Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
When it comes to neutral mutations, we can literally see constant variance creation in plenty of non-coding areas of DNA over time.
Drift occurs at a fairly consistent rate that reflects the intrinsic error rate of the particular replication machinery that a given organism uses. You can measure the statistical error rate of different ribosomal complexes.
Different planets are going to have different selection pressures. They'll have different conflicts. Different crises. Different cultures. Different reproductive preferences. Imagining that these populations will converge on the same wildtype by sheer chance is lunacy.
Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
It had already intentionally been forgotten how well that worked the first time.
I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.
If the southern agricultural states didn't want to be with the free states in the Union any more anyway, it might have been the only opportunity to withdraw without a war.
Individually, without a confederacy, which instead quickly amounted to a large vengeful adversary where there didn't have to be.
It would have been a tough decision for each state to make, under non-emergency conditions, whether or not they wanted to remain with the country that possessed Wall Street or not.
After all it was Wall Street companies who were often financing the plantations to begin with, before stock traders escalated to funding the slave trade once its human cargo became more lucrative than most.
As it turned out, besides all the death & destruction suffered by all states, Washington itself went into such deep debt to Wall Street in order to fully vanquish the Confederate States, that it set the stage for untenable "permanent" debt where the lenders never got paid back real well for so many decades.
Wall Street has possessed Washington ever since.
Otherwise there would never have been a FED as we know it.
Today millions of new wage slaves flood into the country to further devalue the citizens labor and vote.
Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.
This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.
In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.
1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"
War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?
Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.
At least not exactly.
>war simply made everyone a slave
The same thing in my message, from almost the reverse point of view, how the way some factory-working slaves were turned into employees by the same war in the 19th century.
What's the difference anyway?
The difference between wage slave and fully-owned has been based mainly on freedom-of-movement and payment for labor, which have always been big enough to destroy a republic.
But not big enough for any difference in tasks or financial considerations to be the major thing for something like a government or corporation.
In some ways not much more modern than the Romans.
For the elites, they have always benefited most from a majority of subjects whose wages, if wages were involved, were not that much more significant than zero when it comes to the bottom line.
Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.