Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!

Kosh · Oct 23, 2012

Been lurking on here for a while but this is my first post.

Nothing of consequence to add, except that I'm so happy to see LTTW back....it's the reason I joined this forum

.

Unfortunately work is going to suffer as I log on everyday to see if there are any updates.

Thanks Thande.

Thande · Oct 23, 2012

Kosh said:
Been lurking on here for a while but this is my first post.

Nothing of consequence to add, except that I'm so happy to see LTTW back....it's the reason I joined this forum .

Unfortunately work is going to suffer as I log on everyday to see if there are any updates.

Thanks Thande.

My apologies

And thank you for this; I'm always humbled by the number of people who say they stopped lurking for my TL. It's rather better than the reason I stopped lurking, i.e. to tell someone off for getting a map of one of Turtledove's AH worlds wrong

fortyseven · Oct 23, 2012

I enjoy the frame story. Is Diversitarianism inspired by MrP?

Nugax · Oct 23, 2012

Woo, glad you started again! I still have several more print diagrammatic map stuff if you want.

For the record on the framing story I like it, but think it should be severely edited of all the AH.com in-joke wankery if LTTW is to be redone as single volume

.

Dathi THorfinnsson · Oct 23, 2012

Let me add my appreciation to the throng welcoming this back.

Herzen's love-child · Oct 23, 2012

One of my favorite "throwaway" parts of LTTW to date. "The Venator". Blade Runner in the 1840's?

Looking forward to where things will go...

Thande · Oct 23, 2012

Nugax said:
For the record on the framing story I like it, but think it should be severely edited of all the AH.com in-joke wankery if LTTW is to be redone as single volume .

I don't think there's a problem unless knowledge of an in-joke is required to understand what's going on. Which may be the case occasionally, I admit.

Lycaon pictus · Oct 23, 2012

Let me add my voice to the chorus of fans rejoicing that LTTW is back.

Also, I've gotten almost as interested in the story of the missing crosstime explorers as I am in the history.

fortyseven · Oct 25, 2012

fortyseven said:
I enjoy the frame story. Is Diversitarianism inspired by MrP?

Thande likes to refer to him by demographic, i.e. “You! Ginger bisexual transvestite Catholic vegan!” on the grounds that he is probably the only person in the world who fits that description.

MrP

Max Sinister · Oct 25, 2012

Well, I will definitely read this thread whenever it updates.

I may be wrong, but Diversitarianism looks like an extreme individualism. Saying that there's an ideology behind it might be wrong (too), since it's so anti-ideology, but then, the German Greens once called themselves "the anti-parties party".

And I like the bit about Yapon.

Thande · Oct 25, 2012

fortyseven said:
MrP

That's a coincidence, but it is rather appropriate

Admiral Matt · Oct 25, 2012

Again I'm struck by the sheer intensity of the reaction against Societism. We really don't have a clear parallel in OTL - even the most absurd extremes of anti-communism fell far short of LTTW's bizarre mandatory celebrations of ethnic cleansing. In a lot of ways it seems to have more in common with the knee-jerk rejection of eugenics and human improvement that the Nazis left us with, but seemingly an order of magnitude larger.

I can't wait to see the origins of all this.

Having just gotten heavily into "Axis of Andes" I am also very intrigued to see how you'll construct a genuine South American superpower.

When the time comes I also have a mind to irritate you with any number of economic issues, but now.... now is a time for celebration.

Thande · Oct 25, 2012

Admiral Matt said:
Again I'm struck by the sheer intensity of the reaction against Societism. We really don't have a clear parallel in OTL - even the most absurd extremes of anti-communism fell far short of LTTW's bizarre mandatory celebrations of ethnic cleansing. In a lot of ways it seems to have more in common with the knee-jerk rejection of eugenics and human improvement that the Nazis left us with, but seemingly an order of magnitude larger.

I can't wait to see the origins of all this.

Having just gotten heavily into "Axis of Andes" I am also very intrigued to see how you'll construct a genuine South American superpower.

When the time comes I also have a mind to irritate you with any number of economic issues, but now.... now is a time for celebration.

Really all these points go together: one of the main themes of this work is to expound my view that people in OTL tend to waaaaay overrate the importance of economic issues when attempting to interpret history and politics, something which of course our friend Karl Marx is largely responsible for: even his enemies basically allow him to set the playing field and argue within his own defined boundaries, rather than suggesting that that's not the only game in town to start with. I'm going for something roughly analogous here, with the primary 'theory of history' being based on identity rather than wealth, Sanchez as the loose analogue to Marx and his Diversitarian opponents again allowing him to define what the game is and playing it against him, rather than just saying 'actually maybe identity just isn't such the important all-defining issue you say it is to start with?'

Naturally we are all somewhat blinded by OTL bias on this: the choice of identity as the alternative 'all-defining issue' on my part is clearly influenced by the fact that it is the only occasional competitor to economics in OTL when defining political spectra and historical interpretation. Two OTL examples of identity dominating over wealth to define a political landscape and historical interpretation are Northern Ireland and Belgium. But in OTL these are regarded as aberrations, at least so long as the West remains the dominant contributor of ideas to global interpretations of history. My point is that there are probably thousands of alternative issues that could become the 'all-defining one' people fight ideological wars to the death over, it's just that identity is probably the easiest one for us to see and thus the obvious choice for me to write about.

With that in mind, I enjoy it when people sometimes criticise LTTW as not being economically well grounded, for example suggesting that country X could not be as powerful as it is painted as being on economic grounds, because it shows me that I am writing the way I want to write. People in TTL would find it a very alien attitude to suggest that a country's power and influence is so tied to its economic potential (resources, industrial output, etc.), and also would find the ways in which we measure it to be rather strange. You can see similar examples of philosophical disconnect just within OTL if you vary viewpoints based on chronological time back and forth rather than parallel timelines side to side. The obvious one being that people back in the 17th century or so would find our notion that there is no fixed amount of trade in the world that countries must compete over to be completely mad.

Similarly, modern historical interpretations of things like, say, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes almost always take the tone of 'Louis XIV was foolish to do this because it meant most of the Huguenots went to England, thus depriving France of these educated industrious people and gifting them to France's enemy'. This is not an interpretation that can be found in works about the incident written prior to the 19th century when the ideological ideas the assumption is based on were concocted. It is equally valid to say 'Louis XIV was wise to do this because it purified France's national identity, tying the newly centralised state to religious conformity, and allowed the Bourbons to make realistic threats to the Papacy that they might break with Rome and create a national state church, giving them greater influence when seeking to alter the balance of power within Europe with Papal backing'. But you'll never hear this said nowadays, because it is just assumed that France's economic power is intrinsically more important than the coherency of France's identity, as though there are no circumstances in which having the latter would objectively benefit French interests more than the former. Again, identity is probably far from the only issue in which you could draw this distinction, it's just the most obvious one to me because of how OTL has shaped our minds.

So here, via the extracts from the in-timeline books, I am not only presenting a world in which history has gone differently, but where historiography has gone differently as well, and people do not necessarily focus on the same things we do when seeking to interpret the currents of history. Is that clear?

My Username is Inigo Montoya · Oct 25, 2012

Thande said:
Similarly, modern historical interpretations of things like, say, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes almost always take the tone of 'Louis XIV was foolish to do this because it meant most of the Huguenots went to England, thus depriving France of these educated industrious people and gifting them to France's enemy'. This is not an interpretation that can be found in works about the incident written prior to the 19th century when the ideological ideas the assumption is based on were concocted. It is equally valid to say 'Louis XIV was wise to do this because it purified France's national identity, tying the newly centralised state to religious conformity, and allowed the Bourbons to make realistic threats to the Papacy that they might break with Rome and create a national state church, giving them greater influence when seeking to alter the balance of power within Europe with Papal backing'. But you'll never hear this said nowadays, because it is just assumed that France's economic power is intrinsically more important than the coherency of France's identity, as though there are no circumstances in which having the latter would objectively benefit French interests more than the former.

I think it's due to hindsight. In retrospect, we know that economic output would prove more useful than Papal backing in the centuries to come. Plus many people presume that since core French territories have little in the way of an identity nowadays, it must always have been so.

Thande said:
Again, identity is probably far from the only issue in which you could draw this distinction, it's just the most obvious one to me because of how OTL has shaped our minds.

I must say I am at loss of idea for yet another dichotomy besides those two... This is absolutely fascinating. Any suggestions?

Also, re: Belgium, you'll be pleased to know that many Belgian historians take great pains to explain the linguistic conflict in economical terms, of course

It completely misses the point that for most Flemish nationalists, the economy was just one stick to beat their former arrogant masters with, a revenge for a century of cultural humiliation at the hands of the French-speaking elite.

Space Oddity · Oct 25, 2012

You know have to comment on something that baffles me--the continuing meme that the Societists are racists and slaveowners when every indication in the text suggests the opposite. Most Societist writers seem to view Linnaenism with disgust--racism is something they OBJECT to, and evidence that the "lower classes" have to be kept from power. As for slavery, it's a little less clear but given the UPSA's opposition to it, I have my doubts the Societists are going to bring it back. (Though they doubtless have things that are so close to it, it's hard to tell the difference.)

What Societists are--so far as I can see--are hierarchal authoritarian internationalists. They think the upper classes in ENA have more in common with the upper classes in--at the top of my head--Ethiopia than either do with the lower classes of their own country. They just have to be shown that this is the case, with the Societists helping to wrinkle out any... unfortunate little differences.

The Diversicans answer to this has been cultural relativism and nationalism TO THE EXTREME! Which is why this argument looks to any outsider's eyes like two groups of authoritarian nutjobs yelling at each other.

Thande · Oct 25, 2012

My Username is Inigo Montoya said:
Also, re: Belgium, you'll be pleased to know that many Belgian historians take great pains to explain the linguistic conflict in economical terms, of course It completely misses the point that for most Flemish nationalists, the economy was just one stick to beat their former arrogant masters with, a revenge for a century of cultural humiliation at the hands of the French-speaking elite.

I very much appreciate your thoughts on this issue

Space Oddity said:
You know have to comment on something that baffles me--the continuing meme that the Societists are racists and slaveowners when every indication in the text suggests the opposite. Most Societist writers seem to view Linnaenism with disgust--racism is something they OBJECT to, and evidence that the "lower classes" have to be kept from power. As for slavery, it's a little less clear but given the UPSA's opposition to it, I have my doubts the Societists are going to bring it back. (Though they doubtless have things that are so close to it, it's hard to tell the difference.)

Quite so--I'm not sure where that misconception came from but a few people do seem to have it.

It may be because some people (esp. in the Americas) tend to automatically associate slavery with racism for obvious reasons (and indeed when slavery has been discussed in the timeline so far it is of the black slavery variety) when of course it's perfectly possible to not discriminate on the basis of race and have a colour-blind slavery institution. I remember suggesting that could be the far future of the Decades of Darkness USA--some people were saying that racism would inevitably end and I was arguing that even if you accept that idea, it doesn't mean slavery will end with it, they could start having some free blacks and some enslaved whites, etc.

Of course most of what we have read comes from Diversitarian writers who are likely to put Societist institutions in deliberately dark-sounding terms, so if there have been references to slavery under Societism one could assume it is a deliberately alarmist term akin to e.g. "wage-slavery" in OTL.

Your own interpretation of Societism vs Diversitarianism in the second part of your post is pretty much spot-on, btw. Again to come back to my earlier point, I am trying to portray just how nonsensical the capitalism vs. communism cold war of OTL would seem to somebody from another timeline (and indeed how it can do even to us OTLers at times).

Alex Richards · Oct 25, 2012

My Username is Inigo Montoya said:
I must say I am at loss of idea for yet another dichotomy besides those two... This is absolutely fascinating. Any suggestions?

Geographic determinism? One thesis based on the notion that for any given area there are 'natural borders' that when a state should aspire to as the absolute definition of their limits for to have the border at any other place leaves them open to attack, while the other thesis is that it is the state who is free to define what the best border is, even if the natural one is different, perhaps using economic and identity considerations.

So for the example of France, we could see the 'determinist' side claiming that France's natural borders are clearly the Alps, pyrenees, Rhine and the coasts linking them, and that there should be no deviation from these boders whatsoever (so that if you had a state ruling Provence and Corsica, that is inherited by France, Corsica should be immediately spun off as an independent state due to encouraging a recklessness with the key defensive concept of the natural borders). The 'statist' side would, on the other hand, claim that France should either abandon the Germanic speaking areas as being too rebellious, or going the other way should go further annexing areas such as the Ruhr to get the rich lands there, while in the south Catalonia and Navarre would be viewed as desirable extensions to bring under control all Occitan and Basque peoples, the better to stabalise the state.

mowque · Oct 25, 2012

I still like to think this is a time travel story.

Space Oddity · Oct 25, 2012

Thande said:
Of course most of what we have read comes from Diversitarian writers who are likely to put Societist institutions in deliberately dark-sounding terms, so if there have been references to slavery under Societism one could assume it is a deliberately alarmist term akin to e.g. "wage-slavery" in OTL.

I'm not sure I've found ANY references to it, however. (And I've been rereading the thing of late.) A few comments on abolition arguments which make it sound like an ongoing issue, but nothing to tie it definitely to the Societists. They might have it--or something like it--but if they do it's not going to be 19th-century plantation slavery. (Might be chain gangs, however. Slavery as a punishment for a crime. Which, let's be honest, is a damn tough concept to erradicate.)

From where I stand, this looks like people reacting to the vibe they've picked up from the mostly Diversican history texts that the Societists are the bad guy. Hell, I can't shake a suspicion that it's the Diversicans who practice slavery--at least some of them--with others of course being anti-slavery, because DIVERSITY. It's what we do! Don't judge us, are you some sort of dirty SOCIETIST, saying what we do is WRONG?

Thande said:
Your own interpretation of Societism vs Diversitarianism in the second part of your post is pretty much spot-on, btw. Again to come back to my earlier point, I am trying to portray just how nonsensical the capitalism vs. communism cold war of OTL would seem to somebody from another timeline (and indeed how it can do even to us OTLers at times).

Yeah, except I'm not sure I see an 'End of History' scenario here. (And boy, doesn't the naked hubris of that phrase still pack a wallop?) Both regimes appear to be heavily ideologically based--hell, the Diversicans seem if anything worse than the Societists. (I find the tendency of Societist scholars to write down their conclusions and then throw in a sentence of Societist doctrine strongly suggests that a good chunk of 'the Society's' intelligensia find their ideology foolish and ridiculous--but then they look across the water at the organized riots, and mutter "could be worse".) And that strongly suggests two crazy systems that are going to stand on their respective sandbar even as the ocean washes them away....

Which, in retrospect, might be an honest-to-goodness 'End of History' scenario...

wolf_brother · Oct 25, 2012

Actually, an ideological state based around ethnic identity very well could employ slavery. It's likely an extreme case only seen in the most out there of Societist states, but let's not pretend that it's not entirely possible. Or alternate strands of the same ideology - Communism, Anarchism, Mutualism, and the modern Green movement are all considered socialist ideologies but they are almost farther apart than they are from classical capitalist systems. And then you have to consider that just because one is considered a Societist state doesn't mean one actually employs Societist policies - look at the modern PRC. So again let's not say that slavery is something that absolutely couldn't be a Societist practice until Thande says otherwise.