i expect just an average flu outbreak instead, which were common anyways
Es Geloybte Aretz - a Germanwank
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Theavonharbouhaven, Tanganyika Freistaat, 27 July 1957
RIP Sam Shepard
I've been exposed to a sketch of the idea in a high school psych survey class, certainly. But my impression is that Maslow was a liberal-progressive whose perspective was that since people who are struggling to meet basic needs cannot be expected to engage in higher ethics, it follows that it is the responsibility of a society that has enough surplus wealth to provide for classes that can afford higher-level morals, to share the wealth and strategically employ their more favored members to uplift the conditions of the less well off so that they too can see the bigger picture--then one can have an enlightened democracy functioning on the basis of higher ethics. For the more fortunate to choose otherwise, in my personal opinion (assuming Maslow should be interpreted to mean that the lower classes just can't have higher ethics, which I suspect is a gross oversimplification) is for them to nullify their own claims to a specially better standard--to in fact lower themselves below the level of the desperate who have no choice, and would be justification for overthrowing them as ruling classes and accept the consequences of mass democracy, ready or not, since the "betters" do no better anyway.
Trying to square this perspective, accepted only as a stipulation for debate by me right now, with questions of the possible benefits of war and your association with a "Konservative" revolution, is taking me to some very dark places indeed!
By the way it is of course unclear what you mean by "Conservative revolution" anyway. In this thread's context you could be referring to the next decade or so of Wilhelm III's postwar Reich which we've been told is going rightward for a while, and that the line the upcoming leadership will adopt is that the recent war they just had was a good thing for Germany somehow--despite the fact that most of their actions are "cleaning up" changes in German society they think are unfortunate, and trying to restore the status quo ante, or something even more reactionary they think would be even better.
But my first thought was that you are talking about a Conservative revolution that is either coming or is underway right now in Euro-American societies, in the First World generally, and that we in our little liberal-progressive bubble here at AH have not seen the light of Conservative wisdom just because we haven't got the word yet.
Funny thing about that though--I grew up in a pretty right wing family myself here in the USA, and at a time when the first President I remember from personal memory was Nixon, and we've had a pretty vigorous right wing backlash striving for sweeping transformations, and agitating at great length and volume against the wrongness of liberal progressivism and worse, pretty much all my life. In Britain it is pretty hard to go farther to the Right than Maggie Thatcher, who became PM while I was in early high school, without becoming an outright racist and general bigot quite openly. So maybe there is even more success for the Conservative Revolution, if that is what you mean by it rather than referring to something embedded in carlton_bach's TL, coming over the near horizon, but I don't expect it to teach me anything except that my early perception that conservatives (so-called, real conservatives like say J.R.R. Tolkien might be something else) are generally barbaric and mean people. Who rejoice and call good obvious and egregious evils.
Anyway, how to piece in your oblique reference to Maslow with your oblique reference to a "Conservative revolution" making war look less unambiguously bad takes me to scary places. Stipulating for the moment that Maslow meant to say that people who have not met the full set of essential biological needs cannot be looked to for employing higher ethics and must prioritize whatever benefits them toward the goal of survival, that refers to individual people and to to classes. It cannot refer to an entire society, because every society has elites whose personal hierarchy of basic material needs have in fact been met--they should be able to see things differently than the masses who serve them, and direct things otherwise than a democracy of the desperate would. This is true of the poorest and most desperate societies on Earth. And Germany, in this TL at this point, is at a far higher point of being able to satisfy the general human needs of her entire population, even the poorest. If millions in post-war Germany here are starving or otherwise in desperate material want, it is because of the greed and lack of generosity of those who style themselves "betters." Maslow would be voting for the SPD here, I'm pretty sure.
Taking the notion to the level of entire nations anyway--well, if I were an elite prince or high priest or especially fortunate and successful businessman with my personal needs met, but standing on the shoulders of a desperately poor nation, what would my ethical position be, exactly? I might have love in my heart for my fellow people who are less fortunate than me. I might have a clear conscience that I have not conspired with any immoral acts to put myself in my fortunate position, that I did not ask to be born in a lucky place, and that if my people do not have enough to live as properly ethical, fully developed human beings, it is my duty to strive, using my own privileges as leverage, on their behalf collectively. I suppose I might conclude than an opportunistic war might possibly give my whole nation a leg up, and thus I take on, as some reified agent of the nation as a whole, the persona of the personified nation as a desperately poor, lower hierarchy of needs place person who is justified in any desperate self-serving means of improving "my" position.
From the perspective of Uncle Sam or John Bull or some other personified much richer nation, who is the potential victim of the desperate poor's thuggery then, the world remains dog eat dog despite "my personal" elevation. Since the wretched of the Earth are naturally out to get me, until they get richer anyway, I too must arm myself and prepare for necessary war. Since war is necessary, it is not really evil.
Is that where the logic is going?
Of course this parable is ridiculous--it is not the poor, desperate peoples of Earth who prey on the fatuous but well meaning rich. The rich generally have, at some collective aggregation, a rap sheet of vile and dastardly deeds performed by the better off against the worse off, polarizing their relationship more, rather than dog eat dog leveling to the level of the hungriest mongrel stray dog. The Herero of Namibia have not invaded Germany, the Germans have subdued Namibia.
So--if I stipulate Maslow as I understand him to be correct, then the well off have a moral duty and pragmatic interest that are one and the same, to help the worse off elevate themselves so that everyone can be operating at the same level. To suggest otherwise, that the "poor will always be with you" and that the elites should cultivate themselves while fighting off the parasitic draining, is to despair of progress and hold that only a few are capable of being really good, and those few are the rich.
I should read Maslow directly in detail if we are take his name as some sort of guiding star. I will bet right now that my impression he's a liberal progressive recommending strongly the avoidance of war and ending it on the least disruptive terms for all sides is much more true to anything he may have recommended than the suggestion that his observation of a hierarchy of moral compasses is somehow to justify the ongoing polarization of humanity and the routine, normal acceptance of war as natural, inevitable and somehow useful.
Anyway, the simplistic notion that only the well off are capable of real morality flies in the face of common human experience. History is replete with instances of the less well off behaving more kindly and with scrupulous consideration than people they meet who are far better off than them, yet more vicious and generally sociopathic.
I guess if I am to understand what you are hinting at, I will have to ask you to explain, and enlighten my ignorance!
Thank you.
So Maslow postulates a hierarchy of human motives in which the base needs (food, shelter, clothing, security, health) must be fulfilled before the superstructure aims (approval, recreation, self-actualisation) can be persued.
Thus my original post stems from an exasperation with a statement like (mangled) "war is always detrimental to an economy and I am unaware that anybody would argue otherwise".
Even if the main statement were true, I find the -if not ignorance then- innocence of the case, that since Heroclitus some men should have considered War the Father of all Things, dangerous.
Myself, I could -for debate- argue with Maslow that warfare is a superstructure activity, a luxury, a vice, that can only be sustained by the base economy. For the US to defeat Axis Germany, the US needed to draft, feed, cloth, house, vaccinate, transport 90 divisions cross-Atlantic, before they ever could entertain to take a shot at a German. These are precisely the base human needs under the Maslow model; and the devil might thus argue that war enforces the optimization of the base industry, whilst the transformation of the superstructure industry, from radar to television sets later, is trivial.
I represent my old client here pro bono, as those who do not contemplate his existence may also do his bidding.
"The Konservative Revolution" was a side-stream in the German history of ideas in the time which this AH covers. It lost out to the forces of National Socialism and liberal democracy and thus is today mostly forgotten: and I know little about it. However, it was not without intellectual brilliance so I am in eager anticipation of what Carlton will come up with. An Ernst Jünger Tagebucheintrag about Halley's Comet perhaps ?
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http://www.ediblegeography.com/the-lost-sausages-of-world-war-i/
In unusual things which I just learned today, apparently the military production of zeppelins during WWI OTL had major repercussions in the German sausage industry; the reason being that Zeppelin canvas was made from cattle intestine, which of course is used also to produce sausage. The intestine required to produce one zeppelin, apparently, could also have been used to make 33 million sausages.
Which brings me to my next point--we do know that ITTL, unlike OTL, the early advent of WWI has led to heavier-than-air craft being discounted for its military applications in favor of lighter than air craft such as zeppelins--in fact, unlike OTL, zeppelins will form the cornerstone of the nascent German Air Force. So while there may be some relief from the ending of the war, much intestine that would ordinarily be used to make sausage will probably be bought up post-war for arms research and military production.
So my question is, @carlton_bach, what consequences do you foresee the German-Russian war having on German, Russian, and Eastern European cuisine overall, and will German sausage-making survive as an art for the remainder of the 20th century?
In unusual things which I just learned today, apparently the military production of zeppelins during WWI OTL had major repercussions in the German sausage industry; the reason being that Zeppelin canvas was made from cattle intestine, which of course is used also to produce sausage. The intestine required to produce one zeppelin, apparently, could also have been used to make 33 million sausages.
Which brings me to my next point--we do know that ITTL, unlike OTL, the early advent of WWI has led to heavier-than-air craft being discounted for its military applications in favor of lighter than air craft such as zeppelins--in fact, unlike OTL, zeppelins will form the cornerstone of the nascent German Air Force. So while there may be some relief from the ending of the war, much intestine that would ordinarily be used to make sausage will probably be bought up post-war for arms research and military production.
So my question is, @carlton_bach, what consequences do you foresee the German-Russian war having on German, Russian, and Eastern European cuisine overall, and will German sausage-making survive as an art for the remainder of the 20th century?
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@Zmflavius as ever hits the vital questions.
I think the Danes should be able to help here, using pig intestine instead of cattle intestine may be a viable alternative until a synthetic version of cattle intestine is available for one or the other.
I think the Danes should be able to help here, using pig intestine instead of cattle intestine may be a viable alternative until a synthetic version of cattle intestine is available for one or the other.
Not as extensive ones as the war IOTL did, for two reasons:
- the sheer numbers do not really compare. ITTL Germany has a total fleet of around 30 airships, including many smaller and even some pre-war models. Only the very largest Zeppelin ships built towards the end of the war come anywhere near the size and capability of WWI standard models.
- the international market is still open to German buyers. Even if we discout the possibility of using whale intrestine (this is the dawn of industrial whaling), the places to go for goldbeater's skin in huge quantities are Chicago and Buenos Aires, not Kiel and Magdeburg.
That said, the shortage of sausage casings, like that of most animal products, was real during the war, and with rationing being removed in undue haste, a big part of the populace will go without for quite a while longer. German butchers are being inventive in all kinds of ways, but the biggest lasting fashion to come out of the war effort is sausage in jars. It was the fashion of the future, anyway - hygienic, sterilised and guaranteed safe from the pilfering hands of servants while sealed - but the shortages (and the possibility of adding soy meal and other 'stretchers') gave it a boost during the war. Other forms of caseless sausages won't catch on, just as per OTL.
Pig gut for sausage casings is happening. Goat and sheep, too. And horse. And dog, when nobody's checking. But none of these are good options.
I have just read the TL over the last month and wanted to say how much I have enjoyed this quality TL!
Thank you! I am sorry that I have so little time to develop it further these days.
I'm now imagining how big a salami made with cattle intestine would be.
I'll be in my bunk...
I'm now imagining how big a salami made with cattle intestine would be.
I'll be in my bunk...
Have you seen Mettwurst? They can get pretty big.
Any updates? I've been watching this TL for long and I'm very eager to see the TL keep going.
Even though it's happening in service to a rather nasty organisation which is probably going to lead Russia in a very bad direction indeed, in a scene like this it's difficult not to cheer Valentina being empowered and finding a place for herself where she can make a difference.
This seems like a key experience for her character. Using all that she has learned, all the confidence she has gained and all the authority provided to her by the Patriotic Union to impose her will and lay down the law on others. No longer just a receiver of orders, but actually giving them to someone over whom she has, in theory, no authority. Am I wrong if I read this as a taste of what is to come for her? A position of (relative) power?
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