How much of a wank was OTL?

DougM

Donor
If you think about it History is sort of a series of various Wanks. This is what gives us things like (for example) the Roman Empire. The English Empire. Ect ect. If you want to think of it this way then realy things had to go pretty drastically in favor of one country or the other to allow this to happen.
The country needs to have the right technology at the right moment or it needs a certain weather pattern or it needs a genius military commander to be at a spicific battle (or battles) The list of things goes on and on. Eventually in order to get a dominant country in a given area (or in England’s case almost everywhere) at a given time usually takes a great many of these types of things coming together at the same basic time and place. This creates the dominant culture or government that we see. Be that the dominance of the US in the Mid to late 1900s or China back in the day or the Mongol Hoard.
So when looked at history is nothing but a bunch of wanks that favored various countries or cultures throughout history.

Now in the more traditional definition as we tend to use it here non of these are truly wanks as usually a wank is more often viewed as a timeline created to spicificly create a given outcome. The difference is that if you start with a point of departure and let it flow naturally from there it is not a wank.
But if you basically have an outcome in mind and manipulate as much as needed to get the desired result it is a wank.
The easiest way to detect this from the outside reader is if you read a timeline where a rediculus number of things go in the way needed to achieve the result. The more improbable these events are the more the timeline appears to be a wank.
 
I know we need no evolutionary PODs, but honestly, macroevolution is the biggest wank ever. In all honestly, how many things had to go absolutely right for the first lifeform to 1. randomly come together, 2. have dna structures formed arbitrarily and yet actually work, 3. be animated, 4. not die? If this was a very easy process, we would see this happening all the time...which it doesn't. The fact we are posting here on this message board is the biggest wank of all.
When you have a billion years of trying to spare, the most unlikely processes become nigh-inevitable.
 
. . . become nigh-inevitable.
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No, not inevitable.

Even once blue-green algaes, etc, had built up enough oxygen in the atmosphere, how lightly was the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells?

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which have even a bigger size difference than shown above, plus a complexity difference
 
I don't think we're talking about

"Our timeline is one of the ones that fundamentally don't make rational sense"

Does history even exist?

The OTL timeline cannot be agreed. As far back as the Persian war in 490BC, history is a battleground of opinions. Might history have been better if the Persians had won? We don't know. But we do know that Persia did not practice slavery while the Greeks did. We also know that Greek society was intensely oppressive towards women and the Spartan agoge system guaranteed regular mass murder. Hardly a system to be admired, as in the movie 300.

History is often just someone's opinion. A true world history? I'm not sure it's ever been written.
 
maxresdefault.jpg

No, not inevitable.

Even once blue-green algaes, etc, had built up enough oxygen in the atmosphere, how lightly was the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells?

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which have even a bigger size difference than shown above, plus a complexity difference
That's why I said nigh-inevitable.

Obviously there was a chance that with a billion years of constantly trying, life might still not have developed by today.

It's just that it was a tremendously small chance. Because guess what, with such an astronomically large sample size, even if the chance of the development of cellular life was one in a quintillion, it would still be pretty much bound to happen.
 
Islam first spread by Mongol style conquests from the Arabian peninsula, for the first and last time in history you got a nomadic empire not originating on the Eurasian steppe.

This is a bit strange, they were townspeople for the most part in Mecca although Bedouin did also exist. The early companions who went to Medina with Muhammad were townspeople who had to learn farming and start doing it when they came to Medina. They weren't Bedouin, although Muhammad did spend a few years with the Bedouin as a young child.

More generally, it has been suggested that the rise of Islam may have been influenced by the fact of increasing urbanisation, wealth and social stratification in the Hejaz, and the resulting inequality coming into conflict with more egalitarian Bedouin based notions around equality. Certainly that played a role in much of early Islam's emphasis on fair treatment, charitable action and criticism of excessive focus on worldly wealth. But yeah the Arabs weren't a society of nomads in the Mongol sense. They were a mix of nomads and settled, with most people probably being sedentary.

Also the negotiated surrender of Jerusalem to the Arabs in 637 was very different to the Mongol destruction of Nishapur in 1221. In the former, the citizens were granted civil and religious freedom in exchange for tax; in the case of the latter, the entire population was murdered in cold blood and their skulls were piled up into pyramids.
 
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. . . with such an astronomically large sample size, even if the chance of the development of cellular life was one in a quintillion, . . .
That if you deal the cards enough times, eventually you’ll get five royal flushes in a row.

On the other hand, Ward and Brownlee in their book Rare Earth advance the hypothesis that one-cell life might be somewhat common in the Universe, multi-cellular life is rare.
https://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw102.html

What I think, is that there are many directions for life to evolve in. It’s as if the possibilities exist in multi-dimensional hyperspace.
 
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Too much anglo-wank if you ask me.
I hear the author is going to go with a multi-polar setting very soon, but honestly between Europe, Russia and Brazil all stumbling recently and now getting to recover, it seems like Sino-Wank is what it will be. Sorry I don't buy that Russia-wankish conspiracy theory, its worse than Jonsa shipping and Alpha Legion memes. I think its just a lazy way to avoid having to write a truly powerful Russia with reasonable justification.
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I'm not sure if that's better or worse than all these rumours in the 80s that the timeline was going full Nipponwank ahead.

Also, it seems like South Africa was supposed to be turbo-wanked but someone changed his mind and now it sucks.

Also there was that time when the author spent years wanking the Turks, I don't get it, but the ending was kinda pathetic
 
Too much anglo-wank if you ask me.
I hear the author is going to go with a multi-polar setting very soon, but honestly between Europe, Russia and Brazil all stumbling recently and now getting to recover, it seems like Sino-Wank is what it will be. Sorry I don't buy that Russia-wankish conspiracy theory, its worse than Jonsa shipping and Alpha Legion memes. I think its just a lazy way to avoid having to write a truly powerful Russia with reasonable justification.
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I'm not sure if that's better or worse than all these rumours in the 80s that the timeline was going full Nipponwank ahead.

Also, it seems like South Africa was supposed to be turbo-wanked but someone changed his mind and now it sucks
The whole nuclear thing they were doing gave me Draka vibes but then they just dropped with Deus ex UN Interventiona
 
"oh noes we decided nukes are bad and got rid of it"

Lamest aborted arc ever. Its brazilian nuke arc over all again.
The writer has written themselves into a wall because nukes will prevent any epic WWIII from breaking it out so he had to put lead in the water of the nuclear powers save for China to allow them to build up, also the WMD's in Iraq story line got destroyed by the comments as they derided it's implausibility. A lot of the old characters are gone now and not it's just shitty ones like Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau, Erdogan, however the introduction of both the crazy self-insert Gary Stu, Trump, and the crazy b-film characters of Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Jeremy Corbyn things may start to get interesting again
 

zhropkick

Banned
Too much anglo-wank if you ask me.
I hear the author is going to go with a multi-polar setting very soon, but honestly between Europe, Russia and Brazil all stumbling recently and now getting to recover, it seems like Sino-Wank is what it will be. Sorry I don't buy that Russia-wankish conspiracy theory, its worse than Jonsa shipping and Alpha Legion memes. I think its just a lazy way to avoid having to write a truly powerful Russia with reasonable justification.
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I'm not sure if that's better or worse than all these rumours in the 80s that the timeline was going full Nipponwank ahead.

Also, it seems like South Africa was supposed to be turbo-wanked but someone changed his mind and now it sucks.

Also there was that time when the author spent years wanking the Turks, I don't get it, but the ending was kinda pathetic
I dunno, I think the author has justified the recent updates on Russia's situation pretty well. He's got Russia stagnating, both in terms of GDP and in terms of population, which makes sense given how dysfunctional a country that had a command economy for nearly a century would be if it was dealt economic shock therapy, given impressive levels of corruption following the collapse of that system and was economically sanctioned by much of the developed world while aiming to build an economy around exporting natural resources and goods produced by heavy industry. If you go a few pages back, he mentions the USSR being very poor at allocating labour to new emerging fields (including information technology), and fetishising heavy industry so much it spent half of its existence importing grain despite being the largest country on Earth in terms of land area (Southern Russia and the Ukraine also have some of the most fertile soil on Earth). You'll get what I mean once the author starts writing about conflict in the Caucasus or political upheaval in Moscow soon, I think another update on Russia is coming close to being due given its situation.

I do agree with you that South Africa is pretty disappointing though, and Turkey certainly could have had a better-written (and probably lighter) fall from peak Ottoman-wank. I'm glad he nerfed Japan though, given Japan's population stagnation from being such a hyper-developed country, it would have been poor writing to prop up Japan and draw too much attention to it while China inevitably industrialises and embraces a market economy. Also, having a Marxist-Leninist state embrace a market economy was a pretty witty turn imo, most authors don't tend to come up with states doing something so ideologically out of character even though it makes perfect sense from a self-interest standpoint, plenty of states historically have done things out of pure self-interest to ensure their survival.
 
But we do know that Persia did not practice slavery while the Greeks did. We also know that Greek society was intensely oppressive towards women

Yes, true.....though, in reference to the latter.....not that much worse than the Persians, or even the Egyptians(yes, even in Egypt women were what we'd call second-class citizens today), etc.-and they were certainly less bad than some other civilizations of the period. From what I've found, they were pretty much middle of the road if anything.
 
Yes, true.....though, in reference to the latter.....not that much worse than the Persians, or even the Egyptians(yes, even in Egypt women were what we'd call second-class citizens today), etc.-and they were certainly less bad than some other civilizations of the period. From what I've found, they were pretty much middle of the road if anything.
The Persian did have slavery as well.
 
Not that the Roman Empire rose to power, but that it would survive, at least in part, until 1,502 years after the ascension of Augustus.
 
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