Recent content by Maeglin

Moa survive longer, and no-one chases off Tasman in 1642.

Apartheid had two levels of problematic: The earlier issue is that South Africa objected to Maori and Pacific Island players coming as part of touring teams. The 1928, 1949, and 1960 New Zealand tours to South Africa were all-white. By the 1960s, you had a "No Maoris, No Tour!" movement in New...

It took until the mid-1990s for real-life rugby union to turn professional. Scotland was not trivial at the time, and in fact was the most successful rugby nation of the nineteenth century (Wales would take over prior to the First World War). Moreover, one imagines that the elite amateurs of...

Problem: I think you still get a split. Scottish Rugby at the time was incredibly anti-professional, to the point where they frowned on touring players getting pocket money to live off. If England endorses professionalism, Scotland's going to throw a hissy fit.

Not sure Roman ships were good enough to pull off a Trans-Atlantic voyage (Mediterranean waters are much calmer). But Plato's Atlantis was (1) clearly presented as metaphorical, (2) explicitly destroyed, and (3) located just beyond the Straits of Gibraltar - once you find the Canary Islands or...

Prosperity? Delay of Execution, perhaps. The issue with the Severans is that this is the point at which Grim Military Dictatorship becomes the order of the day. To get and maintain power, it was a matter of "enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men." Put Commodus away (or give Pertinax more...

Assuming Arcadius dies on schedule in 408, that is still better than Honorius making it to 423.

Emperor Honorius.

1968 was not 1980, or even 1976. Reagan (outside California) was regarded as a right-wing nut in 1968. So, so easy to paint as Goldwater 2.0.

Ted Kennedy had little real interest in the Presidency. He only ran in 1980 to spite Carter. Without Nixon getting discredited (though he might still be, with another scandal), no-one outside the South ever hears of Carter. The forces that pushed the Honest Outsider are no longer there, and...

So far as No Commune goes... this also gives less space for Lenin to develop his more autocratic version of revolutionary socialism (Lenin was exploring Where the Commune Went Wrong). Of course, it's possible that another Commune analogy happens somewhere else, further down the line.

By the same token, Cuba was not in the Warsaw Pact. SEATO was famously called a "zoo of paper tigers." Any attempt at a Latin American equivalent would be an infamous who's-who of nasty juntas.

The "conventional wisdom" at the time was that Clinton's scandals were a weakness. So Gore decided to steer clear - which is also why he picked Lieberman. Now, based off the 1998 midterms, there was probably good reason for rejecting that conventional wisdom, but at the time, that was his reasoning.

I think the most realistic option under these circumstances isn't Wallace. It's that the House and Senate leadership simply refuses to select anyone, whereupon the incumbent Speaker of the House, John W, McCormack becomes President.

Irish monasteries also helped preserve Latin texts. Without them, we're basically reliant on the Carolingians to keep those texts alive.