Recent content by Drunkrobot

My wonder about Ireland is that while the people overall might be exhausted by war, those in government, and that section of the populace most concerned with Britain's apparent imperial decline, might react to the confirmation of a continental hegemon with a strong navy with a redoubling of...

With Austria-Hungary and the Ottomons as allies Germany does have a continguous land route to the Middle East, so it does have much more leverage in that department, with the biggest being over the Suez Canal. But again, it's relatively minor compared to at least some concessions Germany had to...

I didn't imagine a huge exchange of territory, just some border changes and annexations in Africa and the Middle East for example. As for what Britain gets, it gets Germany not sinking ships heading to Britain; having access to Europe and now France for plunder allowed Germany to alleviate the...

For the sake of the discussion, I defined 'losing World War I' as Germany overcoming the Entente on the Western Front in around 1917-1919, with no involvement by the Americans, leading to an overrunning of Paris and and surrender by the French. Basically out of money at this point and with no...

Could you elaborate in this? Is this an acronym for something, or are you referring to mechanicisation of labour (robots)?

What I like in concept about AVBCW is it has a three-way split at its core; a democratic, constitutional faction looking to make Prince Albert/George VI King, an autocratic faction with royalists and Mosleyite fascists as its two heads, and a far-left faction calling for socialist revolution...

I've been thinking about A Very British Civil War and the concept of the British government collapsing in authority some time in the '30s. I find the setting interesting, but I had the feeling that a PoD of Edward VIII insisting on marriage to Wallis Simpson and being able to appoint Moseley PM...

Yes, a US that has fallen to authoritarian government, so captured by corporate interest that the majority of people are excluded from the benefits it provides or any sense of inclusion within it, and which suffers from endless domestic insurrection, is much more vulnerable to invasion (at least...

@OtterArmyPutsch The counterargument is that this rural black population would not have to contend with Jim Crow. Black churches were essential in the organisation of the civil rights campaign, and the all too frequent failure of white liberal and leftwing groups to make solidarity with black...

I see it less in terms of overall productivity and more in terms of who the 'winners' and 'losers' are. Of course, the freed population who gets land are the obvious immediate winners, but who else benefits from such a large population moving up from total poverty? Framed a certain way, it...

A complication I'm sure has been mentioned before is the dilemma that not every Freedman actually wants land, and there's a chance that if the government tried to give everybody those plots they just would not be of viable size. The Reconstruction bureaus might facilitate exchanges between...

So, stabbing them with Morton's Fork? Either they concede, and allow concessions that are in the interest of the working class, or they attempt to stop it, and provoke a conflict they couldn't hope to win. This could translate into more leftwing interest in the advancement of direct methods of...

On a local level, it gets the South's economic base up and running again, more in the hands of people of unquestionable loyalty to the Union. A black farmer will put the land back under the till (and he knows all or most of what to do, from the work he had to do as a slave), would provide...

It might have been said before, but depending on how the war and reconstruction pans out it could have a significant effect on how Marx develops his ideas. I understand if a Marxist looks at how the civil war and reconstruction developed and decided it was evidence that liberal democracy was no...

Whether Lincoln always wanted to end slavery in the South or not, he understood that Rule 0 was to keep the South in the Union if the Federal government was to ever end it. Lincoln specifically resisted and countermanded abolitionist decrees early in the war that he was afraid would spook the...