Shitty Alternate History Thread - If only the Romans had AK-47's they would've survived...

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Montgomerie's LinkedIn page (archive) lists him as residing within the Greater New York City Area, his occupation "Extended vacation in NYC", which corresponds with the AH.com's wiki (archive) that claims he resides in New York City, and that same page also claims he is Canadian, while LinkedIn lists his university degree as a Bachelor of Math, Computer Science (1996-2000), alma mater the University of Waterloo, located in Canada.

There is this archived file (archive) on AH.com that mentions Ian Montgomerie ("iadmontg") who apparently was already active in the alternate history community while in University, with his own page dedicated to it, though any pre-2001 archive of the page on archive.org simply takes you to a login screen (post-2001 archives are completely irrelevant, obviously), and appears to be inaccessible.

This 2014 BBC article (archive) mentions an Ian Montgomerie, "a 35-year-old software developer who recently moved to New York", if 1-2 years is "recent", and hosts bad movie nights "in his Brooklyn apartment". The article helpfully includes a link to the group (archive), which lists an organizer, "Ian M", his page here (archive). I am not quite sure if this really is Ian the Admin, since I feel his face differs very slightly from the earlier photo I provided, but then again, the photos likely could have been taken at different dates and times. There are also a number of similarities, as meetup Ian calls himself a geek who ditched tech and ditched CA, taking a "writing sabbatical in Brooklyn", which is similar wording to the LinkedIn Ian's "extended vacation in NYC", and both Ians had experience in tech in California. Meetup Ian is also in a "Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers Group" that includes science fiction and steampunk among its topics, and perhaps would also explore 'speculative history' as well. Aside from that, there are two board gaming groups within the list of groups meetup Ian is in, if it helps. Obviously, both photos depict a balding, middle-aged white man wearing glasses, and in real life, if the are both different people, they both likely consider themselves left-leaning.

There also exists on whitepages record (archive) of an "Ian A Montgomerie" residing in NY, though it lists his address as that of the meetup group instead of Brooklyn, which is listed as a former place of residence. It also lists previous locations he used to live in, such as Menlo Park, Fremont, and also Santa Clara, all in California. In Ian's LinkedIn profile, he is stated to have worked in Sunnyvale CA, which is located in Santa Clara County and is within driving distance of Menlo Park and Fremont. Another company he is stated to have experience at is C-Cube (acquired by LSI Logic), which was headquartered in Milpitas, also within Santa Clara County, and LSI Logic, based in San Jose, also within driving distance of all three locations.

The main problem with connecting meetup Ian with AH.com-LinkedIn Ian, besides the differing photos, is the "iadmontg", and I'm dumb so I don't know whether or not the "D" there is a middle name or something else, and would contradict the other middle name "A", though one can wonder about some confusing process that lead to different middle names appearing in some records, if there even are different middle names at all.

I might post more later, perhaps Ian's history on usenet, if it will be of any use. Probably clean this post up too, as I did most of the searching while writing this post. Honestly, I think this is all autistic, but eh, I was bored, and this information could be useful sometime in the near future.

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Also, here's a site that sells the same shirt featured in the slavery advocate Ian photo. Enjoy.
 
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The "running jokes" page on the wiki is absolutely riotous.
Universal Healthcare Debates: A subject which has been so often argued in Political Chat that the threads have now descended to self-parody. Essentially, the Americans are convinced that receiving free healthcare is tantamount to worshipping Stalin, while everyone else thinks it's a good idea. In 2009 this exploded into the mainstream consciousness, with Barack Obama's alleged plans for universal expanded state leaving American healthcare pretty much as bad as it was already, with transatlantic flamewars crisscrossing the internet. It remains to be seen if other AH.com traditions such as arguing over the Universal Colour Scheme will result in a Tory civil war also.


Gun Control Debates: A subject which has been so often argued in Political Chat that the threads have now descended to self-parody. Essentially, the Americans are convinced that depriving any man, woman or child of their right to own a lethal weapon is tantamount to worshipping Hitler, while everyone else thinks it's a good idea.


Global Warming Debates: A subject which has been so often argued in Political Chat that the threads have now descended to self-parody. Essentially, the Americans are convinced that depriving any man, woman, child or global mega-corporation of their right to churn out enough Carbon Dioxide to put out the Sun is tantamount to worshipping Mao (we're running out of loony dictators, chaps), while everyone else thinks it's a good idea.
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Anyone who browses the site for any length of them can see that these are all lies. American members are just as left-wing as the rest of the site. The few members who are actually conservative never actually share their views beyond the occasional "Have I mentioned I'm conservative today?"
 
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John Merston said:
The "running jokes" page on the wiki is absolutely riotous.

Anyone who browses the site for any length of them can see that these are all lies. American members are just as left-wing as the rest of the site. The few members who are actually conservative never actually share their views beyond the occasional "Have I mentioned I'm conservative today?"
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It's why for the past few years you see more banned tankies than the people you'd think would be on an alternate history site like Wehraboos or Lost Causers. Still plenty of tankies who don't get banned since you can quote Stalinist propaganda verbatim and only rarely will you get the same instaban that you will quoting Nazi or KKK propaganda.
Marshal Mannerheim said:
That's what having Calbear and Ian as jannies does to a site.
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Somewhere you can find Calbear describing himself as a "Blue Dog Democrat" which may actually be true given he's from San Francisco IIRC and a "Blue Dog Democrat" in San Francisco is presumably any Democrat who is not an open communist and might support a few positions slightly to the right of Mao.
 

A More Perfect Union: An Alternate History of the Land of the Free

A MORE PERFECT UNION An Alternate History of the Land of the Free -------------------------------- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the...
www.alternatehistory.com

God this one alt his is one huge progressive circlejerk.

A Note from the Author
(Added Jan 29, 2020)
I've had a complicated relationship with the United States and its history over the course of my seventeen years of life on this planet. As a kid, I was of course blindly patriotic. Everyone under the age of eleven is. I didn't know why America was great. It just was. Or at least, that's what I was told. As I grew up, I slowly but surely became obsessed with history, a product of my insatiable hunger to read when I was in elementary and middle school. And I started seeing other sides to (mostly American) history. The bad, dark, gloomy, offensive, throw-up-in-your-mouth disgusting sides. I learned many of my beloved Founding Fathers held slaves, that the United States was horribly racist far longer than it had any right to be, that swathes of native populations were massacred and hundreds of thousands of prospective immigrants were turned away for reasons as simple as the language they spoke or the religion they practiced. I underwent my own little Enlightenment in middle school and early high school, leaving behind the socially conservative politics that had been drilled into my head by my Catholic primary school and jumping ship to a far more tolerant, open stance.

It was then, I think, I fell out of love with America, and instead fell in love with the idea of America. A place where anyone from anywhere could do anything they set their mind to. A place that held the ideals spouted by the sometimes hypocritical Founders and other great, but flawed, people throughout American history. And then something happened. Last year, during my AP US History class, I found myself looking at every wrong turn America had taken on their path to the present and wondering, "What if it happened differently?" My interest in alternate history was but a fling then, but there's only so many times one can stomach hearing about the horrors of slavery, the hypocrisy of the Founders, the failings of the Revolution, the assassination of Reconstruction, and the death of civil rights time and time again. I needed to do something about it.

America always says it's the greatest nation in the history of the world. I decided to make it be the greatest nation in the history of the world. The United States of America would get to be the utopic beacon of liberty and hope it sees itself as in the here and now from its foundation. There's a reason why Ho Chi Minh added the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence unedited into the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, a reason why protesters around the world hoist the Stars and Stripes high as a sign of rebellion and hope, and it's not because of the American subjugation of the Philippines or the internment of innocent Japanese during WWII. It's because of what those symbols represent in the public consciousness. It's because of the idea they stand for.

And that's A More Perfect Union. Where the Revolution never died and the American Dream is a tangible reality.
Click to expand...
 
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Jaromar said:

A More Perfect Union: An Alternate History of the Land of the Free

A MORE PERFECT UNION An Alternate History of the Land of the Free -------------------------------- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the...
www.alternatehistory.com

God this one alt his is one huge progressive circlejerk.
Click to expand...
Any alternate history based around ”what if x country followed my set of moral values” will always end up as a massive alternate history wank supporting that set of values.

If memory serves me rightly, AANW's biggest problem was that Calbear couldn't leave his own politics behind when writing the damn thing. The world after World War III is basically:
• the Atomic Four (ie Gringolandia, Britbongistan, Leafland and Australia), which are egalitarian democratic socialist paradises with 90% tax rates, universal healthcare and whatever else American progressives think is cool.
• France, the Low Countries, Norway and Italy, who exist as the A4's bitches, to the point where America can casually carry out regime change in France and nobody bats an eye, and the UK gets Normandy back because reasons.
• the Russian Tsarist Republic (???) which is a very thinly disguised American puppet state written in ignorance of the fact that Russian monarchists would not be happy with the borders it got.
• whatever bits of Siberia America thinks are useful, which are incorporated into America proper in the same way Algeria was part of France. The large ethnically Russian populace of those areas is handwaved away.
• Japan, an American puppet (are you noticing a theme here?) which buys everything America produces and is mainly known for creating anime. The Japanese monarchy has magically been abolished despite that being against the wishes of almost every Japanese at the time.
• Germany, which is partitioned into 15 different states, which are bound by treaties that make Versailles look fair and lenient by comparison and where any German nationalists are nuked from orbit. This is presented as a good thing.
• China, which is apparently an ”ultra nationalist cabal” and mainly sits there because the story needs an antagonist.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that Calbear's solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is ”Israel doesn't exist because all the Jews died”?
 
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Hammers, Sickles, and Mushroom Clouds is a story about Russia and America swapping roles in the Cold War. Not too bad on its own, but it's full of howlers like
  • Leon Trotsky being elected president of Russia. The idea that a country with a long history of predjudice against Jews would elect a Jew as head of state is pretty ridiculous.
  • The French Hitler-expy being given a cliched Freudian Excuse to explain his hatred of Jews.
  • Not-Nazi France being able to invade America while fighting a land war in Europe at the same time
  • Ronald Reagan being the Gorbachev analogue. Given his age, he'd be more likely to be a part of the old guard that would be against any changes to the communist system
  • Amerindian paganism as the Islamic terror analogue. It's not like fundamentalist Christian terror doesn't exist.
  • Post-Communist America having a standoff with the Philippines over Mindanao. If the author wanted to have a Crimea analogue, they could've picked something closer to home.
 
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John Merston said:
Hammers, Sickles, and Mushroom Clouds is a story about Russia and America swapping roles in the Cold War. Not too bad on its own, but it's full of howlers like
  • Leon Trotsky being elected president of Russia. The idea that a country with a long history of predjudice against Jews would elect a Jew as head of state is pretty ridiculous.
  • The French Hitler-expy being given a cliched Freudian Excuse to explain his hatred of Jews.
  • Not-Nazi France being able to invade America while fighting a land war in Europe at the same time
  • Ronald Reagan being the Gorbachev analogue. Given his age, he'd be more likely to be a part of the old guard that would be against any changes to the communist system
  • Amerindian paganism as the Islamic terror analogue. It's not like fundamentalist Christian terror doesn't exist.
  • Post-Communist America having a standoff with the Philippines over Mindanao. If the author wanted to have a Crimea analogue, they could've picked something closer to home.
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I read a good chunk of that one a long time ago, it is definitely fun as a story but it certainly shouldn't be read as a serious attempt at alt-history.

A more serious Russia/America swap would probably be interesting but a harder scenario to engineer. A moderately democratic Russia could probably have emerged if Alexander Kerensky's government survived but it would be a nation wracked by ethnic tensions and instability so it couldn't be a great "Bastion of Democracy" in the sort the USA was in OTL's cold war. A socialist USA, on the other hand, would probably be able to throw its weight around earlier than the Soviets did OTL due to the USA's larger industrial base than Russia's, so a Red USA could easily end up the big bad of some alt-WW2.
 
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John Merston said:
The idea that a country with a long history of predjudice against Jews would elect a Jew as head of state is pretty ridiculous.
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The idea that Russia would just abolish the monarchy is also pretty silly, given that in our timeline where the Tsar managed to fuck quite a lot of things up and Russia was very much getting BTFO monarchism had a lot of support.
John Merston said:
Amerindian paganism as the Islamic terror analogue. It's not like fundamentalist Christian terror doesn't exist.
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The reason Islamism became a thing is because various local rulers were willing to support it as an alternative to colonialism.

There weren't any independent pagan rulers in Latin America at that time so I'm not sure how that could have happened.
John Merston said:
If the author wanted to have a Crimea analogue, they could've picked something closer to home.
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I'd have gone for a WASP successor state to America picking a fight with a Spanish-speaking Republic of Texas over Houston or something similar.
 
Marshal Mannerheim said:
I know it did.

That occured as a result of Russia getting roundly defeated in WWI. It's ridiculous to say that Russian Republic could have become a stable democracy, or that the monarchy could have fallen outside of the circumstances in which it did.
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But the monarchy does fall for the same reasons that it did OTL. It's what happens afterward that is the bullshit part.
 
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