But even still, I would imagine them still playing catch up to the UASR, in terms of social progress and attitude toward revolution.
Not so much, I don't think so, at least in my opinion.
But even still, I would imagine them still playing catch up to the UASR, in terms of social progress and attitude toward revolution.
Really great contribution @GoulashComrade!
It really adds nuance to life in the UASR: how even a successful worker's revolution can't end institutional racism overnight.
The downside is that if a Red American is the first to figure out a way to "cure mortality" then a significant fraction of the population would implode under the unbearable weight of their own second-hand smugness.
Which would mollify the Malthusians somewhat and ease the remaining pressure on resources for a while, so I suppose every cloud has a silver lining.
At what point did I imply I was in favour of the latter? Imploding the most self-righteous portion of Red America is a small price to pay to avoid a dystopian, segregated-immortality hellscape as far as I'm concerned.I'll take the smugness over an immortal capitalist class in control of the means of immortality production.
Time to kill death, I guess? I dread what the capitalist world would make of a cure for death though. The level of extortion by pharmaceuticals corporations would be through the roof with such a leverage. Especially if you have to keep taking it. It could easily be the spark that ignite the next revolutionary wave.
The downside is that if a Red American is the first to figure out a way to "cure mortality" then a significant fraction of the population would implode under the unbearable weight of their own second-hand smugness.
Which would mollify the Malthusians somewhat and ease the remaining pressure on resources for a while, so I suppose every cloud has a silver lining.
At what point did I imply I was in favour of the latter? Imploding the most self-righteous portion of Red America is a small price to pay to avoid a dystopian, segregated-immortality hellscape as far as I'm concerned.
Exaggerating for comedic effect, but the underlying sentiment remains. I'm well aware that the segment of the population I'm talking about is the smallest it's ever been at the point that article was written ITTL and that the motives and intent in the article and associated research are admirable.Uh...
I don't know if you are being facetious or not.
Are Red Americans smug? Yes. Do they actually help the world more than they hurt it? My impression is yes. Their exports of revolution are better than OTL Americans exports of freedom (and SUVs).
The woman writing the article is smug, but she also has really sympathetic reasons for supporting the end of aging.
Exaggerating for comedic effect, but the underlying sentiment remains. I'm well aware that the segment of the population I'm talking about is the smallest it's ever been at the point that article was written ITTL and that the motives and intent in the article and associated research are admirable.
What I've been getting from the glimpses of the post-WW2 era (mainly the 50s and Red Turn eras) doesn't give me a high opinion of Red Americans. Red America itself I quite like, but so far I've seen almost exactly the same braggadocio that gets OTL Americans (mostly unfairly) stereotyped as nationalistic boors with an added sense of self-righteousness stemming from an incorrect belief that they've solved the problems of the pre-communist USA and can easily apply those solutions everywhere else. I'm sure that by 2018 it's simmered down to the usual arrogance that plagues political idealists no matter what part of the political spectrum/compass/hypercube they're on and is no worse than OTL, but I'm hardly enamoured with that either.
I'd definitely be a Ralph Ellison fan if I was living ITTL, smugness is only excusable when you don't have such a gaping disconnect between what you practice and what you preach. If I were to pick any group in Red America we've seen so far to live amongst, "native" (i.e. not Cuban/Soviet/etc immigrant communities) Big-City Red Americans would probably be at the bottom of the list.
Good work on not having OTL's plague of school shootings though, it sort of makes up for ignoring serial killers for so long because acknowledging them would be ideologically inconvenient.
I think Mr Ellison already summed up my views on that attitude quite well. Being better than a shit sandwich is nothing to crow about.But again, this is an America I can say fuck yeah to, not the increasingly dysfunctional democracy whose political class has a Scrooge-like view of social problems. So a lot of that arrogance is, to myself, more understandable.
I think Mr Ellison already summed up my views on that attitude quite well. Being better than a shit sandwich is nothing to crow about.
I think Mr Ellison already summed up my views on that attitude quite well. Being better than a shit sandwich is nothing to crow about.
Mr Ellison is a rather harsh critic (for a number of good reasons) of the state of things in the UASR, but he is writing during the 1950s. A lot happens after that point to make the UASR more authentically like the harmoniously multi-ethnic bastion of libertarian communism it paints itself as - things like the Second Cultural Revolution and the rise of new parties like the Bookchinite SEU. Tellingly, Ellison never stops identifying with Liberation - the most fervent believers in exporting the revolution abroad and arguably the party that's most prone to the "Red America, Fuck Yeah!" sentiment.
Just like a huge number of other nations in OTL, congrats.The UASR is a nation decades ahead of the USA in many, many things.
Yeah, they were only getting run out of town by "vigilantes" in the Deep South for looking at white women instead of being lynched. Some countries' prisoners have more rights than black Americans had in the 1950s, being better than that is not something worth boasting about.And even in the ITTL 1950s, Black Americans still have more political rights then they did in the OTL 1950s.
It is telling and the implications that even a cynic like Ellison considers the UASR to be capable of self-improvement are heartening.Mr Ellison is a rather harsh critic (for a number of good reasons) of the state of things in the UASR, but he is writing during the 1950s. A lot happens after that point to make the UASR more authentically like the harmoniously multi-ethnic bastion of libertarian communism it paints itself as - things like the Second Cultural Revolution and the rise of new parties like the Bookchinite SEU. Tellingly, Ellison never stops identifying with Liberation - the most fervent believers in exporting the revolution abroad and arguably the party that's most prone to the "Red America, Fuck Yeah!" sentiment.
My view was never that Red Americans never made any improvements over OTL to be proud of, it's that I think there's too much of a gap between their words and their actions to justify their attitude. I find it all too plausible that when interacting with non-Comintern citizens modern Red Americans (especially those whose families were never oppressed beyond the usual revolution-fomenting economic ways) would behave like the shift to communism rather than capitalism somehow erased every problem that the old USA ever had and never think about why there needed to be a Second Cultural Revolution, just like someone from the capitalist nations would focus on the hypocrisy of the UASR's early race relations (I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of the implications of that Ellison book) and psychology ("only capitalist societies produce serial killers") as well as their (from what I can tell from the tidbits we've been give) frankly rabid foreign policy rather than the deteriorating class situation and growing inequality in their home nations.
The overtly violent forms of racism ITTL get you staring down the business end of the Red Terror. Racism takes a more insidious form; in the case of miscegenation it often leads to ostracism even by many ostensible communists. It's not uniform; things are a bit better in cities with large black, Chinese, or Native minorities.
Also monolithic whiteness is something that is mostly stillborn. IOTL 1930s it was still very much an Anglo-Saxon club with the various 'white' ethnix taking lower positions on the chain. ITTL, white ethnic identity is much more strongly preserved. Most people born after the revolution would not consider themselves part of a white race or ethnic group; they'd consider themselves German, Scots, Italian, Jewish, etc.