Look to the West Volume VII: The Eye Against the Prism

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teg

Betelgeuse said:
I think that Russia's history is starting to come together. The Imperial Soviet (What is that? A super important government committee?) coups the czar and makes him a puppet after Moscow and St. Petersburg are nuked by the Societists in the Sunrise War. It rules from Novgorod and governs Russia as an oligarchy until it is finally overthrown sometime in the 90s in a popular revolution.
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My interpretation of the Soviets is that they are actually similar to the juntas that sprang in Spain in the aftermath of the abdications of Bayonne, except in this timeline there is no Romanov with sufficient legitimacy to claim the throne. I agree that with your prognosis of the resulting regime's overall character, although not necessarily that it will be overthrown and certainly not in the 1990s.

Another quick prediction - it will turn out that the Assembly of Nations was founded as much as anti-Russian as an anti-Combine/Societist alliance.
 
Born in the USSA

Born in the USSA

teg said:
My interpretation of the Soviets is that they are actually similar to the juntas that sprang in Spain in the aftermath of the abdications of Bayonne, except in this timeline there is no Romanov with sufficient legitimacy to claim the throne. I agree that with your prognosis of the resulting regime's overall character, although not necessarily that it will be overthrown and certainly not in the 1990s.

Another quick prediction - it will turn out that the Assembly of Nations was founded as much as anti-Russian as an anti-Combine/Societist alliance.
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If the ASN is anything like the LoN/UN, aka the victors get together and found a club with their own rulebook, what if Russia gets the cold shoulder for awhile, at least until the Black Twenties really get rolling and they realize "Holy crap if we don't get the Ruskies on side that bastard Alfarus will use it as a wedge against us!"? If the division lasts a little longer then that it would make Russia ironically the ASN's Japan, oddly enough, a region with the same basic ideology that takes it way too far and is regarded warily at best by everyone else.
 

Googolbyte

I'm only part 256 but I've got bunch of thoughts to dump. Sorry if they don't make sense as of the latest chapter.

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I expect Diversitarian science will be much more Bayesian than our more Frequentist-style scientific method, as relying on subjective priors is very pro-diversitarian while still allowing science to get on with sciencing.

No theory would become scientific fact, every nation would just have different odds on various hypotheses. While every nation might agree relativity is the most probable theory of gravity they could still be diverse by splitting difference on the current prior being 93% or 99.995%. Even Russel's Teapot would have a state mandated prior probability to be updated as observational evidence comes in.

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Quantum Physics will be very fun. I expect that each Diversitarian nation will try to have its own interpretation of quantum mechanics that it's most confident in. With some even integrating it into national policy. I mean who could object to the death penalty when the state-mandated interpretation of quantum mechanics says subjective death is impossible due to quantum immortality. Botched execution? Nope, this is just the 1 in 1000 timeline where the criminal survived.

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I'm very interested to see how the education system differs in LTTW. I'm not seeing a lot of indications of a starkly different system from this educational material, but the ideas for our primary-secondary-tertiary factory style education system originate around the point of divergence so I could see a plenty distinct system evolving. Given modern research showing that education focused on Mastery learning with Collaborative learning and Peer tutoring is cheap and effective, our current model of lecturing to fixed progress targets could easily be an alien way of doing things in another timeline.

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I think the Combine could be fairly utopian in terms of poverty if its guaranteed housing and income based on land value tax holds up.

I also expect that advertising will be strictly controlled in the Combine since marketing campaigns can be very effective. So its a utopia for diehard ad-blockers.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if there's a soft version of Societism with all those benefits without the authoritarianism that's all about using economic sanctions and incentives to nudge people away from nationalism and towards panhumanism. Especially after the collapse of the Combine. Paying people to move areas to make them bigger melting pots, giving bigger tax breaks to cross-national marriages, state funding for panhumanist art and media, free tuition for students who schools internationally, more open borders, etc. Though I suspect this is the Californian model of Societism, even if it is Garderista.

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Also I might have commented this before, but the method used to select the Venetian Doges seems like a good inspiration for selecting Societist nobility, since it remained fairly uncorrupted for a timescale longer that the Combine is expected to exist for.

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Something I wonder about with Photel. Could the Combine drown out other Radio broadcasts across the world with sufficiently powerful transmitters? I doubt the Combine will have any respect for nationally assigned frequency bands.
 
Thande

Thande

Donor
Because I can't remember if I posted it here - don't forget I have a Goodreads page and Amazon author page, and reviews of LTTW or my other works are always welcome. (To the point that you may be able to blackmail cameos out of me if you do enough of them :p )

Kaiser Julius said:
Was "The Day the Music Lived" a Buddy Holly althist perchance?
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Among other things yes, you can read it here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-the-day-the-music-lived.169070/#post-3705048

I've just realised I wrote an earlier story in the same setting which I forgot to count - dammit, I knew I'd miss something!

Alkeni said:
This is a truly magnificent TL that I have now (finally) finished reading through.

I have a lot of things I think but ill settle on two points.
  • I am somewhat irrationally furious that Russia did so well on almost all fronts in the pandoric war. Though not really out of partisan ship for that bizarre Wettin-led abortion of a german empire. But its yet another mark of quality of the TL im so angry.
  • Even before the Biblioteka Mundial got their hands on them, Sanchez's writings seem so divorced from reality and full of unfounded assumptions, more so than Anything else I can think of with the same rigor. Not that that stops it from becoming an influential ideology. I'm sure we can all think of our own examples from OTL. But in many ways, diversitarianism scares me a lot more than original recipe societism.
Excelent story and TL. Looking forward to more.
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Thanks very much for your kind words. As you say, getting emotionally invested in a work of fiction says something good about that work, I think (I know I'd say so myself about the authors I like).

Googolbyte said:
I'm only part 256 but I've got bunch of thoughts to dump. Sorry if they don't make sense as of the latest chapter.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


I expect Diversitarian science will be much more Bayesian than our more Frequentist-style scientific method, as relying on subjective priors is very pro-diversitarian while still allowing science to get on with sciencing.

No theory would become scientific fact, every nation would just have different odds on various hypotheses. While every nation might agree relativity is the most probable theory of gravity they could still be diverse by splitting difference on the current prior being 93% or 99.995%. Even Russel's Teapot would have a state mandated prior probability to be updated as observational evidence comes in.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


Quantum Physics will be very fun. I expect that each Diversitarian nation will try to have its own interpretation of quantum mechanics that it's most confident in. With some even integrating it into national policy. I mean who could object to the death penalty when the state-mandated interpretation of quantum mechanics says subjective death is impossible due to quantum immortality. Botched execution? Nope, this is just the 1 in 1000 timeline where the criminal survived.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


I'm very interested to see how the education system differs in LTTW. I'm not seeing a lot of indications of a starkly different system from this educational material, but the ideas for our primary-secondary-tertiary factory style education system originate around the point of divergence so I could see a plenty distinct system evolving. Given modern research showing that education focused on Mastery learning with Collaborative learning and Peer tutoring is cheap and effective, our current model of lecturing to fixed progress targets could easily be an alien way of doing things in another timeline.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


I think the Combine could be fairly utopian in terms of poverty if its guaranteed housing and income based on land value tax holds up.

I also expect that advertising will be strictly controlled in the Combine since marketing campaigns can be very effective. So its a utopia for diehard ad-blockers.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if there's a soft version of Societism with all those benefits without the authoritarianism that's all about using economic sanctions and incentives to nudge people away from nationalism and towards panhumanism. Especially after the collapse of the Combine. Paying people to move areas to make them bigger melting pots, giving bigger tax breaks to cross-national marriages, state funding for panhumanist art and media, free tuition for students who schools internationally, more open borders, etc. Though I suspect this is the Californian model of Societism, even if it is Garderista.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


Also I might have commented this before, but the method used to select the Venetian Doges seems like a good inspiration for selecting Societist nobility, since it remained fairly uncorrupted for a timescale longer that the Combine is expected to exist for.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________


Something I wonder about with Photel. Could the Combine drown out other Radio broadcasts across the world with sufficiently powerful transmitters? I doubt the Combine will have any respect for nationally assigned frequency bands.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your thoughts, a lot of interesting ideas there.
 

xsampa

Banned
Maybe they won't display news because the rabble dont need to know and only display vapid entertainment like Fahrenheit 451
 

1SaBy

I was under the impression that according to Anarchist Societism, the Final Society is humanity throwing off not only the vestiges of national identity, race and separate religions, but also the state, as opposed to the Combine's vision which involves a totalitarian state.
 

xsampa

Banned
1SaBy said:
I was under the impression that according to Anarchist Societism, the Final Society is humanity throwing off not only the vestiges of national identity, race and separate religions, but also the state, as opposed to the Combine's vision which involves a totalitarian state.
Click to expand...
This reminds me of Sayyid Qutb's Anarchist version of Islamism where laws would directly come from God
 

xsampa

Banned
It seems that the Combine would have around 800 million people given OTL pop figures and pronatalism. The Eternal State would have around 500 million people
 
Born in the USSA

Born in the USSA

xsampa said:
It seems that the Combine would have around 800 million people given OTL pop figures and pronatalism. The Eternal State would have around 500 million people
Click to expand...
IIRC there's quite a bit of environmental degradation in this timeline, even ignoring the copious use of nukes, so that tracks, although it's important to remember that OTL population figures don't necessarily apply, so it might be higher or lower depending on the region in question.
 
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