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You know, it's interesting to note that for whatever reason the expeditionary team can't go home. Something wrong with the portals?

Yeah, I wouldn't even think it except that the agency which issued the books was started up in 1951 and the book itself is supposed to be fairly old, so I'm guessing it might be from around then. Also, good catch re: "inequality of luxury". I can't help but wonder what things are like in the...

Of course not, Amico. Companies can compete with each other in ways which undercut Society just as surely as class divisions and national identities, in that they can promote exclusive identities with which customers can identify. Why, consider the spectacle of "advertising campaigns" in the...

So one thing to note here is that the Zone 4 education and indoctrination authority started up in 1951, so the rumoured things happening in the nationalistically-blinded world that the characters are worrying about is probably the leadup to the Sunrise War as opposed to something to do with the...

I think one point to make re: Pandoric War is that states in Look to the West seem to be generally weaker than their counterparts in our own timeline, and the two big exceptions - Russia and the UPSA - stick out like sore thumbs because of it. I mean, the ENA by comparison to the USA didn't even...

I mean, I wouldn't know, but the Veld seems like it'd be good tank country to me. But the thing is, wide-open spaces like that are *also* good for airplanes.

You know, all this talk of rapid Armart strikes reminds me of how people talked about bombers before WW2, how the bomber would always get through and all the ways this influenced strategic thinking before the war. However, I'm kind of suspicious of it and not just because of all the...

You know, it's interesting to note how the Societism here has gone from "All humans are the same," to "All men are brothers, and all women are sisters" as the author puts it. Maybe this is a long-term consequence of the non-Garderistas whose name escapes me at the moment winning the power...

One thing to note re: The Official Story in favour of that point is that, at the risk of minor spoilers, the Societists later became infamous for using precisely the kind of poison-gas attack that ended the Pandoric War in other parts of the world. It's entirely possible the Diversitarians read...

Huh, I didn't know about that. Cool!

So ah, on another side note, I think we can safely say that Timeline A is not quite our timeline. For starters, a quick google search for Steve McMichael, the governor of South Carolina, turns up this guy, and while there's no guarantee it's the same person it seems like quite a plausible...

I think we can also see some of it in the textbooks at the start of this volume too, all of the "Your parents generation believed that [blank] but that was wrong, and we're placing a lot of hope in you to be able to see things that we/they couldn't because of the Quiet War!" Oh, and also, the...

"Hey, the Roman Empire was the closest thing in human history(?) to the Final Society, wouldn't it be very Just and Fitting if Rome was the capital of the Final Society again? No? You disagree? Too bad. Publazon Benestarum!"

Yeah. You know, that might be part of why the Diversitarian sources we've been getting our stuff from spend so much time talking about Russian excesses. So far it's seemed to be mostly a matter of their domestic politics being too rigid, but if Russia really gets nuked in the Sunrise War I can...

Re: Third World: yeah, maybe? I'm not sure there will be a third world, if for no reason other than that both the ASN and the Combine would find it intolerable. But if there was one, I can see it working the way you lay out here? ASN membership presumably means you have to accept the system of...

Yeah, I agree, it's an interesting point here that Diversitarianism as a framework includes room for a different sort of totalitarianism than the Combine, and I'm sure that once we actually get to see Soviet Russia we'll get a lot more of a sense of it. The "everything is a political act" is...

I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure. One big thing here is that Timeline L doesn't seem to have anything resembling our concept of total war - or rather, something resembling our concept of total war, a war fought with the explicit goal of the total destruction of the enemy and...

There's one other thing to consider as well, which is that TLL's Combine Societists have a thoroughly-earned reputation for conspiracy, intrigue, and double-dealing even just going from this volume. I'd bet that anyone from TLL looking at our timeline is going to be keeping an eye out for signs...

So on a side note, related to the earlier discussion of what TLL would think of our timeline, I'm pretty sure all the people who think they'd see us as a combination of a crapsack and villain worlds are dead on the money. Here's a point to consider: in OTL, globalization hasn't exactly been...

Which reminds me, Lost, while you're around, since I've been catching up on the thread after not-quite-lurking for verging on a decade, I wanted to mention that Germans in OTL actually did the whole comparison-to-Greece thing you were talking about a few pages back. The idea being that, unlike...