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Alternate History General Discussion

Talking about weird/unsavory elements of alternate history- I feel like you can't deny the adjacency to conspiracy theory and 'secret histories'

www.bloomberg.com

Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture

On YouTube videos and Reddit boards, adherents of a bizarre conspiracy theory argue that everything you know about the history of architecture is wrong.
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Coiler said:
How likely (I'm hesitant to say plausible) is a UK parliament with national proportional representation (ie, no districts/subunits, just one block of percentages) becoming very Knesset-esque (IE, unstable, every governing coalition is held together with bubble gum and scotch tape, and fringe minor parties become kingmakers because their votes are needed to get to the magic 51% of seats).
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monroetempleton said:
The Netherlands would be more comparable- PR only really facilitates a more fluid state of national politics, with the fragmenting of larger voter blocs on the left and right that would have been held together under FPTP in favour of more specific organisations reflecting this fluidity. While this fragmenting is something you certainly see in Israel, Israeli politics also has specific crisises and neurosis that drive the fragility of its coalitions and leaves it peculiarly fucked, while the Netherlands- with an outcome of governments formed from the centre-blocs swinging with everyone it can over decades in power- is more what I'd expect the UK would see under a similar system.

If you want a picture of 'Dutch Britain' its Nick Clegg celebrating his 13th year In Office with coalition mayflies
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Actually, neither is particularly likely IMO. The Netherlands isn't much of a contrast to Israel because historically, those countries' political systems have been very similar, and neither is particularly representative of countries that use PR. Israel's political system is the way it is because the parties are also divided along ethnic and religious lines and that makes coalitions trickier - one of the reasons they just had so many elections was that Lieberman, whose strongest base is not particularly religious Jews from the post-Soviet bloc, decided he was better off not trying to compromise with the Haredim. You have an environment where there already couldn't be that many swing voters to begin with and then add Netanyahu - an extremely polarising figure - and yeah, you get a mixture really unlikely to be replicated anywhere else because...

The Netherlands have historically been much the same, minus Netanyahu. Every meaningful branch of Christianity had its own party, the secular working-class had its own, the secular middle and upper-class had its own. Getting people to swing between them - winning over religious workers, for instance, was always something Dutch social democrats dreamed of - tended to be arduous and often involved people actually revising their identities, which is why you don't see that much of it until the 60s, and why you suddenly see the creation of the CDA as the mainstream Catholic and Protestant parties (yes, there were quite a few) merged to preserve Christian influence in the political system even as they shrank. The thing is the Dutch left was wrong to think this would mean parties would automatically become more divided on class lines instead. The current state of the Dutch party system stems from the fact that pillarisation was replaced with nothing, and voting just kept becoming more individual and in the moment, and the lack of a threshold and Dutch people being used to long coalition negotiations means there's nothing to balance this out. It's not the 50s in the UK anymore, voters have gotten much more fickle as they have everywhere else, but there isn't much sign of things getting to that point either. And no, FPTP isn't making up all the difference because, as India or Canada show, it's not the system that matters, it's the divides - or lack thereof - in society that matter.

We already have an example of what happens when a society that's similar to the UK suddenly adopts PR and it's New Zealand.
 
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Heat said:
We already have an example of what happens when a society that's similar to the UK suddenly adopts PR and it's New Zealand.
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I do think that is right here, different of course, given how the LibDems don’t have a NZ counterpart really but a similar energy would be likely. The Scottish and Welsh assemblies are probably other comparisons though I think a U.K. wide PR Parliament would allow a Conservative lead coalition of some kind.

I do have to say, my favourite ‘Now Britain does PR’ possibility is that @Callan list where David Owen is Labour PM and oversees Neoliberalism.
 
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Indicus said:
West Virginia has its Eastern Panhandle because the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad went through it, and controlling that land despite it not being culturally similar to the rest was therefore considered very important. The Baltimore and Ohio was charter in 1827, which was ridiculously early and an extremely wise investment by Baltimore in an era when railroads were in their infancy. If Baltimore had not been so far-seeing and instead went for, say, a modest canal as some were proposing, then no doubt a railroad would be constructed later but it wouldn’t have been as important and so West Virginia would not necessarily have had its Eastern Panhandle. This has a host of other changes as well - for instance, Baltimore would have had a weaker economy and less prominence.
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Where did you read that?
Much of the population of the Eastern Panhandle was pro-Confederate. Same with Southern West Virginia. However, they were militarily occupied by the Union.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Where did you read that?
Much of the population of the Eastern Panhandle was pro-Confederate. Same with Southern West Virginia. However, they were militarily occupied by the Union.
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The Union occupied the Eastern Panhandle in part because the Baltimore & Ohio was so important and it went through it. The Wheeling Convention did not necessarily incorporate all the territories under Union occupation - notably, it declined to incorporate Alexandria and Fairfax - as it generally sought to maintain an Appalachian cultural outlook, including as you note some pro-Confederate parts. But it made an exception for the Eastern Panhandle because of the importance of the Baltimore & Ohio.
 
Indicus said:
The Union occupied the Eastern Panhandle in part because the Baltimore & Ohio was so important and it went through it. The Wheeling Convention did not necessarily incorporate all the territories under Union occupation - notably, it declined to incorporate Alexandria and Fairfax - as it generally sought to maintain an Appalachian cultural outlook, including as you note some pro-Confederate parts. But it made an exception for the Eastern Panhandle because of the importance of the Baltimore & Ohio.
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It's actually pretty fascinating to consider how a rump Virginia and a larger West/North Virginia would develop into the present day.
 
On further analysis,a Geoană Presidency would be incredibily corrupt and disastrous,in more ways than you'd possibly imagine.

He had no independent thoughts,he was 100% a puppet of the barons and moguls/businessmen like Voiculescu,Vântu or Patriciu and,this cannot be stated enough,he is Nicola Murray on steroids in terms of gaffes/incompetence.

Ioan Niculae,the Grain and Fertilizer King,demanded while illegally funding Geoană’s campaign and bribing people for him that Iulian Iancu be named Minister of Economy which is like putting Spiro Agnew in charge of the Treasury. Iancu takes bribes willy nilly,the only reason he’s Gazprom’s guy is because Chevron gave him less bribe money. During a Romania Liberă investigation/ sting,he was not only one of the many hundred of MPs to agree with taking hypothetical bribes in exchange for whatever but told Romania Liberă’s fake sheik that he’s always available for these kinds of things.

Add people like Costel Voicu who openly said in DNA transcripts that he’s gonna arrest his political rivals when he gets to be Minister of Interior and you got a recipe for a disaster.

Not to mention Patriciu’s dumb idea of privatizing legal courts or Vântu having more power and using it in his regular way: unstable as fuck.
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
Reading the Looming Tower (great book) for News At 11.

Man. It turns out 9/11 really pissed people off, huh — ? Like, Jesus h-fucking christ. No wonder why we went in insane in the 2000s.
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It’s hard to overstate how much it changed peoples view of the world, at least in the Anglosphere. (I’m less qualified to comment about other areas.)

The zeitgeist of the 90s was “the Cold War is over, the world’s gotten so much better.” Yes, there was still plenty of unpleasantness in the world (former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, to name but two). Terrorism was still an issue, but the scale was nowhere near the same.

With hindsight, the potential for something like 9/11 was always there. I recall a newspaper article before 9/11 quoting some associate of bin Laden about how there was some terrorist act planned which would change the world. But it’s still hard to overstate the shock of how much it changed things. The Pearl Harbor of its day, as it were.
 
Jared said:
With hindsight, the potential for something like 9/11 was always there. I recall a newspaper article before 9/11 quoting some associate of bin Laden about how there was some terrorist act planned which would change the world. But it’s still hard to overstate the shock of how much it changed things. The Pearl Harbor of its day, as it were.
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Both Tom Clancy and Dale Brown had airliners being used as makeshift cruise missiles. But the possibility wasn't taken that seriously until it was too late.

Chris
 
Stephen King also had a ramming airplane in the book version of the Running Man. The concept and fear has been there ever since kamikazes.

I've said it before, possibly in this very thread, but I feel OTL dodged a bullet in that no one in the 1960s "golden age of hijacking" ultimately committed a 9/11-style attack before security improved (read: was implemented in even the most basic form). All it takes is at most a few crazy radicals in a decade full of crazy radicals.
 
Venocara said:
Which groups do you think were most likely to attempt such an attack in the 60s, and what do you think the effect would have been?
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I'm convinced it would have been one Samuel Byck type or at most one leader cut from the same cloth and a few associates and acquaintances (relatives or lovers, potentially). Any group with the slightest self-preservation instinct knows that they'll instantly become the biggest public enemies (which is a deterrent against going too big even later).

Hang on a sec, one disturbed person.., this is going into soft parallel AH, but what if Lee Harvey Oswald in that timeline carried out such an attack instead of what he did IOTL?
 
ChrisNuttall said:
Both Tom Clancy and Dale Brown had airliners being used as makeshift cruise missiles. But the possibility wasn't taken that seriously until it was too late.

Chris
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Clancy featuring the idea in Debt of Honor got him quite a bit of airtime on the day of and subsequently.





Being the reader of Clancy that I was as a precocious teenager with interests quite different from my peers, I still remember having the thought of how much it all felt like one of his books. And I also can’t help having the sense that everyone thinking that the subsequent military actions afterwards would be quickly over and done with because of 15+ years of people reading Clancy (and others) books telling them it would be so. Fate, of course, had other ideas which might also be why Clancy seemed to stop writing about that time and let the ghostwriters take over.
 
Coiler said:
Any group with the slightest self-preservation instinct knows that they'll instantly become the biggest public enemies (which is a deterrent against going too big even later).
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Does this rule out all of the major terrorist groups of the period, or do you think a group (either out of desperation as a sort of last stand or just one with sufficiently deranged leaders) could make an attempt in this period? Alternatively, is it possible that something of this magnitude could have committed by terrorists operating outside the US?
 
Coiler said:
Stephen King also had a ramming airplane in the book version of the Running Man. The concept and fear has been there ever since kamikazes.

I've said it before, possibly in this very thread, but I feel OTL dodged a bullet in that no one in the 1960s "golden age of hijacking" ultimately committed a 9/11-style attack before security improved (read: was implemented in even the most basic form). All it takes is at most a few crazy radicals in a decade full of crazy radicals.
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The hijackers of Southern Airways Flight 49 said that they were going to crash into a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge if their demands weren't met and they even flew around the area for an hour or so. That took place in November 1972 and by January 1973 all airline passengers in the United States were required to be physically screened prior to boarding.
 
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