publicly admire his methods, and revere him as the best President America ever had. One wonders: is this because they'd like to do, all over again, all of the things Lincoln did to the American people? Judging from their taste for executions as a substitute for individual self-defense, their penchant for putting people behind bars -- more than any other country in the world, per capita, no matter how poorly it works to reduce crime -- and the bitter distaste they display for Constitutional "technicalities" like the exclusionary rule, which are all that keep America from becoming the world's largest banana republic, one is well-justified in wondering.

The troubling truth is that, more than anybody else's, Abraham Lincoln's career resembles and foreshadows that of V.I. Lenin, who, with somewhat better technology at his disposal, slaughtered millions of innocents -- rather than mere hundreds of thousands -- to enforce an impossibly stupid idea which, in the end, like forced association, was proven by history to be a resounding failure. Abraham Lincoln was America's Lenin, and when America has finally absorbed that painful but illuminating truth, it will finally have begun to recover from the War between the States.

 

[Yokai Man]

His rants are a sight to behold.

THE AMERICAN LENIN?

THEM WHO PREY TELL IS THE AMERICAN STALIN? JOHNSON?GRANT?

JESUS CHRIST MAN,LINCOLN HAD NOTHING IN COMMON WITH LENIN.THE FIRST BELIEVED IN DEMOCRACY,WHILE THE LATTER INSTALLED A HORRIBLE TOTALITARIAN REGIME AND WAS QUITE BLOODTHIRSTY(not like Stalin,but still)

OH GOD,NOW I GET WHY LINCOLN IS TREATED LIKE SHIT IN THE WEBCOMIC

 

[Yokai Man]

I'm sorry for being so angry,I just felt like saying what I thought.

I'm gonna try to calm down and take deep breaths.

 

[Skaven]

If Rumsfeldia does it, uh, then it is not implausible. That's my understanding, anyway.

I thought the argument was that people didn't say it was implausible when Rumsfeldia did it, so all the criticism has to stem from political biases from the libcucks on AH.com. Which ignores many, many things, mainly that people have been calling Rumsfeldia implausible for years, but still.

 

[The Red]

Can we actually talk about how the central point of making Rumsfeld a pantomime caricature of the New Right makes absolutely no sense and basically is NDCR-level stuff?

I mean he was a Nixonian figure. He was shut out under Reagan. Like Bush and Dole he's a pre-New Right figure. And under early Nixon he was actually regarded as pretty liberal.

I think you can view the progression from OTL Rumsfeld from being a fairly laid back Nixonian to fratricidal dictator all the way back to the earlier stages of FLG. Agnew becomes President and at first it seems that all is well, or at least as well as can be expected, so when Agnew elevates Rumsfeld and Cheney to his brain trust it's fairly plausible they'd begin to tie themselves to Agnew's manias and as the establishment began to line up against him its fairly clear that a mix of desperation and paranoia are beginning to change Cheney and Rumsfeld already at this juncture. So a random outburst where Rumsfeld compares Gavin to Pinochet is still uncharacteristic but the potential's already beginning to show.

I don't think it's accidental that him and Cheney's later notoriety was based on a period of weakly ideological state power exercise/abuse. And that their careers stretched over forty years. They're both adaptive functionaries who I don't think ever had anything close to grand designs other than party, power, and country.

Cheney's implacability for power is fairly well demonstrated in the first few years of Rumsfeldia, particularly because his scheming is mainly still just based on undermining the Democrats and courting evangelicals. By the time he's having to call CEOs "sir" and nod along with whatever prophecy Pat Robertson received from his toaster that morning he's clearly resenting the situation he's put himself in, but such is often the case with the architects of fascist regimes.

If I was doing something like Rumfeldia I'd take Nixon/Iraq War-style power dysfunctionalism to its plausible logical extreme rather than try to shoe-horn in a tale of PRIVATISE AIR.

It seems that this is more a problem with the latter stages of the TL, at least until America goes full Gilead and its here that the contrived elements and the seemingly random occurances become more sporadic. I'm a fan of the TL but I can't deny it was pretty jarring when you're expecting this slow creep towards dystopia to continue and suddenly there's jackbooted militias burning "incorrect" editions of the Bible. It's still readable though, and there's a decent lived in feel to a lot of it even amidst a fascist theocracy; some of the latter stuff still has highlights like the experiences of Korean-Americans emigrating back to South Korea. The comparison to NDCR isn't fair.

 

[Matt]

You joke but Mike is still alive and on Facebook.

John hasn't been seen online since 2012. Considering he was literally unable to do anything else but it that probably means he is dead.

I believe reports of John’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Oh, and enjoy his Amazon author page, too.

 

[Elektronaut]

Paul your reply prompted me to make absolutely sure I knew what I was talking about, so I went back and re-read parts of Gumbo, and honestly Rumsfeld's development is even weaker than I thought when I was writing above, and I can see why I felt your reply at first viewing was a bit headcanon-ish.

There's basically no reason given that I can see for why Rumsfeld becomes, eh, whatever it is he becomes politically in the timeline, and certainly no psychological prep or anything. No, I think you're meant to believe that the Rumsfeld of the timeline is more or less the unvarnished OTL Rumsfeld. It's clear in linking him, Cheney, Bork et al to Agnew as soon as Agnew comes to power that you're meant to believe these are immediately The Bad Guys. It's also worth noting that it's clear from the portrayals of side-characters like eg Bork that Drew regards so much of the US right as basically chomping at the bit of crypto-extremism. There's not a hell of a lot of nuance.

Rumsfeld's political revival isn't well-detailed either because he's apparently having troubles distancing himself from Agnew - reasonable, considering the taint of even OTL Nixon finished off or nearly finished off several careers - one minute and then he's governor of Illinois the next. You could forgive this if it was a C-tier character but given it's the main focus of the second part of the timeline it's not good.

It's all bad writing made worse by the fact that you actually have a genuine crypto-Nazi from OTL who attained high influence under multiple administrations in the form of Pat Buchanan. But I feel like Drew wouldn't have used someone who, when they emerged from the backrooms, were shunned by the wider party, because that would defeat the political point he's making that the whole US right is tainted. Yet Buchanan's unashamaed racist communitarian populism is clearly something you'd expect to come through in the Gumboverse. But no, it has to be the Nazism of Privatise the Universe through a guy who wasn't even really a Conservative.

Sorry but I still think Rumsfeldia is fundamentally at its core grounded on tendentious nonsense.