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I can't speak for him, but I presume he's talking about how advances in computing and genetic modification, coupled with reduced costs for things like mapping the genomes of food crops, are immediately applicable.
There's a National Geographic article on some of this from several years ago
They're the Diplomacy/Espionage faction; soft power is their hat.
Both we and California have the option of outright military conquest; they really don't, because the centre of their power remains entirely too vulnerable. So expansion has to be peaceful, and with significant popular support.
They're probably going to anschluss New Jersey and Delaware in short order, with parts of Maryland and DC next on the list.
Food security, and lebensraum would be enough reason, and there's no way they haven't been building friends and networks in those regions in the last two decades; those coastal areas are well situated for coastal aid missions and outreach from the Big City.
Imagine how much easier it would be for them to assimilate Philadelphia if they rolled up with the Liberty Bell.
Or DC if they had the Declaration.
The fact that Ma has seven sons on her farm in the middle of a general conscription of men of military age, which our protagonist only ducked because of a bad physical, is a blaring clarion that she has Pull with the local authority network. Note how she was not at all worried about being accosted by an Inquistor while her sons were pointing guns at a sheriff as long as she answered his questions. Or her apparent belief that she'd get away with it.
And there are very few ways a single mother with sons living in the ass-end of nowhere with Third World accoutrements gets that sort of influence with the authorities.
On the other hand this particular Inquisitor is not familiar to her family, else the boys would not have tried to point a weapon at him.
Which suggests she doesn't deal with one Inquisitor, but a whole bunch of them.
Possibly the entire local branch.
We can't afford to build critical national industries or capabilities around bulk importation of materials that can be cut off by a mortal enemy. And it's worth pointing out that the St Lawrence shuts down in winter.
Besides, as I point out further down the thread, we don't need fertilizer to feed our current population, given the amount of arable land we control.
I mean, we should do it, but you need to recognize that work will have to go into clearing the way. Our armed merchant boats and barges (deep-draught ships don't do well on much of the Mississippi) can only move so far and so fast, and gunners on the banks of the river can fill them with holes pretty easily. Not to mention any fuckery with things like command-detonated mines that someone really serious about establishing his control of the river might try. Furthermore there are likely collapsed bridges and civil engineering works whose wreckage is a major hindrance to commercial navigation.
Worth noting that the Ohio River meets the Mississipi at the city of Cairo, Illnois.
And the Ohio goes upstream past Cincinatti, OH and Louisville KE, all the way up to Pittsburgh PA.
Opportunity and threat both. Especially Pittsburgh, which is 300-350km from Buffalo.
Err... Except we don't have the chemical industry anyway. So, we are going to be forced to buy fertiliser, especially since climate change has made farming very unpredictable in yields.
We have good enough chemical industry to manufacture the tons of explosives necessary to build artillery shells for the equivalent of almost two battalions of artillery, if you count the guns assigned to the army and navy together. And that's not counting the mortars.
Good enough to maintain a rudimentary pharmaceutical sector. To maintain 60% vaccination rates.
It's slow and smallscale, but it exists.
Scaling it up is going to take time and equipment and money/effort, but there's somewhere to build on.
What other alternate process is there ? It's not just farming equipment we need, it's chemical inputs, water, salinization, details on flooding, growth season and etc, all upended by climate change. A hotter season means lower yields. Or make harvesting more complicated, unless you have the tech such as weather forecasting and such to help predict in advance.
Synthetic fertilizer accounts for 30-50% of yield productivity in modern US agriculture.
Utilizing a range of long-term evaluations, spanning a total of 362 seasons of crop production, of crop yields and nutrient budgets across the world, Stewart et al. (2005) concluded that between 30-50 percent of yield increases could be attributed to synthetic fertilizer inputs (and typically even higher in the tropics).10
Given how much US agricultural output goes to feed animals and export, you are drastically underestimating our ability to feed ourselves if we can get the land under cultivation.
At worst we lay our hands on a couple shipments of GMO seed.
If significant climate issues are a thing, other countries with our climate, including the Russian Empire, India and China, would have invested in ensuring there'd be seed strains available.
Do note that much of US domestic grain consumption mostly goes to feeding animals for meat and to industrial use, not to food.
USDA figures for corn,
That has 80-90% of the US production of corn going to bioethanol and animal feed, with actual human use being a fraction of the roughly ten percent that is used for seed and other industrial uses.
Export is 10-20% of the US harvest of corn/sorghum/barley and oats, and 50% of the US harvest of wheat
The major feed grains are corn, sorghum, barley, and oats. Corn is the primary feed grain in the United States, accounting for more than 90 percent of total feed grain production and use.
Wheat ranks third among U.S. field crops in planted acreage, production, and gross farm receipts, behind corn and soybeans.In 2016/17 U.S. farmers produced a total of .820 billion bushels of winter, other spring, and durum wheat on 50.2 million acres of cropland. U.S. wheat planted area for 2017/18 is projected at 46 million acres, a record-low. Declining wheat plantings and production are attributable to lower relative returns for wheat, changes in government programs that give farmers more planting flexibility, and increased competition in global wheat markets.
The U.S. share of the global wheat market has also been declining over the past two decades as the European Union and Russia have risen in prominence. Between 2001 and 2005, the U.S. share of global wheat exports averaged 25 percent; by 2016/17, the U.S. share slipped to about 15 percent.
The United States is a major wheat-producing country, and wheat ranks third among U.S. field crops in both planted acreage and gross farm receipts.
www.ers.usda.gov
The appalling scale of US agricultural productivity is something that is difficult to get one's head around.
If we can get enough land under cultivation, we can feed ourselves comfortably without fertilizers.
We may not be chowing down on burgers every day, but we go back to taking a full stomach for granted and exploring export.
Eventually agricultural products; getting the breadbasket of North America back online will ultimately deprive the Russian Empire of a lot of political power from their outsize influence on international grain trade.
Which is something a lot of non-Russians would probably be looking forward to.
Petroleum products like synthetic rubber(Missouri is apparently home to 120,000bpd of petroleum production, for example, in addition to their limestone). Light manufacturing.
All that is maybe five years down the road though.
Right now?
IP. Stuff that our Libraries perk gives us access to, but which we can't currently build.
The first thing that immediately comes to mind are some of the specifics of early 21st century US military technology.
The kind of thing that California has details on but Russia has probably prevented them from selling, and non-US allies would have to develop from scratch if they wanted to build a material deterrent.
Selling Nigeria or South Africa or Indonesia or Turkey detailed schematics for a W80-series missile warhead might save them a decade and billions of dollars worth of investment necessary to build a re-entry vehicle for a burgeoning nuclear capability.
And allows them to avoid having to do public testing.
Or details of the US space launch program, which would similarly serve as a leg up for people like PACS or the countries of Latin America or Africa, neither of which have a history of space exploration, and which would need to learn old lessons from scratch.
Well, we have all those old artifacts we took from Victorians lying around, I am sure worldwide auction would fetch a better price than whatever pittance New York is offering...
They are valuable to New York precisely because they are of diplomatic as well as historical value. To other people they are simply more knicknacks. A Russian museum with the Liberty Bell is simply in possession of a historical artifact and bragging rights, it doesn't give it claim in American or international eyes to other parts of the United States.
It's the equivalent of attempting to auction off the Crown Jewels of the British Royal Family.
To external collectors they are simply jewelry of some historical significance. To Britain they are quite literally symbols of their political system.
New York will pay you orders of magnitude more than anyone other than Alexei will.
They are valuable to New York precisely because they are of diplomatic as well as historical value. To other people they are simply more knicknacks. A Russian museum with the Liberty Bell is simply in possession of a historical artifact and bragging rights, it doesn't give it claim in American or international eyes to other parts of the United States.
It's the equivalent of attempting to auction off the Crown Jewels of the British Royal Family.
To external collectors they are simply jewelry of some historical significance. To Britain they are quite literally symbols of their political system.
New York will pay you orders of magnitude more than anyone other than Alexei will.
Yes, I am. "We have good reasons not to pick this option under this set of circumstances." is not a valid counterpoint to "Not being able to pick this option regardless of circumstance is a weakness."
When "this set of circumstances" includes permanent and unalterable features of the setting such as "basic geography," it kind of is a valid counterpoint.
I mean, the Commonwealth's lack of unicycle factories means we probably can't pick the option of developing an army of unicycle cavalry. That doesn't mean that our inability to do so is a "weakness," because frankly unicycle cavalry aren't a very good idea to begin with.
Likewise, a lack of political support for limited-war or cabinet-war conflicts with Victoria that do not have a realistic chance of permanently defeating them and are not a defensive response to one of their attacks? That's not necessarily a weakness; it may stop us from injuring ourselves badly. The outcome of such conflicts, given the nature of the terrain we face once we put the Victorians on the defensive and given that they are likely to have foreign supporters, is less certain than we'd like.
Also, you're presenting my arguments as being solely about mindless aggression rather than any of the other options it applies to, such as painful counterpunches when Victoria inevitably attacks us yet again.
Firstly, you presented the option as a way of hitting Victoria to "keep the grass mowed," so to speak, which would strongly imply that we would need to wage war on Victoria at times not of Victoria's choosing... which would, in turn, involve us declaring war on them.
Secondly, I do not think your claim that I am "presenting your arguments as being solely about mindless aggression" is supported by the text. I did not accuse you of being mindless. I simply presented a series of reasons why fighting wars with limited aims against Victoria will present us with military problems. Geography makes it difficult for us to get at them with a large land army unless we, essentially, build entire new approach routes. Once Blackwell establishes competently laid out, reasonably well armed defenses and begins to train a new army capable of holding those defenses, we are going to face major struggles in getting our boots onto Victorian soil unless we do a lot of prep work.
Thus, I would argue that a strategy of trying to raid, weaken, or "counterpunch" Victoria is in danger of backfiring. We may very easily create a situation where such wars cost us more than they cost the Vicks.
They're the Diplomacy/Espionage faction; soft power is their hat.
Both we and California have the option of outright military conquest; they really don't, because the centre of their power remains entirely too vulnerable. So expansion has to be peaceful, and with significant popular support.
They're probably going to anschluss New Jersey and Delaware in short order, with parts of Maryland and DC next on the list.
I think you may be overstating the speed with which they will do so, though it's certainly a possibility. Especially if the Victorian Civil War drags out another year somehow, giving the New Yorkers time to act.
The fact that Ma has seven sons on her farm in the middle of a general conscription of men of military age, which our protagonist only ducked because of a bad physical, is a blaring clarion that she has Pull with the local authority network. Note how she was not at all worried about being accosted by an Inquistor while her sons were pointing guns at a sheriff as long as she answered his questions. Or her apparent belief that she'd get away with it.
And there are very few ways a single mother with sons living in the ass-end of nowhere with Third World accoutrements gets that sort of influence with the authorities.
On the other hand this particular Inquisitor is not familiar to her family, else the boys would not have tried to point a weapon at him.
Which suggests she doesn't deal with one Inquisitor, but a whole bunch of them.
Possibly the entire local branch.
Worth noting that the Ohio River meets the Mississipi at the city of Cairo, Illnois.
And the Ohio goes upstream past Cincinatti, OH and Louisville KE, all the way up to Pittsburgh PA.
Opportunity and threat both. Especially Pittsburgh, which is 300-350km from Buffalo.
I should note that there's going to be a fair amount of extra work clearing our way up the Ohio, and that the terrain between Pittsburgh and Buffalo (and upstate New York in general) is quite mountainous. Difficult to expand or march through.
Selling Nigeria or South Africa or Indonesia or Turkey detailed schematics for a W80-series missile warhead might save them a decade and billions of dollars worth of investment necessary to build a re-entry vehicle for a burgeoning nuclear capability.
And allows them to avoid having to do public testing.
I suspect we will not find detailed schematics for nuclear weapons, and if we did we'd do... things... to our international reputation if we started selling them.
They have bigger economies but their per capita GDP isn't so overwhelmingly much greater (New York is implied to have broadly First World living conditions, yes?) For buying other people's cultural artifacts, size of economy is less important, and per capita GDP more so in my opinion; the nation being ten times more populous doesn't necessarily mean it's going to spend ten times more on a cultural artifact that isn't from their culture anyway.
Once a certain critical size is surpassed (and the Free City has a population of ~10 million or more), having the artifacts be important to you is going to have more impact on how much you're willing to spend on them than the theoretical size of your economy. American museums don't reliably pay 5-10 times more for paintings than, say, Swedish museums.
I will vote for "sell everything to New York" a thousand times over before I vote for selling one single artifact of American history to external nations.
Bigger economies does not translate to a willingness to spend money on American artifacts. Alexei has reasons to do it, noone else does besides maybe Japan. And for them it would be cheaper to attempt to destroy it.
Avoids giving resources to an adversary.
As for economies?
The 2017 budget of New York City was 82 billion dollars, which would have put it at around 38th in the world, just below the UAE and above Thailand.
I should note that there's going to be a fair amount of extra work clearing our way up the Ohio, and that the terrain between Pittsburgh and Buffalo (and upstate New York in general) is quite mountainous. Difficult to expand or march through.
Oh definitely.
But even now, barges can go up and downstream, even if that's only smallscale traders. Which is useful if you're attempting to supply a resistance, or move some medications upriver.
I suspect we will not find detailed schematics for nuclear weapons, and if we did we'd do... things... to our international reputation if we started selling them.
Whether there are schematics or tradeable tech information is a GM decision; I'd think so, but this is a fiat thing.
As for international reputation? I don't see how.
The last forty years have seen multiple Great Powers engage in territorial expansion and aggression at the detriment of their neighbors.
Russia has gobbled down at least eleven nations and counting, destabilized a bunch more, occupied Alaska and choked California into submission. Japan fought a literal war to conquer South Korea and the Phillipines, and is occupying portions of Canada and the US.
Even India destabilized and is still destabilizing Pakistan, and attempted it on China.
Barring GM fiat, every midranking nation with the local intellectual capital to pull it off, and unwilling to bow to the Kremlin will have invested in, or be attempting to invest in, either a small arsenal or breakout capability and the capability to deliver it. I can count at least twenty nations capable of it.
Nightmare world to live in, but I can't really see much of a logical alternative.
If the Doom clock still exists, it will be stuck on like 5 seconds to midnight.
When "this set of circumstances" includes permanent and unalterable features of the setting such as "basic geography," it kind of is a valid counterpoint.
Your argument has 4 postulates - that geography means we can't attack except through Buffalo (in the short term), that Blackwell will rapidly fortify Buffalo & surroundings to the point where taking it would be extremely expensive, that upstate New York is and always will be an insignificant part of Victorian industry, and that this is all taking part in a short enough timeline that alternate routes are impossible. Point A being a constant is not proof that B/C/D/etc. are also constant.
Secondly, you yourself are acknowledging my point throughout your posts -
Likewise, a lack of political support for limited-war or cabinet-war conflicts with Victoria that do not have a realistic chance of permanently defeating them and are not a defensive response to one of their attacks? That's not necessarily a weakness; it may stop us from injuring ourselves badly.
Thus, I would argue that a strategy of trying to raid, weaken, or "counterpunch" Victoria is in danger of backfiring. We may very easily create a situation where such wars cost us more than they cost the Vicks.
You can't even confidently assert "This is never going to be a good idea" without sticking in weasel words about the cases where your assertions are wrong, which is exactly my point. You've been trying to disprove my point by providing a counterexample, but "A can be the best option, so never being able to pick is a weakness" cannot be disproven by pointing out examples where A is not the best option. Proof by contradiction does not work against non-exhaustive arguments.
I will vote for "sell everything to New York" a thousand times over before I vote for selling one single artifact of American history to external nations.
Like, okay, I can get objecting to selling to private collectors or w/e. But if we're selling to foreign governments to put in, like, museums? What's so awful about that?
Like, okay, I can get objecting to selling to private collectors or w/e. But if we're selling to foreign governments to put in, like, museums? What's so awful about that?
1.) It reeks of the same cultural imperialism that resulted in Britain looting Egypt and other places for centuries (have we mentioned people LITERALLY EATING MUMMIES?).
2.) The artifacts of American history belong to the people of America, even if they're regarded only as historical artifacts and not "Legitimacy boosts".
3.) They are not simple monetary transactions.
4.) It greatly increases the risk of Alexander or someone else getting their hands on them and destroying them.
Your argument has 4 postulates - that geography means we can't attack except through Buffalo (in the short term), that Blackwell will rapidly fortify Buffalo & surroundings to the point where taking it would be extremely expensive, that upstate New York is and always will be an insignificant part of Victorian industry, and that this is all taking part in a short enough timeline that alternate routes are impossible. Point A being a constant is not proof that B/C/D/etc. are also constant.
Blackwell fortifying Buffalo is something we'd be unwise not to foresee coming. We've attacked the city twice now and humiliated Victoria on both occasions. Blackwell is on record as believing that there's a strong need to reform the military to be capable of meeting the kind of threat we present. A plan that is only good if Blackwell doesn't start fortifying the east end of Lake Erie is not a good plan for warfare, because it is only going to work if the enemy ignores an obvious need to prepare against you.
Upstate New York being noncritical territory for Victoria is pretty much unavoidable. The vast majority of their land mass is well to the east. Losing that territory hurts and inconveniences them, but the 'defense in depth' situation for Victoria won't go away.
The one element in my analysis that may hopefully change is that we may develop alternate invasion routes through which to attack Victoria. However, we cannot now predict the nature of these actions, and by the time we have taken such actions the situation may be very different.
Furthermore, even the alternate invasion routes will still have problems. Basing out of Toronto and Hamilton means we need to build a whole new fleet in those cities to contest Lake Ontario, or fight our way across the Welland Canal and probably the Niagara River again. The latter case will not be so easy with prepared and trained defenders. Working our way up along the north or south coast of Lake Erie presents similar problems- in the case of the south coast, we have to fight our way over hilly/mountainous terrain except for a narrow belt along the coast itself, and in the north, we get funneled into the same Welland/Niagara defensive region that would be an ideal place for the Victorians to defend against us.
It is CONCEIVABLE that some combination of circumstances will make this kind of land attack feasible and rewarding. But for every outcome that is feasible and rewarding, there are other possible outcomes that might go very badly (say, if Victoria surprises us with their possession of new advanced weapons).
All things considered, I don't consider it much of a 'weakness' that we won't be doing it.
Secondly, you yourself are acknowledging my point throughout your posts -
You can't even confidently assert "This is never going to be a good idea" without sticking in weasel words about the cases where your assertions are wrong, which is exactly my point. You've been trying to disprove my point by providing a counterexample, but "A can be the best option, so never being able to pick is a weakness" cannot be disproven by pointing out examples where A is not the best option. Proof by contradiction does not work against non-exhaustive arguments.
My core argument is that "A might in some circumstances be the best option, but in other circumstances will be a risky or costly option, and we won't always be able to tell the difference."
Trying to spot the logical fallacy in my argument is a case of barking up the wrong tree here. The point isn't to come up with some formalistic proof of why staging small-scale land invasions of Victoria is literally always a mistake. The point is that small-scale land invasions of Victoria are inherently a gamble- gambling on Victoria's ability to upgrade its defenses and fight us.
1.) It reeks of the same cultural imperialism that resulted in Britain looting Egypt and other places for centuries (have we mentioned people LITERALLY EATING MUMMIES?).
2.) The artifacts of American history belong to the people of America, even if they're regarded only as historical artifacts and not "Legitimacy boosts".
3.) They are not simple monetary transactions.
4.) It greatly increases the risk of Alexander or someone else getting their hands on them and destroying them.
...if you don't see the difference between the British Empire looting foreign cultures and us voluntarily offering to sell our artifacts (which, yes, is fundamentally just a monetary transaction) then I don't know what to tell you. I also don't see how said relics getting destroyed in somebody else's custody is our problem.
...if you don't see the difference between the British Empire looting foreign cultures and us voluntarily offering to sell our artifacts (which, yes, is fundamentally just a monetary transaction) then I don't know what to tell you. I also don't see how said relics getting destroyed in somebody else's custody is our problem.
Which ultimately is the point he is trying to make. These symbols in and of themselves have no value. The documents are pieces of paper, the liberty bell is just a cracked bell.
However, for a revivalist nation. The selling and dispersal of their national artifacts, their legacy, to a foreign nation for something so base as money is near tantamount to treason. Especially when Chicago has the ability to simply take a loan. If the Vicks were knocking on the gates of Chicago itself I imagine for many nationalists it would still be a tough sell.
New York on the other hand has the benefit of legitimately being perhaps the most known symbol of America for the last 200 years (in quest). Therefore giving them these items as a loan or safekeeping is not entirely unreasonable to revivalist, which we are playing as
However, for a revivalist nation. The selling and dispersal of their national artifacts, their legacy, to a foreign nation for something so base as money is near tantamount to treason. Especially when Chicago has the ability to simply take a loan. If the Vicks were knocking on the gates of Chicago itself I imagine for many nationalists it would still be a tough sell.
New York on the other hand has the benefit of legitimately being perhaps the most known symbol of America for the last 200 years (in quest). Therefore giving them these items as a loan or safekeeping is not entirely unreasonable to revivalist, which we are playing as
"Revivalist" and "nationalist" are not synonymous, and I will fight tooth and bloody nail to keep it that way. Just because we're interested in restoring unity to part of the Old Country doesn't mean we need to care about its symbolic legacy beyond practical utility.
"Revivalist" and "nationalist" are not synonymous, and I will fight tooth and bloody nail to keep it that way. Just because we're interested in restoring unity to part of the Old Country doesn't mean we need to care about its symbolic legacy beyond practical utility.
A fair point. However I imagine that to the average citizen of the Commonwealth which has after all only existed for a bare couple of years and which was founded on the principal of building a better America the difference is largely academic. Especially when a major war was just fought where a peace clause was to get American artifacts back.
Upstate New York being noncritical territory for Victoria is pretty much unavoidable. The vast majority of their land mass is well to the east. Losing that territory hurts and inconveniences them, but the 'defense in depth' situation for Victoria won't go away.
Point of order:
-New York State has to be their major food production region, and the plurality of their population.
Combined with Massachusetts next door, it's their main industrial area as well as the location of a majority of their population.
Losing it won't be lethal, but it will be crippling.
We just can't pull it off atm.
-Not entirely accurate.
We could portage military gunboats of ~150 tons or less across the neck of lower Ontario and to the shores of Lake Ontario given an uninterrupted 12 hour period and a couple heavy haulers. Vehicles like a Shershen-class, or a CB90, or a bunch of PT boats.
What's really shutting down our options there is the lack of petroleum to operate any ships.
I make the point because if we can do it, so can the Vics from Rochester to Buffalo as a surprise, bypassing the Welland Canal to avoid any watchers/monitors that treaty obligations allow us to maintain on the location and dropping a squadron of light gunboats into the Erie as a surprise.
Best to keep that in mind.
...if you don't see the difference between the British Empire looting foreign cultures and us voluntarily offering to sell our artifacts (which, yes, is fundamentally just a monetary transaction) then I don't know what to tell you. I also don't see how said relics getting destroyed in somebody else's custody is our problem.
That's a little like being a pharmaceutical company and disclaiming any responsibility for how the oxycontin you sold to a drug dealer ended up on the streets. Or being an arms dealer and not caring about your weapons being used on civilian populations. Or being a pet dealer and selling puppies to a butcher dealing in dogmeat and disclaiming all responsibility for their ultimate fate.
Which ultimately is the point he is trying to make. These symbols in and of themselves have no value. The documents are pieces of paper, the liberty bell is just a cracked bell.
Value IS in the eye of the beholder.
Jewelry-grade diamonds are just funny rocks. The Mona Lisa is just oil and paper. The lunar rocks are just rock samples with no residual scientific value. Gold is an industrial metal that is instead primarily held for sentimental reasons. And so on.
"Revivalist" and "nationalist" are not synonymous, and I will fight tooth and bloody nail to keep it that way. Just because we're interested in restoring unity to part of the Old Country doesn't mean we need to care about its symbolic legacy beyond practical utility.
For you, perhaps
For most people, symbols matter. People raise a fuss when you burn flags, when you are deemed to have disrespected a book.
Legitimacy would not be a mechanic in this quest if that wasn't true IC.
That's a little like being a pharmaceutical company and disclaiming any responsibility for how the oxycontin you sold to a drug dealer ended up on the streets. Or being an arms dealer and not caring about your weapons being used on civilian populations. Or being a pet dealer and selling puppies to a butcher dealing in dogmeat and disclaiming all responsibility for their ultimate fate.
Only if you take the continued survival of these cultural artifacts as an a priori moral good on the level of human or even canine lives, which, uh. You probably shouldn't. Especially when it's not as though the destruction of the artifacts is an inevitability in foreign hands, just an arguably elevated risk.
For you, perhaps
For most people, symbols matter. People raise a fuss when you burn flags, when you are deemed to have disrespected a book.
Legitimacy would not be a mechanic in this quest if that wasn't true IC.
Oh, sure, symbols in general matter. I could just care less about these ones except, again, insofar as they are useful to us (e.g. for getting Legitimacy where we want it, which is a separate debate).
Only if you take the continued survival of these cultural artifacts as an a priori moral good on the level of human or even canine lives, which, uh. You probably shouldn't. Especially when it's not as though the destruction of the artifacts is an inevitability in foreign hands, just an arguably elevated risk.
I do believe I do.
Too many people forget or romanticize their history entirely too quickly without visible reminders of what it actually was.
And yeah, I do believe their destruction is an inevitability at this point if we put them on the international market.
It was one thing while they were in the hands of the Vics and there was no apparent risk of their being used to attempt to reunify the US. Quite another with a pandemic of successor states breaking out in North America and Victoria momentarily impotent.
Alex is competent after all.
Not to mention that public opinion would be able to pin at least part of the blame on us as the ones who hocked it for cash to people who proceeded to trash a piece of collective American heritage.
Most diabolical would be his buying it and using it to prop up a new puppet somewhere on the North American continent.
Oh, sure, symbols in general matter. I could just care less about these ones except, again, insofar as they are useful to us (e.g. for getting Legitimacy where we want it, which is a separate debate).
...if you don't see the difference between the British Empire looting foreign cultures and us voluntarily offering to sell our artifacts (which, yes, is fundamentally just a monetary transaction) then I don't know what to tell you. I also don't see how said relics getting destroyed in somebody else's custody is our problem.
The underlying argument is that cultural artifacts should not be sold for money to collectors who will view them as curiosities. To make such deals is corrosive to the cultural integrity of the seller's society, and perpetuates imperialistic power dynamics. If you, personally, view the cultural artifacts as being of no value due to a desire to radically reboot the national culture, then that's your perspective... But surely you can understand that other people value cultural artifacts and want them to stay safe and under the control of people who will value them for their cultural value, not just their cash value.
Point of order:
-New York State has to be their major food production region, and the plurality of their population.
Combined with Massachusetts next door, it's their main industrial area as well as the location of a majority of their population.
Losing it won't be lethal, but it will be crippling.
What I'm getting at is that this entire area ("upstate New York" and "western upstate New York in particular") is a large expanse of territory, much of it inland or mountainous or both. Sure, as we raided and attacked within it, we'd do damage- but the damage would be progressive and 'chip away' at Victoria's strength, especially when it comes to capturing agricultural areas. And many of our targets would be waaay over in the eastern part of the state and hard to reach. After all, this isn't a game of Risk and we don't get all of a province just because we won a huge battle at one end of it.
This would be a good opportunity for Victoria to practice the same kind of warfare on us that we practiced on them around Detroit- bleeding the enemy at one phase line after another, taking up positions in chokepoints and bottlenecks, falling back, accepting a certain amount of material loss but inflicting significant military losses on the attacker. Fighting this kind of warfare repeatedly in an attempt to limit the economic productivity of upstate New York by repeatedly pillaging it could prove costly if Blackwell is successful in rebuilding the Victorian Army along conventional lines.
-Not entirely accurate.
We could portage military gunboats of ~150 tons or less across the neck of lower Ontario and to the shores of Lake Ontario given an uninterrupted 12 hour period and a couple heavy haulers. Vehicles like a Shershen-class, or a CB90, or a bunch of PT boats.
What's really shutting down our options there is the lack of petroleum to operate any ships.
I mean yes, but such tiny military vessels, in numbers we're likely to be able to support, aren't going to be an adequate support for Commonwealth amphibious operations on Lake Ontario. We'd need to do something like ship bigger modular gunboats and assemble them in place
I'm not saying it's not a valid way to 'poke' the enemy, inflicting nuisance damage and a strategic inconvenience on them. But it doesn't really resolve or change anything decisive and large scale.
The underlying argument is that cultural artifacts should not be sold for money to collectors who will view them as curiosities. To make such deals is corrosive to the cultural integrity of the seller's society, and perpetuates imperialistic power dynamics. If you, personally, view the cultural artifacts as being of no value due to a desire to radically reboot the national culture, then that's your perspective... But surely you can understand that other people value cultural artifacts and want them to stay safe and under the control of people who will value them for their cultural value, not just their cash value.
As I believe I already said to KnightDisciple, I'm talking about selling them to like...museums, or foreign governments, or whatever. I agree that just pawning them off to private collectors would be objectionable on multiple levels.
Ironically, (well probably to people that have argued with me) I would be deeply opposed to selling off priceless items of American heritage to private collectors, even museums.
(A good deal of my... distaste for American "Legitimacy" is that "Americanness" often involves the forced erase of other people's pasts along racial lines, such as you know, what happened to First Nations peoples.
And then even replacement of even traditional European culture with whatever Edward Bernays need to assert that week in order to get you to buy stuff. So much of what people consider "Whiteness" or "American Culture" is literally successful advertising.
It's actually my contention that the rise of a lot of fascism and the alt right across the Anglo world is because people have been divorced from their pasts due to this hypercapitalist replacement of culture with advertising and the only thing they have to replace it are fanciful delusions of Whiteness that never existed and now sold by literal fucking Nazis.
Young people of European heritage look around and people of colour trying to recover their cultural inheritance and get angry because they think they're being denied their own by THE LIBERALS or whatever... except what actually happened is that their cultures were entirely destroyed by Capitalism to make way for excuses to spend more on bullshit. Or absorbed and recuperated and trivialized into harmless fluff to be sold as a product instead of a living part of people's lives and cultural experience.
Name just about everything in mainstream Anglosphere culture today and it can be traced back to someone in America deciding "we want to sell this" and American hegemonic economic and cultural clout causing that to overwhelm everything else.
(And this is all not even mentioning that "Whiteness" is an artificial concept created by Capitalist systems to prevent workers in the New World from finding common cause with each other.)
While I am opposed to building your current identity entirely on some imagined idea of the past.
It would be an actual tragedy to divorce people from their pasts and their own cultural inheritance. I would be fine with allowing New York to harbour "American" relics because it's their own common history and those relics would be available for the people they are important to to access.
The destruction, loss, or dispersal of culturally important artifacts and relics away from the people they are meaningful too, especially due to major power imbalances like selling relics for food, is a crime against communities of people and should be opposed. (This is not to say that I'm opposed for like touring exhibitions and shit. But selling your cultural heritage to eat is pretty tragic)
I mean yes, but such tiny military vessels, in numbers we're likely to be able to support, aren't going to be an adequate support for Commonwealth amphibious operations on Lake Ontario. We'd need to do something like ship bigger modular gunboats and assemble them in place
I'm not saying it's not a valid way to 'poke' the enemy, inflicting nuisance damage and a strategic inconvenience on them. But it doesn't really resolve or change anything decisive and large scale.
Other than commando raids, the whole point would be primarily to choke Rochester's civilian trade as the primary Vic port in Lake Ontario. Possibly secondarily to smother the Quebecois ports along the St Lawrence River, denying the Vics access to the resources in the occupied Canadian territories and making it unprofitable for corporations to operate there.
Though I will note that if we can get ten or thirty boats of that size into the St Lawrence River, it becomes that much more difficult for Victoria to support troops in Atlantic Quebec, and vice versa.
As I believe I already said to KnightDisciple, I'm talking about selling them to like...museums, or foreign governments, or whatever. I agree that just pawning them off to private collectors would be objectionable on multiple levels.
It bears pointing out that museums do not have the budget to be able to afford you much of anything.
The most expensive piece of art sold was Leonardo da Vinci's Salvador Mundi for 450 mill, and that went to a Saudi prince.
And has vanished from public view since then.
Besides, foreign governments don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the art or artifacts of other countries.
They'll steal and carry off anything that isn't nailed down, but they never pay anything like a fair market price for it.
It bears pointing out that museums do not have the budget to be able to afford you much of anything.
The most expensive piece of art sold was Leonardo da Vinci's Salvador Mundi for 450 mill, and that went to a Saudi prince.
And has vanished from public view since then.
Besides, foreign governments don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the art or artifacts of other countries.
They'll steal and carry off anything that isn't nailed down, but they never pay anything like a fair market price for it.
Reminder that this started with me questioning KnightDisciple's "we must never do this ever" stance. The practical dimension is pretty much moot - if we don't have cause or opportunity to sell, then of course we won't, but the question is how acceptable the action would be in a general sense.
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