Calvin's Weblog

yah, but what about the commercial weaponization of space... the new McLaser satellite wipes out every Subway on the face of the earth, blackened cold-cuts littered about among splatter marks caused by overheated bottles of chipotle mayonnaise and bbq sauce... or the big-ass Pepsi billboard, visible from the earth, is secretly emitting an ion ray that reacts with whatever the sour stuff is in Kool-Aid causing stomach cancer in children who haven't had a Pepsi (or Pepsi subsidiary product such as 7-up or Mountain Dew) in the last 12 hours...

oh, the humanity...

if you're looking for something else to use as a blog topic, kaitlen and i had an interesting discussion on the ramifications of the south winning the u.s. civil war... think about it, the north american continent would look a lot different, and the world would be a totally different place...

LOL - You're so sinister (The Pepsi thing) - I was going to counter that by saying "yeah, yeah, funny - but seriously when in history has a corporation ever hatched a plan so diabolical..." - then I clued in to an article I read on the weekend where the FDA was heaping praises on themselves for being so successful at limiting the horrific results of thalidomide in the US, compared to Britain's massive onslaught of victims. Anyway, the obvious joke about the FDA working in the publics interest aside, the article said that the drug manufacturers still continued to pump the stuff out, and the doctors continued perscribing, despite the strange 'flipper-baby' coincidence... so, um, I suppose the pepsi thing could happen - but not in Canadian airspace!

Anyway, about the Confederate Army... by the looks of the US right now, you'd kinda think the south DID win! Neither of you were actually thinking it would have been better if they'd won, were ya? As an accademic exercise, it's interesting to ponder how things would be in the following 50 or so years, but I'm not so sure things would be much different today. For instance, I'm pretty sure slavery would be history by now. I'm also pretty sure there would have been a subsequent race war, and in the end, we'd all pretty much be where we are now...
Sure, I'm not really thinking this through - I know there were a lot more issues than emancipation, but other than the fact that we'd have cheaper cotton, no much else would be different - there'd still be a redneck buffoon in the oval office, right?

no, you're failing to remember some of the really important stuff:

a split u.s. wouldn't have had the jam to keep texas, new mexico, arizona, nevada, & california from forming their own nation... remember, texas wanted to be its own country... the southern states would have become a lot like south africa, and eventually the aftrican americans would have overthrown the white-devil... the u.s. wouldn't be nearly the world power it is now and the rest of the world wouldn't hate it as much...

Ah, well if that's the way you want to look at it, then you're practically proving my point for me. Remember, at least three states wanted out of the Confederation even before the war was over! The governor of Georgia, as a way of asserting his states own autonomy, was deliberately stockpiling weapons and uniforms that were supposed to be going to the Southern troops. Georgia would have been the first out, and Arkansas wouldn't have been far behind. Even if the remaining 10 or 11 states did manage to cobble together a cohesive government, they would have been conquered brutally within five years. Remember, at the time, Nepoleon had aquired Mexico from the Spanish, and had propped up that Maximillian guy as el Presidente. The first thing the USA did after winning the civil war was to park 50,000 troops at the Mexican border as a not so friendly hint to Napoleon to get the hell out of there. This would never have happened if the CSA had won, and the CSA would have been squeezed between two super-powers instead of just one. Ah, but you say the USA wouldn't have been a super-power without the south? Not true - during the civil war, Europe was going through the great potato famine. Britain was letting the Irish starve to death, just as Russia was doing to the polish. A mass exodus of Irish and Polish to the USA (remember, the closest port was New York, and that made you a citizen of the USA) gave Lincoln an endless supply of troops. This, coupled with the flood of German imigrants trying to escape the Kaiser's expansionist government (remember, we're only 30 years away from WW I at the end of the Civil War) made the USA a very strong, industrialized nation. Most estimates say that within 5 years, the USA would have had more than ten times the population of the fledgling CSA, and that another war was inevitable, this one, a swift and assured victory. Other than the US, Britain was the leading buyer of cotton, but they were abhored by slavery, and British factory workers were already refusing to work in factories that imported CSA cotton before the war even ended. This caused England to annex Egypt and exploit its resourses, so the CSA would have slumped into a serious depression - or, as many speculate, they would have gone after as many close-by Spanish countries as possible, to expand their range of exportable goods. Cuba surely would have become a southern state, as would Puerto Rico - but would this have been enough, or would they be begging the USA for aid within the decade? As I said earlier, World War I was only 30 years away, but the Great Depression was a decade earlier... the entire world pretty much closed shop for 10 years - the US barely survived because of it's factories, and medchanical/industrial-centric product, but the south, being largely reliant of trade and commerce would have been hit HARD, and would have been ripe for invasion either by the US to the north, or the French to the south (nothing like winning an easy war to keep your peoples minds off of the financial problems at home...sound familliar?) . All the other 'single' states that tried to become their own countries would have either begged to be back in the states, or would have been taken back. The CSA would have shrunk to a handfull of the poorest states on the continent, if it survived at all. Now, the real question to ME, is not whether or not it was inevitable that the USA became a super-power, but whether or not the USA and/or the CSA would have joined in on WWI. And if they did, would they be on the same side? If neither participated in that war, then the world certainly WOULD look different now. If Germany got as big as the Kaiser had envisioned, there never would have been a need for Hitler or WW2. Japan would have expanded anyway, but without their 'picking on the USA' blunder, they'd probably own half of Asia right now. OR... if we backtrack a few dozen years, maybe USA and CSA participation in WWI wouldn't even have been required... if France was so huge, they could have shipped enough Mexican troops to ward off Germany - of course, that would seriously destablize Mexico and France would likely have given up on such a large foreign protectorate shortly thereafter. So where does that leave the world? Pretty much where it is now - except that there never would have been Comunism (no Bolshevik Revolution if Germany had to concentrate all it's forces on the French borders OR if Germany had won the war). The States would own Cuba, Japan would own Korea. So yeah, I guess without all the death, sorrow, tyrany and destruction that Communism has brought to the world, we would have been a lot better off if the South had won after all. You win.

see, i told you it was a fun exercise...

the u.s. already owned cuba, it won cuba from the spanish in the spanish-american war and then pretty much immediately set it free... when you look at the parallels between theodore roosevelt and dubya and the further parallels between the spanish-american war and the iraq war, it's really kinda frightening watching history repeating itself...

as for the bolshevik revolution, it would have happened anyway... the only thing is, if, as you've proposed, the second world war was unnecessary, the u.s.s.r. wouldn't have dropped so many resources into killing 2/3 of the german army single handedly, joseph stalin (who was a fascist, really) wouldn't have gained so much influence, and all of the eastern bloc wouldn't have been forcibly annexed...

just a thought...

But Germany would have quashed any comunist movement before it ever gained momentum. The last Czar of Russia was so preoccupied about the health of his only son (and heir to the throne... the kid was a hemopheliac, and wouldn't have made it to be Czar anyway) that he completely ignored the country around him, and allowed the cultivation of the Bolshevik uprizing. Under the Kaiser's watch, it wouldn't have gone down that way - either the Czar would have been removed, and some other relative would be propped up as a figure-head Czar, or Germany would have just taken over. The Germans were treating their new subject a lot better than the Czar was, so I highly doubt there'd be any uprising - again, if there was, it would have been quashed with an iron fist.

I won't argue the fact that the USSR pretty much single handedly destroyed the German war machine in WW2 - too bad they didn't have as effective of a propagand campaign as the Americans did... for some reason the US still things THEY won that war.
But the splitting of Germany and the later splitting of Korea between the two victors (USA/USSR)DID infact prove to be propaganda machines for both sides. And it's pretty easy to see which side won that one. But Russias utter failure to convince Germany of the virtues of communism (and their modest success in North Korea) are a VERY different debate.

This one's about how different the world would be in the South had won the civil war - and I say it would be different, but not much different that it is now. There's an equilibrium to the universe, and everything always seems to balance out over time. Besides - you're forgetting how your favorite subject plays into this debate... The US was still on a Manifest Destiny kick. You don't think that would have included all these tiny little soviergn states?

nah, manifest destiny was james polk's idea and polk had been out of office for over 30 years before the civil war... california had already claimed its statehood, fulfilling the "sea to shining sea" bit of the clause (although there was debate in washington as to whether or not california would be a slavery state, the californians themselves voted against it in their state constitution and joined the union after having settled that debate themselves)... which part of a split u.s. would have continued on with the manifest destiny mandate?

Yeah - the south ... I eluded to it at the beginning, if the south won, they would have saught small spanish nations to take over, probably would have tried to expand through the south pacific, Hawaii, Guam, etc, as well ... again, it all would turn out pretty much like it is now - what with the CSA men all fighting in Cuba or wherever, the USA with it's imigrant armies and mutitions factories would/could walk all over the depleated south and retain ownership of all their new protectorates.
NOW ... what would the CANADIAN border look like if the south had won? A lot of the higher ranking confederate soldiers (especially the french speaking Louisiana folk) hid out in Canada during and after the war. In fact, there were actually civil war skirmishes at the Canadian border, where confederate soldiers made looting runs into Vermont from Canada. Canada was officially neutral, and had obolished slavery nearly 100 years before the US, but WAS still somewhat sympathetic to the South, because of the obvious benefit that a smaller, weaker united states would have to Canada ... several American ships captured by the confederates somehow made it to safehaven in Halifax, and there were quite a few 'international incidents' when Yankee soldiers would pursue fleeing CSA troops across the Canadian border.
But regardless of the occasional southern sympathy, many Canadians turned out to be Civil War heroes, for the North of course.... there are no heroes if you lose! Four Canadaians were promoted to Brigadier-General, and 29 got the congressional medal of honour. If the South has won, would they like us or hate us? ALL of the states certainly resented the economic boom that Canada was enjoying off the backs of their wartorn nation - their war created a HUGE market for our goods, and with american exports drying up during the war, prices increased for virtualy all of Canadas exports. Maybe the south would've wanted some of those spoils of war back?
Even when the North won, tensions with Canada were high in the following years, which proved to be one of the biggest reasons behind the Canadian Confederation - we needed to be united for fear of invasion....

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http://et.tv.yahoo.com/celebrities/2004/06/25/britneyengagement/
does this tie in?