Thought Provoking Questions #1* - What historical event would you stop if you could?

[summsuccess]

In an effort to bring more than nostalgia to your forum I am stealing the series idea from Offshore Toon and putting my own little spin on it.

What historical event would you stop if you were able to go back in time and do so but more importantly for the member answering it, why have you chosen what you have?

Discuss.

Remember that for every action there is a reaction that would set off a different chain of events which is where I would like others to members to participate.

Thank You.

[Shindig]

Brexit. I can't be arsed with different coloured passports.

[Offshore Toon]

Mike Ashley buying Newcastle United. If I had to choose between killing Hitler or Mike Ashley as a baby then it'd be Ashley every time.

[Lewis]

I wouldn't.

[Sir Andy Mahowry]

The Butterfly Effect with Ashton Kutcher has scared me from changing anything.

[Offshore Toon]

Actually, I might change something bigger. I've got fuck all possessions so might as well spin the wheel. I don't have a clue what would benefit me right now, so I'll have to get back to you.

[SvN]

I'd get Fergie's sister in law to the doctors.

[Dark Soldier]

EDIT: Fucked it. My apologies, move along.

[summsuccess]

Brexit. I can't be arsed with different coloured passports.

Assuming the conservatives or that grubby little pig fucker David Cameron didnt offer a referendum then would it be fair to say we could be stuck with JC's Labour party or could Nigel 'I got a black and white TV' Farage be the new PM as people vote UKIP in record numbers?


Mike Ashley buying Newcastle United. If I had to choose between killing Hitler or Mike Ashley as a baby then it'd be Ashley every time.

You could still be owned by the debt ridden Hall family? I was looking on the internet to see who else was in the running when Mike Ashley put in a bid to buy your club and I found this (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/2385366/Newcastles-20m-bid-for-Rooney-rejected.html).

Lucky escape or missed opportunity.


I wouldn't.

Lewis doesnt change history. He creates it.

:huhu:

[summsuccess]

EDIT: Fucked it. My apologies, move along.

How big was she?

[Jimmy Floyd]

American independence. We should still be ruling it, basketball should never have been invented, and Spoonsky should be tweeting how proud he is to have been selected Theresa May's local candidate for Salt Lake City North West.

[Offshore Toon]

You could still be owned by the debt ridden Hall family? I was looking on the internet to see who else was in the running when Mike Ashley put in a bid to buy your club and I found this (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/2385366/Newcastles-20m-bid-for-Rooney-rejected.html).

Lucky escape or missed opportunity.
The general consensus is we bid that to bump up the price for Everton and make us look ambitious. I can't remember what we got in return.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/wwe-owner-vince-mcmahon-reported-to-be-sniffing-around-newcastle-united-with-a-view-to-incredible-9135535.html

That would have been ideal.

[Boydy]

The fall of the Soviet Union.

[7om]

Just to play devil's advocate, why don't people just go for the obvious and stop the most vile acts in history? I.e. Hitler's persecution of undesirables / Mao's Great Leap Forward / The election of Tony Blair.

[Lewis]

Because we have enough Chinese people as it is.

[John]

Just to play devil's advocate, why don't people just go for the obvious and stop the most vile acts in history? I.e. Hitler's persecution of undesirables / Mao's Great Leap Forward / The election of Tony Blair.

The TD/FMG merger.

Similar to Offy, I'd stop Craig Whyte taking over Rangers. That fucker was responsible for us dropping through the leagues, he sold off assets which had been part of the club for decades, signed off on a merchandising deal (involving Mike Ashley) which is still dicking the club six years later, and just generally fucked everything up.

[ItalAussie]

I'd throw a spanner in the Louisiana Purchase. It'd be interesting to see how things changed if the North American continent was broken into a series of smaller countries, like Europe, which is kind of what I think would happen.

[Adamski]

The TD/FMG merger.

Similar to Offy, I'd stop Craig Whyte taking over Rangers. That fucker was responsible for us dropping through the leagues, he sold off assets which had been part of the club for decades, signed off on a merchandising deal (involving Mike Ashley) which is still dicking the club six years later, and just generally fucked everything up.

It was Green that did the retail deal but I guess that's just a chain reaction from Whyte anyway.

[Shindig]

Actually. preventing the holocaust might've given the Middle East one less headache.

[Henry]

The fall of the Soviet Union.

On the contrary, I'm going to go with stopping the rise of the Soviet Union.

I'm also trying to think of how we might have stopped monotheistic religion from achieving dominance, at least in the way that it did. Maybe prevent the Jewish uprising or something.

[phonics]

If you did walk up and kill baby Hitler, how are you going to explain to everyone around you that, 'No it's fine, that was baby Hitler'

[Jimmy Floyd]

I don't think you can possibly stop monotheistic religion in any human history. It's the logical conclusion of polytheistic religion, i.e. it's all very well having rain gods, sun gods but when you develop further and have time to think deeper, rather than just worrying about your next harvest, you have time to think about who's really in charge. The Romans went over to Christianity at a certain point and it was a shoo in from there.

There is a very long gap between the point where humans are able to conceive of a single God running things and the point where things like particle physics could cast doubt on having gods at all (and even now it's highly contested), and during that long gap you have a shitload of technological development and population expansion that kills a lot of people.

[Spammer]

I'd do something to ensure that I could never go back and do something, just to see how the universe reacted.

[Henry]

I don't think you can possibly stop monotheistic religion in any human history. It's the logical conclusion of polytheistic religion, i.e. it's all very well having rain gods, sun gods but when you develop further and have time to think deeper, rather than just worrying about your next harvest, you have time to think about who's really in charge. The Romans went over to Christianity at a certain point and it was a shoo in from there.

There is a very long gap between the point where humans are able to conceive of a single God running things and the point where things like particle physics could cast doubt on having gods at all (and even now it's highly contested), and during that long gap you have a shitload of technological development and population expansion that kills a lot of people.

I'd contest that on a couple of fronts.

Firstly, polytheism existed for thousands of years without any sort of transition. It's not an inevitable development. Like many other large societal changes, it took severe repression and coersion to cause people to abandon it.

Secondly, I'm not saying that the adoption of monotheism itself was all bad. In fact, it's in some ways a necessary retreat from the full-on superstition of polytheism (where everything from trees and rocks are controlled by spirits) to a system where nature pretty much governs itself beyond an initial act of creation and occasional interference.

However, it's also the case that the way that monotheism was adopted, whereby it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, both contributed to the downfall of that empire and instituted a period of over a thousand years of tyrannical thought-policing on the part of the Roman church.

Monotheism was already in existence by the time Christianity developed, via Zoroastrianism and related cults, with people like Plato and others moving towards it as well. But these developments were a little more benign and might have played out better without the rise of Christianity. I'm surmising that the definitive event in the development of that was its separation from second temple Judaism, which would not have occurred without the Jewish Revolt. Stop that and Christianity remains a backwater cult little different from Mandaeism, we don't spend several centuries arguing about the precise manner in which some dude who was tortured to death should define our lives and educated people gradually move towards something like deism, even as the masses continue whatever nonsense they wish until someone shows them better.

[Kikó]

On the contrary, I'm going to go with stopping the rise of the Soviet Union.

I'm also trying to think of how we might have stopped monotheistic religion from achieving dominance, at least in the way that it did. Maybe prevent the Jewish uprising or something.

There is a fascinating exhibition at the British Library on the Russian Revolution. It's a fascinating part of history that I really need to learn more about.

[Jimmy Floyd]

I can accept that (didn't the Egyptians try it a millennium earlier as well?) but I can't accept that you're not going to get a massive violent/aggressive cult at some point in response to paganism (as Islam later demonstrated). Christianity and Islam didn't spread by accident, this was stuff that the educated bought into because it made sense and moreover offered malleable levers of control.

I just don't buy that human thought moves quickly enough in any conceivable history to avoid some form of major monotheistic movement ruling the roost for ages prior to the industrial revolution. If it wasn't Christ it would have ended up being someone else.

[Henry]

Well, Islam started up in regions that were heavily influenced by ( though importantly not controlled by) Christian thought. I don't think you get one without the other. It was probably on the rise anyway, but I don't see why you need to have any kind of mass adoption of montheism. It didn't happen in the east.

But obviously we don't have a world simulation to run this stuff on.

[Jimmy Floyd]

True but the east is bigger and doesn't have the same geo-political conflict/progress hotspots that the West has. You obviously need Rome to happen to get the Jewish revolt in the first place.

I was once told by a professor at university that the presence of bays fundamentally defines history. There are fuck all bays in Africa, for example, but loads in the Med and Britain. No idea if that has any merit beyond SOAS postulation.

[Sir Andy Mahowry]

I'd go back and destroy any notion of religion so we wouldn't have to hear about it on here.

[summsuccess]

If we killed Hitler than who are the aliens going to hear instead?

[Spammer]

I don't think you can fuck about with culture at all really, and I doubt it'd be in any way possible to prevent monotheistic religion from happening without changing the world beyond recognition. I think the forces governing these kinds of development run very deep and probably run back to long before they came to the surface and presented themselves.

[Offshore Toon]

If anything, this thread has made me realise how little 'major events' have had an effect on me personally. When the RBS bank systems went down (in 2012?) I couldn't make it to a Kendrick Lamar gig, which was a pretty big deal at the time, but I doubt I'd even remember the gig properly anymore.

[phonics]

He's crap live anyway.

[Offshore Toon]

Yeah, I've never heard anything great. I caught him in Hyde Park last year and it was really good, but rather disappointing at the same time.

[Disco]

I'd go back and destroy any notion of religion so we wouldn't have to hear about it on here.

For the same reason I'd go back and get your watch.

[Lewis]

If you did walk up and kill baby Hitler, how are you going to explain to everyone around you that, 'No it's fine, that was baby Hitler'

Why even kill him (baby or otherwise)? Why not just buy his paintings?

[Disco]

Intetesting that phonics jumps straight to murdering babies, if you can change anything why not just have him not be born.

[phonics]

Why even kill him (baby or otherwise)? Why not just buy his paintings?

Only thing worse than Hitler would be a Damien Hirst Hitler

[Spammer]

Everyone knows that if you kill Hitler the Soviets will just become a more direct threat earlier what with Yuri and the tesla coils and the chrono tanks and all that stuff.

[Mike]

I fell over in a nightclub once, The Krazyhouse, and hurt my knee. I wasn't drunk but the floor was wet. I would stop that fall from happening.

It really did hurt my knee.

[Jimmy Floyd]

If you stop Bismarck from being born then the 20th century probably improves a fair bit.

[Disco]

I might pop hack and strap Owen Hart in properly, or tell Senna to lift a bit more going into Tamburello.

[Offshore Toon]

I fell over in a nightclub once, The Krazyhouse, and hurt my knee. I wasn't drunk but the floor was wet. I would stop that fall from happening.

It really did hurt my knee.
I jumped off a wall last March and although it didn't hurt at the time my ankle hasn't been the same since. It'll swell up regularly for seemingly no reason. Tried resting it for a few months last summer but did no good.

[Jimmy Floyd]

or tell Senna to lift a bit more going into Tamburello.

I've done this one before. If Senna lives he wins '94 (the Williams was much the better car by year end), Schumacher probably pinches '95 but not by quite so much, Senna wins '96 and '97 (Schumacher still goes to Ferrari I think) and then with his ruthless streak probably joins Mika in the McLaren again in '98, winning at least one more title which would be seven.

It also means David Coulthard is restricted to a mediocre tintop career, Schumacher is nowhere near as massive a figure, Senna would by now either be President of Brazil or running F1, and he and Prost would be having a 20 year tedious love in.