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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Hmm, a lot here.

I think the United States was pretty close to being destined to ride out World War Two unscathed as long as nobody hostile developed a nuclear weapon. I think that's pretty much the only way CONUS gets more than a scratch. It's just very hard to do damage from across the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, and we only managed it on the one hand by taking a bunch of islands within striking range of Japan (and there aren't many of these on the Eastern American seaboard) and on the other hand by having England conveniently right there.

(This isn't the same argument as "the United States was destined to win the war in the Pacific).

Similarly, I'm not sure anything about Japan's technology would have saved it from being stuck between the United States (with 2x its population) and the Soviet Union (with nearly 3x its population).

But I do agree that a slightly different culture would have kept it from getting bombed out of World War Two and made it more competitive in the postwar era - a Japan that doesn't lose World War Two is at a minimum a major regional power.

I also think, FWIW, you probably don't get US culture without US geography. I think crossing the Atlantic and Pacific had a strong filtering effect on Americans that persists to this day.

(Incidentally there is imho a huge underrated and interesting question about long-term space colonization, as imho space colonies are likely to be insanely productive due to founder effects, but may also be prone to regimented thinking.)

(Incidentally there is imho a huge underrated and interesting question about long-term space colonization, as imho space colonies are likely to be insanely productive due to founder effects, but may also be prone to regimented thinking.)

On this note, I've always thought that one of the greatest advantages the US had was in being able to construct its constitution with significantly reduced baggage/inertia. Trying to reform the US constitution today seems essentially impossible. My hope is that if space colonization ever works out that a new set of founders with foresight manage to take the chance at a fresh start at put together an even better constitution for the modern era. It would be a fun discussion to hear what people would want explicitly included.

With any luck(??) we'll get Archipelago In Space, which could be very interesting on a lot of different levels. IMHO the US Constitution is very good ("working exactly as intended") but it was a some what unwieldy compromise because it had to accommodate certain geopolitical realities. That may be less true for SPACE COLONIES than any other civilization before (although I am not sure I would place money on it).

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