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Cultures in D&D/roleplaying: damned if you do, damned if you don't
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7400978" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>That's some serious squinting you are doing there. Square peg into a round hole. Although neither side necessarily sold the war on these terms, the American Civil War was fought over slavery. And by "fought over slavery" I mean specifically that it was fought over the ethical and normative value of slavery, which happened precisely because the national cultural value was supposed to be "all men are created equal...". The north would have had no problem with slavery as an economic institution if it did not have a significant population that opposed it for moral and religious grounds. </p><p></p><p>You can't put two different cultures into the same nation, so by 1860 you had a situation where you had two nations trying to live under the same political umbrella and the South's move to secede only was a final acknowledgement of that reality. It wasn't fought over population pressure, and none of your evidence actually links up. You gave a series of stand alone sentences that neither support each other or your thesis. The South wanted to expand into the Western territories, not because it was feeling crowded, but because it needed additional leverage in the democracy. The South was perfectly willing to forgo all Western territories if by doing so it could secure it's culture from political intrusion. The burgeoning population of the North wasn't an economic crisis for the South, but a political crisis because it gave the North more votes and it knew that eventually those votes would be used to try to forcefully dissolve the South's economic institutions. But it wasn't like the South feared the North wanted it's land or the South thought that more Northerners was a bad thing in and of itself, because the North was among other things a market for its goods.</p><p></p><p>It's absolutely ridiculous to assert the North would have been destitute without the South. The Civil War itself proved that. The North could have afforded to let the South go from an economic perspective. The North's economy was massive compared to the South, because the South for a variety of reasons from slavery itself to climate had not industrialized (the South didn't actually explode in prosperity until air conditioning came along). New York alone had a larger economy than all the states of the Confederacy. Nothing the South provided was irreplaceable, because the economy was global. The North could have and did import cotton and beef and so forth from other suppliers without so much as blinking. Your assessment of the war seems grounded in the Southern leaders pre-war assessment of the war, and not the war as it actually was. I think it is very valuable to teach the American Civil War from a Southern perspective, but you seem to take that a bit too far. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>You are speaking too soon. China is well on its way to picking a fight. It's just looking around for a good excuse and a likely target. It's pretty much acting just like I'd expect a newly prosperous nation to act. It's trying to acquire assets in Africa, trying to gain overseas territory for naval purposes, and expanding its hitherto primarily defensive military assets into more and more aggressive assets that you need to assert military supremacy far from your homeland. The only reason it hasn't tried to take Taiwan already is its concerned the USA would intervene, but it's trying to box the US Navy out of the area in an attempt to gain enough 'breathing room' to do an invasion quickly and force the USA to accept it as a fait accompli. </p><p></p><p>But let's try to stay away from modern examples, and stick to history. Some of the most aggressively expansionistic nations in history were the Athenian Republic, the Roman Republic, the British, and the USA. Athens was the aggressor nation in the Peloponnesian War. Rome was the aggressor nation in the Punic Wars, and let's not forget that Carthage was itself a product of a highly expansionistic and aggressive Phoenician Empire. Most people, including most Americans, looking at American military history get things exactly backwards. Pretty much every war the USA was involved in during the first 100 years, the USA was the aggressor in. We started pretty much all of them. After the US Civil War, the explosion of prosperity directly led to America's most blatantly imperialistic behavior in the Spanish-American war. The USA certainly wasn't short of land to exploit at the time. However, almost every war that the USA has fought since the beginning of the 20th century has been defensive in nature. Most people get this backwards, treating the young nation as simply defending its interest, and the more developed nation as being aggressively imperial. The facts go exactly the other direction. In point of fact, newly wealthy nations try to dominate less wealthy nations simply because they can, and newly wealthy Republics tend to look for excuses to go to war. France became much more aggressive as a Republic than it had been as a Monarchy, leading "World War 4" (if you count actual global wars) and between 4.5 and 7.5 million deaths (depending on your sources).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7400978, member: 4937"] That's some serious squinting you are doing there. Square peg into a round hole. Although neither side necessarily sold the war on these terms, the American Civil War was fought over slavery. And by "fought over slavery" I mean specifically that it was fought over the ethical and normative value of slavery, which happened precisely because the national cultural value was supposed to be "all men are created equal...". The north would have had no problem with slavery as an economic institution if it did not have a significant population that opposed it for moral and religious grounds. You can't put two different cultures into the same nation, so by 1860 you had a situation where you had two nations trying to live under the same political umbrella and the South's move to secede only was a final acknowledgement of that reality. It wasn't fought over population pressure, and none of your evidence actually links up. You gave a series of stand alone sentences that neither support each other or your thesis. The South wanted to expand into the Western territories, not because it was feeling crowded, but because it needed additional leverage in the democracy. The South was perfectly willing to forgo all Western territories if by doing so it could secure it's culture from political intrusion. The burgeoning population of the North wasn't an economic crisis for the South, but a political crisis because it gave the North more votes and it knew that eventually those votes would be used to try to forcefully dissolve the South's economic institutions. But it wasn't like the South feared the North wanted it's land or the South thought that more Northerners was a bad thing in and of itself, because the North was among other things a market for its goods. It's absolutely ridiculous to assert the North would have been destitute without the South. The Civil War itself proved that. The North could have afforded to let the South go from an economic perspective. The North's economy was massive compared to the South, because the South for a variety of reasons from slavery itself to climate had not industrialized (the South didn't actually explode in prosperity until air conditioning came along). New York alone had a larger economy than all the states of the Confederacy. Nothing the South provided was irreplaceable, because the economy was global. The North could have and did import cotton and beef and so forth from other suppliers without so much as blinking. Your assessment of the war seems grounded in the Southern leaders pre-war assessment of the war, and not the war as it actually was. I think it is very valuable to teach the American Civil War from a Southern perspective, but you seem to take that a bit too far. You are speaking too soon. China is well on its way to picking a fight. It's just looking around for a good excuse and a likely target. It's pretty much acting just like I'd expect a newly prosperous nation to act. It's trying to acquire assets in Africa, trying to gain overseas territory for naval purposes, and expanding its hitherto primarily defensive military assets into more and more aggressive assets that you need to assert military supremacy far from your homeland. The only reason it hasn't tried to take Taiwan already is its concerned the USA would intervene, but it's trying to box the US Navy out of the area in an attempt to gain enough 'breathing room' to do an invasion quickly and force the USA to accept it as a fait accompli. But let's try to stay away from modern examples, and stick to history. Some of the most aggressively expansionistic nations in history were the Athenian Republic, the Roman Republic, the British, and the USA. Athens was the aggressor nation in the Peloponnesian War. Rome was the aggressor nation in the Punic Wars, and let's not forget that Carthage was itself a product of a highly expansionistic and aggressive Phoenician Empire. Most people, including most Americans, looking at American military history get things exactly backwards. Pretty much every war the USA was involved in during the first 100 years, the USA was the aggressor in. We started pretty much all of them. After the US Civil War, the explosion of prosperity directly led to America's most blatantly imperialistic behavior in the Spanish-American war. The USA certainly wasn't short of land to exploit at the time. However, almost every war that the USA has fought since the beginning of the 20th century has been defensive in nature. Most people get this backwards, treating the young nation as simply defending its interest, and the more developed nation as being aggressively imperial. The facts go exactly the other direction. In point of fact, newly wealthy nations try to dominate less wealthy nations simply because they can, and newly wealthy Republics tend to look for excuses to go to war. France became much more aggressive as a Republic than it had been as a Monarchy, leading "World War 4" (if you count actual global wars) and between 4.5 and 7.5 million deaths (depending on your sources). [/QUOTE]
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