Recent content by Peter Hillock

I worked in SF from 1993 to 1999, and the office I was in had quite a few gays and lesbians who had moved there from other parts of the country because it was SF. So although SF is certainly majority straight, it definitely has a pull for people who don't want to worry about homophobia every...

We shouldn't overrate the Russians' refusal to negotiate with hostage-takers as a reason why 9/11 wasn't directed at them. The history of manipulating Mideast states to favor Western oil interests, the support for Israel, the maintenance of US military bases in the land of Mecca- those were the...

Since the European diseases that decimated the Native American populations were incubated in the Old World through keeping domestic animals, you could argue that replacing pigs with grasshoppers could have led to a much different course of events in the Western Hemisphere after 1492.

Going for the earlier POD, what about making Russia not more modern and developed than OTL, but less? It seems Tsarist Russia strained to keep up with the (western) Joneses, its partial failure to do so helped undermine it; and Russian revolutionaries of all stripes saw their mission to outdo...

Avoiding WW1, certainly, especially avoiding plunging into East Prussia unprepared. Also, Stolypin (a) not falling out of favor so his economic reforms could continue; and (b) not being assassinated in 1911.

Remember, the Patton who was in the public's eye was the one Bill Mauldin caricatured, not so cruelly, in the war cartoons published in all the syndicated papers. Not the lunatic played by George C. Scott. Which one was closer to the truth, I don't know enough to guess.

This is good. It's hard to define post-modernism as tightly as, say, communism, partly because it was identified after it had come about. So we're stuck trying to pick its "essence" out from the bigger social, technological and political conditions that the post-modern mindset happened to grow...

This seems pretty hard to untangle. The "postmodernism" of bored, spoiled, directionless young people is one thing, while the more serious things you list are really deeply rooted in modern times. The Enlightenment, capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, Marxism-- these all contributed to...

As an American-- Arrgh! Arrgh! God, we can be such a bunch of clods. I admit, I'm biased against Palin, for her wishful-thinking politics, her paint-peeling voice, her surfer-dude/ski-bum academic record, and all the rest. So I realize I won't convince anyone who doesn't already agree with...

This is the only part I'll quibble with. Both Mussolini and the Marxists thought that communism and fascism were the big rivals to succeed 19th century liberal democracy (after all, history hadn't "ended" yet). So just any bogeyman wouldn't have done it. Hence my Red Germany-- not necessarily...

Yep, I agree. Nice run down the list, going beyond "whites win" to something that could worry the liberal democracies.

It seems like, to get real fascism going, you have to have a communist bogeyman -- otherwise it's just conservative or reactionary politics with some modern features. Of course fascism is one of those famously hard to define things. Copying, condensing and pasting the features of fascism...

Thank you! I was feeling left out of the loop.

Maybe the title of the thread is too ambitious, and the SU "unifying" the world isn't realistic without nuclear war. But it is interesting to think how the Soviets might have won the Cold War, and what the world would be like if they had. No doubt there has been a thread like this, though I...

I grew up in Portland, was seven when the Blazers were an expansion team. The only consolations for that draft: (1) Sam Bowie was a very decent young man, as far as I can tell. (2) It's only a game. It's only a game. It's only a game. (To be repeated until the weeping subsides)