I agree. It's this sort of group think that pushed me into spending most of my time here in the ASB forum. (It crazy weird at times but its at least fun.) In pre-1900 and post-1900 its near impossible to enjoy a story because a hardcore group of members have, in their own minds at least, already decide the only possible courses of action history can take and they refuse to even think about any other possiblilities. This thread in my opinion is just an attempt to rationalize their own refusal to explore alternate history. It is their way or the highway.
Irritating cliches of post-1900 Alternate History:
- Thread starter Snake Featherston
- Start date
I agree. It's this sort of group think that pushed me into spending most of my time here in the ASB forum. (It crazy weird at times but its at least fun.) In pre-1900 and post-1900 its near impossible to enjoy a story because a hardcore group of members have, in their own minds at least, already decide the only possible courses of action history can take and they refuse to even think about any other possiblilities. This thread in my opinion is just an attempt to rationalize their own refusal to explore alternate history. It is their way or the highway.
I don't know what kind of forums you are looking at. I can match you more than one boring and clichéd "ISOT to wank some country (usually the US or UK)" in Alien Space Bats for every "whatever you do, only this can happen" in either Pre or Post-1900. As a matter of fact, I can't recall having ever seen one of those sorts of comments in an actual timeline, as opposed to a WI/AHC/discussion thread, where pointing out why those ideas wouldn't work is sort of the point.
To be honest, it sounds like you are upset that someone told you that your brilliant idea for (say) Frisian Island landings was ridiculous, and decided to just write off the forum.
Amen! MM, I have come to the same conclusions.
Your post does remind me of one annoying related cliche (or not a cliche?). That a TL can show how alternate events would happen.
Maybe you're part of the "hardcore group"? I'd guess so based on your immediate assumption that I only have this opinion because I am thin skinned.
Of course ASB is crazy, its ASB!
Really? You've never seen it here? Read the first 2 dozen pages of "WW3 in 1946" in post-1900. It dove the "hardcore" crazy Hairog wouldn't give in to their pressure. That member is something like 300 pages into his story and still ever so often someone argues its "ASB".
You need more examples? Run a search on the letters "ASB" in post-1900. You can see hundreds of times OP's that were just very unlikely but challenged the accepted "group think" that are damn near immediately called "ASB."
The implication that something that is improbable is ASB is incredibly annoying. If it's not magic or aliens, it cannot be ASB. If something is physically possible, the random winds of change in the right order can make it happen.
I agree that ASB is thrown out at the improbable by certain people (and it only belongs to the impossible), but I think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill.
And heaven forbid if you ever suggest that the Germans may have done a little better than they did in OTL 
Yep that really was posted to a question about if there was anything the Luftwaffe had that could damage a British Battleship.
I had a similar problem in regard to the Amendment which passed the Senate in 1913, limiting Presidents to a single six year term. Some guy kept insisting that its ratification by the States was "ASB", though all he ever managed to prove was that it mightn't have been 100% inevitable - which was hardly the same thing.
Will Kürlich Kerl
Banned
Communism and Fascism always take root in some country: And not other ideologies like Anarchism, Nihilism, Utilitarianism, and Marxist Communism (different from OTL's Communism)
I posted this in the pre-1900 cliche tread, but it's just as applicable here (arguably even more so).
My really irritating and often just plain offensive cliche is:
Displaying intellectual interest in a particular alternate historical scenario is assumed to mean you desire said outcome in the real world. An example of this is the idea that all Byzantophiles are racist against Turks.
My really irritating and often just plain offensive cliche is:
Displaying intellectual interest in a particular alternate historical scenario is assumed to mean you desire said outcome in the real world. An example of this is the idea that all Byzantophiles are racist against Turks.
No worries. 1848-based unifications put the capital in Frankfurt and I imagine Austrian-based unifications put the capital in Vienna (albeit I personally never read an Austrian-based unification TL)...
my ASB ATL avoids this entirely by having Germany not unify at all
That would also get a lot of posters into trouble if it was applied by the administration - even Jello's Reds and Dominion of Southern America have some fairly nasty or questionable events occurring in them.
teg
People constantly referring to the Germans as Nazis (by shortening & alteration from Nationalsozialist, from national national + Sozialist socialist: First Known Use: 1930) ... a nazi is ...
- A member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, founded in Germany in 1919 and brought to power in 1933 under Adolf Hitler.
- A member of the National Socialist German Workers' party of Germany, which in 1933, under Adolf Hitler, seized political control of the country, suppressing all opposition and establishing a dictatorship over all cultural, economic, and political activities of the people, and promulgated belief in the supremacy of Hitler as Führer, aggressive anti-Semitism, the natural supremacy of the German people, and the establishment of Germany by superior force as a dominant world power. The party was officially abolished in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II.
- A person who is likened to a German Nazi : a harshly domineering, dictatorial, or intolerant person.
- Sometimes Offensive. ( often lowercase ) a person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity, practice, etc.: a jazz nazi who disdains other forms of music; tobacco nazis trying to ban smoking.
I've encountered that same problem myself, especially with some more hardcore fans of certain stories on this site(if you really want to know especially if you ask nicely, I'll tell you what I can, but ONLY thru the PM system, though.).....can't tell you how many times I've gotten a little peeved because somebody just won't listen to my perspective just because it differs from their own.
Yeah, I can definitely see how that'd be quite annoying.....