Zyobot
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Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
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Post by Zyobot on Mar 14, 2023 15:54:34 GMT
WI: the nationalists win the Chinese Civil War. Don’t have the details in front of me, but best guess is Thicc Taiwan at a human-development level more comparable to India than South Korea. Certainly, I’d expect it to be less gruesome and more well-adjusted than Maoist China. Chiang Kai-Shek was a despot with blood on his hands for sure, and I can certainly imagine a period of White Terror where the Communists (and many innocents, unfortunately) get eradicated. Even then, that’s still no worse than Chairman Mao IOTL, who has the Cultural Revolution, Great Famine, and Great Leap Forward under his belt — and ultimately, left behind a China that hasn’t democratized or really liberalized all that much. |
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miletus12
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 15, 2023 10:16:34 GMT
AHC: Optimize the Italian military for ww2. I'm going to turn that around a bit. AHC: optimize the American military for WWII; but let me give a start date: March 4, 1933. |
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miletus12
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To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 15, 2023 10:22:07 GMT
WI: the nationalists win the Chinese Civil War. Don’t have the details in front of me, but best guess is Thicc Taiwan at a human-development level more comparable to India than South Korea. Certainly, I’d expect it to be less gruesome and more well-adjusted than Maoist China. Chiang Kai-Shek was a despot with blood on his hands for sure, and I can certainly imagine a period of White Terror where the Communists (and many innocents, unfortunately) get eradicated. Even then, that’s still no worse than Chairman Mao IOTL, who has the Cultural Revolution, Great Famine, and Great Leap Forward under his belt — and ultimately, left behind a China that hasn’t democratized or really liberalized all that much. Hmmm. Something tells me Coca Cola imperialism comes ashore to Mainland China in 1949. IOW, we see Zaibatsu in Beizing, Chengdu, and Shanghai embrace the Wallstreet Way and China becomes the planet's lead economy by 1990 if not earlier. I am not so sure that Taiwan is like Sri Lanka, either. I think it becomes more like Hong Kong with Taipei as another internationalized major business and finance hub. |
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Zyobot
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Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
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Post by Zyobot on Mar 15, 2023 16:39:20 GMT
Don’t have the details in front of me, but best guess is Thicc Taiwan at a human-development level more comparable to India than South Korea. Certainly, I’d expect it to be less gruesome and more well-adjusted than Maoist China. Chiang Kai-Shek was a despot with blood on his hands for sure, and I can certainly imagine a period of White Terror where the Communists (and many innocents, unfortunately) get eradicated. Even then, that’s still no worse than Chairman Mao IOTL, who has the Cultural Revolution, Great Famine, and Great Leap Forward under his belt — and ultimately, left behind a China that hasn’t democratized or really liberalized all that much. Hmmm. Something tells me Coca Cola imperialism comes ashore to Mainland China in 1949. IOW, we see Zaibatsu in Beizing, Chengdu, and Shanghai embrace the Wallstreet Way and China becomes the planet's lead economy by 1990 if not earlier. I am not so sure that Taiwan is like Sri Lanka, either. I think it becomes more like Hong Kong with Taipei as another internationalized major business and finance hub.  More seriously, though, I’m not so sure even a Nationalist China would be quite as developed as Japan, South Korea, or OTL Taiwan today. No doubt it’d be much improved compared to Maoist China, but unlike the other three, it’s a massive country with varied terrain and probably more than a few stubborn holdouts to weed out, so I’ve a feeling it’ll take a bit longer than the other three to become a First World nation. Then again, it’ll probably receive considerable reconstruction aid from the West to make up for the lack of Soviet patronage (which they’re probably better off without, anyway). Even at my most pessimistic, I’d say a Nationalist China that undergoes its own “Miracle of the Yangtze River” in a few decades without replicating the USSR’s cack-handed, collectivist, centrally micromanaged Five-Year Plans — and with way less famines, plunder, and much smaller mountains of corpses, to boot — would still be a huge slap in the face to Communist economic theory (which is always a good thing). In fact, Communism in general would wind up even more discredited IATL, since China — which like Russia, also started as an oversized, underdeveloped, war-torn nation once derided as the “Sick Man” of the Continent — would be an excellent diorama for showing the world how horrible Communist economics are compared to liberalization and free markets. In which case, imagine the shock and resentment of average Soviet citizens and Eastern Europeans when they realize how they’ve been lied to all this time and that their sacrifices were for nothing, once the Soviet Bloc starts crumbling…  |
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Post by Otto Kretschmer on Mar 15, 2023 16:50:48 GMT
AHC: prepare the Iraqi military for the Iran Iraq War. You may delay the war until 1990.
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lordroel
Administrator
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Post by lordroel on Mar 15, 2023 17:05:09 GMT
AHC: prepare the Iraqi military for the Iran Iraq War. You may delay the war until 1990. The best solution is not to start the war in the first place. |
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Post by Otto Kretschmer on Mar 15, 2023 17:33:10 GMT
AHC: prepare the Iraqi military for the Iran Iraq War. You may delay the war until 1990. The best solution is not to start the war in the first place. That's not the solution I'm looking for.  |
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miletus12
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To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 15, 2023 17:44:39 GMT
AHC: prepare the Iraqi military for the Iran Iraq War. You may delay the war until 1990. The best solution is not to start the war in the first place.  |
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miletus12
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To get yourself lost, just follow the signs.
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 15, 2023 17:55:42 GMT
The best solution is not to start the war in the first place. That's not the solution I'm looking for. If you want a serious answer: then: a. you get rid of Saddam Hussein. b. You figure out the Kurdish problem, which is absolutely vital because you want to renormalize Iran and Iraq together. The Kurdish people have been the most kicked around, abused and oppressed "national" grouping in southwest Asia. If you can figure out how to democratize and organize them, you go a long way towards rectifying a LOT of the political mess that certain colonial powers created when they drew artificial borders that created the political tyrannies and chaos that is Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey; all four "nations" which have carried out a common cooperative quasi-genocide against the Kurds. c. You go through the same kind of analysis like I did with 1930s Italy, and you conclude that maybe the problem is intractable and very much a result of 4,000 years of tribalism overlaid with European colonialism, and maybe you should just throw up your hands and walk away. |
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Post by Otto Kretschmer on Mar 15, 2023 18:02:56 GMT
WI: less immigration to the US from Italy, more from britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
How does US cuisine look like without pizza and pasta but with more French and British influences?
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miletus12
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 15, 2023 18:22:35 GMT
WI: less immigration to the US from Italy, more from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. How does US cuisine look like without pizza and pasta but with more French influences? Hmmm. a. I think not much different. PIZZA, or something like it, would still arrive from Chinese immigrants. b. More French influence would affect our politics and culture, probably for the better. The French have an undeserved reputation for cultural xenophobia, hence the jokes about the "French language police". They are a lot less racist than we are, despite the recent problems with immigrant assimilation they have currently. c. Our food would be spicier and we would have more fish and cheese in our diets. d. The downside is that we would have a lot more hunting accidents. With American gun culture and the propensity of the French to hunt and not look where they shoot, it could be "exciting" during deer season. Of course the survivors would know what wine goes with Bambi. For your information that would be a Bordeaux. |
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Post by Max Sinister on Mar 16, 2023 2:21:29 GMT
WI: less immigration to the US from Italy, more from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. How does US cuisine look like without pizza and pasta but with more French influences? Hmmm. a. I think not much different. PIZZA, or something like it, would still arrive from Chinese immigrants. 1. Why from the Chinese? Other Mediterranean people have similar food (baked dough with cheese and some other ingredients on it) - although those weren't mentioned. 2. Technically, one single Italian pizza baker might suffice to influence US cuisine.
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miletus12
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 16, 2023 4:47:43 GMT
1. Why from the Chinese? Other Mediterranean people have similar food (baked dough with cheese and some other ingredients on it) - although those weren't mentioned. You could get it from Spain, the Native Americans, the Greeks, the Arabs, the FRENCH. It just so happens that Marco Polo brought something like it back with him from China when he returned to Italy; so we know how and where the Chinese in California got it, when they showed up to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. They brought it with them from China, along with something like spaghetti, though not exactly alike. |
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Post by Otto Kretschmer on Mar 16, 2023 9:44:34 GMT
WI: USSR actually prepared for Barbarossa.
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miletus12
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Post by miletus12 on Mar 16, 2023 11:26:59 GMT
WI: USSR actually prepared for Barbarossa. They did, but they had Stalin and they were Russians. The expression is; "Czar or Commissar, Russians are Russians." For far too long, since the 1970s communist-influenced historical revisionists and the myth of the "heroic Red Army" and the "Nazi superior soldiers", we Westerners downplayed our decisive role in saving the Russians, and the world from the fascists. It turns out that WE were the difference: the French, the British, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Danes, the Greeks, and yes the Americans in Europe. The Russians were and are "inefficient". For them to be different in 1941, they would have to become more like the Swedes or Finnish. |
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