#are we FOR REALSIES getting wwii ....

[adamsvanrhijn]

There is an actress on the Downton 3 imbd Rose Galbraith listed as playing Lady Sybil Branson. IMBD confusion?

Link: https://m.imdb.com/name/nm11635548/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl29

Three options:

Complete mistake/misunderstanding/fake news

Ghosts are once again real at Downton Abbey but they couldn't get Jessica Brown Findlay back, so Rose Galbraith is playing Lady Sybil Branson (ghost). See also flashbacks

Rose Galbraith is playing Sybil Branson and she or her agent got mixed up around Sybbie's lack of title

[balioc]

The Alpha Timeline

In the alpha timeline of my imagination --

-- the “true story” of our world that makes our actual, experienced history feel like an absurd Spock-has-a-goatee-here aberration --

-- 9/11 happened ten years later.

We had ten more years of the ‘90s, basically.  Ten more years of everyone knowing that politics are lame-o and irrelevant.   Ten more years of the twentieth-century culture wars fading into an unpleasant memory, until they’re so faded that no one could possibly bring them back and no one would want to.  Ten more years of chill, of Dave Barry and Jay Leno representing the gravitic center of American culture.  Ten more years of easygoing yellow-ribbon patriotism in the suburbs and Seinfeld in the cities.  Ten more years of disaffected alienated young people struggling to figure out how to live authentically in the shadow of a monolithic Establishment, which would always happily pat them on the head and take them in as soon as they got over themselves.  

Obama was still elected, but -- as a show horse, as a young handsome well-spoken guy with a photogenic family, without any of the messianic “was right when everyone else was wrong about the most important issue in memory” stuff.  Politics don’t really matter anyway, so of course you’ll just play to the TV cameras, right?  Everyone was less impressed by him than in our timeline, but in fact he accomplished a lot more.

The 2008 market crash, and accompanying recession, still happened.  We had three years of fear and despair.  And then fanatics crashed some planes into the World Trade Center, and...

...America still went apeshit.  Even more so, in fact.  There was none of this leftover-Reaganite fight-the-war-on-the-cheap your-patriotic-duty-is-to-go-shopping business.  The Moment of Unity didn’t devolve into culture war shit-flinging, because there was no culture war.  The US Government put the country on an actual war footing, requisitioned everything for military use, and sent endless waves of eager Millennial soldiers into basically every part of the Muslim Middle East to pacify and conquer it, for realsies. 

That sure did get the economy up and running again, in the same way that WWII did. 

Also, of course, a whole lot of people died.  Most of them Middle Easterners. 

It wasn’t all blood and death, though, especially towards the end.  The war in the sand wasn’t actually demanding WWII levels of sustained engagement, but -- we wanted sustained engagement, we wanted to be world-savior heroes, we wanted a grand adventure to pull us out of our doldrums, that was a large part of the point, and some leaders were actually capable of consciously recognizing that -- so we ended up pouring a lot of that money and manpower into international uplift.  We built schools and hospitals and roads and factories all across the impoverished Third World.  We sent in soldiers to bring peace and dignity and hope to the huddling masses, at gunpoint, and...a lot of things went wrong, but overall it actually mostly worked.  Africa and South Asia (and of course the Middle East itself) received tons of investment, delivered by smiling young multiracial Americans who wouldn’t take no for an answer and completely brushed off local elites. 

The returning Millennial neo-GIs were even more smug and self-righteous than the Millennials of our timeline, having actually gotten to save the world.  And they were just as inclined towards pearl-clutching prudery.  Something like #MeToo still happened, the whole Pronoun Thing still happened.  But it wasn’t vicious and divisive, because it wasn’t a culture war salvo, it was just the new Way Things Were.  People didn’t get their lives ruined by angry online mobs, they just got shunted out of polite society by scandalmongers until they could display proper penitence. 

Social media and the New Internet, of course, hit their stride during the war years, and even before that point things were pretty different.  The government put a lot of pressure on Google and Facebook to be Useful, and by and large they were happy to do so.  Silicon Valley culture ended up being much less “move fast and break stuff” self-consciously-weird culty disruption and much more ‘60s-era Whiz Kid Boffins toiling away to make wonders for the Good of Us All. 

...Jonathan Larson didn’t die young, in the alpha timeline.  He became something like what Lin-Manuel Miranda ended up being for us, a mega-successful mega-hyped pop-theater Voice of His Generation.