hydroacetylene
No bio...
User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
Alternate history point of divergence- William Lloyd Garrison in 1839 agreed to a compromise keeping the American Anti-Slavery Society intact. The Liberty party is never formed; the lack of third party competition in the 1844 election allows Henry Clay to win New York, and the electoral college. The American turn against Texas annexation drives the republic of Texas into the arms of France and Britain, and drives a realignment of the slaveholding east against annexation and into alignment with the nationalist faction, which supports expansion to the Pacific, the defeat of Mexico militarily, and white settlement across the southwest. In this world, dispute between the Virginia militia and the Whig federal government over the treatment of captured Harper's Ferry raiders triggers the civil war, and with the US distracted France, Britain and the republic of Texas invade Mexico, theoretically over debt defaults but in reality over French and Texan territorial ambitions. The treaty of Versailles(1860) installs a French puppet government in Mexico and cedes vast northern territories to Texas, the entire Mexican cessation plus Baja California and an access corridor around the Colorado river.
The second Mexican empire doesn't go particularly well, but the US civil war dragged on and on, the Whig establishment proving less zealous about prosecuting the war than Lincoln, and Britain was able to use the relatively free new world hand to demand, and get, concessions. The republic of Texas agreed not to expand slavery to counties that didn't already have it, in exchange for Britain agreeing not to pressure it to abolish the practice east of the trinity, and to give Britain a set of pacific navy bases, most notably San Francisco, and in return Britain gave technical assistance and forced the post-French Mexican government to recognize the greatly expanded Texan borders- along with a few other breakaway republics in the far south. Eventually the US civil war ended with the final capture of the temporary confederate capital of Atlanta. The commodore Perry expedition never happened, obviously, but the British navy opened Japan for trade by force- and Japan successfully pulled a Meiji restoration in the aftermath.
British and sometimes French assistance led to Texas establishing immigration-driven colonies in the southwest- in this world Pheonix is a German speaking city and major rail hub for reaching the gulf of California- but the Deseret war over control of the old Spanish trail was the first conflict the republic prosecuted without favorable outside intervention, beginning in 1883 and ending by 1887. The republic of Deseret was forced to capitulate, but Texas lacked the ability to dominate the region as thoroughly as the USA had in our world, which is still stuck dealing with plains indians, not having a good transcontintental rail route. In this world mormons are an impoverished minority which does a lot of terrorism and organized crime, when you can tell the difference between the two, and still practices polygamy and- when they can get away with it- religious communism. Their lost boys make up a big chunk of the 21st century republic of Texas' cannon fodder, and Deseret is the poorest and worst managed subdivision in North America.
The republic of Texas abolishes slavery in 1910, with a final phaseout in the thirties. Today the black population is often discriminated against, but never officially- blacks in the army receive equal pay and promotions to equivalent whites. While known for oil, the 21st century republic of Texas' largest industries are arms, chemicals, and shipping, with oil and agriculture being relatively distant. Texas is a major power, but has a drastically lower population than the equivalent territories in our world- and different regions can be, and are, managed drastically differently, with enormously different levels of independence given to regional governments. The world is multipolar, with rather open vassalage relationships between impoverished third world countries and both middle and major powers. France, Britain, and Japan retain large parts of their old colonial empires. Militaries are far more influential than in our world, because major wars happen more regularly- while most of the major and middle powers are theoretically democracies, senior generals and admirals have far more influence over governments, and large economic interests have a much stronger hand negotiating with elected governments.
International commissions exist, but there is no such thing as a united nations. There is no undisputed most powerful country in the world; Japan has the largest navy and Russia has the largest army. The US is very rich but has limited Pacific influence, and peopling the west took far longer than in our world, with plains indian independence lasting into the 1890s in some cases and Mormon raiders preventing regular resupply across the northern Rockies into the 1920s. Oregon territory grew, though, after the highway links in the fifties.
Canada maintains closer ties to Britain than in our world; ditto Australia. How commonwealth foreign policy should be decided is a live issue in all three countries, although the CANZUK countries maintain their own domestic policies they share a currency. The Latin monetary union is alive and well, with franc-based currency the international standard- although it has dropped official bimetallism and the gold standard is more of a theoretical basis than a practical one. One of the bright spots in this world is Russia, which is more like a normal, although oppressive, developed country with a GDP per capita at Western European standards, albeit not the nicer parts of Western Europe. One of the dark spots is China, which was never decolonized, and large parts of which are as bad as sub-saharan Africa. The port cities ruled by Japan, Russia, Britain, Germany etc are fine, but the interior is ruled by warlords as often as by the government.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
I generally outperform the market by guessing demand trends ~6 mo out. I made good money off of LNG infrastructure companies(a separate thing from energy stocks) after the ukraine invasion, for example. If you're not good at this, I'm sorry, I don't have an algorithm, stick to index funds.
Oh, when a democrat gets elected, buy silver. Sell it before a republican gets elected.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Christian kid's books are still being produced, and generally not full of woke shit. They are mediocre, but kids eat that stuff up. Feed volume and keep room for the classics.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Why? They're not Americans.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Going to a state flagship even if you could technically get into a more selective private college is pretty common behavior in flyover.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
And outside of the US, people don't even use SMS!
WhatsApp and telegram still rely on your phone number. It’s just an app that sends texts by data rather than as an SMS- either because it’s cheaper($0.10/text adds up in countries that don’t have unlimited texting) or because of features offered by those apps(eg ability to create groups or whatever).
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
In America, it’s done by parolees(will be arrested if they don’t have a job) and illegals(no access to welfare). Law abiding citizens would rather take welfare.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
I’ve done butchery before- you absolutely do not want this. You need a generalist robot at least to start with.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
A lot of white collar office work could have been automated a while ago, it just wasn’t for status reasons- bosses like having direct reports and customers like having actual people. Likewise, sales will always be there. Regulated professions may be playing solitaire while a computer works uninterrupted, but the board of CPA’s will ensure work for their members, even if it’s mostly to make sure there’s someone to sue when it all goes wrong.
All in all I would estimate that a fairly small portion of work gets automated.
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
Does JD Vance occupying a liminal space between the two groups explain the lefty hate boner for him?
hydroacetylene
19hr ago
You can join one of many existing fundamentalist Christian groups. Almost all of them have a better gender ratio than the motte and accept converts. If you live in a major city in the US, there’s almost certainly several to choose from within driving distance.
But I’m guessing you don’t want to do this, because in practice you don’t actually like the society you desire. You might not like the actual gender role of a patriarchal man(which comes with responsibilities). You probably don’t want the policing of young men. These things are loadbearing for the social model.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yes, the majority of people advocating for conservative religious morality are religious conservatives. Numerically most people into Christian sharia are being told to dial it down a notch by their coreligionists who still don’t let their daughters wear pants or listen to rock music. That crowd is not what I was addressing.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I mean sticking it in the wrong hole, maybe rounding out to all same-sex acts but definitely not excluding eg homosexual blowjobs.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Ok, hard mode- do you condemn sodomy?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
By the way- harem doesn’t mean what you think it does either. It refers to the woman’s part of a large household- in other words, it’s a reference to gender segregation and not to the sexual satisfaction of a single man. Historical harems housed a large number of women which were not involved sexually with the man who owned the house.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Divorce rates have been trending down since the nineties, why would you expect that trend to reverse?
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Alternately: "cuntry music"
Pop country is more likely to be about finding happiness in a committed relationship regardless of the gender of the singer. That is a fully generalizable statement and does not need a baseline to compare to, btw.
‘Outlaw country’ and ‘red dirt’ music usually have a male singer who might be singing a breakup song, but never about bad sex, and is still more likely to be singing about a committed relationship(in this case usually explicitly marriage), although non-relationship topics are also more common than breakup songs.
I’m not sure what you’re exactly referring to here.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yes, people are wired not to hit and quit ingroup members. Even men. Imagine your friend’s hot sister or something.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I’ll notice that these people advocating for trad sexual mores don’t seem to join the many existing Christian fundamentalist groups out there. Few are hostile to converts and a they invariably have better gender balance than secular right wing circles(low bar to clear, I know).
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I think there’d be plenty of warning to flee to Canada(and after that, further abroad) much closer to the time it actually became necessary if so.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I will say one good thing about the black political machine- it’s very thoroughly non-ideological. When the DNC decides to settle on something that isn’t insane race communism, they will always have been at war with EastAsia. And it’s worth noting that the ridiculously unpopular insanity mostly comes from the far left wing which itself doesn’t get along great with the black wing.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The black political machine is another important wing for the democrats.
So you have a minor class-first wing, an establishment blob wing, a far left wing, and a black machine politics wing. I’m guessing the blob can’t carry the other three on it’s own.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Compare parents who tend to be cowed into submission should CPS threaten to take their children away.
Or use as a threat ‘CPS says we’re hitting you too much, you’d better start behaving or they’ll take you away.’.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I think you’re right that losing the emerging democratic majority is deflating but it’s also just that democrats don’t have a single ideology. Chuck Schumer no doubt is theoretically very progressive but probably he’s not entirely comfortable with trans. The radical activist wing is not able to execute radical solutions but that might be specifically the radical activist wing.
In our world, the US had an anti-colonialism stance in the negotiations after the boxer rebellion. In this one, the USA is not a major power in the pacific, and China just gets carved up between colonial powers after Russia and Japan sack Beijing, even colonial powers for whom it makes no sense. Italy, Belgium, Austria, etc prove incapable of administering chunks of territory on the other side of the world and former concessions to the minor powers are the worst parts of China.
In our world nationalist China was a crap hole in the thirties. But in this one, it’s a patchwork, and the great powers still maintain concessions that keep the country from unifying, as well as controlling most of the urban areas.
More options
Context Copy link