Alternate History Ideas and Discussion

[WolfBear]

Well on the last point, although IIRC they were largely from the Parsis minority in India the 1st non-white MPs in the British Parliament were from India in the late 19thC. Also as one hang-over from the Raj a lot of the Indian upper classes especially are English speaking which would make it easier for them to be accepted in Britain and possibly to a lesser degree elsewhere in western Europe as they would be fluent in a language that a lot of other Europeans speak.

Moving tens of millions of people, especially if in the aftermath of a major conflict or an ecological collapse would be a huge operation however and you could see more dying that making it to the end of the voyage.

Steve, you might be interested in this data:

Minorities' Cognitive Performance In The UK - Anatoly Karlin

Here is data from the Cognitive Abilities Test for UK students in 2009/10 via Ambiguous. Some interesting things to take away here: (1) The sample is very large. Verbal IQ has the highest correlation with academic performance in most subjects, followed by Quantitative IQ, and then Non-Verbal...

akarlin.com

British Indians are, on average, almost as smart as British whites are!

 

[WolfBear]

Not impossible if he strongly downplays his religious right credentials and instead runs a pseduo-populist working class campaign in 2012 similar to what Donald Trump did in 2016. But it would be harder to pull off against an incumbent US President.

Rick Santorum actually made some attempts in this direction, but they were insufficient:

Santorum Brings the Working Class into Campaign 2012

And it's about time someone did.

www.motherjones.com

 

[Doomsought]

British Indians are, on average, almost as smart as British whites are!

Historically, one of the main reasons that Indians moved to the Brittan/UK was to get an education so they could being the knowledge back to their homeland, however a significant number of these immigrants ended up staying instead.

 

[WolfBear]

Historically, one of the main reasons that Indians moved to the Brittan/UK was to get an education so they could being the knowledge back to their homeland, however a significant number of these immigrants ended up staying instead.

That's likely true and I'm assuming that this was less true for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis since their own average IQs in Britain are not as high as that of British Indians, correct?

 

[WolfBear]

FWIW, Indians in Canada have an average IQ of around 105:

Test Scores By Ethnicity In Canada | Blog Posts

@HumanVarieties presents some preliminary data o...

vdare.com

But then again, so do white Canadians themselves.

 

[Doomsought]

That's likely true and I'm assuming that this was less true for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis since their own average IQs in Britain are not as high as that of British Indians, correct?

I'm not sure. It could also be settlement habits. The most common things to lower a person's IQ are heavy metal contamination and anti-intellectual cultures, both are very common in big cities.

 

[PsihoKekec]

And would Central Asian Muslims really be that hostile to South Asian Muslims?

Tensions between different ethnicities is a common issue, especially if they compete to get ahead in the society, shared religion is no impediment in people going at each other throats.

FWIW, Indians in Canada have an average IQ of around 105:

And what is the structure of Indian immigrants coming to Canada? Are they representative of general India population or do they skew heavily towards top 15% of their nation?

 

[WolfBear]

Tensions between different ethnicities is a common issue, especially if they compete to get ahead in the society, shared religion is no impediment in people going at each other throats.



And what is the structure of Indian immigrants coming to Canada? Are they representative of general India population or do they skew heavily towards top 15% of their nation?

Possible, though they could also be allies against Russian/Slavic/European supremacy within Russia.

Almost certainly the latter.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Well yeah, using immigration to destroy the nation is always a viable option, however it might drive Russians to a very violent backlash, as they are not as domesticated people as British (who go so far as to tolerate the existence of Pakistani rape gangs), we would probably see situation similar to Burma and their pogroms of Rohingyas.

 

[WolfBear]

Well yeah, using immigration to destroy the nation is always a viable option, however it might drive Russians to a very violent backlash, as they are not as domesticated people as British (who go so far as to tolerate the existence of Pakistani rape gangs), we would probably see situation similar to Burma and their pogroms of Rohingyas.

It could be quite a challenge for Russia to successfully pull this off if there will be a huge number of non-Europeans in Russia, though--especially considering that there would be parts of Russia, such as southern Central Asia, where non-Europeans are going to be the majority of the total population.

 

[PsihoKekec]

When free for all murderfests break out, people starting them tend not to think how it might affect their countrymates in other regions, not to mention that Russians and non-Russian natives might make common cause against the immigrants, like during riots in Buryatia where Buryats and Russians jointly attacked the Chechens. So, for example, if you have lot of Bangladeshis in Kazakhstan and tensions boil over, you would sooner see combined Russian/Khazak mobs attacking Bangladeshis (or everyone against everyone) rather then Khazaks uniting with Bangladeshis. The most recent invader is always most hated.

 

[stevep]

Steve, when do you think is the earliest time in the past that you could have realistically been magically transported to while still being able to make a successful living for yourself? 2000? Earlier than that? I mean your current self.

Given that I'm 62 and having been effectively retired for ~ a decade [took voluntary redundancy with a settlement I could easily live on ] but have seen my computing skills atrophy possibly some time in the late 19th or early 20thC if I could actually persuade someone with enough wealth/power/influence to listen to me. For instance suddenly teleported into the middle of a British cabinet meeting on the 3rd August 1914 is a scenario I've thought about that could be practical.

Or placed in my own younger self ~ early1978 with current knowledge and of course the ability to change things. I could hopefully gain some credibility by info on people such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe who was rather notorious at that time and cut his career short. Based on that and possibly identify a few other such characters and hence get some people to listen to me. Plus this is late enough for a decent living standard and I would be young again.

 

[WolfBear]

Given that I'm 62 and having been effectively retired for ~ a decade [took voluntary redundancy with a settlement I could easily live on ] but have seen my computing skills atrophy possibly some time in the late 19th or early 20thC if I could actually persuade someone with enough wealth/power/influence to listen to me. For instance suddenly teleported into the middle of a British cabinet meeting on the 3rd August 1914 is a scenario I've thought about that could be practical.

Or placed in my own younger self ~ early1978 with current knowledge and of course the ability to change things. I could hopefully gain some credibility by info on people such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe who was rather notorious at that time and cut his career short. Based on that and possibly identify a few other such characters and hence get some people to listen to me. Plus this is late enough for a decent living standard and I would be young again.

Have your computing skills atrophied due to aging?

 

[Captain X]

"If you don't use it, you lose it," I'm going to guess.

 

[PsihoKekec]

An interesting alternate history article, apparently it was originally posted as 1st April joke.

CF-121 Redhawk Program: The True Story Behind Canada’s Purchase of 30 Soviet Built MiG-21 Fishbed Fighters - The Aviation Geek Club

The political maelstrom that set Canada against America back in 1960 lasted not much more than one year but it took nearly a decade for heads to cool off and for relations to return to normal. Variously referred to by American media as “The Stab in the Back-yard”, “The Fishbed Flap” “The Redhawk Incident” or more ominously “The Canuck Invasion Crisis”, the events of that year brought Canadian-American relations to the breaking point. There were members of Congress in Washington who were ready to sanction Canada and there were commanders of the United States Air Force who were ready to go toe to toe with the RCAF. The commander of the Strategic Air Command, General Curtis Lemay took it even farther when he offered “My solution to the problem would be to tell those frozen Canuck bastards frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the stone age.”


In the early Fall of 1960, like a ferocious Arctic front, news that the Royal Canadian Air Force had made a secret purchase of 30 state-of-the-Soviet-art MiG-21 fighters to replace what would have been a deployment of the production model Avro Arrow interceptor swept across America. Americans from coast to coast were stunned and fears that Communist influence had spread to their northern border were rampant. Across America, anti-Canadian rhetoric was boiling over and people began to cut down maple trees in protest from Maine to Wisconsin. In one act of retaliation, three beavers were executed by pistol on the lawn outside the State Legislature in Frankfurt, Kentucky.

 

[WolfBear]

'AHC: A Russian conquest of northern Kazakhstan after 1991'

 

[stevep]

"If you don't use it, you lose it," I'm going to guess.

Dead on. When I stopped work I had a lot of plans including keeping up some html and other coding and it all slipped away. Only really use the computers for discussion boards like this, emails and gaming.

 

[WolfBear]

When free for all murderfests break out, people starting them tend not to think how it might affect their countrymates in other regions, not to mention that Russians and non-Russian natives might make common cause against the immigrants, like during riots in Buryatia where Buryats and Russians jointly attacked the Chechens. So, for example, if you have lot of Bangladeshis in Kazakhstan and tensions boil over, you would sooner see combined Russian/Khazak mobs attacking Bangladeshis (or everyone against everyone) rather then Khazaks uniting with Bangladeshis. The most recent invader is always most hated.

The US has been able to avoid such murderfests, thankfully. At least outside of its ghetto black population, which is really the most homicidal segment of the US population by far:

Black Americans Are Killed At 12 Times The Rate Of People In Other Developed Countries

“We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” President Obama said earlier to…

fivethirtyeight.com

Most victims of ghetto blacks are, of course, other ghetto blacks. But Yeah, you thankfully don't see massive nonblack-on-black violence in the US nowadays like you did 100 years ago in the Jim Crow South.

 

[TheRomanSlayer]

'AHC: A Russian conquest of northern Kazakhstan after 1991'

Possibly replicate the Georgian tragedy that happened on April 9, 1990, like the Zheltoqsan Massacre gone horribly wrong. Zheltoqsan going worse would result in increase Russophobia among the Kazakh population, resulting in northern Kazakhstan becoming a hotbed of Russian ultranationalism east of the Urals.

 

[WolfBear]

Possibly replicate the Georgian tragedy that happened on April 9, 1990, like the Zheltoqsan Massacre gone horribly wrong. Zheltoqsan going worse would result in increase Russophobia among the Kazakh population, resulting in northern Kazakhstan becoming a hotbed of Russian ultranationalism east of the Urals.

Interesting. Sounds terrible!

Well yeah, using immigration to destroy the nation is always a viable option, however it might drive Russians to a very violent backlash, as they are not as domesticated people as British (who go so far as to tolerate the existence of Pakistani rape gangs), we would probably see situation similar to Burma and their pogroms of Rohingyas.

BTW, what kind of immigration policy do you think that a surviving Ottoman Empire will have?