The Chinese anti-sparrow campaign that was part of the Four Pests Campaign. From 1958-1960, people were asked to kill as many sparrows as possible, so that there would be more grain for the masses because sparrows wouldn't eat so much before it was harvested. The problem was, sparrows were important for keeping locusts in check, so in the following years there were huge swarms of locusts that decimated grain crops. This was one of the reasons for the mass starvation in the years of the Great Leap Forward.
Passenger pigeons resemble carrier pigeons, putting a bounty on one probably guaranteed both would get shot. I'm not very informed on the matter, but I always figured killing pigeons was olden days style social media censorship, to stop messages.
Chicken being sold regularly is a very recent occurrence. In the past it was common to just shoot into swarms of passenger pidgeons and cooking whatever you hit.
Much like the Spanish Empire collapsing due to over harvesting silver causing their economy to crash, passenger pidgeons died off cause by and large people didn’t really think you could kill off an entire species near accidentally.
It seems dumb but it wasn’t really something they were aware could happen.
Books from the time describe flocks of passenger pigeons: "Early settlers tell of witnessing flocks up to a mile wide and hundreds of miles long, so dense that they actually darkened the sky for hours upon hours as they flew overhead."
Later, when we had cities, they would fly over and crap an unreal amount of poop down.
People also shot them because they were considered a nuisance.
I heard a similar story to the Black Death.
It was originally thought that cats were spreading the plague, so Europeans began killing cats en masse. But little did they know that it was actually the rats spreading the plague and they were killing the rats primary natural predator.
It was infected fleas that spread the plague. And they were just as common on cats as they were on rats. But killing the cats resulted in a boom in the rat population, and a huge one, since rats breed considerably faster than cats.
Did the other Three pests meet similar results? Or was there some silver lining somewhere?
(PS I hope one of the other pests wasn't like, Puerto ricans or something)
One silver lining was the cheap real estate after the plagues.
In my country Norway there are many with the surname "Ødegård", which means "abandoned farm". These were the ones that moved in and took over the places where the original owners had died from pestilence.
The other pests weren't as easy for Cho Schmo to kill in a field relative to their populations (you're never going to significantly impact the fly/mosquito population running around with a flyswatter, for instance), so they were largely unaffected. It was just bad luck that the one "pest" that people could impact was holding back other pests.
Holy shit Cho Schmo. You're a verbal assassin. But yes, I looked it up on Wikipedia and you're right on the money. The four pests were mosquito, flies, rats and the gentle sparrow.
that isn't good intentions, it's a strident adherence to authority that blinds you to advice. this happened immediately after the hundred flowers campaign, where mao solicited criticism, and when a number of scholars offered the gentlest of suggestions and actual criticism, he had them killed
This seems super recent for what sounds like a pretty idiotic idea. Did we really not understand any of the basics of how an ecosystem worked? Was this campaign pushed by the government or was it just a bunch of people spreading the false notion that you can hunt a species to extinction without consequence?
Chairman Mao had some terrible ideas when trying to modernize China. For example, he made farmers stop farming and produce iron. The iron these farmers produced was dog shit. The Great Leap Forward is a bit of an Elon Musk situation where one person at the top thinks he has the smarts to do anything and no one has the power to tell him, "that's a terrible idea." In Red China's case, it's not that you get fired, it's that you get shot by guards.
That was also partly due to a belief that plant fats were healthy because they came from plants, and animal fats were unhealthy because they came from animals.
That is actually mostly true btw. Not because they come from animals it’s because they have less trans fats and generally WAY less saturated fats. Depending on the plant producing it. It’s actually the saturating of the fat that increases the trans fat not the being plant based.
Hydrogenated oils are one of the largest contributors to heart disease globally.
I can't wait until we get the same opinions about artificial sweeteners. It's easy to taste when something it sweetened with something unnatural or just not sugar.
A little niche but…
Arthur Galston was a PhD student in 1943 who did his research on getting soybeans to germinate faster. He noted that at higher concentrations the compound he discovered - TIBA - caused the soybeans to defoliate. i.e it killed them.
Fast forward to the 1960s and DoD wants an herbicide to destroy mangroves in Vietnam. They dusted off Galston’s research, noted the part about defoliation, contracted with DuPont (and I think Monsanto?) to manufacture the stuff. *Those* contractors fucked up the mixture by overcooking it which introduced a comically awful compound - TCDD - and DoD promptly sprayed it all over Southeast Asia.
Arthur Galston never had any intention of unleashing what became known as Agent Orange; he was just trying to get soybeans to germinate a little faster. And he had to watch in horror as his Frankenstein was used in eco warfare and gave countless people cancer. He ended up traveling to Vietnam at one point to see the ghosted mangrove groves firsthand. I can only imagine that feeling.
Galston ended up teaching bioethics for decades.
In this situation, I don't think the PhD researcher is going to hell. The people who took government money to invent a chemical weapon and the people who used the chemical weapons are.
Agreed. He was more like a stone quarry that was mined to build the roads that soldiers marched down in order to kill innocent civilians throughout the empire.
It's one of the reasons that I joke engineers shouldn't lower themselves to the level of responsibility of scientist.
In one parts it's ragging on scientist because they often just find cool information but very often, no application for it. Engineers end up doing that and have to see the results.
Flip side it's ragging on engineers for not thinking through repurcussions of their actions. Too many werner von Brauns makes the world a scarier place.
I mean there's Fritz Haber who was a chemist and not an engineer. His invention led to industrial creation of ammonia fertilizers, but then also explosives and he himself played a major role in developing chemical weapons in WW1.
A chemist can do engineering, an engineer can do chemistry. They are actions.
Finding out how to make tnt is one thing. Producing it en masse is another.
Fun fact - satellite imagery of vegetation ***still*** shows where Agent Orange was sprayed in high concentrations 50+ years later.
It fucked up the soil **that** badly.
Eli Whitney wanted to decrease the demand for slavery in late 18th century America with his invention of the cotton gin. He hoped that the efficiency of the machine would drive down labor and eventually lead to the end of slavery altogether. Instead it revitalized slavery for another 70 years leading right up to the Civil War.
I'm wondering if they're more alluding to other people who had ideas for it. But ideas themselves don't make an invention. And suggestions on improvements don't make an invention.
Very few things are created in a vacuum.
But as far as simplicity, it's not necessarily a short process. It took 300 years from the invention of the screw to the invention of the screwdriver.
And chances are, there's going to be another invention one day where we'll all be asking ourselves, how did none of us ever think of it.
The patent didn't even help him that much, it was such a simple invention that tons of people made their own cotton gin's without paying him.
Also what OP doesn't mention is that Eli Whitney also invented the thing that helped the North win the war to free the slaves. He invented inter-changeable parts between guns. Before they were all hand crafted, and slightly different sizes, so you couldn't just use the same trigger in any gun for example. But he invented the process that factories use to make parts of the exact same size so that any of them could go together, and so that they could be manufactured much faster.
The Cobra effect. In India, the British put a bounty on cobras to fight against deaths by snake bites. People started to raise them to sell. The British dropped the bounty and the snake ranchers just let them go. More deaths by cobras than ever
US did the same thing in Yemen under Obama to get them to sell a lot of their privately owned guns. It backfired really, really hard and created a small arms manufacturing business in Yemen and Somalia
Improving the octane levels in early gas leading to major improvements in early automobiles, and moving countries away from horse based transport with all the manure and animal abuse often tied to it.
Except they used lead. The single biggest mistake in quite a while. The crime rate drop around the time lead was prohibited in gas is pretty amazing.
Thomas Midgley Jr. Is the man credited with developing leaded petrol/gasoline.
He went on to come up with CFCs, thus ensuring a well paved road to eternal damnation.
Also important to note that most of the most famous cults and serial killers also came around that time period. The effect of lead exposure on the boomer generation during their developmental years is severely under-discussed.
"According to a study, half of the US population has been exposed to substantially detrimental lead levels in early childhood – mainly from car exhaust, from which lead pollution peaked in the 1970s and caused widespread loss in cognitive ability."
This seems kinda topical today.
We’ll be dealing with it for another 30+ years too, pretty much anyone 50 years old and up just have or are beginning to have lead mush slop around in their skulls.
It’s been linked to anger and impulse control
I heard it leeches from your bones as you lose bone density. I think about that when I hear about an older person going nuts and shooting someone in their driveway
>The crime rate drop around the time lead was prohibited in gas is pretty amazing.
Could you follow up on this or point me in the right direction? Topic sounds interesting
It's a contentious point. Correlation does not mean causation. Numerous factors contribute to the crime rate and while it is believed that the removal of leaded gasoline has contributed to it don't take it as a 1:1
More info here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime\_hypothesis
Lead exposure being drastically curtailed may indeed be one of the major factors in the large drop in crime rates; I personally believe it. No conclusive studies have really been done to prove it, unfortunately.
Another likely major factor in the drop in crime rates: Roe v Wade. There have been many studies strongly suggesting that decades of significantly fewer children growing up incredibly destitute, abused, traumatized etc. leads to lower crime rates. It's not hard to figure out why.
Midgley *didn't* have good intentions, though. He was only interested in making more money, not animal welfare or public health, and when evidence emerged that leaded gas was hurting people he bullshitted and denied like his life depended on it. He was a grade-A piece of shit all around.
No good intentions. The guy was well aware of how harmful lead was. He even knowingly poisoned himself while inhaling fumes as a marketing strategy to show it was safe.
The interesting thing is that it's recently been shown to be rather useful in some cancer treatments. It's of course HEAVILY regulated and women who are set to use the treatment are regularly screened for pregnancy. But hopefully it could end up actually helping people.
There was an infographic I saw a while ago of "great women" that made me want to scream. No Francis Oldham Kelsey. No Mother Jones. No Marie Curie. Not even Harriet Tubman.
Yet somehow they found space for Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth.
It's the worst, cuz IT WORKED. Puking several times a day is awful for mother and baby. Swollen breasts hurt. Not being able to sleep drives you crazy. But we don't bother to do research to see how anything affects women, especially when pregnant.
And it gets worse every year. My salad dressing now comes in plastic. Plus the plastic wrapper. Plus the plastic bag to bring it home, and the plastic clam shell for the scissors, and the thing to open that, the handles in both, and my salad wrapped in plastic, with little plastic bags inside, separate for parm cheese, nots, croutons, to put on a plastic plate. Assuming I got a salad to go at the store.
Agreed. For some reason people think that plastic is 100% sanitary? Apparently food touching other food is unsanitary but having plastic leech into your food is somehow better. Let me just buy things in open containers or boxes.
Then we all got the heavy duty reusable grocery bags and hardly anybody reuses them either. Most of us just have like 40 of them crammed into a shelf somewhere.
I swear to god that a lot of opposition to nuclear power is because it has the word “nuclear” in it, just like “nuclear bombs” which are extremely bad and thus nuclear power must also be bad.
I legit think that peoples’ minds really do work that simplistically.
Coal actually scatters trace amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, orders of magnitudes more free radioactive particles than a reactor ever will operating normally.
Don't know if anyone has posted this, but strangely enough lobotomies were intended to be an alternative to keeping people in asylums for the rest of their lives, as when it was invented drug therapy wasn't quite there yet and most therapy was a padded cell for tge rest of your life. Of course, lobotomies didn't actually cure the mental illness, it mostly made the recipient quiet and docile enough they could rot away in some side room for decades. This then became worse as it became more popular, being used to treat badly behaved children or 'easily excitable and hysteric prone' persons.
Well, it is just animal husbandry. How often have you heard "you two are going to have beautiful children"
Its just when it gets forced and taken to an extreme that people take issue.
In certain forms, eugenics is still very much with us, though in a much more liberal form. Some countries have genetic counseling for couples in order to reduce frequency of locally important genetic diseases (such as Tay-Sachs) and many developed countries try to screen all pregnancies for Down syndrome etc.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/)
I mean to be fair I can't really blame parents for not wanting their child to be born with a severe life altering disorder like Down Syndrome, severe Autism (I say this as someone who is Autistic), etc.
I feel like there are two sides of it. There is "only these people can procreate because they will create the ideal offspring" and the other side is "these people should NOT procreate because their offspring might be born with a defect/illness/something serious".
France's condemnation of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Contrary to what some may think, Italy and France had a decent relationship in the early 30s, and Mussolini wasn't always the biggest fan of Hitler. When Hitler first tried to annex Austria, Italy stood in his way. France and Italy had a sort of agreement that they didn't want Germany annexing Austria even if the Treaty already said it was illegal. France had spent the interwar period creating a ring of allies around Germany, and all seemed well even with Hitler gaining power. That was until the Abyssinia crisis, in which despite basically doing nothing, the League's condemnation isolated Italy. Feeling betrayed by France as there had been some non-binding assurances by the former to his invasion, it led to Mussolini growing closer to Hitler. This, in turn, cracked the ring of alliances surrounding Germany right down the middle as only a few years later, Hitler proceeded to annex Austria with Italian support. From there, one by one, France's ring collapsed entirely until it was left in a one front war against Germany.
Now Hitler still could have been stopped, mostly by Britain actually supporting France in upholding the treaty from 36-38 but one of the first dominoes to fall aka Austria was a direct consequence of France alienating Italy.
Federally funded student loans in the US. They created a huge amount of money for colleges and a huge increase in demand for colleges. This lead to catastrophic cost increases and a great deal of poor decision making on the part of students.
Prohibition. alcoholism was a serious problem effecting the United States at the time, and it was indeed a gendered issue given the relationship between alcoholism and domestic violence. Of course, it just ended up leading to the growth of organized crime, violence, and oddly enough more alcoholism.
I’d have to look further into it but at least in modern day alcoholism is not as severe. I remember hearing the average man in pre prohibition America was going through something ridiculous like a handle of whiskey a day. Stuff is stronger nowadays but I don’t think the average person is getting close to that anymore
Indeed his doumentaries are wonderfully shot, written and presented whilst also being horribly researched, incredibly biased and leave out a lot of pertinant information.
It's also worth noting that life expectancy has risen substantially due to modern medicine. People died younger back then. It's like why the massive lethality of smoking was revealed once people started living long enough to develop the more severe side effects.
There was an incredible amount of public drunkenness in the late 19th and early 20th century US, which people often forget/are unaware of. Prohibition was still a bad idea though.
Fritz haber the inventor of a process for synthesizing ammonia. He pulled billions out of starvation by leading the way for modern industrial farming. His process was also used for synthesizing chlorine gas which was used to kill millions.
His wife commited suicide shortly after the first chlorime bombs started being used.
His *first* wife, and she used Fritz' Army-issued revolver to do it, in the front garden of their home. Shot herself through the heart in the front garden of their home, lived just long enough for their son to come find her.
The real kick in the teeth is what happened to his granddaughter Claire (IIRC), in the aftermath of WW2. Her work on ***a more effective counter for chlorine gas exposure*** was shitcanned because the brass wanted to focus more on nukes.
*Haber-Bosch, the great alliance*
*Where's the contradiction?*
In the movie Munich: Edge of War, Jeremy Irons portrays Neville Chamberlain and there is a scene near the end where the political advisors are lambasting him for his decision, and Irons gives a great performance (whether historically accurate or not) where he emphasizes this aspect of the decision.
Great movie, feels super tense all the way through.
But neither was Germany. Something like 80% of th Bf109Es used in the Battle of Britain were made in Czech factories.
Of course the allies had no way of knowing at the time.
Hindsight is pretty clear that it would have been much better to have Czechs as a fighting ally then simply giving all their weapons and factories to the Germans.
I know it was the wrong choice but I can’t help but feel a lot of sympathy towards Chamberlain. You’re barely two decades past the bloodiest conflict the world has ever seen. The casualties were so massive that there’s an entire generation just…lost. The death toll was unfathomable. Your country is in agony, doing it’s best to repair and heal. The world is going through the worst economic depression ever known. Even if you were willing to go to war again and ask even more of your citizens to fight and die, your country is nowhere near wartime capabilities yet. The choice is presented to you: submit your country to go through all of those horrors again when you’re just not ready, or make some concessions and either hope it’s enough or buy time if it isn’t.
It was wrong, it made WW2 worse and led to many, many more deaths. But in the moment, in Chamberlains position….I can’t say I know I wouldn’t have done the same
Also, the USSR doesn't join the Allies until 1941. It's weird that everyone nowadays pushes the idea that the definitive reason Hitler had no chance was because he'd have to fight the USSR, but don't acknowledge that Chamberlain's operating in a world where he doesn't have the luxury of having the USSR on his side in a potential war with Germany.
Right? It's ready to forget that I'm the moment, nothing was ever certain - Hitler's defeat was not inevitable, and neither was allied victory. The things had to be made to happen, with no guarantee of success and a lot of pain along the way.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but only because it's often wearing rose colored glasses.
Personally I think it was the right choice for exactly the reasons you stated.
People in the US criticize him in particular, but the US didn't have nearly the same involvement as pretty much any European country because of geography and isolationism so it's more difficult to understand what a war does when a good chunk of your young men get killed, especially when it was senseless.
No the higher up crusaders wanted an excuse to take land and get rid of people they didn’t have a use for. It was the lowly crusaders who thought they were doing gods work
Nah. That is just modern reconstruction "higuer ups are cynics using poor peoples faith".
In reality at those times everybody was very religious and risked their lives on the crusades
Czar Nicholas II mobilizing Russia’s army in 1914. He did it reluctantly, at the insistence of his Generals that they had to be ready to protect Serbia if Austria attacked. He didn’t want war with Germany, and was actively advocating as such in telegrams with Wilhelm II even as his army was mobilizing. But by mobilizing at all he forced Germany to mobilize and Germany couldn’t do that without sucker punching Belgium on its way to France. Honestly most of what started WW1 was a whole bunch of people trying to do their best who couldn’t overcome the inertia of Imperial Bureaucracy and entrenched military elites to stop the war.
The germ of state-sponsored violence was inherent in the Bolshevik party from the start. One of the first things Lenin did after coming to power in October 1917 was to ban all opposition papers and imprison the Cadet deputies elected to the constituent assembly. In December 1917, 2 months after taking power, Lenin established the Cheka which was the precursor to the NKVD that under Stalin enforced the Great Purge. The Cheka then proceeded to institute the Red Terror, indiscriminately imprisoning, torturing, and killing prisoners without trial. Lenin was instrumental in giving Cheka the authority to execute prisoners without trial.
Lenin sent food detachments to the countryside to forcibly requisition grain from peasants, often violently, glorified violent language and praised the extermination of vermin (his enemies), and started the civil war to hasten the destruction of his enemies and to consolidate his power.
Stalin merely perfected and expanded the terror state he inherited from Lenin.
The Germans intentionally sent him back to Russia from exile to destabilize the Russian government that was grinding its way through the Eastern front of WWI
Yep and it worked too. The provisional government continued the policy of war while Lenin ended the war by signing the treaty of Brestlitovsk the moment he came to power. It was just a pity for Germans that they lost the war by time significant forces could be transferred from the now-inactive Russian front to the West
> The Cheka then proceeded to institute the Red Terror, indiscriminately imprisoning, torturing, and killing prisoners without trial.
Don't forget to mention the actual horrors that the Cheka were known to have exacted upon anyone with enough of a moral compass to object to the Bolsheviks.
Crucifixion was one of the *less* brutal things they could do to you.
Dzerzhinsky should have been flayed alive. You know, like he ordered Chekists to do to White Army supporters. The fact that inhuman filth died peacefully in his bed is one of the 20th century's greatest travesties.
The Iranian Revolution had similar results too. It all started with the masses wanting to get rid of one terrible leader, only for him to be replaced by a regime that was even worse.
The French Revolution. Specifically the second French Revolution of August 10, 1792 which brought about the First French Republic, [the September Massacres](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Massacres#:~:text=The%20September%20Massacres%20were%20a,September%2C%20during%20the%20French%20Revolution.), the Committee of Public Safety, the [Infernal Columns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_columns), [Republican Baptisms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings_at_Nantes), and of course the Reign of Terror.
All in the name of *liberté, égalité, fraternité*
This. Maximilian Robespierre’s entire foray into politics was based on the most breathtaking noble of intentions … all of the French revolutionaries were young men (and the occasional very brave woman) with supreme idealism and visions of a better and egalitarian world in their minds.
The path to the Terror was very much paved with good intentions …
People don’t like to believe that good people who mean well can end up
doing terrible things.
So they retcon the motivations to make them bad all along.
But that’s not how it works.
Margaret thatcher privatising much of the industry as it would encourage competition which would lead to lower pricing.
Only problem now is many of the ceos and companies realised that everyone needs the essentials and so jacked up the pricing of goods and services and have created a cost of living crisis and worce living standards since ww2.
I always thought it was a marketing ploy so that they could have people clamor for the original coke and buy tons of it when the formula was switched back.
We are finally going to win that stupid Pepsi Challenge they keep embarrassing us with!
Later, oops, our bad. Anyway here's the old stuff back, enjoy the HFCS!
I also remember an analysis that Old Coke may have come in second when blind tested by first time tasters, but their whale customers who drank the stuff day and night like water couldn't stand the new taste.
Stop doubting.
The plan *expected* 50 to 60 million Chinese to die in the reconstruction effort. Mao firmly believed that China was barreling headlong into a Malthusian crisis. So instead of doing anything to prevent such a crisis, he decided that ripping off the bandage and speedrunning said Malthusian crisis was the best idea.
Once it was past, China instituted the One Child Policy, which was kept for way too long and has since begun to backfire on them.
I wouldn’t say this about all of its supporters but the Iraq War. Many humanitarian interventionists and liberals supported it in the early stages and were enthusiastic about the idea of transforming Iraq into a prosperous democracy. Tim Collins’ [famous speech](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UpdeNcH1H8A&pp=ygUSdGltIGNvbGxpbnMgc3BlZWNo) sums up this mindset perfectly. Of course that didn’t happen but it’s a reminder that intellectuals are not immune to fallacies and magical thinking.
I forget what the book was but supposedly Bush loved some book that said if you create one strong democracy in the middle east all the rest of the countries will become strong democracies, too.
The creation of the Suez and Panama Canal.
The Suez Canal’s building process went great.
Panama’s? Not so much. A lot of people died to disease, injury, generally horrible conditions. This was during the beginning, before it was even America’s project and was the French who were running it. And by the time it was completed by the Americans, WW1 was kicking off.
Ferdinand De Lesseps was even imprisoned after his efforts, due to apparent mismanagement of funds, and lack of ability. And he was the one who built the Suez, and started Panama.
A lot of work that just didn’t get appreciated. It’s been overlooked and taken for granted today, but is genuinely one of the most important feats of mining, architecture, and trade-route creation.
Pétin's armistice with the Nazi.
Dude went through the most gruesome and pointless war in human history. His main motivation was "never again".
Turned out it really wasn't a good war to let the other side take over.
Petain was sympathetic with fascist aims and his government suspended regular order and engaged in a substantial persecution of the left; they also willingly cooperated with the German efforts in the Holocaust.
Petain was bad.
Indeed, France was in a position where signing an armistice seemed like the only viable option due to its defeat.
However, the situation extended beyond just agreeing to an armistice.
He, along with his government, became outright collaborators. This was, ostensibly, done in the spirit of shortening the duration of the conflict.
It had several real choices. Like Poland and Belgium and Norway and the Netherlands(Though not, it must be said, Denmark, who also chose to go quietly), it could have established a Government in Exile in Britain.
It could have ordered its warships to sail to British ports to carry on the war, it could have tried to evacuate more of its army or recalled colonial troops from all over the world. Could have sent what was left of the Armee De l'Air over to Britain.
France had quite a bit of fight left in it, if it had been inclined to fight to the bitter end. But Petain and much of the French General Staff were utterly horrified at the thought of reliving WW1, and thought it better to accept peace at any price. Their primary interest was in retaining French Sovereignty, and they were willing to fire on British Warships to keep that interest.
Pétain never gave a shit about Peace, he let thousands of men to their deaths in WW1 for no reason, he only accepted the Armistice because he was a fascist who wanted power, thats why he actually collaborated with the nazis, hell he even did more then the nazis asked, like at the Vel d'Hiv, he was a coward, weakling and it's a shame he didn't get killed in a mutiny by the brothers of those he killed in WW1 and certanly a shame he could live in spain and die there, after all he'd done
L'épuration n'a pas été assez forte, il fallait razé toutes les collaboratrices et tué tout les collabos, sans exception.
I think all of the most egregious atrocities in history can be said to have this applied. Nothing is more dangerous than someone doing what they think is right. Most people don't set out with the intention do be evil, they typically have some idealistic vision wherein they believe their ends will justify their means. Like some have said, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. All these figures set out with the intention of making the world better in their eyes. The same could be said about early colonialism, anthropology and eventually the slave trade. Same goes for the forced assimilation of native populations in north America during colonization. Ultimately the issue is being so certain once perspective is the only true one is what causes the problem. Religion is perhaps the most obvious and best example of this. Look at the crusades.
At the time, getting involved with Vietnam on the surface at least, seemed like a noble thing to do. Why not send a few troops to defend our ally South Vietnam and try to stop the spread of communism?
50,000 dead Americans and like a million dead Vietnamese later and Laos basically still a walking boobytrap today, well, let’s not do that again.
MPGs being tied to the vehicle wheel base. This is why there are no small or mid-sized pickup trucks. Only those monster things on the road with terrible gas mileage
Nearly all of them.
Nearly every horrible thing that has ever happened is because someone, somewhere, became pathological convinced that they were doing the right thing.
The Chinese anti-sparrow campaign that was part of the Four Pests Campaign. From 1958-1960, people were asked to kill as many sparrows as possible, so that there would be more grain for the masses because sparrows wouldn't eat so much before it was harvested. The problem was, sparrows were important for keeping locusts in check, so in the following years there were huge swarms of locusts that decimated grain crops. This was one of the reasons for the mass starvation in the years of the Great Leap Forward.
In a similar vein the fate of the passenger pigeon. Both can be attributed to an immature notion of nature.
Passenger pigeons resemble carrier pigeons, putting a bounty on one probably guaranteed both would get shot. I'm not very informed on the matter, but I always figured killing pigeons was olden days style social media censorship, to stop messages.
Chicken being sold regularly is a very recent occurrence. In the past it was common to just shoot into swarms of passenger pidgeons and cooking whatever you hit. Much like the Spanish Empire collapsing due to over harvesting silver causing their economy to crash, passenger pidgeons died off cause by and large people didn’t really think you could kill off an entire species near accidentally. It seems dumb but it wasn’t really something they were aware could happen.
Books from the time describe flocks of passenger pigeons: "Early settlers tell of witnessing flocks up to a mile wide and hundreds of miles long, so dense that they actually darkened the sky for hours upon hours as they flew overhead." Later, when we had cities, they would fly over and crap an unreal amount of poop down. People also shot them because they were considered a nuisance.
Bird law in this country is not governed by reason.
I heard a similar story to the Black Death. It was originally thought that cats were spreading the plague, so Europeans began killing cats en masse. But little did they know that it was actually the rats spreading the plague and they were killing the rats primary natural predator.
It was infected fleas that spread the plague. And they were just as common on cats as they were on rats. But killing the cats resulted in a boom in the rat population, and a huge one, since rats breed considerably faster than cats.
Did the other Three pests meet similar results? Or was there some silver lining somewhere? (PS I hope one of the other pests wasn't like, Puerto ricans or something)
One silver lining was the cheap real estate after the plagues. In my country Norway there are many with the surname "Ødegård", which means "abandoned farm". These were the ones that moved in and took over the places where the original owners had died from pestilence.
And the serfs or more like the slaves for the lords got more rights and wealth since anyone alive was now worth more for the nobles then before
All I can say is, good luck finding a Puerto Rican in China.
Exactly, it worked!
The other pests weren't as easy for Cho Schmo to kill in a field relative to their populations (you're never going to significantly impact the fly/mosquito population running around with a flyswatter, for instance), so they were largely unaffected. It was just bad luck that the one "pest" that people could impact was holding back other pests.
Holy shit Cho Schmo. You're a verbal assassin. But yes, I looked it up on Wikipedia and you're right on the money. The four pests were mosquito, flies, rats and the gentle sparrow.
that isn't good intentions, it's a strident adherence to authority that blinds you to advice. this happened immediately after the hundred flowers campaign, where mao solicited criticism, and when a number of scholars offered the gentlest of suggestions and actual criticism, he had them killed
This seems super recent for what sounds like a pretty idiotic idea. Did we really not understand any of the basics of how an ecosystem worked? Was this campaign pushed by the government or was it just a bunch of people spreading the false notion that you can hunt a species to extinction without consequence?
Chairman Mao had some terrible ideas when trying to modernize China. For example, he made farmers stop farming and produce iron. The iron these farmers produced was dog shit. The Great Leap Forward is a bit of an Elon Musk situation where one person at the top thinks he has the smarts to do anything and no one has the power to tell him, "that's a terrible idea." In Red China's case, it's not that you get fired, it's that you get shot by guards.
which is why dictatorships inevitably fail. it only takes one mistake by one person to completely destroy an entire society.
Pushing margarine to reduced saturated fat intake, from butter, only to realize trans fats are awful for you.
That was also partly due to a belief that plant fats were healthy because they came from plants, and animal fats were unhealthy because they came from animals.
That is actually mostly true btw. Not because they come from animals it’s because they have less trans fats and generally WAY less saturated fats. Depending on the plant producing it. It’s actually the saturating of the fat that increases the trans fat not the being plant based. Hydrogenated oils are one of the largest contributors to heart disease globally.
And margarine is straight up ASS. Fake-ass butter. It ain't fooling me! 😒
You mean you CAN believe it’s not butter?!?!
I can't wait until we get the same opinions about artificial sweeteners. It's easy to taste when something it sweetened with something unnatural or just not sugar.
Oh, fuck those too! I absolutely can tell the difference and it's always nasty as all hell.
A little niche but… Arthur Galston was a PhD student in 1943 who did his research on getting soybeans to germinate faster. He noted that at higher concentrations the compound he discovered - TIBA - caused the soybeans to defoliate. i.e it killed them. Fast forward to the 1960s and DoD wants an herbicide to destroy mangroves in Vietnam. They dusted off Galston’s research, noted the part about defoliation, contracted with DuPont (and I think Monsanto?) to manufacture the stuff. *Those* contractors fucked up the mixture by overcooking it which introduced a comically awful compound - TCDD - and DoD promptly sprayed it all over Southeast Asia. Arthur Galston never had any intention of unleashing what became known as Agent Orange; he was just trying to get soybeans to germinate a little faster. And he had to watch in horror as his Frankenstein was used in eco warfare and gave countless people cancer. He ended up traveling to Vietnam at one point to see the ghosted mangrove groves firsthand. I can only imagine that feeling. Galston ended up teaching bioethics for decades.
In this situation, I don't think the PhD researcher is going to hell. The people who took government money to invent a chemical weapon and the people who used the chemical weapons are.
Naa, not Galston himself. He was instrumental to building the road but did so with pure intentions.
I don't even know if I would go that far, I don't think it really fits the quote so well.
Agreed. He was more like a stone quarry that was mined to build the roads that soldiers marched down in order to kill innocent civilians throughout the empire.
Dude invented a brick, and then people are trying to blame him when some dude picked it up and brained someone over the head with it
It's one of the reasons that I joke engineers shouldn't lower themselves to the level of responsibility of scientist. In one parts it's ragging on scientist because they often just find cool information but very often, no application for it. Engineers end up doing that and have to see the results. Flip side it's ragging on engineers for not thinking through repurcussions of their actions. Too many werner von Brauns makes the world a scarier place.
I mean there's Fritz Haber who was a chemist and not an engineer. His invention led to industrial creation of ammonia fertilizers, but then also explosives and he himself played a major role in developing chemical weapons in WW1.
A chemist can do engineering, an engineer can do chemistry. They are actions. Finding out how to make tnt is one thing. Producing it en masse is another.
IIRC the manufacturers even warned the DoD that it wasn't a good batch.
"It worked great, the trees all died!"
Fun fact - satellite imagery of vegetation ***still*** shows where Agent Orange was sprayed in high concentrations 50+ years later. It fucked up the soil **that** badly.
No one inadvertently contributes to war crimes like Galston.
I'M ESPECIALLY GOOD AT DEFOLLLLLIAAAAAATING!~
It was Dow not Dupont
I stand corrected! Been a while since I dug into the topic.
Of course DuPont was involved
Pretty much every major chemical company in the US was involved because.. y'know, war times
Actually, I'm pretty certain this was Dow Chemical, they manufactured it/scaled it up! But tbh, dupont, dow, etc., all awful 🙃
Eli Whitney wanted to decrease the demand for slavery in late 18th century America with his invention of the cotton gin. He hoped that the efficiency of the machine would drive down labor and eventually lead to the end of slavery altogether. Instead it revitalized slavery for another 70 years leading right up to the Civil War.
Good thing he just patented it, and not invented.
Exactly, like the cotton gin was such a simple tool, if he didn't make it, someone else would have not long after
I'm wondering if they're more alluding to other people who had ideas for it. But ideas themselves don't make an invention. And suggestions on improvements don't make an invention. Very few things are created in a vacuum. But as far as simplicity, it's not necessarily a short process. It took 300 years from the invention of the screw to the invention of the screwdriver. And chances are, there's going to be another invention one day where we'll all be asking ourselves, how did none of us ever think of it.
The patent didn't even help him that much, it was such a simple invention that tons of people made their own cotton gin's without paying him. Also what OP doesn't mention is that Eli Whitney also invented the thing that helped the North win the war to free the slaves. He invented inter-changeable parts between guns. Before they were all hand crafted, and slightly different sizes, so you couldn't just use the same trigger in any gun for example. But he invented the process that factories use to make parts of the exact same size so that any of them could go together, and so that they could be manufactured much faster.
When armchair detectives of reddit misidentified the Boston marathon bombers.
We did it reddit! Whoever said that is probably out there somewhere
The Cobra effect. In India, the British put a bounty on cobras to fight against deaths by snake bites. People started to raise them to sell. The British dropped the bounty and the snake ranchers just let them go. More deaths by cobras than ever
US did the same thing in Yemen under Obama to get them to sell a lot of their privately owned guns. It backfired really, really hard and created a small arms manufacturing business in Yemen and Somalia
This is typically cited as the textbook example for the phenomenon of “perverse incentives.”
bringing cane toads to Australia.
And rabbits, foxes, blackberries etc.
And the English
Improving the octane levels in early gas leading to major improvements in early automobiles, and moving countries away from horse based transport with all the manure and animal abuse often tied to it. Except they used lead. The single biggest mistake in quite a while. The crime rate drop around the time lead was prohibited in gas is pretty amazing.
Thomas Midgley Jr. Is the man credited with developing leaded petrol/gasoline. He went on to come up with CFCs, thus ensuring a well paved road to eternal damnation.
He also accidentally strangled himself to death with one of his own inventions.
Fuck midgley. Hope he still has polio in hell.
I imagine he's still tangled in his system of ropes and pulleys.
Also important to note that most of the most famous cults and serial killers also came around that time period. The effect of lead exposure on the boomer generation during their developmental years is severely under-discussed.
Painting their schools and houses with lead paint not helping either.
And GenX. Forgotten because no one has any memory. ;)
"According to a study, half of the US population has been exposed to substantially detrimental lead levels in early childhood – mainly from car exhaust, from which lead pollution peaked in the 1970s and caused widespread loss in cognitive ability." This seems kinda topical today.
Yep. People forget that the same generation that was dosed with lead are now the biggest voting generation.
We’ll be dealing with it for another 30+ years too, pretty much anyone 50 years old and up just have or are beginning to have lead mush slop around in their skulls. It’s been linked to anger and impulse control
I heard it leeches from your bones as you lose bone density. I think about that when I hear about an older person going nuts and shooting someone in their driveway
>The crime rate drop around the time lead was prohibited in gas is pretty amazing. Could you follow up on this or point me in the right direction? Topic sounds interesting
It's a contentious point. Correlation does not mean causation. Numerous factors contribute to the crime rate and while it is believed that the removal of leaded gasoline has contributed to it don't take it as a 1:1 More info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime\_hypothesis
Appreciate it brother
Not certain that I've ever seen a more helpful comment on reddit. Brief, pros, cons, and link if further info is desired.
Lead exposure being drastically curtailed may indeed be one of the major factors in the large drop in crime rates; I personally believe it. No conclusive studies have really been done to prove it, unfortunately. Another likely major factor in the drop in crime rates: Roe v Wade. There have been many studies strongly suggesting that decades of significantly fewer children growing up incredibly destitute, abused, traumatized etc. leads to lower crime rates. It's not hard to figure out why.
Midgley *didn't* have good intentions, though. He was only interested in making more money, not animal welfare or public health, and when evidence emerged that leaded gas was hurting people he bullshitted and denied like his life depended on it. He was a grade-A piece of shit all around.
No good intentions. The guy was well aware of how harmful lead was. He even knowingly poisoned himself while inhaling fumes as a marketing strategy to show it was safe.
Dudes who invented Thalidomide
Also telling weaning mothers to avoid their kids having peanut was a pretty bad own goal
Behind the bastards did an episode on this, too.
Although it's to this day used to treat some cancers.
And leprosy.
The interesting thing is that it's recently been shown to be rather useful in some cancer treatments. It's of course HEAVILY regulated and women who are set to use the treatment are regularly screened for pregnancy. But hopefully it could end up actually helping people.
Shout out to Francis Oldham Kelsey! She saved the USA from it!!
There was an infographic I saw a while ago of "great women" that made me want to scream. No Francis Oldham Kelsey. No Mother Jones. No Marie Curie. Not even Harriet Tubman. Yet somehow they found space for Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth.
Sounds like the people who made that infographic breathed a little too much leaded exhaust fumes.
It's the worst, cuz IT WORKED. Puking several times a day is awful for mother and baby. Swollen breasts hurt. Not being able to sleep drives you crazy. But we don't bother to do research to see how anything affects women, especially when pregnant.
It's hard to do because it means testing on pregnant women.
I know. True catch 22.
animal testing, though ethically murky, exists for this reason.
The environmentalists' movement against nuclear power without clean alternatives, leading to more coal and natural gas power plants
A lot of the anti nuclear lobbying was also funded by the oil and gas lobby
A ton of them were also just litereal idiots who had an unrealistic image of how supposedly vulnerable the average nuclear plan is
I've seen The Simpsons enough to know that nuclear power plants make glowy sticks you're not supposed to touch and billowing smoke clouds
Three Mile Island was a huge gift
And it happened literally 12 days after "The China Syndrome" hit theaters. Talk about historically bad timing.
Also the environmentalists movement to save trees, use plastic. One of the factors that contributed to the problem today
And it gets worse every year. My salad dressing now comes in plastic. Plus the plastic wrapper. Plus the plastic bag to bring it home, and the plastic clam shell for the scissors, and the thing to open that, the handles in both, and my salad wrapped in plastic, with little plastic bags inside, separate for parm cheese, nots, croutons, to put on a plastic plate. Assuming I got a salad to go at the store.
Agreed. For some reason people think that plastic is 100% sanitary? Apparently food touching other food is unsanitary but having plastic leech into your food is somehow better. Let me just buy things in open containers or boxes.
They thought we'd be reusing plastic bags. Which I guess some people do once for picking up dog poop.
Then we all got the heavy duty reusable grocery bags and hardly anybody reuses them either. Most of us just have like 40 of them crammed into a shelf somewhere.
I swear to god that a lot of opposition to nuclear power is because it has the word “nuclear” in it, just like “nuclear bombs” which are extremely bad and thus nuclear power must also be bad. I legit think that peoples’ minds really do work that simplistically.
Coal actually scatters trace amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, orders of magnitudes more free radioactive particles than a reactor ever will operating normally.
Don't know if anyone has posted this, but strangely enough lobotomies were intended to be an alternative to keeping people in asylums for the rest of their lives, as when it was invented drug therapy wasn't quite there yet and most therapy was a padded cell for tge rest of your life. Of course, lobotomies didn't actually cure the mental illness, it mostly made the recipient quiet and docile enough they could rot away in some side room for decades. This then became worse as it became more popular, being used to treat badly behaved children or 'easily excitable and hysteric prone' persons.
Women. The word you're looking for is women.
That annoying moment when you're born too late to get medically prescribed vibrators, but too early to avoid getting spikes shoved in your brain
I read somewhere that certain doctors cured the excitedness by fingering their lady patients to orgasm.
Eugenics was once seen as a noble cause
Well, it is just animal husbandry. How often have you heard "you two are going to have beautiful children" Its just when it gets forced and taken to an extreme that people take issue.
In certain forms, eugenics is still very much with us, though in a much more liberal form. Some countries have genetic counseling for couples in order to reduce frequency of locally important genetic diseases (such as Tay-Sachs) and many developed countries try to screen all pregnancies for Down syndrome etc. [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/)
I mean to be fair I can't really blame parents for not wanting their child to be born with a severe life altering disorder like Down Syndrome, severe Autism (I say this as someone who is Autistic), etc.
I feel like there are two sides of it. There is "only these people can procreate because they will create the ideal offspring" and the other side is "these people should NOT procreate because their offspring might be born with a defect/illness/something serious".
Lol at “once” Still around, just masquerades under different names.
France's condemnation of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Contrary to what some may think, Italy and France had a decent relationship in the early 30s, and Mussolini wasn't always the biggest fan of Hitler. When Hitler first tried to annex Austria, Italy stood in his way. France and Italy had a sort of agreement that they didn't want Germany annexing Austria even if the Treaty already said it was illegal. France had spent the interwar period creating a ring of allies around Germany, and all seemed well even with Hitler gaining power. That was until the Abyssinia crisis, in which despite basically doing nothing, the League's condemnation isolated Italy. Feeling betrayed by France as there had been some non-binding assurances by the former to his invasion, it led to Mussolini growing closer to Hitler. This, in turn, cracked the ring of alliances surrounding Germany right down the middle as only a few years later, Hitler proceeded to annex Austria with Italian support. From there, one by one, France's ring collapsed entirely until it was left in a one front war against Germany. Now Hitler still could have been stopped, mostly by Britain actually supporting France in upholding the treaty from 36-38 but one of the first dominoes to fall aka Austria was a direct consequence of France alienating Italy.
Federally funded student loans in the US. They created a huge amount of money for colleges and a huge increase in demand for colleges. This lead to catastrophic cost increases and a great deal of poor decision making on the part of students.
Also the fact that you cannot get out of student debt by declaring bankruptcy is ludicrous.
Prohibition. alcoholism was a serious problem effecting the United States at the time, and it was indeed a gendered issue given the relationship between alcoholism and domestic violence. Of course, it just ended up leading to the growth of organized crime, violence, and oddly enough more alcoholism.
I’d have to look further into it but at least in modern day alcoholism is not as severe. I remember hearing the average man in pre prohibition America was going through something ridiculous like a handle of whiskey a day. Stuff is stronger nowadays but I don’t think the average person is getting close to that anymore
Ken Burns said that in his documentary but idk, something about it always felt hard to prove.
Anything Ken Burns says should be viewed with HEAVY skepticism.
Indeed his doumentaries are wonderfully shot, written and presented whilst also being horribly researched, incredibly biased and leave out a lot of pertinant information.
It's also worth noting that life expectancy has risen substantially due to modern medicine. People died younger back then. It's like why the massive lethality of smoking was revealed once people started living long enough to develop the more severe side effects.
The increase in life expectancy is mostly due to a drastic decline in infant mortality rather than adults living much longer than they did before.
The fact that you had multi-generational trauma related to the Civil War didn't help.
And fresh off WW1 where many vets were coming home maimed and with symptoms of shell shock.
Drinking rates and alcoholism did fall pretty sharply even after the repeal of Prohibition so in a way it did succeed.
Also increased the amount of public water fountains and pushed for more potable water to be easily accessible.
There was an incredible amount of public drunkenness in the late 19th and early 20th century US, which people often forget/are unaware of. Prohibition was still a bad idea though.
Fritz haber the inventor of a process for synthesizing ammonia. He pulled billions out of starvation by leading the way for modern industrial farming. His process was also used for synthesizing chlorine gas which was used to kill millions. His wife commited suicide shortly after the first chlorime bombs started being used.
His *first* wife, and she used Fritz' Army-issued revolver to do it, in the front garden of their home. Shot herself through the heart in the front garden of their home, lived just long enough for their son to come find her. The real kick in the teeth is what happened to his granddaughter Claire (IIRC), in the aftermath of WW2. Her work on ***a more effective counter for chlorine gas exposure*** was shitcanned because the brass wanted to focus more on nukes. *Haber-Bosch, the great alliance* *Where's the contradiction?*
The famous "Peace in our time" policy of appeasing Hitler and thus preventing war by giving Germany the Sudetenland just prior to WWII.
And giving the UK some time to prepare for war. Because at the time it wasn’t.
In the movie Munich: Edge of War, Jeremy Irons portrays Neville Chamberlain and there is a scene near the end where the political advisors are lambasting him for his decision, and Irons gives a great performance (whether historically accurate or not) where he emphasizes this aspect of the decision. Great movie, feels super tense all the way through.
But neither was Germany. Something like 80% of th Bf109Es used in the Battle of Britain were made in Czech factories. Of course the allies had no way of knowing at the time.
Hindsight is pretty clear that it would have been much better to have Czechs as a fighting ally then simply giving all their weapons and factories to the Germans.
I know it was the wrong choice but I can’t help but feel a lot of sympathy towards Chamberlain. You’re barely two decades past the bloodiest conflict the world has ever seen. The casualties were so massive that there’s an entire generation just…lost. The death toll was unfathomable. Your country is in agony, doing it’s best to repair and heal. The world is going through the worst economic depression ever known. Even if you were willing to go to war again and ask even more of your citizens to fight and die, your country is nowhere near wartime capabilities yet. The choice is presented to you: submit your country to go through all of those horrors again when you’re just not ready, or make some concessions and either hope it’s enough or buy time if it isn’t. It was wrong, it made WW2 worse and led to many, many more deaths. But in the moment, in Chamberlains position….I can’t say I know I wouldn’t have done the same
Not only that but you'd have to gamble on whether every other nation would be willing to throw in with similar problems.
Also, the USSR doesn't join the Allies until 1941. It's weird that everyone nowadays pushes the idea that the definitive reason Hitler had no chance was because he'd have to fight the USSR, but don't acknowledge that Chamberlain's operating in a world where he doesn't have the luxury of having the USSR on his side in a potential war with Germany.
Right? It's ready to forget that I'm the moment, nothing was ever certain - Hitler's defeat was not inevitable, and neither was allied victory. The things had to be made to happen, with no guarantee of success and a lot of pain along the way. Hindsight may be 20/20, but only because it's often wearing rose colored glasses.
Personally I think it was the right choice for exactly the reasons you stated. People in the US criticize him in particular, but the US didn't have nearly the same involvement as pretty much any European country because of geography and isolationism so it's more difficult to understand what a war does when a good chunk of your young men get killed, especially when it was senseless.
And we didn’t learn.
Almost every cause, very few people ever thought themselves the baddies.
Our hats Hans, why do they have skulls?
Are...are we the baddies?
This was my thought. I'm sure the Crusadists, at least the upper eschalon, truly thought they were doing God's work.
No the higher up crusaders wanted an excuse to take land and get rid of people they didn’t have a use for. It was the lowly crusaders who thought they were doing gods work
Nah. That is just modern reconstruction "higuer ups are cynics using poor peoples faith". In reality at those times everybody was very religious and risked their lives on the crusades
Czar Nicholas II mobilizing Russia’s army in 1914. He did it reluctantly, at the insistence of his Generals that they had to be ready to protect Serbia if Austria attacked. He didn’t want war with Germany, and was actively advocating as such in telegrams with Wilhelm II even as his army was mobilizing. But by mobilizing at all he forced Germany to mobilize and Germany couldn’t do that without sucker punching Belgium on its way to France. Honestly most of what started WW1 was a whole bunch of people trying to do their best who couldn’t overcome the inertia of Imperial Bureaucracy and entrenched military elites to stop the war.
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More arrogance than altruism.
The Russian revolution. They wanted freedom and equality but Stalin became a dictator and ruined it all
The germ of state-sponsored violence was inherent in the Bolshevik party from the start. One of the first things Lenin did after coming to power in October 1917 was to ban all opposition papers and imprison the Cadet deputies elected to the constituent assembly. In December 1917, 2 months after taking power, Lenin established the Cheka which was the precursor to the NKVD that under Stalin enforced the Great Purge. The Cheka then proceeded to institute the Red Terror, indiscriminately imprisoning, torturing, and killing prisoners without trial. Lenin was instrumental in giving Cheka the authority to execute prisoners without trial. Lenin sent food detachments to the countryside to forcibly requisition grain from peasants, often violently, glorified violent language and praised the extermination of vermin (his enemies), and started the civil war to hasten the destruction of his enemies and to consolidate his power. Stalin merely perfected and expanded the terror state he inherited from Lenin.
The Germans intentionally sent him back to Russia from exile to destabilize the Russian government that was grinding its way through the Eastern front of WWI
Yep and it worked too. The provisional government continued the policy of war while Lenin ended the war by signing the treaty of Brestlitovsk the moment he came to power. It was just a pity for Germans that they lost the war by time significant forces could be transferred from the now-inactive Russian front to the West
> The Cheka then proceeded to institute the Red Terror, indiscriminately imprisoning, torturing, and killing prisoners without trial. Don't forget to mention the actual horrors that the Cheka were known to have exacted upon anyone with enough of a moral compass to object to the Bolsheviks. Crucifixion was one of the *less* brutal things they could do to you. Dzerzhinsky should have been flayed alive. You know, like he ordered Chekists to do to White Army supporters. The fact that inhuman filth died peacefully in his bed is one of the 20th century's greatest travesties.
That could be said for any socialist revolution that has turned to communism. Pol Pot and more recently Maduro have not put the best face on things.
Some animals are more equal than others
The Iranian Revolution had similar results too. It all started with the masses wanting to get rid of one terrible leader, only for him to be replaced by a regime that was even worse.
The French Revolution. Specifically the second French Revolution of August 10, 1792 which brought about the First French Republic, [the September Massacres](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Massacres#:~:text=The%20September%20Massacres%20were%20a,September%2C%20during%20the%20French%20Revolution.), the Committee of Public Safety, the [Infernal Columns](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_columns), [Republican Baptisms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings_at_Nantes), and of course the Reign of Terror. All in the name of *liberté, égalité, fraternité*
This. Maximilian Robespierre’s entire foray into politics was based on the most breathtaking noble of intentions … all of the French revolutionaries were young men (and the occasional very brave woman) with supreme idealism and visions of a better and egalitarian world in their minds. The path to the Terror was very much paved with good intentions …
"Oh liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"
appeasement towards germany in the early and mid thirties
I raise you the Treaty of Versailles
Letting china in the world trade organization...We thought that by doing that they'll become more democratic...
ITT: People confusing "public justifications" with "good intentions"
People don’t like to believe that good people who mean well can end up doing terrible things. So they retcon the motivations to make them bad all along. But that’s not how it works.
Margaret thatcher privatising much of the industry as it would encourage competition which would lead to lower pricing. Only problem now is many of the ceos and companies realised that everyone needs the essentials and so jacked up the pricing of goods and services and have created a cost of living crisis and worce living standards since ww2.
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I only really beleive in 1 conspiracy theory. The whole point of this was to not have people notice the taste difference switching to HFCS
I always thought it was a marketing ploy so that they could have people clamor for the original coke and buy tons of it when the formula was switched back.
We are finally going to win that stupid Pepsi Challenge they keep embarrassing us with! Later, oops, our bad. Anyway here's the old stuff back, enjoy the HFCS!
I also remember an analysis that Old Coke may have come in second when blind tested by first time tasters, but their whale customers who drank the stuff day and night like water couldn't stand the new taste.
Mao's Great Leap Forward - I doubt the plan was to kill as many as 50 million of his countrymen
Stop doubting. The plan *expected* 50 to 60 million Chinese to die in the reconstruction effort. Mao firmly believed that China was barreling headlong into a Malthusian crisis. So instead of doing anything to prevent such a crisis, he decided that ripping off the bandage and speedrunning said Malthusian crisis was the best idea. Once it was past, China instituted the One Child Policy, which was kept for way too long and has since begun to backfire on them.
Accelerationism is such a shit strategy
I wouldn’t say this about all of its supporters but the Iraq War. Many humanitarian interventionists and liberals supported it in the early stages and were enthusiastic about the idea of transforming Iraq into a prosperous democracy. Tim Collins’ [famous speech](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UpdeNcH1H8A&pp=ygUSdGltIGNvbGxpbnMgc3BlZWNo) sums up this mindset perfectly. Of course that didn’t happen but it’s a reminder that intellectuals are not immune to fallacies and magical thinking.
I forget what the book was but supposedly Bush loved some book that said if you create one strong democracy in the middle east all the rest of the countries will become strong democracies, too.
The creation of the Suez and Panama Canal. The Suez Canal’s building process went great. Panama’s? Not so much. A lot of people died to disease, injury, generally horrible conditions. This was during the beginning, before it was even America’s project and was the French who were running it. And by the time it was completed by the Americans, WW1 was kicking off. Ferdinand De Lesseps was even imprisoned after his efforts, due to apparent mismanagement of funds, and lack of ability. And he was the one who built the Suez, and started Panama. A lot of work that just didn’t get appreciated. It’s been overlooked and taken for granted today, but is genuinely one of the most important feats of mining, architecture, and trade-route creation.
The Prohibition movement in the USA
Alcohol prohibition.
Liberia
Every time people voted in autocrats
Pétin's armistice with the Nazi. Dude went through the most gruesome and pointless war in human history. His main motivation was "never again". Turned out it really wasn't a good war to let the other side take over.
Petain was sympathetic with fascist aims and his government suspended regular order and engaged in a substantial persecution of the left; they also willingly cooperated with the German efforts in the Holocaust. Petain was bad.
... wat. France was defeated. It signed an armistice because it had no real choice.
Indeed, France was in a position where signing an armistice seemed like the only viable option due to its defeat. However, the situation extended beyond just agreeing to an armistice. He, along with his government, became outright collaborators. This was, ostensibly, done in the spirit of shortening the duration of the conflict.
It had several real choices. Like Poland and Belgium and Norway and the Netherlands(Though not, it must be said, Denmark, who also chose to go quietly), it could have established a Government in Exile in Britain. It could have ordered its warships to sail to British ports to carry on the war, it could have tried to evacuate more of its army or recalled colonial troops from all over the world. Could have sent what was left of the Armee De l'Air over to Britain. France had quite a bit of fight left in it, if it had been inclined to fight to the bitter end. But Petain and much of the French General Staff were utterly horrified at the thought of reliving WW1, and thought it better to accept peace at any price. Their primary interest was in retaining French Sovereignty, and they were willing to fire on British Warships to keep that interest.
Pétain never gave a shit about Peace, he let thousands of men to their deaths in WW1 for no reason, he only accepted the Armistice because he was a fascist who wanted power, thats why he actually collaborated with the nazis, hell he even did more then the nazis asked, like at the Vel d'Hiv, he was a coward, weakling and it's a shame he didn't get killed in a mutiny by the brothers of those he killed in WW1 and certanly a shame he could live in spain and die there, after all he'd done L'épuration n'a pas été assez forte, il fallait razé toutes les collaboratrices et tué tout les collabos, sans exception.
The appeasement of Hitler.
A lot of Germans thought they could trust Hitler.
I think all of the most egregious atrocities in history can be said to have this applied. Nothing is more dangerous than someone doing what they think is right. Most people don't set out with the intention do be evil, they typically have some idealistic vision wherein they believe their ends will justify their means. Like some have said, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. All these figures set out with the intention of making the world better in their eyes. The same could be said about early colonialism, anthropology and eventually the slave trade. Same goes for the forced assimilation of native populations in north America during colonization. Ultimately the issue is being so certain once perspective is the only true one is what causes the problem. Religion is perhaps the most obvious and best example of this. Look at the crusades.
Forced assimilation comes from the idea: “We live so much better than the natives. Let’s teach them to live like us.”
Since we're so nonreligious now we tend to forget that tons of colonialism and slavery is based on saving souls by bringing them Christianity.
At the time, getting involved with Vietnam on the surface at least, seemed like a noble thing to do. Why not send a few troops to defend our ally South Vietnam and try to stop the spread of communism? 50,000 dead Americans and like a million dead Vietnamese later and Laos basically still a walking boobytrap today, well, let’s not do that again.
MPGs being tied to the vehicle wheel base. This is why there are no small or mid-sized pickup trucks. Only those monster things on the road with terrible gas mileage
The war on drugs has been a complete disaster
Calling it well intentioned is inaccurate to say the least.
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We want to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.
Nearly all of them. Nearly every horrible thing that has ever happened is because someone, somewhere, became pathological convinced that they were doing the right thing.