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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

ExNihilo said:
1) All non-western cultures are racist? Ah, that's a bold claim and I'd need actual evidence to back it up. Have you asked every non-western culture about their views on racism? All of them?
2) Beyond using a spell-checker, 'muslim' isn't really a unified culture, neither is Indian. I'm not as informed on Chinese internal divisions, but India isn't a monoculture, for instance, and there are more and less racist parts of it.
3) Western cultures are still very racist.
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sorry for late answer .your qestions are important.
So;
1.I was unclear - not all cultures, but all big,expanding cultures - becous culture usually must convert to become big, and could not convert others without beliving in its own superiority.Which means being at least partially racist.
2.Hindu are divided by castes - but they all belive, that you could not convert and become hindu,but only after reincarnation.Unless other religions, nobody could convert to hindu religion.Which is exception from point 1 - hindu do not convert,but still are big and racist - becouse consider non-hindu as worst kind of people.
Muslims are divided and killing each other for many reasons, but when formally everybody could become good muslim,black people are still consider inferior.Which is against their religion,i think.
3.Western cultures - you are right,there are few of them.Some, like scandinavian are not racist,other belive so but still are racisr - like german-french combo,who belive,that they have right to decide what is good for all european nations.

P.S i remember one alternate history when USA send soldiers 5 million years ago to built pipeline which take all oil from arab countries to Israel,soviet fought them, and it weakened USA in OTL somehow.Unfortunatelly,i forget both author and title.
3.
 
This isn't really as good a rebuttal as you think it is.

ATP said:
2.Hindu are divided by castes - but they all belive, that you could not convert and become hindu,but only after reincarnation.Unless other religions, nobody could convert to hindu religion.Which is exception from point 1 - hindu do not convert,but still are big and racist - becouse consider non-hindu as worst kind of people.
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Not all Indians are Hindu, and not all Hindus are in favor of the caste system. While I'll admit there are a lot of Hindu Supremacists and they are well represented in government (AKA Modi), to say all Indians, or even all Hindus, are equally convinced that all non-Hindus are the worst thing ever is not supported by evidence. There are Hindu movements, historical and current, that have been accepting of other cultures and religions. Notably, India has gotten some credit for its good treatment overall of Jewish people.

ATP said:
Muslims are divided and killing each other for many reasons, but when formally everybody could become good muslim,black people are still consider inferior.Which is against their religion,i think.
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If they consider black people inferior, they aren't good Muslims(Zakat), or good people. Also there are a lot of black Muslims. Also there are significant liberal Muslim populations.

ATP said:
3.Western cultures - you are right,there are few of them.Some, like scandinavian are not racist,other belive so but still are racisr - like german-french combo,who belive,that they have right to decide what is good for all european nations.
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As much as I like the Scandinavian nations, there's still a lot of racism and islamophobia there. Not as much as some other countries perhaps, but not gone,
 
ATP said:
P.S i remember one alternate history when USA send soldiers 5 million years ago to built pipeline which take all oil from arab countries to Israel,soviet fought them, and it weakened USA in OTL somehow.Unfortunatelly,i forget both author and title.
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It is a German book. The Last Day of Creation - Wikipedia

ATP said:
3.Western cultures - you are right,there are few of them.Some, like scandinavian are not racist,other belive so but still are racisr - like german-french combo,who belive,that they have right to decide what is good for all european nations.
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Saying that the German-French (not like there are others who support them like Austria, the Netherlands etc.) "combo" is racist for not being too thrilled about racism and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe is certainly a take... I don't have the energy to dive into the rest.
 
Staff Notice: This post is getting really off topic, and it's edging into a territory that we would advise you not to tread on. So let's stop this line of discussion and avoid bringing it up again, yeah?
Anchises said:
It is a German book. The Last Day of Creation - Wikipedia


Saying that the German-French (not like there are others who support them like Austria, the Netherlands etc.) "combo" is racist for not being too thrilled about racism and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe is certainly a take... I don't have the energy to dive into the rest.
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Thanks for info.About racism in eastern europe - leftist yournalist,Jacek Hugo-bader, painted himself black to cosplay as black and go on polish patriots march 11.11.2016,becouse he belived, that somebody would attack him.Nobody did that.
Jews are attacked in Berlin,not Warsaw.
And Germany are problem,becouse they belive, that they had right to rule over other countries.Poland or Hungary do not order germans what they should did on german soil - and we expect,the same from germans.
Every country had right to decide for itself how would be ruled.That is freedom.When one country try to rule over others, that is racism.
 
ATP said:
About racism in eastern europe - leftist yournalist,Jacek Hugo-bader, painted himself black to cosplay as black and go on polish patriots march 11.11.2016,becouse he belived, that somebody would attack him.Nobody did that.
Jews are attacked in Berlin,not Warsaw.
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weird flex: Some anecdote where someone in blackface isn't attacked is proof that Eastern Poland does not have a problem with racism.

ATP said:
And Germany are problem,becouse they belive, that they had right to rule over other countries.Poland or Hungary do not order germans what they should did on german soil - and we expect,the same from germans.
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No you don't. You want to have your cake and eat it too. All the EU-benefits but none of the obligations. Germany is just a convenient scapegoat because of the history of violent German attempts to dominate Europe. The whining about Nordstream 2 actually is the perfect example. Once Germany (again: actually a coalition of countries) actually goes it's own way this rhetoric of self-rule is suddenly replaced by desperate appeals to European solidarity..

ATP said:
Every country had right to decide for itself how would be ruled.That is freedom.When one country try to rule over others, that is racism.
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Certainly a weird definition of racism but the more interesting point is again that you want freedom for certain countries but not for others. That would certainly fit your definition of racism.


But this isn't NP. Your constant barbs against some evil German-French hegemony just get really tiresome.
 
Alert: This is a weird derail. Think it should stop.
  • Staff Post
    • i think we're losing the point of the thread a bit.
    I believe that the thread title is 'What is the most cringeworthy alternate history you've ever read', not 'Which cultures are inherently racist'.

    Let's try to stay on topic people. And for anyone who might want to, no, do not make a thread discussing what cultures are inherently racist. That's just poking a dragon that you really don't want to wake up.
     
  • Staff Post
    • Getting back on the plot then, Eric Flint's Belisarius series is being released (finally) as audiobooks so I've been listening to them at work. Now, as much as I love this series I do have to admit that the spirit of Mary Sue is strong with the main characters. :p
     
    ToothMaker said:
    Getting back on the plot then, Eric Flint's Belisarius series is being released (finally) as audiobooks so I've been listening to them at work. Now, as much as I love this series I do have to admit that the spirit of Mary Sue is strong with the main characters. :p
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    Yeah, it's basically "historical high fantasy" in terms of how fighty/sneaky/smart/etc the characters are, with a sort of borderline superheroic aspect.

    The only thing that makes it work is that they regularly make fun of each other's foibles so much, which humanizes them a bit.

    Come to think of it, this reminds me of David Eddings' writing style- traveling parties of hypercompetent characters who indulge in a lot of humanizing banter about who's going to do the cooking and stuff like that.

    Skywalker_T-65 said:
    I think that fits for most of Flint's work, to be honest. Grantville is Mary Suetopia, after all :p
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    The thing is, Flint actually dialed that back a lot after the first few "main stem" novels of the setting. There's a lot of iffy choices in the first few books to be published (like, ones that came out over ten years ago now), and while Flint hasn't actually retconned those, he's shifted the emphasis away strongly from "aren't the uptimers from Grantville awesome" to "how are the downtimers reacting to the situation and how are they taking this broadly speaking 19th-century hybrid technological base and doing Cool Shit with it?" The physical presence of the uptimers becomes increasingly epiphenomenal in books titled "1635," "1636," or later.

    Another part of the reason you get the "IT'S SUE-FUL!" problem is that the 1632 series started with an unapologetic populist/anti-aristocratic message. The population of Europe at the time was dominated by an aristocracy whose talent pool was really only being drawn from at most a couple of hundred thousand elites spread widely across Europe.

    And the way Flint chose to express that populist message, rather clumsily, was to take the leading luminaries of an Appalachian small town circa 2000 A.D. and argue "these people, if put in a position to "have greatness thrust upon them," would probably do little or no worse than the knights and barons and dukes and whatnot who actually ran European countries in this era."

    Which leads to something difficult if not impossible to distinguish from Sue-ism, even though I can sympathize with that message because it's broadly the same as the Stephen Jay Gould quote I'm sure a bunch of us here love:

    "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
     
    I loved the Belisarius Series when I first read them and still enjoy them to this day :) .
     
    Yeah the thing about Grantville is I'd probably enjoy the latter books more than 1632 and 1632 isn't actually that bad but it's off putting enough that I myself unwilling to push forward with the series.
     
    John Schettler's Kirov series has to be up there. I mean, the series is now at 49 books of what's essentially wargame let's plays (and dull, verbatim ones at that), and going by a back of a napkin calc, it's now even longer than The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest in terms of word count. So it's definitely really bad in literary terms. In terms of AH, it's a little weird.

    1: Time travel is explicitly involved (the series started as an Axis of Time ripoff), so there's the "A time manipulator did it" justification (it's like comparing Guns of the South, with all its flaws, to a story where the Confederates invented AKs on their own and won the war that way, if you know what I mean).
    2: All the wargaming leads to at least a bit of verisimilitude, if only in a rivet counting way.
     


    So it appears Calm Before the Storm FINALLY realized that having a Second Russian Civil War start because of a botched Great Purge was...hilariously terrible for so many reasons and it seems it now starts if Stalin is Assassinated. So one of the most cringe filled mods is slightly less of a walking disaster. Though at this point I have to wonder if the mod has content for a non-civil War soviet union because dear god the lead dev is obessed with this civil war.
     
    Teen Spirit said:
    So it appears Calm Before the Storm FINALLY realized that having a Second Russian Civil War start because of a botched Great Purge was...hilariously terrible for so many reasons and it seems it now starts if Stalin is Assassinated. So one of the most cringe filled mods is slightly less of a walking disaster
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    So, that makes it more realistic than Vanilla :V

    Teen Spirit said:
    Though at this point I have to wonder if the mod has content for a non-civil War soviet union because dear god the lead dev is obessed with this civil war.
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    Unfortunately, Kaiserreich is one of the most popular mods in HOI4, and certainly the most visible beyond perhaps the absolute trainwreck that is RT56. And Kaiserreich is famous for its civil wars and technically-not-civil-wars. It's an easy bandwagon to get on.
     
    Coiler said:
    John Schettler's Kirov series has to be up there. I mean, the series is now at 49 books of what's essentially wargame let's plays (and dull, verbatim ones at that), and going by a back of a napkin calc, it's now even longer than The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest in terms of word count. So it's definitely really bad in literary terms. In terms of AH, it's a little weird.

    1: Time travel is explicitly involved (the series started as an Axis of Time ripoff), so there's the "A time manipulator did it" justification (it's like comparing Guns of the South, with all its flaws, to a story where the Confederates invented AKs on their own and won the war that way, if you know what I mean).
    2: All the wargaming leads to at least a bit of verisimilitude, if only in a rivet counting way.
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    So let's have a look at this. OK, The Final Countdown with a Russian ship, nothing wrong with -

    Amazon.com
    The battlecruiser Kirov, is the most powerful surface combatant that ever put to sea. Built from the bones of all four prior Kirov Class battlecruisers, she is updated with Russia's most lethal weapons, given back her old name, and commissioned in the year 2020....
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    SERIOUSLY!? o_O
     
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    I mean, you CAN do that to some extent. You can cannibalize one ship for parts to get another one working, and it can actually make sense to do so if they're parts you don't have the tools to easily recreate due to lack of demand for a long time.
     
    Oh, I forgot one if this wasn't said already.

    Any alt-timeline where a writer tries to explain that the American Civil War was about states rights and not slavery.
     
    Teen Spirit said:


    So it appears Calm Before the Storm FINALLY realized that having a Second Russian Civil War start because of a botched Great Purge was...hilariously terrible for so many reasons and it seems it now starts if Stalin is Assassinated. So one of the most cringe filled mods is slightly less of a walking disaster. Though at this point I have to wonder if the mod has content for a non-civil War soviet union because dear god the lead dev is obessed with this civil war.
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    Ha, the lead 'dev' is a huge idiot. What he started with was a pretty cool concept with different presidents, 'customize your reich,' letting oddballs like Moseley and Strasser have a go at things, then he went the 'realism' route by nerfing the Nazis and the Soviets, which is FINE (stupid as hell though) but does not make for good game design. And then he started cutting paths like Strasser, Moseley, and I think Huey Long while having a second russian civil war that restores the monarchy as an option. His priorities have been skewed, big time.
     
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