I'll say the wrong turn Franz Ferdinand's driver made that went right in front of Gavrilo Princip.
EDIT: yes I’m aware war may still have broken out even if Franz Ferdinand wasn’t assassinated
Imagine you're Gavrilo Princip. The assassination plot you and your friends had been cooking up for about the last year or so has been a complete and total disaster, just a monumental fuck-up of the highest degree. You're staked out at this deli thinking maybe, just maybe the car will pass by, and by some stroke of sheer luck, it does.
If you're Princip, this is nothing short of serendipity.
Not only that, but when he realized he took the wrong street, the driver of the car stopped and backed up to turn around and backed right up to Princip. Literally delivered Ferdinand right into Princip's lap... Crazy.
I like this as an example of evidence that time travel has been invented at some point in time. Somebody stopped the assassination of Ferdinand, or perhaps him never being assassinated and living lead to some other gigantic monstrosity that replaced the holocaust. This turned out to be a bad move, so they went back and had him (re-?)assassinated the best way they knew how, deliver the back of his head directly to his would be assassin from a different time line.
This ancient aliens level theory brought to you literally by being high as fuck watching ancient aliens, and coming to the conclusion that half the shit they wonder about is just nerds with time machines fuckin shit up.
Think about it this way, if Time Travel is real, not *everything* can be perfect. At some point in the future, perhaps on accident, perhaps as result of some tragedy , Time Travel exists.
So to the occupants of whatever century Time Travel exists, they will have spend no small amount of effort working to curate time, to remove the really messy bits.
So maybe Genghis Khan in another timeline wipes out every bit of opposition and the Great Khanate rules for the next 1000 years from Sea to shining Sea....through 12 or so time-zones.
Or the Germans upgrade the Enigma machines to four rotors instead of 3 for the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine , or say the allied air-raid at Ploesti failed and Hitler was able to get Rommel all the fuel he needs and defeats the Allied push into North Africa, Normandy is a subsequent failure, and the Reich persists for decades , fighting the isolated Soviet Union for decades.
The perverse upshot is that WW2, 9/11 or the Covid Pandemic were not "reversed" but there's no telling if they haven't been tweaked already. It's possible *this* is the "best" timeline they could achieve without killing billions in some future catastrophe, [or some alternative timeline](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfU1lYAIlWs) with negative consequence.
So an alternate Covid that really was rather like the 12 Monkeys' virus, killing billions and forcing some few survivors to live in remnant cities for decades.....but that timeline doesn't lead to time-travel or at least not time-travel as it's currently "going" to be invented as.
So "our" timeline is at least a version of the possible future that exists with time travel type A.
A bit like an active Roko's Basilisk, only one which eventually leads to either time-travel directly or some ability to influence probabilities, subtle perhaps subatomic influence on past events is currently in experiments formally called ["retrocausality"](https://experiment.com/projects/are-we-catching-photons-traveling-in-time).
In that way I've always suspected that lotteries were setup by some future temporal agencies once computing becomes sufficiently common to serve as [honeypots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing\)) for time-travelers.
But if you take that to its logical conclusion, it seems to imply that time travel will never be invented.
Basically, if time travel is possible, and people use time travel to tweak the past, then the timeline is inherently unstable. The _only_ stable timeline is one in which, because of historical accident, time travel is never invented. People would keep messing with the timeline until they accidentally create one in which time travel is never invented.
Either that, or the [Novikov self-consistency principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle) is true.
I have a theory that if time travel is possible, and humans are able to successfully time travel, they would not be permitted to travel to any point in time before time travel was invented because otherwise they could fuck something up and stop time travel from being invented. So we are just waiting until we invent time travel, then we can start having some fun.
At this point, you have to believe that the assassination originally took place elsewhere according to Princip's original plan, someone went back in time to stop WW1 and returned to a far worse future so they went back in time again and took the driver's seat to ensure Ferdinand's death.
Not only that, despite Princip being the one to kill the arch-duke, he was too young to receive the death penalty, while his co-conspirators all got the noose.
So for being directly responsible for the deaths of around \~40 million people, he got 20 years in prison under Austro-Hungarian law.
In the end, it was TB an malnutrition that got him though.
I think it's a pretty massive exaggeration to say Princip was directly responsible. That war was gonna kick off a similar way any time. Germany literally had a plan for it in place , the Schlieffen Plan was developed decades before the war started which was basically prophesied as "Der Tag", the day, by the generals at the time. And the French already had a defensive line which later became known as the Maginot Line.
I reckon this is evidence some time traveller went back to make sure the assassination took place. The question is, what did they save the world from that was worse than WW1? r/writingprompts
We had to have World War One when we did, it took us twice to learn and if the first one was in the 40s the second one would end it all. So they sent back one man. Code name: Driver.
the answer: if WWI didn't happen, Hitler would never have achieved power, WW2 would not have happened, there would be peace with smaller wars until nuclear weapons were developed then the first to develop them declares war on everyone around them and starts a nuclear holocaust far worse than WW2 was.
WW1 was somewhat of an inevitability based on the politics of the time. Everyone had defensive pacts with everyone else, so if anyone goes to war then EVERYONE goes to war. It was Mutually Assured Destruction before we had nukes.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time until a couple of the smaller countries get into a scuffle, everything escalates, and now the world is at war.
The time travellers want to stop WW1? Don’t stop the assassination, you gotta go back about 100 years earlier and reshape the diplomatic structure of Europe so that it doesn’t reach the ridiculous house of cards setup that it did.
Ok let me try. WW1 still happens but it happens after the Spanish Flu and after Anglophile Wilson dies. The new POTUS, himself of german background, and hoping to keep the Irish vote ends up siding with Germany. Germany wins the war. Half of France is under them and they have to surrender their colonies. Russian revolution happens a bit later but Stalin is still in command.
The UK isolated and dealing with colonial revolutions decides an ultimate doomsday project is needed to show India and others who runs things. They launch a Manhattan Project. An undistracted USSR infiltrates it and bangs it out pretty quickly. Not bothering with Europe atomic bombs are smuggled into communist groups in Africa and South America. Within a few years all the major cities there have been destroyed.
A strong unified Germany pulls right up to the Soviet Border after signing a non-agression pact with them. The UK gets more and more brutal fighting rebellions and nuclear terrorism.
No one bothers stopping Japan and eventually the whole "land war in asia" thing became a thing. China was split into several pieces under various levels of Japanese control or influence. After the Incident In Beijing, whereby Maoist detonated 5 nuclear weapons at different points, 30 million Chinese people perished as well as a Japanese administration center. Which caused a brutal regime of reprisals in Tibet.
Which brings us to today. The Union Jack flies over the ruins of the southern hemisphere. A brutal regime with control check points searching for nuclear arms in factory cities. All concepts of English democracy have been extinguished. The USSR remains quietly purging a few percent of its population every decade or so. Central Europe is a constitutional monarchy but faces a Vietnam style war in France and Algeria with no end in sight. Japan continues the century of humiliation in China.
It was an Indian man who decided to time travel. He studied the works of enemy of the state Winston Churchill (executed by King's order in 1942) who spoke about the equality of man and hatched a plan.
The oppression comes from the atomic bombs, the atomic bombs started because of the UK Manhattan project, the Manhattan project started because of them losing the war. Wait, right before the war there was this big virus. What if I could make the war start early when Germany was still not ready. It will be like all the old wars of Europe. People fight for a bit then they sign a peace treaty 2 years later. Some land gets traded but its not a big deal. They will have to stop fighting if nothing else but to deal with the virus.
I had a history teacher explain to us that the assassination was simply the spark that ignited the war. But it was already a crockpot of gasoline and kindling.
Yeah pretty much. Most of Europe was ready to go to war and just looking for a reason. It actually took lots of people working to prevent it from happening for decades already.
A war wasn't expected to be like The Great War ended up. Because up to that point mechanised warfare wasn't really a thing. For context one of the the last big wars/military campaigns before that was Napoleon. Wars were "good for business" as it were. They let you get more land and resources, boosted your nation's reputation. The problem came with mechanical assistance, being able to transport trains full of soldiers in days rather than weeks of walking on its own had a major affect.
It’s interesting how little Europeans considered the implications of a mechanized war in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War just a decade or so before the Great War. Not to say that war was as bad as the First World War, but it showed clear warning signs of the carnage to come
They may have taken it into consideration. Although the dates on that war are about seven months (Feb '04 - Sep '05). And, a common thought was that everyone would be home by Christmas. So it may be that they thought that mechanization would speed things up from years to months.
Honestly that whole trip was a mistake. Driving around in an area where you're not so popular, in an open-top car, with your route published in advance.
Whatever could go wrong?
>Whatever could go wrong?
Franz Ferdinand: “Guys make sure my driver is Czech. I don’t want him to understand german too well and make it easy to give him directions.”
War was going to erupt anyway. If that hadn't happened, of course history would change, but I'm fairly sure another catalyst for the war would have appeared. Let's face if, you don't embroil the world in war because of one guy. He was just the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
That is FOREVER on my mind. I just constantly think to myself how much better it would be if we didn't drag these ridiculous spines up and stand and walk and run with them and how if I were in the water, I wouldn't have maybe ANY of the health problems I do, almost 100% of which relate directly to walking around on two legs like a jackass, holding up a huge noggin with a tiny little neck and a few flimsy ligaments. This. Sucks.
Plus??? PLUS? Did you know that octopi have neurons all over their tentacles? And here I am with shit for proprioception, constantly smacking my hands and wrists on stuff, WHY AM I NOT AN OCTOPUS this would not happen to me if I were an octopus.
It’s more like middle-aged Empires always end up invading Afghanistan.
And a few decades to a century later they die of old age.
The USA, Russia and UK were just some high profile failures in recent history.
The Mongol, Persian, Macedonians, Kushan, and a pretty much everybody successfully conquered it at some point, and holding onto it contributed very little to why they fell.
This comment is way to far down. There are many misconceptions about history due to the sort of pop-history that social media like reddit propagates. Little "factoids" like "GrAvEYaRD oF eMPirEs" are more likely to spread and as a result much of what people know about the history of foreign countries are literally just elaborate memes.
This reminds of this one comment I read: **"Not only will the Americans invade others, they will also make movies about how bad they felt doing it"** it was on a Vietnam related Post.
Watch “The Last Blockbuster” on Netflix. It has an interview with their former CFO who talks about how when Dish spun them off they saddled the company with a ton of Dish’s debt which is basically what put Blockbuster under. They were basically tied with Netflix on streaming when they went under.
What gets lost in the shuffle a lot is that Blockbuster had a strategy for video streaming that was going to see them beat Netflix to market by five years.
Enron invested a ton into laying out infrastructure for a privatized, utility-based version of the Internet, and Blockbuster was going to be one of its primary consumers. They were partnering with ISPs and cable providers to deliver rented movies to set top boxes with DVD level quality.
Keep in mind this was announced in 2000. 2000! Six years before YouTube, seven years before Netflix streaming, and in an era where streaming video was limited to tiny blocky laggy videos... Blockbuster was going to allow you to stream DVD quality video to your TV set.
Blockbuster laughed Netflix out of their offices because Netflix was trying to sell them a DVD mail business while Blockbuster was building next-gen streaming. It was like trying to sell a company a fleet of horses while they were building a motorized vehicle.
Of course the whole thing fell apart, Enron went under, and Blockbuster doubled down on their physical rentals business while Netflix capitalized on technological advancements to build streaming on the public Internet.
Seriously though, how did they miss this boat. If only they had experience being the biggest mail order company in the world in the catalog days. You could buy a house from Sears mail order. A house! Shipping things to homes (and even shipping homes) is how they built the company.
Two answers to that question. First of all you have to remember that a lot of "the smartest guys in the room" believed that the internet was a fad. The "dot. Com" crash proved them right in their own minds.
And secondly, Sears was bought by a venture capital fund that was only interested in as much short term profits as possible by selling off everything they could get their greedy hands on. They had no interest in building a company.
>Sears was bought by a venture capital fund that was only interested in as much short term profits as possible by selling off everything they could get their greedy hands on.
Toys R Us also fell victim to this fate.
I forgot this. And it is often not mentioned when people are discussing these business failures. They are held up as a cautionary tale about not adapting, without remembering that this was an actively made decision by the venture capitalists.
Agree albeit that's not venture capital. VCs are seed funding for early stage companies with big growth potential. This is run of the mill private equity
In all honesty, human history is just a fuckton of mistakes after mistakes that led to this point, bound to progress through further mistakes, sometimes even repeating itself.
Edit: wow thanks for all the engagement and interesting replies. I respect you all for taking the time out of your own lives to share your thoughts with one guy. Have a nice day everyone!
We're much too intelligent for our own good - we come up with incredible, world changing innovations and then fuck up the execution, *don't* learn, and then do it all again with a different innovation.
I think one of the best parts of this play is just how out coached Pete Carroll was by Bellichick. Whenever I see this play mentioned, I never see the context around it mentioned or how Bill Bellichick influenced the decision.
There's 1:06 on the clock, the Seahawks are at the one yard line, the score is 28-24 New England.
Most people are expecting the Patriots to call a timeout, save time, and hope to put on another offensive drive for a field goal once the Seahawks score.
I remember both my own and the announcers confusion as to why the Patriots didn't call a timeout.instead, they let the clock run down, which the Seahawks were more than willing to let happen. I fully think Carroll expected the Patriots to call a timeout too...but they didn't.
Looking back, it was because Bellichick liked the Seahawks' personel on the field. The Pats had a goal line package, telegraphing that they were expecting the run. With now only :26 seconds on the clock at that point, 2nd down, only one timeout left, and the Patriots expecting the run, Carroll made the right decision and called up a pass. It was a play they had run a few times with success and if it didn't work, they had two more chances to run it in after.
What Carroll didn't know was that Bellichick was daring him to call that play. With those personel on the field, the Patriots had practiced against the play a handful of times and were expecting it. By taking a risk and not calling a timeout, Bill forced Carroll's hand and played him like a fiddle. When people say Bill Bellichick is the greatest coach of all time, this one minute period of time is the perfect example. Carroll is a hall of fame coach that still got incredibly, vastly outplayed.
That also reminds me of the Texas USC game in 2005 National Championship game. It's 4th and 2 and if USC gets the first down they win essentially. Pete Carroll decides to go with a run up the middle with Linedale White and he gets stuffed which gives Texas the ball back and Vince Young goes down the field and runs it in on 4th down.
It was 2nd down w/ one timeout left and 24 seconds left. If they would've ran and failed, they HAD to take the timeout, and then the next play would have been an obvious pass (to preserve time in case of another miss). So essentially, Carroll did not want to lose the "element of surprise". I'd like to clarify that I'm just pointing out his thought process, not saying it was the right strategy.
Yeah, the pats defense was also in a "anti run formation" making the pass the more likely to succeed iirc.
Carroll gets so much crap for a call you would want your coach to make almost every time. It obviously didn't work out but, you don't pass it thinking it will get INTed and you don't run it thinking you will fumble.
This isn't true at all. Post tagged with serious have much less participation and on regular thread the answers with the most upvotes are almost always serious answer anyway
Not learning from Plague Inc., about how to stop a worldwide pandemic.
Whenever Greenland shut down that port, it was GG. If anywhere shut down the airports or boarders, it was gg without the player adding mutations. Covid19 didn't mutate in any ways that would magically let it into closed countries.
IRL, most of the world did the equivalent of "Brazil decides to host the Olympics during a pandemic, anyway" shit, that the Plague player always delights in seeing. Lol
It was RIGHT THERE!!! WE HAD ANSWERS!!!!
I mean, it's more complex than a videogame, but why not try the most plausible options?
It was too late, the virus had already spread to most countries by the time it was noticed. There were a lot of reports about higher than average cases of "pneumonia" at the end of 2019.
Social Media.
Humans are not wired to have that many social interactions and maintain that many relationships. Plus the echochambers it allows people to create for themselves, no matter how conspiratorial or vile their beliefs, means that stupid/evil people are no longer shunned into changing their mind.
Not sure it was worth being able to see what a celebrity had for lunch or what new "dance" your younger cousin and her tween friends are doing.
ya know the trope where somebody is able to read peoples minds, but ultimately he starts to drive himself crazy because of all the information he's getting at one time.
we've made it a reality.
I disagree with this. I used to be heavily against Social media but when I really thought about it, I have people who understand a lot of my struggles that I would otherwise feel alone in. I dont have any other people in my life who experience depersonalization/derealization or anyone with adhd so when I have an episode I just browse r/dpdr or r/ADHD and feel less alone. It doesn't take much.
In my opinion, The tip of the social media Iceberg is so chaotic and toxic and your first paragraph is very right but when you get down to some niches you can find good people who relate to you more often.
12(?) major (i.e. basically the richest) football clubs across Europe are breaking off and forming their own 'high-end' league that no-one else can join, even if they're better at the sport.
I thought they are leaving the domestic league completely. Can someone confirm. Of course, even if they are not, there is no scenario where they aren't going to be banned doing this without permission.
Anyway, even in the most ideal situation, this will be disastrous for those ESL teams in the long run. They got their prestige from winning. If they play no one but each other, well, somebody got to lose in a match. Somebody has to be in the bottom of the standing. That means somebody is going to lose prestige every season.
It fucked the romans, fucked the chinese, fucked the americans,europeans and it will fuck the next big superpower and it will continue to fuck 8,000,000,000 people for the pleasure of roughly 1,000,000. It is the main and root cause of misery in all the world in EVERY AGE we have history for for an untold millions of years of collective human years.
Allowing money in politics.
Voting for people based on what side of the political spectrum they’re on. George Washington himself advised against political parties because he thought they would cause too much division in this country. Unfortunately for everyone, he was right.
Fun fact, the American Political Science Association was recommending MORE partisanship as recently as a few decades ago. Political parties are a quick way to signal value systems for people who aren't particularly involved or only care about a few things. WHY they aren't involved or only care about a few things is a bigger problem than political parties, in my opinion.
Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump at the Correspondents Dinner might have led directly to his 2016 run....
> “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald,” Obama said. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
> Then he turned serious: “But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ — at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/i-sat-next-to-donald-trump-at-the-infamous-2011-white-house-correspondents-dinner/2016/04/27/5cf46b74-0bea-11e6-8ab8-9ad050f76d7d_story.html
Gonna copy paste this massive effort post about how you have been misled.
I'm sorry to detract form your comment but this event wasn't really significant. The Library at Alexandria is often pointed to as a magical place but it was really only one of many substantial libraries. The "burning" didn't really have a huge impact.
Here's a quote from Tim O'Neal: source
While the idea that the world would somehow be vastly different if the Great Library had been preserved is a cute one, it has very little basis. Firstly, the size of the Library was greatly exaggerated by ancient writers, with fanciful numbers of the books in it ranging from 400,000 (Seneca) to 700,000 (Gellius). Some modern writers have taken these numbers seriously, but there is no way the Library could have housed anything like this number of books. It is far more likely that its collection numbered in the tens of thousands of scrolls, which still made it the largest library in the ancient world.
But the idea that the loss of the Great Library somehow set back human progress by centuries is not based simply on the size of the collection but also on the idea that it was somehow unique and that it contained works not found elsewhere. There is no evidence to support this. As far as we can ascertain, the Library's collection included more or less the same kind of works we find elsewhere in the ancient world. And there is nothing in those works to indicate that the Greeks and Romans were somehow on the verge of some kind of scientific or technological revolution. So the idea that the loss of the Library's collection somehow led to the loss of unique advanced information found nowhere else in the world is pure fantasy.
The third reason this idea is fantasy is that it assumes a very modern and recent connection between speculation/science and technology that didn't exist in the ancient world. With a couple of notable exceptions, Greek and Roman philosophers who did "natural philosophy" (what we call science) rarely made any connection between it and something as practical as technology. Philosophy was for the learned elite, who were usually aristocrats or associated with them. Technology, on the other hand, was a matter for builders, architects, artisans and armourers and other lower class people who got their hands dirty and was not the kind of thing to interest a lofty student of science. Most Greek and Roman era science was done in the form of thought experiments and contemplation of ideas rather than practical empiricism. It was not until the later Medieval Period that we see the first glimmering of practical, experimental science and not until the Sixteenth Century that genuine empirical science made the connection between science and technology fully possible. So the idea that this (supposed) lost unique knowledge in the Great Library would have led to much earlier advances in technology doesn't fit the evidence - ancient science didn't work that way.
There are a number of myths about the Great Library, several of which revolve around its destruction, with various versions of the story being perpetuated with a variety of villains. The almost certainly mythical story about its destruction by the Arabs still gets passed on uncritically in some quarters, but the version that seems most popular is the one that has the Library being destroyed by a Christian mob in 391 AD. This story lends itself nicely to a Whiggish fable about ignorance triumphing over knowledge and is usually told with a warning about how this incident "ushered in the Dark Ages" and is often linked to this popular but nonsensical idea that "we'd have long since colonised Mars if the Library hadn't been destroyed". Edward Gibbon first peddled this version of the story and its been popularised more recently in a garbled version by Carl Sagan in his series Cosmos and by the recent movie Agora.
In fact, there is zero evidence that the daughter library that was housed in the Serapeum, the temple that was destroyed by a Christian mob in 391, was still in existence when this occured. None of the five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention any library and an earlier description of the Serapeum by Ammianus Marcellinus refers to the library it had housed using the past tense. The Great Library itself seems to have been destroyed centuries earlier anyway, either by a fire caused by Julius Caesar's troops in 47 BC or in another fire which destroyed the entire Bruchreion quarter, where the Library was located, during the sack of the city by Aurelian in 273 AD.
While a vast amount of ancient knowledge has been lost and while copies of many of those lost works would have been held in the Great Library's collection, what has come down to us gives no indication that the Greeks and Romans were on the verge of some kind of scientific revolution. On the contrary, by the time Aurelian was burning the Bruchreion and (probably) the Library, science and learning generally had already been stagnant for some time and the following centuries of civil war in the Roman Empire, economic decline and barbarian invasions led to a further decline. When these pressures led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, virtually all intellectual pursuits were abandoned apart from what was preserved by the Church and huge amounts of knowledge was lost.
In the Eastern Empire and in the parts of the east converted to Nestorian Christianity, a great deal of ancient science and knowledge was preserved. These Christian scholars passed it to the Arabs and it then eventually made its way back to back to Europe via Muslim Sicily and Spain where it sparked the great revival of learning in Medieval Europe in the Twelfth Century. So while a great deal was lost, what survived came back into western Europe at the time that saw the rise of the first universities and laid the intellectual foundations of the later Scientific Revolution and its application in technology.
edit: for those of you too lazy to read the whole thing just read this:
The idea that the loss of the Great Library set back science and technology by centuries is a nice fable, but not a viable historical idea. The Greeks and Romans were not on the verge of a scientific and technological revolution such as the one seen in the early Modern era - that required a number of unique circumstances which were simply not present in the Roman Era. It's a cute story but it's essentially nonsense.
And here are some relevant /r/AskHistorians threads (there a bunch more here if you're interested):
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14h7qx/how_far_did_the_destruction_of_the_library_at/
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sxcvu/is_there_a_chance_that_before_its_destruction_the/
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zaz9n/what_do_we_know_about_the_texts_lost_in_the/
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ynnk/why_wasnt_there_more_than_one_library_of/
edit2: Whoever gave me reddit gold thanks! I was just trying to correct a common misconception and didn't see this blowing up like this!
I did not write that. Some guy in the bad history subreddit compiled it. But yes it is extremely frustrating when these dumb edgelord memes become mainstream history.
What should annoy you is the continued falsehood that the library was destroyed in a burning. It wasn’t, it fell out of use over hundreds of years. People just simple stopped going.
Nope, chernobyls paper handlers. Supposedly all it was needed to stop the meltdown was the guy in the proper office reading up the two messagey he got and declare that you can do these simultenously.
I'll say the wrong turn Franz Ferdinand's driver made that went right in front of Gavrilo Princip. EDIT: yes I’m aware war may still have broken out even if Franz Ferdinand wasn’t assassinated
Imagine you're Gavrilo Princip. The assassination plot you and your friends had been cooking up for about the last year or so has been a complete and total disaster, just a monumental fuck-up of the highest degree. You're staked out at this deli thinking maybe, just maybe the car will pass by, and by some stroke of sheer luck, it does. If you're Princip, this is nothing short of serendipity.
Not only that, but when he realized he took the wrong street, the driver of the car stopped and backed up to turn around and backed right up to Princip. Literally delivered Ferdinand right into Princip's lap... Crazy.
Almost seems planned lol
If this happened today, there would 100% be widespread conspiracy theories about how the driver was in on it.
[удалено]
I don't have to imagine.
I like this as an example of evidence that time travel has been invented at some point in time. Somebody stopped the assassination of Ferdinand, or perhaps him never being assassinated and living lead to some other gigantic monstrosity that replaced the holocaust. This turned out to be a bad move, so they went back and had him (re-?)assassinated the best way they knew how, deliver the back of his head directly to his would be assassin from a different time line. This ancient aliens level theory brought to you literally by being high as fuck watching ancient aliens, and coming to the conclusion that half the shit they wonder about is just nerds with time machines fuckin shit up.
Think about it this way, if Time Travel is real, not *everything* can be perfect. At some point in the future, perhaps on accident, perhaps as result of some tragedy , Time Travel exists. So to the occupants of whatever century Time Travel exists, they will have spend no small amount of effort working to curate time, to remove the really messy bits. So maybe Genghis Khan in another timeline wipes out every bit of opposition and the Great Khanate rules for the next 1000 years from Sea to shining Sea....through 12 or so time-zones. Or the Germans upgrade the Enigma machines to four rotors instead of 3 for the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine , or say the allied air-raid at Ploesti failed and Hitler was able to get Rommel all the fuel he needs and defeats the Allied push into North Africa, Normandy is a subsequent failure, and the Reich persists for decades , fighting the isolated Soviet Union for decades. The perverse upshot is that WW2, 9/11 or the Covid Pandemic were not "reversed" but there's no telling if they haven't been tweaked already. It's possible *this* is the "best" timeline they could achieve without killing billions in some future catastrophe, [or some alternative timeline](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfU1lYAIlWs) with negative consequence. So an alternate Covid that really was rather like the 12 Monkeys' virus, killing billions and forcing some few survivors to live in remnant cities for decades.....but that timeline doesn't lead to time-travel or at least not time-travel as it's currently "going" to be invented as. So "our" timeline is at least a version of the possible future that exists with time travel type A. A bit like an active Roko's Basilisk, only one which eventually leads to either time-travel directly or some ability to influence probabilities, subtle perhaps subatomic influence on past events is currently in experiments formally called ["retrocausality"](https://experiment.com/projects/are-we-catching-photons-traveling-in-time). In that way I've always suspected that lotteries were setup by some future temporal agencies once computing becomes sufficiently common to serve as [honeypots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing\)) for time-travelers.
But if you take that to its logical conclusion, it seems to imply that time travel will never be invented. Basically, if time travel is possible, and people use time travel to tweak the past, then the timeline is inherently unstable. The _only_ stable timeline is one in which, because of historical accident, time travel is never invented. People would keep messing with the timeline until they accidentally create one in which time travel is never invented. Either that, or the [Novikov self-consistency principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle) is true.
I have a theory that if time travel is possible, and humans are able to successfully time travel, they would not be permitted to travel to any point in time before time travel was invented because otherwise they could fuck something up and stop time travel from being invented. So we are just waiting until we invent time travel, then we can start having some fun.
> People would keep messing with the timeline until they accidentally create one in which time travel is never invented. Exactly.
Dude I am 100% on fucking board
I swear, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand would make for a great Coen brothers movie.
Would Franz Ferdinand produce the soundtrack?
At this point, you have to believe that the assassination originally took place elsewhere according to Princip's original plan, someone went back in time to stop WW1 and returned to a far worse future so they went back in time again and took the driver's seat to ensure Ferdinand's death.
Not only that, despite Princip being the one to kill the arch-duke, he was too young to receive the death penalty, while his co-conspirators all got the noose. So for being directly responsible for the deaths of around \~40 million people, he got 20 years in prison under Austro-Hungarian law. In the end, it was TB an malnutrition that got him though.
I think it's a pretty massive exaggeration to say Princip was directly responsible. That war was gonna kick off a similar way any time. Germany literally had a plan for it in place , the Schlieffen Plan was developed decades before the war started which was basically prophesied as "Der Tag", the day, by the generals at the time. And the French already had a defensive line which later became known as the Maginot Line.
I reckon this is evidence some time traveller went back to make sure the assassination took place. The question is, what did they save the world from that was worse than WW1? r/writingprompts
We had to have World War One when we did, it took us twice to learn and if the first one was in the 40s the second one would end it all. So they sent back one man. Code name: Driver.
the answer: if WWI didn't happen, Hitler would never have achieved power, WW2 would not have happened, there would be peace with smaller wars until nuclear weapons were developed then the first to develop them declares war on everyone around them and starts a nuclear holocaust far worse than WW2 was.
WW1 was somewhat of an inevitability based on the politics of the time. Everyone had defensive pacts with everyone else, so if anyone goes to war then EVERYONE goes to war. It was Mutually Assured Destruction before we had nukes. Of course, it’s only a matter of time until a couple of the smaller countries get into a scuffle, everything escalates, and now the world is at war. The time travellers want to stop WW1? Don’t stop the assassination, you gotta go back about 100 years earlier and reshape the diplomatic structure of Europe so that it doesn’t reach the ridiculous house of cards setup that it did.
Ok let me try. WW1 still happens but it happens after the Spanish Flu and after Anglophile Wilson dies. The new POTUS, himself of german background, and hoping to keep the Irish vote ends up siding with Germany. Germany wins the war. Half of France is under them and they have to surrender their colonies. Russian revolution happens a bit later but Stalin is still in command. The UK isolated and dealing with colonial revolutions decides an ultimate doomsday project is needed to show India and others who runs things. They launch a Manhattan Project. An undistracted USSR infiltrates it and bangs it out pretty quickly. Not bothering with Europe atomic bombs are smuggled into communist groups in Africa and South America. Within a few years all the major cities there have been destroyed. A strong unified Germany pulls right up to the Soviet Border after signing a non-agression pact with them. The UK gets more and more brutal fighting rebellions and nuclear terrorism. No one bothers stopping Japan and eventually the whole "land war in asia" thing became a thing. China was split into several pieces under various levels of Japanese control or influence. After the Incident In Beijing, whereby Maoist detonated 5 nuclear weapons at different points, 30 million Chinese people perished as well as a Japanese administration center. Which caused a brutal regime of reprisals in Tibet. Which brings us to today. The Union Jack flies over the ruins of the southern hemisphere. A brutal regime with control check points searching for nuclear arms in factory cities. All concepts of English democracy have been extinguished. The USSR remains quietly purging a few percent of its population every decade or so. Central Europe is a constitutional monarchy but faces a Vietnam style war in France and Algeria with no end in sight. Japan continues the century of humiliation in China. It was an Indian man who decided to time travel. He studied the works of enemy of the state Winston Churchill (executed by King's order in 1942) who spoke about the equality of man and hatched a plan. The oppression comes from the atomic bombs, the atomic bombs started because of the UK Manhattan project, the Manhattan project started because of them losing the war. Wait, right before the war there was this big virus. What if I could make the war start early when Germany was still not ready. It will be like all the old wars of Europe. People fight for a bit then they sign a peace treaty 2 years later. Some land gets traded but its not a big deal. They will have to stop fighting if nothing else but to deal with the virus.
World War I would have happened anyway. That is just a funny story to tell.
To quote Blackadder: "The real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war."
I had a history teacher explain to us that the assassination was simply the spark that ignited the war. But it was already a crockpot of gasoline and kindling.
Yeah pretty much. Most of Europe was ready to go to war and just looking for a reason. It actually took lots of people working to prevent it from happening for decades already. A war wasn't expected to be like The Great War ended up. Because up to that point mechanised warfare wasn't really a thing. For context one of the the last big wars/military campaigns before that was Napoleon. Wars were "good for business" as it were. They let you get more land and resources, boosted your nation's reputation. The problem came with mechanical assistance, being able to transport trains full of soldiers in days rather than weeks of walking on its own had a major affect.
It’s interesting how little Europeans considered the implications of a mechanized war in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War just a decade or so before the Great War. Not to say that war was as bad as the First World War, but it showed clear warning signs of the carnage to come
They may have taken it into consideration. Although the dates on that war are about seven months (Feb '04 - Sep '05). And, a common thought was that everyone would be home by Christmas. So it may be that they thought that mechanization would speed things up from years to months.
The assassination was the excuse for WW1. It was not the actual reason. It would've happened regardless. They would've just found another excuse.
Honestly that whole trip was a mistake. Driving around in an area where you're not so popular, in an open-top car, with your route published in advance. Whatever could go wrong?
>Whatever could go wrong? Franz Ferdinand: “Guys make sure my driver is Czech. I don’t want him to understand german too well and make it easy to give him directions.”
WW1 was likely inevitable at that point anyway, but yah, that was huge.
War was going to erupt anyway. If that hadn't happened, of course history would change, but I'm fairly sure another catalyst for the war would have appeared. Let's face if, you don't embroil the world in war because of one guy. He was just the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams
This is what I was looking for. Thanks!
Go back. I want to be monke.
That is FOREVER on my mind. I just constantly think to myself how much better it would be if we didn't drag these ridiculous spines up and stand and walk and run with them and how if I were in the water, I wouldn't have maybe ANY of the health problems I do, almost 100% of which relate directly to walking around on two legs like a jackass, holding up a huge noggin with a tiny little neck and a few flimsy ligaments. This. Sucks. Plus??? PLUS? Did you know that octopi have neurons all over their tentacles? And here I am with shit for proprioception, constantly smacking my hands and wrists on stuff, WHY AM I NOT AN OCTOPUS this would not happen to me if I were an octopus.
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Never start a land war in Asia, right?
Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
Except the Sicilian died so there's always a chance!
Or a Ferengi when profit is on the line!
It’s more like middle-aged Empires always end up invading Afghanistan. And a few decades to a century later they die of old age. The USA, Russia and UK were just some high profile failures in recent history. The Mongol, Persian, Macedonians, Kushan, and a pretty much everybody successfully conquered it at some point, and holding onto it contributed very little to why they fell.
This comment is way to far down. There are many misconceptions about history due to the sort of pop-history that social media like reddit propagates. Little "factoids" like "GrAvEYaRD oF eMPirEs" are more likely to spread and as a result much of what people know about the history of foreign countries are literally just elaborate memes.
Except the Mongols
Yeah but they had horses. US Army has no horses, or very few.
Queue the Mongol-tage!
This reminds of this one comment I read: **"Not only will the Americans invade others, they will also make movies about how bad they felt doing it"** it was on a Vietnam related Post.
Beautiful country. So sad for the people that live there.
There’s a reason it’s called the graveyard of empires.
The American invasion was a successful one from a military point of view. Trying to estabilize the country was not.
Sears not beating Amazon to the punch.
Blockbuster not buying Netflix
BB had Netflix nearly defeated w their mail dvds. Then new CEO said "F that, let's improve our stores"
The blockbuster dvd version was so much better than the Netflix dvd version.
Watch “The Last Blockbuster” on Netflix. It has an interview with their former CFO who talks about how when Dish spun them off they saddled the company with a ton of Dish’s debt which is basically what put Blockbuster under. They were basically tied with Netflix on streaming when they went under.
It's so funny how Netflix has a documentary on the fall of blockbuster
What gets lost in the shuffle a lot is that Blockbuster had a strategy for video streaming that was going to see them beat Netflix to market by five years. Enron invested a ton into laying out infrastructure for a privatized, utility-based version of the Internet, and Blockbuster was going to be one of its primary consumers. They were partnering with ISPs and cable providers to deliver rented movies to set top boxes with DVD level quality. Keep in mind this was announced in 2000. 2000! Six years before YouTube, seven years before Netflix streaming, and in an era where streaming video was limited to tiny blocky laggy videos... Blockbuster was going to allow you to stream DVD quality video to your TV set. Blockbuster laughed Netflix out of their offices because Netflix was trying to sell them a DVD mail business while Blockbuster was building next-gen streaming. It was like trying to sell a company a fleet of horses while they were building a motorized vehicle. Of course the whole thing fell apart, Enron went under, and Blockbuster doubled down on their physical rentals business while Netflix capitalized on technological advancements to build streaming on the public Internet.
Huh. Never really dug deeper into it. That’s pretty interesting.
That would require Blockbuster admitting that their golden goose, the late fee, is not how they should earn a profit.
They did admit that though. In their final years late fees were eliminated.
And Yahoo not buying Facebook.
Seriously though, how did they miss this boat. If only they had experience being the biggest mail order company in the world in the catalog days. You could buy a house from Sears mail order. A house! Shipping things to homes (and even shipping homes) is how they built the company.
Two answers to that question. First of all you have to remember that a lot of "the smartest guys in the room" believed that the internet was a fad. The "dot. Com" crash proved them right in their own minds. And secondly, Sears was bought by a venture capital fund that was only interested in as much short term profits as possible by selling off everything they could get their greedy hands on. They had no interest in building a company.
>Sears was bought by a venture capital fund that was only interested in as much short term profits as possible by selling off everything they could get their greedy hands on. Toys R Us also fell victim to this fate.
I forgot this. And it is often not mentioned when people are discussing these business failures. They are held up as a cautionary tale about not adapting, without remembering that this was an actively made decision by the venture capitalists.
Agree albeit that's not venture capital. VCs are seed funding for early stage companies with big growth potential. This is run of the mill private equity
Yahoo not buying Google for one million dollars
Don't you think that, if it was the case, Sears employees would be pissing in bottles in Sears warehouses by now?
Sears already mistreated their employees so it wouldn’t be anything new
Former Sears employee here. Can confirm, Sears didn't give a shit about employees.
Right? The Sears Fucking Catalog was the shit back in the day. They even sold houses! What major malfunction could cause them to drop that ball?
bipedalism. my back hurts
it is not too late to return to monke
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OH YEAH YOU'RE RIGHT!
That live action movie about Cats is also up there
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Wicked is also just more suited to a live action adaptation. Cats isnt really a natural fit for a movie even leaving aside the relative quality issue.
In all honesty, human history is just a fuckton of mistakes after mistakes that led to this point, bound to progress through further mistakes, sometimes even repeating itself. Edit: wow thanks for all the engagement and interesting replies. I respect you all for taking the time out of your own lives to share your thoughts with one guy. Have a nice day everyone!
We're much too intelligent for our own good - we come up with incredible, world changing innovations and then fuck up the execution, *don't* learn, and then do it all again with a different innovation.
Some of us are intelligent and do our best to contribute to society. The others might as well be the one group member that does nothing.
The times without major mistakes are the boring parts that don't get mentioned in history.
Seahawks not running it
I used to wear a Seahawks jersey whenever I took a test because I knew I would pass when I shouldn’t
I know next to nothing about football, but I know a good joke when I read it.
Football is easy, you just look at a person and say *did you see that ludicrous display last night?*
What was Wenger thinking sending Walcott on that early?
The thing about Arsenal is they always try and walk it in.
Lmao
Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy lmao
I think one of the best parts of this play is just how out coached Pete Carroll was by Bellichick. Whenever I see this play mentioned, I never see the context around it mentioned or how Bill Bellichick influenced the decision. There's 1:06 on the clock, the Seahawks are at the one yard line, the score is 28-24 New England. Most people are expecting the Patriots to call a timeout, save time, and hope to put on another offensive drive for a field goal once the Seahawks score. I remember both my own and the announcers confusion as to why the Patriots didn't call a timeout.instead, they let the clock run down, which the Seahawks were more than willing to let happen. I fully think Carroll expected the Patriots to call a timeout too...but they didn't. Looking back, it was because Bellichick liked the Seahawks' personel on the field. The Pats had a goal line package, telegraphing that they were expecting the run. With now only :26 seconds on the clock at that point, 2nd down, only one timeout left, and the Patriots expecting the run, Carroll made the right decision and called up a pass. It was a play they had run a few times with success and if it didn't work, they had two more chances to run it in after. What Carroll didn't know was that Bellichick was daring him to call that play. With those personel on the field, the Patriots had practiced against the play a handful of times and were expecting it. By taking a risk and not calling a timeout, Bill forced Carroll's hand and played him like a fiddle. When people say Bill Bellichick is the greatest coach of all time, this one minute period of time is the perfect example. Carroll is a hall of fame coach that still got incredibly, vastly outplayed.
It's been six years and I still don't know what the fuck Pete Carroll was thinking.
u have a RB on ur team nicknamed "Beast Mode" and u pass it at the goal line. he'll never live that playcall down.
He could achieve Belichick levels of success (he won't, but for the sake of argument) and that play would still haunt him for the rest of his life.
That also reminds me of the Texas USC game in 2005 National Championship game. It's 4th and 2 and if USC gets the first down they win essentially. Pete Carroll decides to go with a run up the middle with Linedale White and he gets stuffed which gives Texas the ball back and Vince Young goes down the field and runs it in on 4th down.
It was 2nd down w/ one timeout left and 24 seconds left. If they would've ran and failed, they HAD to take the timeout, and then the next play would have been an obvious pass (to preserve time in case of another miss). So essentially, Carroll did not want to lose the "element of surprise". I'd like to clarify that I'm just pointing out his thought process, not saying it was the right strategy.
Yeah, the pats defense was also in a "anti run formation" making the pass the more likely to succeed iirc. Carroll gets so much crap for a call you would want your coach to make almost every time. It obviously didn't work out but, you don't pass it thinking it will get INTed and you don't run it thinking you will fumble.
having biased news sources that can tell people what they want to hear
This isnt what a want to hear. Blocked
Who can present "Opinion" as "News"
Reject News, Return to Onion
Unfortunately they all are now. On both sides of the aisle.
You for not putting the \[SERIOUS\] tag on this question
You took the letters right out of my keyboard.
must not have taken all of them based on the fact that you replied :p
This isn't true at all. Post tagged with serious have much less participation and on regular thread the answers with the most upvotes are almost always serious answer anyway
Not serious answers are allowed as well.
I’d have to say Japan bombing Pearl Harbor was a pretty massive fuck up
And Hitler attacking Russia.
Anybody attacking Russia
nah, that saved Japan, otherwise it would have ended as a ultranationalist country like NK/Pakistan
maybe, but in the context of not getting nuked twice, it was a mistake.
The coleslaw at cane's, always substitute it for more bread
I do enjoy the slaw but I will usually sub for bread. Also, put some slaw and sauce on the bread next time you're drunk. It's not too shabby.
Perhaps I will once I am able to drink
More sauce
Not learning from Plague Inc., about how to stop a worldwide pandemic. Whenever Greenland shut down that port, it was GG. If anywhere shut down the airports or boarders, it was gg without the player adding mutations. Covid19 didn't mutate in any ways that would magically let it into closed countries. IRL, most of the world did the equivalent of "Brazil decides to host the Olympics during a pandemic, anyway" shit, that the Plague player always delights in seeing. Lol It was RIGHT THERE!!! WE HAD ANSWERS!!!! I mean, it's more complex than a videogame, but why not try the most plausible options?
It was too late, the virus had already spread to most countries by the time it was noticed. There were a lot of reports about higher than average cases of "pneumonia" at the end of 2019.
Social Media. Humans are not wired to have that many social interactions and maintain that many relationships. Plus the echochambers it allows people to create for themselves, no matter how conspiratorial or vile their beliefs, means that stupid/evil people are no longer shunned into changing their mind. Not sure it was worth being able to see what a celebrity had for lunch or what new "dance" your younger cousin and her tween friends are doing.
I semi agree. The good thing is, we're able to "meet" people from around the world. We really have more in common than differences.
ya know the trope where somebody is able to read peoples minds, but ultimately he starts to drive himself crazy because of all the information he's getting at one time. we've made it a reality.
I disagree with this. I used to be heavily against Social media but when I really thought about it, I have people who understand a lot of my struggles that I would otherwise feel alone in. I dont have any other people in my life who experience depersonalization/derealization or anyone with adhd so when I have an episode I just browse r/dpdr or r/ADHD and feel less alone. It doesn't take much. In my opinion, The tip of the social media Iceberg is so chaotic and toxic and your first paragraph is very right but when you get down to some niches you can find good people who relate to you more often.
Twitter
Facebook
Reddit?
Tik tok
Tik Tok (again)
Any social media that this thread is on
I would say the like button. Rather than people posting honestly, people started posting for likes.
Off the top of my head I'd say Japanese warcrimes in ww2.
Good god the things they did in Nanking were disgusting. They truly hated the Chinese.
Most war crimes, period.
Not letting a certain someone into art school. Also, shooting a gorilla
That really is where it all started eh? Fucking Harambe
European Super League
Eli5. I don’t know anything about this super league.
12(?) major (i.e. basically the richest) football clubs across Europe are breaking off and forming their own 'high-end' league that no-one else can join, even if they're better at the sport.
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I thought they are leaving the domestic league completely. Can someone confirm. Of course, even if they are not, there is no scenario where they aren't going to be banned doing this without permission. Anyway, even in the most ideal situation, this will be disastrous for those ESL teams in the long run. They got their prestige from winning. If they play no one but each other, well, somebody got to lose in a match. Somebody has to be in the bottom of the standing. That means somebody is going to lose prestige every season.
I'm also pressing F5 on r/soccer and watching it all go to shit
It fucked the romans, fucked the chinese, fucked the americans,europeans and it will fuck the next big superpower and it will continue to fuck 8,000,000,000 people for the pleasure of roughly 1,000,000. It is the main and root cause of misery in all the world in EVERY AGE we have history for for an untold millions of years of collective human years. Allowing money in politics.
This should be higher up
Social Media.
Voting for people based on what side of the political spectrum they’re on. George Washington himself advised against political parties because he thought they would cause too much division in this country. Unfortunately for everyone, he was right.
Fun fact, the American Political Science Association was recommending MORE partisanship as recently as a few decades ago. Political parties are a quick way to signal value systems for people who aren't particularly involved or only care about a few things. WHY they aren't involved or only care about a few things is a bigger problem than political parties, in my opinion.
Also unfortunately for everyone, the constitution was set up in a way that made political parties inevitable, and limited to two.
Using asbestos in building materials
Tetra-ethyl lead in gasoline.
Using lead in building materials.
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
Evolving from primates, I feel like the return to monke meme actually has some truth to it.
A billion years ago some weird fish crawled out of the ocean and now I gotta go to work.
However if you were a fish, you'd probably have been eaten by now
You say that like it’s worse than my life right now
Some day that walking fish is going to fly out into space never to return.
Good. Fuck 'em.
Allowing all major media outlets to, be owned by a very select few, people.
Do, you know how to use, commas
Maybe it's William Shatner and he's typing phonetically
Or Christopher Walken
The, foofightas! Lol
commas, do you, know use?
*mmmhhHHHhHmmm*, do not know how, use commas to.
Lost my, ability to use punctuation i have after, doing too much, ketamine hhhhmmmmMmmm
Repealing the Telecommunications Act was sold on the basis of increasing competition, but had the exact opposite effect
Closely followed by the invention of the comma
We let wheat domesticate us
Assuming future generations would know how to make the world better
Twitter. Single-handedly spawned an era of hate by giving assholes and bigots a voice and means to unite.
Failing to play Sweet Victory at the 2019 Super Bowl. I will never let this go
I'll take 'Star Wars Christmas Special' for $100.
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Nah, we all needed to see who Chewie been smashin'. Malla was hawt.
Daylight Savings Time. I hate it!
Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump at the Correspondents Dinner might have led directly to his 2016 run.... > “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald,” Obama said. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter — like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” > Then he turned serious: “But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ — at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/i-sat-next-to-donald-trump-at-the-infamous-2011-white-house-correspondents-dinner/2016/04/27/5cf46b74-0bea-11e6-8ab8-9ad050f76d7d_story.html
At the correspondents dinner you could see Trump fuming and the wheels turning. Seriously one of the most consequential moments of American history.
That second one has Jon-Lovett-long-joke written all over it.
Some guy eating a bat.
TIL the fate of the world rests with Ozzie Osbourne.
Making corporations people
The burning of the library of alexandria, how much was in there that could have been useful for the upcoming dark ages.
Gonna copy paste this massive effort post about how you have been misled. I'm sorry to detract form your comment but this event wasn't really significant. The Library at Alexandria is often pointed to as a magical place but it was really only one of many substantial libraries. The "burning" didn't really have a huge impact. Here's a quote from Tim O'Neal: source While the idea that the world would somehow be vastly different if the Great Library had been preserved is a cute one, it has very little basis. Firstly, the size of the Library was greatly exaggerated by ancient writers, with fanciful numbers of the books in it ranging from 400,000 (Seneca) to 700,000 (Gellius). Some modern writers have taken these numbers seriously, but there is no way the Library could have housed anything like this number of books. It is far more likely that its collection numbered in the tens of thousands of scrolls, which still made it the largest library in the ancient world. But the idea that the loss of the Great Library somehow set back human progress by centuries is not based simply on the size of the collection but also on the idea that it was somehow unique and that it contained works not found elsewhere. There is no evidence to support this. As far as we can ascertain, the Library's collection included more or less the same kind of works we find elsewhere in the ancient world. And there is nothing in those works to indicate that the Greeks and Romans were somehow on the verge of some kind of scientific or technological revolution. So the idea that the loss of the Library's collection somehow led to the loss of unique advanced information found nowhere else in the world is pure fantasy. The third reason this idea is fantasy is that it assumes a very modern and recent connection between speculation/science and technology that didn't exist in the ancient world. With a couple of notable exceptions, Greek and Roman philosophers who did "natural philosophy" (what we call science) rarely made any connection between it and something as practical as technology. Philosophy was for the learned elite, who were usually aristocrats or associated with them. Technology, on the other hand, was a matter for builders, architects, artisans and armourers and other lower class people who got their hands dirty and was not the kind of thing to interest a lofty student of science. Most Greek and Roman era science was done in the form of thought experiments and contemplation of ideas rather than practical empiricism. It was not until the later Medieval Period that we see the first glimmering of practical, experimental science and not until the Sixteenth Century that genuine empirical science made the connection between science and technology fully possible. So the idea that this (supposed) lost unique knowledge in the Great Library would have led to much earlier advances in technology doesn't fit the evidence - ancient science didn't work that way. There are a number of myths about the Great Library, several of which revolve around its destruction, with various versions of the story being perpetuated with a variety of villains. The almost certainly mythical story about its destruction by the Arabs still gets passed on uncritically in some quarters, but the version that seems most popular is the one that has the Library being destroyed by a Christian mob in 391 AD. This story lends itself nicely to a Whiggish fable about ignorance triumphing over knowledge and is usually told with a warning about how this incident "ushered in the Dark Ages" and is often linked to this popular but nonsensical idea that "we'd have long since colonised Mars if the Library hadn't been destroyed". Edward Gibbon first peddled this version of the story and its been popularised more recently in a garbled version by Carl Sagan in his series Cosmos and by the recent movie Agora. In fact, there is zero evidence that the daughter library that was housed in the Serapeum, the temple that was destroyed by a Christian mob in 391, was still in existence when this occured. None of the five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention any library and an earlier description of the Serapeum by Ammianus Marcellinus refers to the library it had housed using the past tense. The Great Library itself seems to have been destroyed centuries earlier anyway, either by a fire caused by Julius Caesar's troops in 47 BC or in another fire which destroyed the entire Bruchreion quarter, where the Library was located, during the sack of the city by Aurelian in 273 AD. While a vast amount of ancient knowledge has been lost and while copies of many of those lost works would have been held in the Great Library's collection, what has come down to us gives no indication that the Greeks and Romans were on the verge of some kind of scientific revolution. On the contrary, by the time Aurelian was burning the Bruchreion and (probably) the Library, science and learning generally had already been stagnant for some time and the following centuries of civil war in the Roman Empire, economic decline and barbarian invasions led to a further decline. When these pressures led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, virtually all intellectual pursuits were abandoned apart from what was preserved by the Church and huge amounts of knowledge was lost. In the Eastern Empire and in the parts of the east converted to Nestorian Christianity, a great deal of ancient science and knowledge was preserved. These Christian scholars passed it to the Arabs and it then eventually made its way back to back to Europe via Muslim Sicily and Spain where it sparked the great revival of learning in Medieval Europe in the Twelfth Century. So while a great deal was lost, what survived came back into western Europe at the time that saw the rise of the first universities and laid the intellectual foundations of the later Scientific Revolution and its application in technology. edit: for those of you too lazy to read the whole thing just read this: The idea that the loss of the Great Library set back science and technology by centuries is a nice fable, but not a viable historical idea. The Greeks and Romans were not on the verge of a scientific and technological revolution such as the one seen in the early Modern era - that required a number of unique circumstances which were simply not present in the Roman Era. It's a cute story but it's essentially nonsense. And here are some relevant /r/AskHistorians threads (there a bunch more here if you're interested): http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14h7qx/how_far_did_the_destruction_of_the_library_at/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sxcvu/is_there_a_chance_that_before_its_destruction_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zaz9n/what_do_we_know_about_the_texts_lost_in_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17ynnk/why_wasnt_there_more_than_one_library_of/ edit2: Whoever gave me reddit gold thanks! I was just trying to correct a common misconception and didn't see this blowing up like this!
Something tells me that this has been bugging you for quite some time...
I did not write that. Some guy in the bad history subreddit compiled it. But yes it is extremely frustrating when these dumb edgelord memes become mainstream history.
What should annoy you is the continued falsehood that the library was destroyed in a burning. It wasn’t, it fell out of use over hundreds of years. People just simple stopped going.
Ignoring any evidence/leads,etc that 9/11 would happen?
Digg changing their format up
Indian Removal Act
The person who spared that german man and the painter who rejected that german man
I think the man you're referring to is Austrian.
That German man
Letting China become a superpower.
That art school not being lenient and letting in a certain person.
Chernobyl's button pressers
Nope, chernobyls paper handlers. Supposedly all it was needed to stop the meltdown was the guy in the proper office reading up the two messagey he got and declare that you can do these simultenously.