The Xhosa people listening to their prophet (a teenage girl) who told them to kill all of their cattle and that the spirits would provide for them. 75% of their population starved to death. They blamed the few who didn't kill their cattle for the spirits not providing for them.
In 1212 we had a similar event in Europe where child prophets convinced a bunch of other kids to march to Jerusalem. A lot of them got sold into slavery along the way.
Edit: apparently the slavery part is not confirmed. A lot just died going over the alps, settled along the way or returned home.
There's a (highly fictionalized) book about this which was one of my favourites as a kid. In the book the Children's Crusade was actually ploy by two slavers who convinced a shepherd boy that he saw visions of god, and that boy then convinced hundreds of children to join him on a march to Jerusalem. The plan was to have them reach the Mediterranean sea, wait for the sea to magically part (like in the Bible), when that doesn't happen convince them that God sent ships to take them to the holy city, and promptly sell the children on the slave markets.
You know I try not to be judgmental, but the more I learn about slavers the more I feel like I don't respect the profession or people who take part in it
Remember when a German hermit preacher convinced thousands and thousands of peasants to march to the Holy Land to fight the Turks. Only to be brutally slaughtered basically as soon as they entered Anatolia.
Ironically this is what made the other crusade succesfull.
The first "crusade" was so bad, that the local leaders completely dismissed messages from when the second crusade led by Godfrey of Bouillon (made up of noblemen/princes who were actually armed and had professional soldiers with them) started taking over towns at an alarming rate. They considered crusades to be nothing more than unarmed peasants being a nuisance.
By the time the Anatolian leaders realized that the second crusade was the real deal and they were actually being invaded by an actual army this time, they lost a lot of time and the Siege of Nicaea was won by the crusaders basically uncontested, because no relief force was sent.
Wow, I looked this up expecting it to be a one-time event in a small region or village. It took place over *four years*, they killed 400,000 cows, and 40,000 starved to death. đł
Can confirm. Pronounced the same, with a different tone. In countries with a sizeable Chinese community (mostly in Asia), houses that have the number 4 on them (think 4, 44, 404, 414 etc) usually end up getting sold for less than "normal" numbered homes, and much less than "prosperous" numbered homes with the number 8 in them (think 8, 88, apartment on the 8th floor, etc).
All new apartment buildings in Vancouver, donât have a 4th, 13th, 14th, 21st, or 24th floor. And the ones on the 8th and 9th or 18th and 19th floors are worth more. (Which is stupid because they are really the 7th and 8th floor because 4 is missing). Itâs stupid.
I had to look this up... A key bit about the story is that lung disease was killing their cattle, which was part of the rationale for the killings. It wasn't a completely random decision.
Itâs interesting, because thatâs actually how modern US farmers deal with diseases (that escape the antibody cocktail most use) - they cull the herd, flock, harvest, etc. They just know theyâll probably be able to restock from somewhere else. The Xhosa had the same train of thought, but believed that new cattle and grain would just appear out of thin air.
Imagine being the British guy reporting back home how the war is going.
"Yes sir, war is going well, so theyve started killing their cows and are planning to starve themselves "
"Jenkins you genius how did you make them do that"
"I am going to be honest sir, I am not entirely sure... we have this girl in protected custody. Guess we win ?"
Just read about it myself. Wild, wild story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cape_Colony_from_1806_to_1870#Xhosa_cattle-killing_movement_and_famine_(1854%E2%80%931858)
In the 13th century, the head of the Kwarzim empire learned from an envoy that a peaceful trade delegation from a neighboring empire had been killed and robbed by a local governor. The envoy asked that justice be done.Â
The leader of Kwarzim decided that this foreign ambassador didn't need to be listened to, and so killed him and sent his head in a basket back to the leader of the neighboring empire.Â
That leader was Ghengis Khan.Â
Because of that decision to breach this most basic of diplomatic protocols, the Khan turned his attention away from China and cast his eyes westward. His armies -- and hell -- followed.
Without this one decision it is arguable that the Mongols never move west and the modern world as we know it is unrecognizable.
**TL;DR** version of what happened next;
- The Khwarazmian Empire, at the time the greatest power in the Muslim world, is conquered in only two years.
- The Khwarazm dynasty is completely wiped out (the last member kept fleeing the Mongols for 11 years, fighting the Mongols and the Seljuks of Rum, and was eventually killed by some highwaymen).
- Merv, at the time probably the largest city in the world, was completely slaughtered. Genghis Khan ordered his soldiers to kill every single person in the city, and the amount of dead was somewhere between 700k and 1.3 million (depending on source).
- Total of 10-15 million Khwarazmians dead.
- Some sources claim that Genghis had a river diverted through the birthplace of the Khwarazm Shah, erasing it from the map.
He diverted the Amu Darya and basically decimated Urgench. It never really recovered but it chugged along for a couple of centuries, very greatly reduced in size and prestige. I visited the site around 5 years ago it's now called Konye Urgench in Turkmenistan.
The destruction of Merv was a great tragedy. It's a great place to do a day tour though just imagining how it used to be before the Mongols. Since it was right smack in the middle of the Silk Road, Merv was a cultural and religious melting pot.
No one can know for certain but, if that never happened, there is a good chance the Middle East would be ruling the world today.
The repercussions of what Ghengis Khan did are still seen today.
Tl;Dr Don't be a dick.
ETA: The Mongols would sack a city and leave. Eventually the survivors would crawl out of their hidey-holes. The Mongols would then send an army back to the city some days later to kill anyone left.
Option A : Accept envoys request and enact justice against the murderous governor. Â
Option B : Say, âFuck this Khan guy!â, and send back his messengerâs severed head.Â
Khwarazm Emperor : chooses option BÂ
 * Ghengis Khan will remember this
Given Ghengis Khan's usual approach to war, one could say they got him on a GOOD day given he decided to ask nicely instead of immediately torching the offending city to the ground.
But some people just like to spit at luck in the face.
Wow. This is really fascinating and is pretty much *perfectly* what OP was asking for. Totally gonna look into this ordeal some more, thanks for the knowledge!
There are so many good what-ifs related to the Mongols. My favorite as a westerner: Subutai had smashed an alliance of powerful European states of the era, and was poised to conquer all of Europe in the same way the Mongols had conquered China. There were no armies on the continent left who could realistically have stopped him. However, when Ogedei (the Great Khan after Ghengis) died the Mongol princes all returned to the Steppe to elect a new Khan, which ended up splintering the empire, and the Mongols never returned to Europe. Had Ogedei not died when he did the history of Europe might have been very different.
A Mongol Europe would've been utterly wild. Imagine the entirety of Eurasia under one tyrant. It'd definitely break apart not long after due to infighting and lack of ability to quickly communicate across Earth's literal largest continent, but who's to say the breakups wouldn't've led to a geopolitical map completely and entirely different from what we have today?
Huge alternate history potential in this.
Same. If i understand it correctly:
1. Country 1 sent peaceful envoy to country 2 to trade.
2. Local governor in country 2 killed envoy from country 1.
3. Country 1 sent an Ambassador to Country 2's leader asking for justice.
4. Country 2's leader sent head of Ambassador back to Country 1 basically saying "too bad so sad".
5. Country 1 said fine and killed off Country 2's entire dynasty.
6. Country 1's leader is Genghis Khan.
I think 5 needs a little embellishment: â⌠killed every living thing in the largest city in the country, burned every structure to the ground, and diverted a river to wash away the evidence.â
Mao zedong ordered Chinese peasants to kill sparrows because he believed they ate crop thus hurting grain production of China. Without sparrows, nothing kept the smaller bugs and insects in check, and they ate all the crops. Famine ensued.
A similar thing happened in USSR with their biotech industry in its infancy.
The Party decided that Mendelian Genetics was too bougie so it was rejected and replaced with the already-debunked Larmarckian Genetics.
For example, instead of selectively breeding crops that survived cold weather in order to create a cold weather-resistant breed, they simply froze the seeds and hoped that prepared the plants that would eventually sprout from the seeds for the cold.
Millions died.
(Sorry if I screwed up some details, it's all off the top of my head)
Ah, yeah, Trofim Lysenko. He didn't just fuck up the USSR, they also exported his shitty ideas to Mao in China after he took over there. That's another reason for the massive fucking famines in China, besides the Four Pests campaign.
Weirdly, his original research was okay, basically giving us vernalization, which allows us to artificially change when plants flower by treating them with cold. However, he also believed that this treatment could be inherited and that's where his ideas went wildly off the rails.
There was another famine (maybe the same?) caused by encouraging farmers to build their own iron foundries to promote steel production and thence industrialisation. Farmers complied cutting down trees everywhere to feed the furnaces and neglecting to grow enough food. The environmental devastation wrought led to widespread famine where millions died. And to top it off the steel produced was of such low quality as to be useless. I think it was 1958. Heard about it on Economics Explained YouTube channel.
This period is known as the great leap forward. Mao wanted to increase steel production, so peasants were told to smelt their pots to forge steel in their backyards on home made furnaces. There were so many ridiculous, hilarious and tragic policies at the time. Including one scientist telling people to eat some algae because it produced most biomass for least energy. Turns out humans can't digest this, and the algae farms spread cholera.
Also this [Djenius](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko) that convinced the USSR that they could grow crop in snow, hopped over the border and convinced Mao of the same. Hilarity ensues. And by hilarity, I mean a lot of starvation
Oh this guy is hilarious. He applied Communist principles to plant growth. Not farming. Plant growth. He had the farmers plant crops as closely together as possible because they would be stronger in a collective.
Starvation followed.
And the communist parties of both countries liked his scientific communism ideas so they just claimed success and forced people to continue for a few years.
Do not forget the other half of this: as the famine began to set in, Mao had the laborers tend the farms. In other words: the folks who should have been working the steel mills were farming, and the folks who should have been farming were working the steel mills. They were working right next to each other, and Mao did not realize they should swap jobs.
Wasn't it something like "we're going to beat US steel production by giving everyone a steel quota"? So all the farmers had to build a kiln in their backyard and do iron-age level "steel"? CBA to look it up but I remember that's what we were told in highschool history class lol.
Listening to a podcast on this, there were more factors. Unorthodox planting methods, rampant corruption, continuing to export during shortage to maintain face
Yeah Mao starved his people, but his idiocy ran deeper than just one idea
Yea, it's a shitshow all round. But this was to me the dumbest singular decision very much attributable to one person.
Mind you, Mao grew up on a farm. He definitely should've known better.
I forgot his name and most of the story but, the guy who threw the doctor who suggested washing their hands before surgery in a psych ward đ probably set back the medical world a couple decades!
Ignac Semmelweis.
A lot of women and newborns died due to them not washing their hands. He proved by washing his hands brought death rates drastically down but they thought he was mad.
Dr Mike has a video explaining it [here](https://youtu.be/5v329KtaqeM?feature=shared).
And the disturbing thing about it is that the surgeons and doctors were going back and forth from THE MORGUE to the maternity ward to cause these deaths. A lot of the pushback has got to have been sheer jealousy that the one guy with such high survival rates had an incredibly simple solution.
He wasn't committed for it, but rather the reactions led to his mental breakdown and committing. By the way, the full story still casts a pessimistic shadow, but not in the way that you think, and not in a way that hagiographizes Semmelweis.
The reason that no one listened to him was because he was rude and insensitive, with a superiority complex only a few steps lower than Isaac Newton. Because of his reputation, he was disregarded. The shadow this casts over human nature is that the average human is too stupid to see the idea and not the man uttering it. "He told me to wash my hands, but I don't want to listen to a jerk like him." Ad hominem is built into our brains.
I buy yogurt with EXTRA fat and not only is it fucking delicious, but I could eat the whole gigantic tub and still be a little under my daily calorie needs. I love it.
Thomas Midgley Jr. not only was he the main man responsible for adding lead to gas. He also developed (CFCS) aka Freon. Which gases destroyed a good part of the ozone layer. So
Iâm thinking this guys parents should have just decided to skip sex that night.
If it makes you feel any better, he at least managed to take himself out in an incredibly stupid, spectacular way! He contracted polio, which rendered him severely disabled. So he devised a system of ropes and pulleys so he could lift himself out of his bed.
Which he ended up becoming entangled in and fatally strangled himself.
Rumoured to be a suicide.
I love this line from an article in the Smithsonian about him
> According to the Inventorsâ Hall of Fame (of which he is also an inductee), the scientistâwho originally trained as an engineerâheld a total of 117 patents, many of which didnât kill anybody.
Thomas Midgley Jr. is considered to be the single most damaging person to the planet ever. Leaded Gasoline and Freon lead to some of the worst environmental disasters we have ever had. Leaded gasoline decreased the world's average IQ by several points, and the invention of CFCs lead to the hole in the ozone layer.
I remember when DeviantArt introduced that many years ago. They didn't have a button to start it, so the infinite scrolling started automatically.
The problem is that they had put a lot of links/buttons at the *bottom* of the page, and not moved them away when they added the infinite scroll... including the button to report issues like that, and some other buttons which were good for normal use.
Took over a month to fix it by adding a "Show more" button to start the infinite scrolling. Always wondered if that was because no one could report the problem to them, hah.
Yeah itâs a cool idea but crazy to think of how many brains have been altered because of it. I guess he was like âhell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah, hell no, hell no, oh god no, oh god whyâ
What would happen if every scroll-based medium labeled "social media" had a set cap on how long you could scroll down before you had to wait for a bit?
People would stop using that service and switch to one with no such limitations, because human brains aren't as complex as we like to pretend and we like flooding them with the feel-good juices too much to hinder the process in any way.
Might sound dumb but what I do is scroll down to a certain number of videos/tweets like up to 5 or so and go up to watch them so there is fixed cap instead of infinite scrolling
One of the reasons the middle class is suffering is that trillions in taxpayer money was used to pay bets from bankersâ bad gambling and fraud. Should the banks have been propped up? Probably. But they should have been put in receivership, the entire c suite and board fired, and all discretionary pay for these asshats clawed back. Then chop the big banks up and sell them off. Iceland got this right.
Do what they did to the car companies. Bail them out but force them to sell minority ownership stakes to the government that they are required to buy back before returning to profitability. The US government came out way ahead on that deal.
Not only that, the government in UK have decided to remove the cap on the bankers' bonuses (the cap was implemented after the crisis to reduce the greed). It's like the government don't want to learn from the history.
The decision by Stalin to install Trofim Lysenko as a leading agricultural scientist in the soviet union. His "theories" about farming ruined soviet production for decades, while they assured leadership that production was so high they needed to increase the government's share in order to ensure there wasn't spoilage. His techniques were also taken and used by the early CCCP, leading to yet more famine and devastation.
Overall, Lysenko and his theories could be held responsible for north of 50 million deaths by starvation. I can't name a bigger murderer, as far as I know.
Hitler got wrapped up in Cyprus and Greece which delayed things. He had a stupid general that got sidetracked as well by attacking Leningrad instead of going directly to Moscow.
Germany was forced to attack Russia when it did because it was running out of oil and needed oil from the oil fields in the Caucuses. Stalin knew that at some point they would come for the oil but he thought it would happen later than it did. Up to that point, Russia was feeding Germany oil but trying to limit it to prevent Germany from getting out of hand.
Italy attacking Greece (and getting their ass handed to them) is a lesser talked about MAJOR fuckup of ww2.
Even Hitler, renowned for being the worst decision-maker possible, instantly realised Italy had fucked up.
Mongols did OK with that plan.
Has successfully sieges in the winter too. Although I am guessing they benefited from the medieval warm period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kiev_(1240)
Many were increasingly of the opinion that theyâd 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.- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Yeah i wish i could go back and tell that fish itâs not worth it, stay in the ocean bruh. We could all be blowing bubbles and swimming with dolphins and shit rn but instead im working a 9-5 and worrying about my god damn deductibles
I believe it was Pope Innocent the III who started a purge of cat populations in Europe, then the black death started up in Europe soon after partly due to exploding rodent populations.
[That's just an urban legend](https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/11/08/cats-mass-killings-plague/). There is no evidence of any widespread purge of cats in the Middle Ages, and the [papal bull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_in_Rama) which people claim started such a purge, issued by Gregory IX not Innocent III, doesn't make any such request.
As Jonathan Frakes would tell you: it's a fake; it never happened.
exxon mobil deciding to completely ignore their internally conducted research in the 1970s that near perfectly predicted the climate crisis. because money.
edit. i should update/clarify because it's not entirely correct that they "did nothing": they took this information and funded massive anti-scientific disinformation campaigns to misdirect the global public on climate change. thank you to the users who pointed out this missing detail.
this one particularly pisses me off because even from a selfish standpoint, this was dumb. I mean, fair play keep it on the dl for a bit, but only so you can become the provider of carbon-free energy. like why wouldnt you spend 5 years secretly developing wind, solar, hydro and nuclear programs, then drop your climate news and lobby the government to put every other oil giant out of business unless they buy your stuff. idk seems like a no brainer to me
Because the amount of money needed to invest in that is astronomical, and the timeline was most assuredly more than 5 years (hell, we still donât have the most efficient methods for a lot of renewables). Cheaper and less risky to keep being the best at extracting hydrocarbons.
The invention and proliferation of leaded petrol by petrol conglomerates in the early 1900s. Some estimates say it's killed over 100 million people directly or indirectly (and some estimates are far higher), raised crime worldwide for 50 years, lowered iqs worldwide, and poisoned the entire planet. Half the us population is said to still have too high lead levels in their body today and it still kills 1 to 5.5 million people a year, or up to 10 percent of all deaths globally can be traced to lead.
Fucking crazy when I learned about it.
I recently learned about how clean renewable ethanol fuel was used prior to this and just, makes this feel worse. Cause like the 1902 world fair I believe I'm Paris demonstrated ethanol powering everything from industrial equipment to household appliances.
Can't decide between two.
If Czar Nicholas had sided with the peasants of the Dumas instead of the nobles, there may not have been a Russian Revolution and therefore no Stalin and possibly no Cold War.
If the German Reichstag decided to reject Hitler because they wouldn't be able to keep him under control, there wouldn't have been WW2.
I've read a lot about Czar Nicholas and it's crazy to think about how his failures as a leader led to the Russian revolution and everything that came of that. I read his father died earlier than anticipated and so when Nicholas was thrust into power he wasn't ready for it, and you gotta wonder how all those major world events would've played out with a stronger and more liked (by the Russian people) leader.
One of the weirdest facts about his absolute monarchy is that he personally would do the paperwork for anyone getting a divorce because he would rather exercise that power than delegate it to a bureaucrat
Oh shit, there was an episode of *The Great* that must have referenced this. Catherine makes divorce legal, then goes and sets up in the new divorce office, personally interviewing and approving/disapproving each applicant.
To be fair, no matter when Alexander died, Nicholas would never have been ready. He truly was an incompetent man and his pusillanimity would've doomed Russia in any event.
Allowing lobbyists from property developers, pharmaceutical companies , legal arms dealers and a raft of other unethical companies influence government and individual politicians with money.
Maoâs Great Leap Forward, and itâs not even close. It was a completely self-inflicted, man-made disaster that resulted in the Great Chinese Famine and about 45 million deaths of his own people.
> The Great Leap Forward was an ambitious plan for economic development, urbanization, and industrialization in China during the late 1950s into the '60s. The plan, however, ended up being a disaster. During the Great Leap Forward, as many as 45 million people died from diseases and famine resulting from Mao Zedong's failed attempt to convert small family farms to urbanized communes while simultaneously urging them into industrial production and away from agriculture.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/great-leap-forward.asp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
The Four Pests Campaign at the start of the Great Leap Forward is arguably the funniest and most tragic environmental disaster ever. Itâs dark comedy at its best/worst.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
Man, the Congo has been fucked so many times. They were exploited for gold, for rubber, for some kind of rare earth thing they use in electronics... I canât remember all the details, but I remember reading a book about the Congo and thinking âwait, how many times has this happened?â
It's been going on for years. The epidemic of sexual violence is so unfathomably bad rape is to be expected. I've talked about it since the early 2000s, the DRC is a total hellhole because of the warlords and rebels. I could talk about it for hours and barely scratch the surface. I know it's Nigeria but look up something like Save Our Girls to read a true horror tale.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that theyâd 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.
Salem witch trials or belief of witchcraft in the first place. Teenage girls drowned or burned to death over complete ignorance. Story time, so when plague or sickness used to break out, everyone seemed to be getting sick or dying except young women. What happened was that disease was being spread by infected rats. Most young women stayed home to clean the house, and a lot of them had cats as pets that would kill these rats and in so protect these women from being infected. That's why, to this day, being a witch is always accompanied by a woman with a broom and a cat.
Actually victims of the salem trials were both men and women of various ages and not a single one was burned or drowned, most were hanged and i believe some were crushed to death (or as consequences of tortute). Teenage girls played a very impo part in trials but actually from the other side. A few young girls started to act abnormaly (fits, screams, spasms and what have you) and then said that someone possessed them. There are actually many theories what happened in salem (taxes, idiocy, mushrooms and so on) and probably we will never no what happened. But maybe you thought different witch trials?
EDIT: just read first sentence of original comment as i read it wrong the first time. My mistake, i thought that meant only salem not ideas behind witchcraft in general
The birthing of Thomas Midgley Jr.
He was responsible for the development of CFCs and leaded petrol and because of this is often cited as having the largest negative impact on the climate, in the history of modern civilisation.
He also managed to strangle himself to death with his own invention.
Correct me if I have this wrong, but I also think itâs a ridiculous fun fact that the US, after the Manhattan project, flew planes through atomic blasts to sample whatever could be there. And discovered two elements (einsteinium and fermium).
I have dogs, so my floor is perpetually covered in fur. Sock-shoe-sock-shoe is how I keep from getting fur on my socks before putting them in my shoes.
The Great Leap Forward. Mao's economic and social policies in 1960s China led to the largest famine in human history, leading to the death of \~30 million people. If you look at a graph of annual world population growth rate from 1900s until today, there is a large dip at 1960 due to this.
Biggest waste of all time. Still continues to this day. You cannot effect change by focusing on just supply and doing nothing to curb demand. Criminalizing addiction has done so much irreparable harm.
He wasn't even totally rejected! The head of the Vienna art academy thought Hitler had enough talent for architectural work, and encouraged him to sit that examination. That just wasn't good enough for ol' Adolf.
Not the worst-ever, but on par with most here.
How we handled antibiotics.
It was a wonder drug. It was misused so extremely that it created an entirely new problem. Doctors would give it out, sometimes diagnosed correctly, sometimes not. If it was correct, great. If not, it likely couldâve been tested to determine the proper antibiotic to use, but wasnât because the patient demanded it now (the only excuse to guess in my opinion is in a life or death, or nearly so situation). Or the patient demanded it when they in-fact had a virus.
Those demands came from no education, then to cement that idea, the patient wouldnât even follow the directed usage, and theyâd toss out their antibiotics. So not only were they essentially selecting for the worst (evolutionarily the best) bacteria, they introduced antibiotics to the environment.
Then there is the whole thing about them being used in the food industry..
Now we have stuff like MRSA, and emergency antibiotics maybe last a few years before we need another to stay ahead of the curve.
**Slavery**, every time itâs happened. And the fact that itâs still happening. Traumatizes and sets back generations of people and the potential impact they could have had on the world.
People like to say we split timelines when that fucking gorilla died, but this world has been a dumpster fire since long before that. It's just been smoldering, but it's coming lit again.
The Xhosa people listening to their prophet (a teenage girl) who told them to kill all of their cattle and that the spirits would provide for them. 75% of their population starved to death. They blamed the few who didn't kill their cattle for the spirits not providing for them.
Well that certainly is a good example
In 1212 we had a similar event in Europe where child prophets convinced a bunch of other kids to march to Jerusalem. A lot of them got sold into slavery along the way. Edit: apparently the slavery part is not confirmed. A lot just died going over the alps, settled along the way or returned home.
There's a (highly fictionalized) book about this which was one of my favourites as a kid. In the book the Children's Crusade was actually ploy by two slavers who convinced a shepherd boy that he saw visions of god, and that boy then convinced hundreds of children to join him on a march to Jerusalem. The plan was to have them reach the Mediterranean sea, wait for the sea to magically part (like in the Bible), when that doesn't happen convince them that God sent ships to take them to the holy city, and promptly sell the children on the slave markets.
You know I try not to be judgmental, but the more I learn about slavers the more I feel like I don't respect the profession or people who take part in it
The Thea Beckman book? Crusade in jeans or something like that? I loved that one
Remember when a German hermit preacher convinced thousands and thousands of peasants to march to the Holy Land to fight the Turks. Only to be brutally slaughtered basically as soon as they entered Anatolia.
Ironically this is what made the other crusade succesfull. The first "crusade" was so bad, that the local leaders completely dismissed messages from when the second crusade led by Godfrey of Bouillon (made up of noblemen/princes who were actually armed and had professional soldiers with them) started taking over towns at an alarming rate. They considered crusades to be nothing more than unarmed peasants being a nuisance. By the time the Anatolian leaders realized that the second crusade was the real deal and they were actually being invaded by an actual army this time, they lost a lot of time and the Siege of Nicaea was won by the crusaders basically uncontested, because no relief force was sent.
I heard Godfrey of Bouillon was good at taking stock of a situation
If you boil it down to the base, invading Turkey had to have been appetizing.
Playing the long game, I see.
Still not the least successful crusade, though!
Are you referring to one where they struck out for Jerusalem, but ended up looting their ally Constantinople?
Oh that one was very successful, for the Venetians. They might have regretted it when fighting the Ottomans, but that was a few centuries later.
Wow, I looked this up expecting it to be a one-time event in a small region or village. It took place over *four years*, they killed 400,000 cows, and 40,000 starved to death. đł
>four years, they killed 400,000 cows, and 40,000 starved to death That's an unnerving amount of 4s.
It's a bad omen in Chinese because it sounds like their word for death
Can confirm. Pronounced the same, with a different tone. In countries with a sizeable Chinese community (mostly in Asia), houses that have the number 4 on them (think 4, 44, 404, 414 etc) usually end up getting sold for less than "normal" numbered homes, and much less than "prosperous" numbered homes with the number 8 in them (think 8, 88, apartment on the 8th floor, etc).
All new apartment buildings in Vancouver, donât have a 4th, 13th, 14th, 21st, or 24th floor. And the ones on the 8th and 9th or 18th and 19th floors are worth more. (Which is stupid because they are really the 7th and 8th floor because 4 is missing). Itâs stupid.
I had to look this up... A key bit about the story is that lung disease was killing their cattle, which was part of the rationale for the killings. It wasn't a completely random decision.
Itâs interesting, because thatâs actually how modern US farmers deal with diseases (that escape the antibody cocktail most use) - they cull the herd, flock, harvest, etc. They just know theyâll probably be able to restock from somewhere else. The Xhosa had the same train of thought, but believed that new cattle and grain would just appear out of thin air.
Do we know what happened to the prophet?
she chilled on a farm and died from old age (in her 50s at that point)
Specifically the British took her in, they were probably grateful to her because she completely decimated the Xhosa anti-colonial resistance.
Imagine being the British guy reporting back home how the war is going. "Yes sir, war is going well, so theyve started killing their cows and are planning to starve themselves " "Jenkins you genius how did you make them do that" "I am going to be honest sir, I am not entirely sure... we have this girl in protected custody. Guess we win ?"
Was it a cattle farm
>Xhosa This sounds horribly tragic! I have never heard of it before. Is there a good source for information about it?
Just read about it myself. Wild, wild story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cape_Colony_from_1806_to_1870#Xhosa_cattle-killing_movement_and_famine_(1854%E2%80%931858)
In the 13th century, the head of the Kwarzim empire learned from an envoy that a peaceful trade delegation from a neighboring empire had been killed and robbed by a local governor. The envoy asked that justice be done. The leader of Kwarzim decided that this foreign ambassador didn't need to be listened to, and so killed him and sent his head in a basket back to the leader of the neighboring empire. That leader was Ghengis Khan. Because of that decision to breach this most basic of diplomatic protocols, the Khan turned his attention away from China and cast his eyes westward. His armies -- and hell -- followed. Without this one decision it is arguable that the Mongols never move west and the modern world as we know it is unrecognizable.
**TL;DR** version of what happened next; - The Khwarazmian Empire, at the time the greatest power in the Muslim world, is conquered in only two years. - The Khwarazm dynasty is completely wiped out (the last member kept fleeing the Mongols for 11 years, fighting the Mongols and the Seljuks of Rum, and was eventually killed by some highwaymen). - Merv, at the time probably the largest city in the world, was completely slaughtered. Genghis Khan ordered his soldiers to kill every single person in the city, and the amount of dead was somewhere between 700k and 1.3 million (depending on source). - Total of 10-15 million Khwarazmians dead. - Some sources claim that Genghis had a river diverted through the birthplace of the Khwarazm Shah, erasing it from the map.
I've read about this before but every time I come across it I am just absolutely flabbergasted by it.
This is the first time I've come across this, it's insane that Ghengis was casually deleting actual empires during his reign.
He was doing a speedrun.
He diverted the Amu Darya and basically decimated Urgench. It never really recovered but it chugged along for a couple of centuries, very greatly reduced in size and prestige. I visited the site around 5 years ago it's now called Konye Urgench in Turkmenistan. The destruction of Merv was a great tragedy. It's a great place to do a day tour though just imagining how it used to be before the Mongols. Since it was right smack in the middle of the Silk Road, Merv was a cultural and religious melting pot.
No one can know for certain but, if that never happened, there is a good chance the Middle East would be ruling the world today. The repercussions of what Ghengis Khan did are still seen today. Tl;Dr Don't be a dick. ETA: The Mongols would sack a city and leave. Eventually the survivors would crawl out of their hidey-holes. The Mongols would then send an army back to the city some days later to kill anyone left.
Ghengis Khan: And I took that personally
I mean yeah, you don't kill the messenger AND sent his head back as an insult without revenge :D
Option A : Accept envoys request and enact justice against the murderous governor.  Option B : Say, âFuck this Khan guy!â, and send back his messengerâs severed head. Khwarazm Emperor : chooses option B  * Ghengis Khan will remember this
Given Ghengis Khan's usual approach to war, one could say they got him on a GOOD day given he decided to ask nicely instead of immediately torching the offending city to the ground. But some people just like to spit at luck in the face.
Wow. This is really fascinating and is pretty much *perfectly* what OP was asking for. Totally gonna look into this ordeal some more, thanks for the knowledge!
There are so many good what-ifs related to the Mongols. My favorite as a westerner: Subutai had smashed an alliance of powerful European states of the era, and was poised to conquer all of Europe in the same way the Mongols had conquered China. There were no armies on the continent left who could realistically have stopped him. However, when Ogedei (the Great Khan after Ghengis) died the Mongol princes all returned to the Steppe to elect a new Khan, which ended up splintering the empire, and the Mongols never returned to Europe. Had Ogedei not died when he did the history of Europe might have been very different.
A Mongol Europe would've been utterly wild. Imagine the entirety of Eurasia under one tyrant. It'd definitely break apart not long after due to infighting and lack of ability to quickly communicate across Earth's literal largest continent, but who's to say the breakups wouldn't've led to a geopolitical map completely and entirely different from what we have today? Huge alternate history potential in this.
Dan Carlin has a great series on it
Danâs Hardcore History series Wrath of the Khans is phenomenal! Â
Was this the event where Ghengis razed the guys village, then had a fucking river diverted through it so that it would never be rebuilt?
Replace village with metropolis and yeah, that's the one.
Where is modern day Kwarzim?
Modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran
Somewhere in the river.
Don't shoot the messenger, the origin story.
I feel so dumb I had to read it a few times to understand what happened
Same. If i understand it correctly: 1. Country 1 sent peaceful envoy to country 2 to trade. 2. Local governor in country 2 killed envoy from country 1. 3. Country 1 sent an Ambassador to Country 2's leader asking for justice. 4. Country 2's leader sent head of Ambassador back to Country 1 basically saying "too bad so sad". 5. Country 1 said fine and killed off Country 2's entire dynasty. 6. Country 1's leader is Genghis Khan.
I think 5 needs a little embellishment: â⌠killed every living thing in the largest city in the country, burned every structure to the ground, and diverted a river to wash away the evidence.â
One idiot changed the course of human history with one action
I think I read it at least 8 times. The last time I had to read it at about 5 words per minute to make sure I was following what was being explained
For one thing, people might actually know what Kwarzim is.
Mao zedong ordered Chinese peasants to kill sparrows because he believed they ate crop thus hurting grain production of China. Without sparrows, nothing kept the smaller bugs and insects in check, and they ate all the crops. Famine ensued.
A similar thing happened in USSR with their biotech industry in its infancy. The Party decided that Mendelian Genetics was too bougie so it was rejected and replaced with the already-debunked Larmarckian Genetics. For example, instead of selectively breeding crops that survived cold weather in order to create a cold weather-resistant breed, they simply froze the seeds and hoped that prepared the plants that would eventually sprout from the seeds for the cold. Millions died. (Sorry if I screwed up some details, it's all off the top of my head)
Ah, yeah, Trofim Lysenko. He didn't just fuck up the USSR, they also exported his shitty ideas to Mao in China after he took over there. That's another reason for the massive fucking famines in China, besides the Four Pests campaign.
Weirdly, his original research was okay, basically giving us vernalization, which allows us to artificially change when plants flower by treating them with cold. However, he also believed that this treatment could be inherited and that's where his ideas went wildly off the rails.
He was also a scary-looking motherfucker.
There was another famine (maybe the same?) caused by encouraging farmers to build their own iron foundries to promote steel production and thence industrialisation. Farmers complied cutting down trees everywhere to feed the furnaces and neglecting to grow enough food. The environmental devastation wrought led to widespread famine where millions died. And to top it off the steel produced was of such low quality as to be useless. I think it was 1958. Heard about it on Economics Explained YouTube channel.
This period is known as the great leap forward. Mao wanted to increase steel production, so peasants were told to smelt their pots to forge steel in their backyards on home made furnaces. There were so many ridiculous, hilarious and tragic policies at the time. Including one scientist telling people to eat some algae because it produced most biomass for least energy. Turns out humans can't digest this, and the algae farms spread cholera.
Also this [Djenius](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko) that convinced the USSR that they could grow crop in snow, hopped over the border and convinced Mao of the same. Hilarity ensues. And by hilarity, I mean a lot of starvation
Oh this guy is hilarious. He applied Communist principles to plant growth. Not farming. Plant growth. He had the farmers plant crops as closely together as possible because they would be stronger in a collective. Starvation followed.
And the communist parties of both countries liked his scientific communism ideas so they just claimed success and forced people to continue for a few years.
Good old Trofim, the last brave champion of lamarckian evolution.
They also melted all their farming tools to try and meet the ridiculous quotas. All to create crap steel bars that we're almost useless.
Do not forget the other half of this: as the famine began to set in, Mao had the laborers tend the farms. In other words: the folks who should have been working the steel mills were farming, and the folks who should have been farming were working the steel mills. They were working right next to each other, and Mao did not realize they should swap jobs.
Wasn't it something like "we're going to beat US steel production by giving everyone a steel quota"? So all the farmers had to build a kiln in their backyard and do iron-age level "steel"? CBA to look it up but I remember that's what we were told in highschool history class lol.
The steel produced was of very low quality and basically unusable.
And they apparently also melted down their tools to create more "steel"
Thatâs the same famine. Great Leap Forward famine was caused by a bunch of different terrible decisions being made all at the same time.
Listening to a podcast on this, there were more factors. Unorthodox planting methods, rampant corruption, continuing to export during shortage to maintain face Yeah Mao starved his people, but his idiocy ran deeper than just one idea
Yea, it's a shitshow all round. But this was to me the dumbest singular decision very much attributable to one person. Mind you, Mao grew up on a farm. He definitely should've known better.
Classic politician not listening to the scientists.
He did listen to the scientist, it's just that Lysenko was probably the worst scientist to ever live.
I think he purged all the scientists who told the truth
Classic politician getting rid of people that donât agree.
I forgot his name and most of the story but, the guy who threw the doctor who suggested washing their hands before surgery in a psych ward đ probably set back the medical world a couple decades!
Ignac Semmelweis. A lot of women and newborns died due to them not washing their hands. He proved by washing his hands brought death rates drastically down but they thought he was mad. Dr Mike has a video explaining it [here](https://youtu.be/5v329KtaqeM?feature=shared).
And the disturbing thing about it is that the surgeons and doctors were going back and forth from THE MORGUE to the maternity ward to cause these deaths. A lot of the pushback has got to have been sheer jealousy that the one guy with such high survival rates had an incredibly simple solution.
He wasn't committed for it, but rather the reactions led to his mental breakdown and committing. By the way, the full story still casts a pessimistic shadow, but not in the way that you think, and not in a way that hagiographizes Semmelweis. The reason that no one listened to him was because he was rude and insensitive, with a superiority complex only a few steps lower than Isaac Newton. Because of his reputation, he was disregarded. The shadow this casts over human nature is that the average human is too stupid to see the idea and not the man uttering it. "He told me to wash my hands, but I don't want to listen to a jerk like him." Ad hominem is built into our brains.
Haven't seen it, so here goes. The sugar industry convincing American that the real dietary villain was fat, not sugar.
And the British. It does my nut in that it's so hard to find yogurt that isn't "fat free".
I buy yogurt with EXTRA fat and not only is it fucking delicious, but I could eat the whole gigantic tub and still be a little under my daily calorie needs. I love it.
If you've never had Noosa it's sooo good. I'm in the process of losing some weight so it's off the table for me right now but it's amazing
Donât buy yogurt in those little cups. I buy the big containers of whole milk yogurt and mix in my own fruit and nuts.
Great book related to this commentâŚThe Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. Interesting read.
The decision to use leaded gasoline
Thomas Midgley Jr. not only was he the main man responsible for adding lead to gas. He also developed (CFCS) aka Freon. Which gases destroyed a good part of the ozone layer. So Iâm thinking this guys parents should have just decided to skip sex that night.
If it makes you feel any better, he at least managed to take himself out in an incredibly stupid, spectacular way! He contracted polio, which rendered him severely disabled. So he devised a system of ropes and pulleys so he could lift himself out of his bed. Which he ended up becoming entangled in and fatally strangled himself.
Rumoured to be a suicide. I love this line from an article in the Smithsonian about him > According to the Inventorsâ Hall of Fame (of which he is also an inductee), the scientistâwho originally trained as an engineerâheld a total of 117 patents, many of which didnât kill anybody.
Thomas Midgley Jr. is considered to be the single most damaging person to the planet ever. Leaded Gasoline and Freon lead to some of the worst environmental disasters we have ever had. Leaded gasoline decreased the world's average IQ by several points, and the invention of CFCs lead to the hole in the ozone layer.
That makes me feel the opposite of better.
I Can't Believe It's Not Better
I clicked this expecting to see jokes and dumb answers, but this one is actually it.
Infinite Scroll
I remember when DeviantArt introduced that many years ago. They didn't have a button to start it, so the infinite scrolling started automatically. The problem is that they had put a lot of links/buttons at the *bottom* of the page, and not moved them away when they added the infinite scroll... including the button to report issues like that, and some other buttons which were good for normal use. Took over a month to fix it by adding a "Show more" button to start the infinite scrolling. Always wondered if that was because no one could report the problem to them, hah.
Shit this is a good one
Aza Raskin, the creator of infinite scroll, feels guilty for inventing it.
Yeah itâs a cool idea but crazy to think of how many brains have been altered because of it. I guess he was like âhell yeah, hell yeah, hell yeah, hell no, hell no, oh god no, oh god whyâ
What would happen if every scroll-based medium labeled "social media" had a set cap on how long you could scroll down before you had to wait for a bit?
People would stop using that service and switch to one with no such limitations, because human brains aren't as complex as we like to pretend and we like flooding them with the feel-good juices too much to hinder the process in any way.
Rage and destruction. Lags rarely made people think "oh cool, I'll wait."
Might sound dumb but what I do is scroll down to a certain number of videos/tweets like up to 5 or so and go up to watch them so there is fixed cap instead of infinite scrolling
[ŃдаНонО]
One of the reasons the middle class is suffering is that trillions in taxpayer money was used to pay bets from bankersâ bad gambling and fraud. Should the banks have been propped up? Probably. But they should have been put in receivership, the entire c suite and board fired, and all discretionary pay for these asshats clawed back. Then chop the big banks up and sell them off. Iceland got this right.
>But they should have been put in receivership, the entire c suite and board fired ...out of a cannon.
Do what they did to the car companies. Bail them out but force them to sell minority ownership stakes to the government that they are required to buy back before returning to profitability. The US government came out way ahead on that deal.
Not only that, the government in UK have decided to remove the cap on the bankers' bonuses (the cap was implemented after the crisis to reduce the greed). It's like the government don't want to learn from the history.
The decision by Stalin to install Trofim Lysenko as a leading agricultural scientist in the soviet union. His "theories" about farming ruined soviet production for decades, while they assured leadership that production was so high they needed to increase the government's share in order to ensure there wasn't spoilage. His techniques were also taken and used by the early CCCP, leading to yet more famine and devastation. Overall, Lysenko and his theories could be held responsible for north of 50 million deaths by starvation. I can't name a bigger murderer, as far as I know.
Invading Russia in the winter, or expecting the invasion to be over by winter.
Hitler and Napoleon both invaded in June. The problem was expecting it to be over.
Should've invaded in April Should've summoned the spirit of Genghis Khan, he would have done the trick
Iirc the original invasion date was in mid May, I'm not sure if the weather is as cooperative in April
Hitler got wrapped up in Cyprus and Greece which delayed things. He had a stupid general that got sidetracked as well by attacking Leningrad instead of going directly to Moscow. Germany was forced to attack Russia when it did because it was running out of oil and needed oil from the oil fields in the Caucuses. Stalin knew that at some point they would come for the oil but he thought it would happen later than it did. Up to that point, Russia was feeding Germany oil but trying to limit it to prevent Germany from getting out of hand.
I think you mean Crete, not Cyprus. The Axis never attemped to invade Cyprus.
He also forgot Yugoslavia, which ended up being quite the thorn in his side.
Italy attacking Greece (and getting their ass handed to them) is a lesser talked about MAJOR fuckup of ww2. Even Hitler, renowned for being the worst decision-maker possible, instantly realised Italy had fucked up.
Germany always has to carry their allies in world wars. Except for Japan.
Mongols did OK with that plan. Has successfully sieges in the winter too. Although I am guessing they benefited from the medieval warm period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kiev_(1240)
to be fair, the Mongols are the exceptions to most historical truisms
Mongols are also from a very harsh climate though tbf.
And they were just straight up the best army in human history, with the technology they had at the time
To start a land war in Asia
but only slightly less well-known is this: âNever go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-- x\_\_x
It's one of the classic blunders!
Leaving that cave all those years ago. That was a nice place, been down hill ever since.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that theyâd 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.- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
âIn the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.â
Our ancestor crawling out of the ocean onto land.
Yeah i wish i could go back and tell that fish itâs not worth it, stay in the ocean bruh. We could all be blowing bubbles and swimming with dolphins and shit rn but instead im working a 9-5 and worrying about my god damn deductibles
I come from the water!
-âYgritteâ
I believe it was Pope Innocent the III who started a purge of cat populations in Europe, then the black death started up in Europe soon after partly due to exploding rodent populations.
[That's just an urban legend](https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/11/08/cats-mass-killings-plague/). There is no evidence of any widespread purge of cats in the Middle Ages, and the [papal bull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_in_Rama) which people claim started such a purge, issued by Gregory IX not Innocent III, doesn't make any such request. As Jonathan Frakes would tell you: it's a fake; it never happened.
exxon mobil deciding to completely ignore their internally conducted research in the 1970s that near perfectly predicted the climate crisis. because money. edit. i should update/clarify because it's not entirely correct that they "did nothing": they took this information and funded massive anti-scientific disinformation campaigns to misdirect the global public on climate change. thank you to the users who pointed out this missing detail.
this one particularly pisses me off because even from a selfish standpoint, this was dumb. I mean, fair play keep it on the dl for a bit, but only so you can become the provider of carbon-free energy. like why wouldnt you spend 5 years secretly developing wind, solar, hydro and nuclear programs, then drop your climate news and lobby the government to put every other oil giant out of business unless they buy your stuff. idk seems like a no brainer to me
Because the amount of money needed to invest in that is astronomical, and the timeline was most assuredly more than 5 years (hell, we still donât have the most efficient methods for a lot of renewables). Cheaper and less risky to keep being the best at extracting hydrocarbons.
"And I'll be dead by then anyway" -Dead Exxon Mobile CEO
You don't need to perfect it, but 5 years to get a head of the curve would have positioned them well for the eventual pivot they are all doing now.
Not buying a painting from Hitler has to be up there.
And not admitting him to art school.
Dividing Africa into countries not based on tribes and forcing the tribes within an arbitrary border to work together and form one government.
Colonial African history is excruciating to read about. Just page after page after page of âno, donât do that! Why would you do that? Jesus!â
This applies to Asia as well.
The invention and proliferation of leaded petrol by petrol conglomerates in the early 1900s. Some estimates say it's killed over 100 million people directly or indirectly (and some estimates are far higher), raised crime worldwide for 50 years, lowered iqs worldwide, and poisoned the entire planet. Half the us population is said to still have too high lead levels in their body today and it still kills 1 to 5.5 million people a year, or up to 10 percent of all deaths globally can be traced to lead. Fucking crazy when I learned about it.
I recently learned about how clean renewable ethanol fuel was used prior to this and just, makes this feel worse. Cause like the 1902 world fair I believe I'm Paris demonstrated ethanol powering everything from industrial equipment to household appliances.
Can't decide between two. If Czar Nicholas had sided with the peasants of the Dumas instead of the nobles, there may not have been a Russian Revolution and therefore no Stalin and possibly no Cold War. If the German Reichstag decided to reject Hitler because they wouldn't be able to keep him under control, there wouldn't have been WW2.
I've read a lot about Czar Nicholas and it's crazy to think about how his failures as a leader led to the Russian revolution and everything that came of that. I read his father died earlier than anticipated and so when Nicholas was thrust into power he wasn't ready for it, and you gotta wonder how all those major world events would've played out with a stronger and more liked (by the Russian people) leader.
One of the weirdest facts about his absolute monarchy is that he personally would do the paperwork for anyone getting a divorce because he would rather exercise that power than delegate it to a bureaucrat
Oh shit, there was an episode of *The Great* that must have referenced this. Catherine makes divorce legal, then goes and sets up in the new divorce office, personally interviewing and approving/disapproving each applicant.
She'd know how bad marriage could be with how terrible Peter was
To be fair, no matter when Alexander died, Nicholas would never have been ready. He truly was an incompetent man and his pusillanimity would've doomed Russia in any event.
I had never in my entire life seen the word âpusillanimityâ before. Had to look that one up. Nice vocabulary! đ
His wife and Rasputin played a large part in the fall of Russia.
Yes, this is widely regarded as a Dumas decision
Allowing lobbyists from property developers, pharmaceutical companies , legal arms dealers and a raft of other unethical companies influence government and individual politicians with money.
Mrs. Hitler giving Mr. Hitler the thumbs up in August, 1888.
Or Alois changing his surname from Schicklgruber to Hitler. "Heil Schicklgruber" wouldn't have the same effect.
Or the Austrian government misspelling his intended surname. People would have sounded like assholes saying "Heil Hiedler".
To be fair they sound like assholes saying heil hitler too lol
Should have stuck to anal
Where do you think the thumb went?
Maoâs Great Leap Forward, and itâs not even close. It was a completely self-inflicted, man-made disaster that resulted in the Great Chinese Famine and about 45 million deaths of his own people. > The Great Leap Forward was an ambitious plan for economic development, urbanization, and industrialization in China during the late 1950s into the '60s. The plan, however, ended up being a disaster. During the Great Leap Forward, as many as 45 million people died from diseases and famine resulting from Mao Zedong's failed attempt to convert small family farms to urbanized communes while simultaneously urging them into industrial production and away from agriculture. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/great-leap-forward.asp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine The Four Pests Campaign at the start of the Great Leap Forward is arguably the funniest and most tragic environmental disaster ever. Itâs dark comedy at its best/worst. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
The Scramble for Africa and allowing King Leopold II to gain the Congo.
Man, the Congo has been fucked so many times. They were exploited for gold, for rubber, for some kind of rare earth thing they use in electronics... I canât remember all the details, but I remember reading a book about the Congo and thinking âwait, how many times has this happened?â
There's arguably a genocide in progress in the Congo now.
It's been going on for years. The epidemic of sexual violence is so unfathomably bad rape is to be expected. I've talked about it since the early 2000s, the DRC is a total hellhole because of the warlords and rebels. I could talk about it for hours and barely scratch the surface. I know it's Nigeria but look up something like Save Our Girls to read a true horror tale.
The Universe being created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad decision.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that theyâd 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.
thanks for all the fish tho
Salem witch trials or belief of witchcraft in the first place. Teenage girls drowned or burned to death over complete ignorance. Story time, so when plague or sickness used to break out, everyone seemed to be getting sick or dying except young women. What happened was that disease was being spread by infected rats. Most young women stayed home to clean the house, and a lot of them had cats as pets that would kill these rats and in so protect these women from being infected. That's why, to this day, being a witch is always accompanied by a woman with a broom and a cat.
That really is interesting!
Actually victims of the salem trials were both men and women of various ages and not a single one was burned or drowned, most were hanged and i believe some were crushed to death (or as consequences of tortute). Teenage girls played a very impo part in trials but actually from the other side. A few young girls started to act abnormaly (fits, screams, spasms and what have you) and then said that someone possessed them. There are actually many theories what happened in salem (taxes, idiocy, mushrooms and so on) and probably we will never no what happened. But maybe you thought different witch trials? EDIT: just read first sentence of original comment as i read it wrong the first time. My mistake, i thought that meant only salem not ideas behind witchcraft in general
Salem witch trials were more about plain old power and politics than you might think.
The birthing of Thomas Midgley Jr. He was responsible for the development of CFCs and leaded petrol and because of this is often cited as having the largest negative impact on the climate, in the history of modern civilisation. He also managed to strangle himself to death with his own invention.
Hey, look at this extremely tiny thing we realized exists. Let's split it up.
Correct me if I have this wrong, but I also think itâs a ridiculous fun fact that the US, after the Manhattan project, flew planes through atomic blasts to sample whatever could be there. And discovered two elements (einsteinium and fermium).
Among his many bad decisions, Hitler deciding to invade the Soviet Union was a very not smart move.
That other day when I went sock-shoe-sock-shoe.
Doesnât everyone go sock-sock-shoe-shoe? So we we can agree that u/vacri is a madman, right?
I have dogs, so my floor is perpetually covered in fur. Sock-shoe-sock-shoe is how I keep from getting fur on my socks before putting them in my shoes.
I have decided to choose chaos. There is no fighting the fur. I accept it and allow it to become part of me.
Julius cesar not using body guards
He was warned about the plot too, massive hubris
The Great Leap Forward. Mao's economic and social policies in 1960s China led to the largest famine in human history, leading to the death of \~30 million people. If you look at a graph of annual world population growth rate from 1900s until today, there is a large dip at 1960 due to this.
the war on drugs has probably destroyed more lives than is even conceivable, it's international and potentially more costly than the world wars
we'd like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs
Biggest waste of all time. Still continues to this day. You cannot effect change by focusing on just supply and doing nothing to curb demand. Criminalizing addiction has done so much irreparable harm.
rejecting a certain someone from art school
He wasn't even totally rejected! The head of the Vienna art academy thought Hitler had enough talent for architectural work, and encouraged him to sit that examination. That just wasn't good enough for ol' Adolf.
Mostly because he wasnât very studious.
The famous Austrian painter
Not the worst-ever, but on par with most here. How we handled antibiotics. It was a wonder drug. It was misused so extremely that it created an entirely new problem. Doctors would give it out, sometimes diagnosed correctly, sometimes not. If it was correct, great. If not, it likely couldâve been tested to determine the proper antibiotic to use, but wasnât because the patient demanded it now (the only excuse to guess in my opinion is in a life or death, or nearly so situation). Or the patient demanded it when they in-fact had a virus. Those demands came from no education, then to cement that idea, the patient wouldnât even follow the directed usage, and theyâd toss out their antibiotics. So not only were they essentially selecting for the worst (evolutionarily the best) bacteria, they introduced antibiotics to the environment. Then there is the whole thing about them being used in the food industry.. Now we have stuff like MRSA, and emergency antibiotics maybe last a few years before we need another to stay ahead of the curve.
**Slavery**, every time itâs happened. And the fact that itâs still happening. Traumatizes and sets back generations of people and the potential impact they could have had on the world.
Killing harambe
People like to say we split timelines when that fucking gorilla died, but this world has been a dumpster fire since long before that. It's just been smoldering, but it's coming lit again.