your opinion of the phillipines?

[WalterMitty]

discuss.

[Storebought]

"Mosquito-infested squalor"

LOL

Truth be told, of the east Asian countries, The Phillippines have always ranked as the least interesting to me to study. All I know of it is
(1) They were colonized by Spain 500 years ago
(2) They are one of only two majority Christian countries in Asia (guess the other)
(3) The country is routinely led by megalomaniac dictators

[The Dowager Mod]

I went through Manila once and it was disgusting.

[MasterJedi]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

[patrick1]

I've never been there so I am undecided.  They have some pretty cool passion plays though. Quite a lot of method actors.

[Colin]

Option 2, it would have been much better off if it had remain an American possession.

[phk]

Hot girls obviously.

[Platypus]

(2) They are one of only two majority Christian countries in Asia (guess the other)

Easy, East Timor.

[ag]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Hot girls obviously.

Yes.

They don't really have a history of dictators either, Marcos is basically the only one. Just very very corrupt and awful politicians for the most part. But the girls make up for it. It's also a shame it's too much under the Pope's yoke, although that is still better than being Muslim, so I'll say the Spanish did a good thing there. It's also better than being fundie, so it's good that the American missionaries weren't too succesful (that's the same reason I oppose the spread of Protestantism in Latin America and am very happy Hugo Chavez recently deported a bunch of missionaries). Plus at least it still has tons of strip clubs.

So I go with option 1.

[opebo]

The number two destination for fun after Thailand, but not nearly as nice a place.  Lovely girls, but a bad (westernized/christianized) culture.  A country highly damaged by colonization.

[MODU]

Considering I learning Tagalog, I have to vote paradise.    It is a very diverse country, with each island having their own culture, and in some cases, their own dialects.  I will get back there one of these days.

[opebo]

Considering I learning Tagalog, I have to vote paradise.    It is a very diverse country, with each island having their own culture, and in some cases, their own dialects.  I will get back there one of these days.

Sex tourist eh?

[Michael Z]

Didn't the Beatles cause riots in the Philippines when they failed to turn up for an appointment with the Marcos family?

[Undisguised Sockpuppet]

Option 2, it would have been much better off if it had remain an American possession.

I agree. We also should have taken mexico in 1848.

[MODU]

Considering I learning Tagalog, I have to vote paradise.    It is a very diverse country, with each island having their own culture, and in some cases, their own dialects.  I will get back there one of these days.

Sex tourist eh?

You would flip if I said Yes.  hahaha . . . unfortunately to disappoint you, no.  I have friends out there which I would like to go visit again.

[Undisguised Sockpuppet]

ha

[MasterJedi]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

I'd probably break them into 3 states but yes, they can still have all their electoral votes. Just like we should have kept Cuba and all of Mexico.

[Undisguised Sockpuppet]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

I'd probably break them into 3 states but yes, they can still have all their electoral votes. Just like we should have kept Cuba and all of Mexico.

good to see we're in agreement here. If I had a time machine I'd go back and shoot nicholas trist(the idiot ambassador who only asked for the current southwest to save time because he knew he was being recalled to washington D.C.)

[WMS]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

I'd probably break them into 3 states but yes, they can still have all their electoral votes. Just like we should have kept Cuba and all of Mexico.

Little-known fact: relations between the Muslim Moros and the Christian Filipinos were so bad when the U.S. took possession of the place in 1898 that the Moros actually asked to enter the U.S. as a state because they figured they'd be treated better by the U.S. than by their neighbors. Their request was declined, and we ended up fighting a nasty ~1902-1910 guerrilla war down there instead...

[Colin]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

I'd probably break them into 3 states but yes, they can still have all their electoral votes. Just like we should have kept Cuba and all of Mexico.

good to see we're in agreement here. If I had a time machine I'd go back and shoot nicholas trist(the idiot ambassador who only asked for the current southwest to save time because he knew he was being recalled to washington D.C.)

Well northern Mexico would have been nice, Baja, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, Taumpalis (sp?), but Mexico south of the Federal District was living in such a backwards state I don't believe that any amount of assistance would have made them a functioning part of the United States. Only Northern Mexico, which has always had less people and been richer, should have joined the United States. Cuba should have joined as well along with the Dominican Republic, which actually asked to be admitted as a state when it gained independence in 1844 but was denied.

[WMS]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

I'd probably break them into 3 states but yes, they can still have all their electoral votes. Just like we should have kept Cuba and all of Mexico.

good to see we're in agreement here. If I had a time machine I'd go back and shoot nicholas trist(the idiot ambassador who only asked for the current southwest to save time because he knew he was being recalled to washington D.C.)

Well northern Mexico would have been nice, Baja, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, Taumpalis (sp?), but Mexico south of the Federal District was living in such a backwards state I don't believe that any amount of assistance would have made them a functioning part of the United States. Only Northern Mexico, which has always had less people and been richer, should have joined the United States. Cuba should have joined as well along with the Dominican Republic, which actually asked to be admitted as a state when it gained independence in 1844 but was denied.

Didn't El Salvador ask to become a state at some point as well?

[ag]

Option 2, would have been better if they stayed a colony and then became a state.

Wow, you are willing to give them their 100 electoral votes (that's, roughly, what they would have if they came in as a single state). Not bad for our xenophobic age!

If they were ever in play in a presidential election, imagine how much time both candidates would have been spending flying from Manila to Mindanao! Who needs California, if you can have Philippines! I'd love that campaign!

I'd probably break them into 3 states but yes, they can still have all their electoral votes. Just like we should have kept Cuba and all of Mexico.

good to see we're in agreement here. If I had a time machine I'd go back and shoot nicholas trist(the idiot ambassador who only asked for the current southwest to save time because he knew he was being recalled to washington D.C.)

Well northern Mexico would have been nice, Baja, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, Taumpalis (sp?), but Mexico south of the Federal District was living in such a backwards state I don't believe that any amount of assistance would have made them a functioning part of the United States. Only Northern Mexico, which has always had less people and been richer, should have joined the United States. Cuba should have joined as well along with the Dominican Republic, which actually asked to be admitted as a state when it gained independence in 1844 but was denied.

The reason Norhern Mexico wasn't annexed back then, mainly, had to do with the Norh/South divide (yes, the ambassador deliberately asked for less then Polk wanted, but Polk wasn't the one to respect an unratified treaty). Basically, Northern Mexico - especially the NE (Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas) - is suitable for Southern-type agriculture, so it would have come in as a block of slave-owning territories (and later, after colonisation from the US, states). There was no way the North would have agreed to it, so such a treaty would not have been ratified by the Congress, ever.  At the same time, annexation of the entire country - including the densely-populated heartland, would have made (at the time, predominantly, Native American) Mexicans a third of the country's population at a stroke of a pen (not to mention, that it would have, likely, resulted in a protracted - possibly, 20-50 year-long - guerilla war). Thus, all calls for the complete annexation were simply ploys by Northern politicians opposed to annexation of Northern Mexico.

The US politics would have, of course, changed dramatically had the annexation of larger chunks of Mexico gone through. I conjecture that if only the North of Mexico were to be annexed, it would have been the North of the US that would attempt to secede in 1861, not the South. Failing that, you'd see a Southern-dominated US history - which, in practice, would mean US today resembling modern Brazil more than its own modern self. 

If the entire Mexico were annexed, the Civil War might have been a three-way, or even a four-way, not a two-way conflict. Hell knows what the possible outcome could have been. At the very least, the political dynamics of the US would have been very different: imagine US being a plurality-Catholic (by now, majority-Catholic), 25%-Indian, 33% Spanish-speaking country from 1850 on! Chances are, almost every election since would have gone entirely differently, the modern party system would not have even emerged.  Also, given how full the US hands would have been in the South, one would imagine a likelyhood of much bigger Canada in the West - I don't think that it would have been really possible to resist a sufficiently firm British suggestion to "revise" the Oregon border, given that most of the US military would have been firmly locked up in dealing with the guerilla in the South, and given that little settlement would be going that way due to the need to populate the Mexican conquests.

[WMS]

Question for ag: Where does the always-rebellious Yucatan stand in your alternate history?

[ag]

Question for ag: Where does the always-rebellious Yucatan stand in your alternate history?

Pretty much as it was: ladino Yucatecans couldn't do it alone, but it is hard to believe that whoever would control Mexico City would let Merida fall to the Mayans, and equally hard to believe that anybody whatsoever would decide that they had resources to spare to get the moskito-infested low-growth jungle back into the civilization (they didn't realize the value of Cancun beaches back then). The only alternate possibility is that while Mexico is being fought over, Merida actually falls and is not reconquered (unlikely - too important), so the bulk of the peninsula "dematerializes" from the international consciousness for a while (as it happened with its Eastern half anyway).