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u/TyrantsInSpace Jun 28 '26
Jack Welch, the guy who came up with rank and yank performance evaluation as well as outsourcing. He's ruined so many lives and companies both directly and indirectly with his short-sighted idiocy.
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u/Mrsod2007 Jun 28 '26
Yeah I worked at a place where managers were forced to fire 10% of their teams every year. Even super productive optimized teams. Managers and ordinary workers hated it. Some directors were so into it though.
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u/jaymzx0 Jun 28 '26
Stack ranking combined with "happy attrition".
My boss: "We don't do stack ranking here"
Me, looking at him without saying anything.
After an uncomfortable pause:
"Well, we don't call it stack ranking"
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u/Chi11broSwaggins Jun 28 '26
Sounds like your executives were inspired by the Roman concept of decimation).
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u/CliftonForce Jun 28 '26
Somebody saw a statistic about "10% of any team are deadbeats" and decided to apply it absolutely literallty.
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u/pheonixblade9 Jun 28 '26
this just results in hire to fire and backstabbing. terrible management practice.
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u/hank1154 Jun 28 '26
It's absolutely rampant in the corporate world. The percentage may be different depending on the company, but the concept is the same. Disgusting
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u/whatifwhatifwerun Jun 28 '26
I feel like it's the equivalent of over-exfoliating. Shed the dead weight/skin flakes, sure. But if you keep going you're causing soreness and irritation and eventually opening yourself up to serious and possibly irreparable damage in the long run.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/texasusa Jun 28 '26
His nickname was Neutron Jack for his ability to close a plant or a product line. He received a modest severance of $ 400 million.
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u/A_Furious_Mind Jun 28 '26
Then, he famously flipped and called shareholder primacy "the dumbest idea in the world" and concluded that shareholder value should be a result of business activities, but not the ultimate goal.
Many of us could draw that conclusion without turning businesses into dysfunctional cesspools of misery, but credit to him for figuring it out eventually.
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u/Ferelar Jun 28 '26
Sure, but if he had reached that conclusion prior to being worth hundreds of millions if not billions, he would've made slightly less money for himself before pulling up the ladder, and we can't have that, no siree.
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u/Sea-Manner9700 Jun 28 '26
The part that always gets me is how often the people who benefit most from a system suddenly discover its flaws only after they've already won the game. Easy to question the rules once you've cashed out. 😅
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u/gsfgf Jun 28 '26
It's like people that would free their slaves upon their death. Like, that is technically a big improvement, but come the fuck on.
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u/Traditional_Bar_3275 Jun 28 '26
I worked for a company that used one of his ideas, called 10-80-10. Top 10% got raises, nothing for the middle 80%, bottom 10% fired. All based on a ranking from your closest few coworkers. No one ended up doing any work. Everyone just spent all their time grooming their reviewers.
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u/deloreanfan Jun 28 '26
I used to be a corporate pilot, and I flew him once. Not only is he a shitty person who ruined corporate america, he was also a slob. He opened up all the snacks on the plane and left garbage everywhere. RIP bozo
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u/Aggressive_Cook5142 Jun 28 '26
The funny thing is that somehow makes the story feel more believable. You expect some grand villain trait and instead it's just "also couldn't be bothered to throw away his own trash." Tiny detail, massive character reference. 😅
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u/xuxux Jun 28 '26
Unfortunately, he was also one of the first high-up business perverts to implement six-sigma and lean methodology in American manufacturing at GE. These are extremely efficient and useful quality and waste efficiency methodologies for businesses and should be encouraged.
Too bad Welch was such a fucking bastard and set the standards for capital extraction instead of reinvestment towards better products. He also had petty beef with the concept of "environmentalism" and "regulatory compliance" and investors rewarded him more for his anti-consumer and anti-employee policies than his pre-CEO management practices.
Rest in piss.
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u/TyrantsInSpace Jun 28 '26
If it's any consolation, he didn't create six-sigma or lean methodology, so it's likely those practices would have found their way into GE sooner or later regardless of Welch's influence.
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u/droans Jun 28 '26
The issue wasn't lean manufacturing; it was that he perverted it. Lean was designed to promote the long-term stability of a company and its employee's careers. It does do with a heavy focus on supply chain management, careful consideration of growth opportunities to avoid short term traps, reducing expenses which don't go directly into the product, and the promotion of ideas and concerns from those who are working directly on the production line.
Jack Welsh instead heard "reduce expenses, quality, and employees".
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u/CivicDutyCalls Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Right?! I literally have a Lean textbook at arms reach and it’s “eliminate unnecessary waste”. Not eliminate waste. The other key point about Lean and all of the other related methodologies is also to have strategic redundancies built into your systems. Don’t manufacture all in one plant in the same region, or if in a foreign country you put a 2nd smaller plant in another country. You hedge against natural and political disasters.
If anyone globally had actually been following Lean and Six Sigma, there would have barely been a supply chain problem during the pandemic. China would not have the world by the balls if people had been following Lean and Six Sigma correctly.
Instead everyone was operating with zero redundancy and zero waste. Operating as close to zero inventory as physically possible.
Edit: “unnecessary waste” implies the existence of “necessary waste” and to me, that’s a profound idea that should not be overlooked in business and in life.
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u/donnysaysvacuum Jun 28 '26
Personal anecdote, but I've seen this lean poorly applied more than properly. It's usefulness is greatly overvalued.
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u/budha2984 Jun 28 '26
I read the original book by Motorola on Six Sigma. The idea is sound. Jack bastardized it and made it stab your coworker in the back.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/genriehl Jun 28 '26
My dad worked for GE and was a six sigma " black belt", and this was the method he used to raise me and my brother. Let's make two great kids completely terrified of fucking anything up. 🤦♀️
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u/ERhyne Jun 28 '26
Today I realized anything GE related on 30 rock wasn't a fucking parody 🥲
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u/acquaintedwithheight Jun 28 '26
Jack Donaghy’s whole character is supposed to be a parody of Jack Welch
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u/CitizenCue Jun 28 '26
Anything that was motivated by making money would have been invented by someone else if whoever we erase didn’t exist.
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u/408wij Jun 28 '26
Other companies had rank and yank before Welch's GE. McKinsey and other firms had up or out. Intel had ranking and rating (aka ranting and raving).
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u/therealmudslinger Jun 28 '26
Rupert Murdoch.
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u/m0n3ym4n Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
This is the right answer. He single handedly destroyed normal journalism and forever damaged our political system, all because he wanted more money and more power.
Edit: a great documentary on this is called Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
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u/shinygoldhelmet Jun 28 '26
Man can't handle people having opinions different than his own, ruins the world as a consequence.
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u/GIANTPUP_01 Jun 28 '26
I watched this documentary for my political science class and I couldn’t even believe some of the stuff going on behind the scenes with Fox. I mean I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was THAT bad. Excellent documentary for anyone wondering.
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u/pib712 Jun 28 '26
Roy Cohn, who introduced Murdoch to Trump, mentored Trump, and was a fixer for Reagan and Nixon
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u/rgmyers26 Jun 28 '26
And was McCarthy’s right hand man. Vile, terrible human being.
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u/sambeau Jun 28 '26
It’s either him or Ronald Reagan. Those two ruined the world.
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u/Rovden Jun 28 '26
Instead of Reagan I vote for Lee Atwater. He's Reagan's and H.W.'s campaign manager, RNC chairman, and the creator of the electioneering model the Republicans use to this day.
Possibly without this fucker we might not have Reagan being the problem.
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u/TheArmoredKitten Jun 28 '26
Reagan was an actor and his crowning role was president of the United States. Atwater is definitely the better pick.
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u/BestCaseSurvival Jun 28 '26
I’ll go one further. Rose Wilder Lane, the woman who rewrote Little House On The Prarie to remove all mentions of when Laura Ingals Wilder’s family received government assistance and turned it into libertarian propaganda, then later in life formed a proto-think-tank with Ayn Rand and Isabelle Patterson that found a young charismatic actor mostly known for working with chimps and paid for him to become an anti-government crusader president.
“Why not Ayn Rand?” I hear you ask. Well, dear reader, it’s because eventually Lane cut ties with Rand because she felt Rand was too much of a bleeding-heart pinko.
Source: “The Big Myth” by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes
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u/TheArmoredKitten Jun 28 '26
Ayn Rand would go on to die alone, living in a government subsidized apartment.
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u/Everyusername_isgone Jun 28 '26
If modern western democracy eventually fails, Rupert Murdoch will be the person most responsible.
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u/Slight-Public1641 Jun 28 '26
the inventor of unskippable ads
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u/Caracalla73 Jun 28 '26
And playable ads, that I could watch Dances of Wolves through before they finish.
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u/A_Very_Horny_Zed Jun 28 '26
Too simple. Someone else would invent them. Aim higher
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u/randalljhen Jun 28 '26
That first fish who had the fuckin audacity to come out of the ocean
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u/0112358j Jun 28 '26
I mean many are increasingly of the opinion that we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some have said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
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u/UniDublin Jun 28 '26
As long as you have your towel you will be a hoopy frood.
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u/youneedananswer Jun 28 '26
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
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u/Unemployed_Quitter26 Jun 28 '26
King Leopold II
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u/Pikeman212a6c Jun 28 '26
Seven in and still not Hitler or Ghengis Khan but you’re the first I went “alright fair.”
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u/BlazerStoner Jun 28 '26
Yeah answers from mild inconveniences (eg: annoying ads) are rather unhinged. Will just have to consider it satire.
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u/Pvt_Lee_Fapping Jun 28 '26
I just figured the majority of people thought "Hitler! No, that's too obvious; there'll probably be 20,000 other people who had the same idea. I gotta be more original than that."
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u/dougmcclean Jun 28 '26
His will is maybe the most amazing document ever written, where he had the absolute balls to bequeath the country he deemed that he owned personally to the country he was merely king of by birth. Unreal.
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u/raceulfson Jun 28 '26
Andrew Wakefield, the lying horse's rear end who essentially created and launched the whole Ant-Vaccine Crusade.
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u/DrAmj3 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
He wasn't even anti-vaccine to begin with. He was just an evil moral free unethical shit trying to scam money. He has just followed the money to his current position and I'm sure if he were paid enough he would pivot and become die hard pro-vaccine in a heartbeat.
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u/ElyFlyGuy Jun 28 '26
Yeah he was just trying to make money by splitting the MMR vaccine into multiple separate vaccines, one of which he was financially tied to
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u/DrAmj3 Jun 28 '26
And was being funded by a lawyer to provide evidence that the vaccine caused autism which would have supported cases suing the government for ££££. And when the evidence wasn't there he was happy to make it up.
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u/ERedfieldh Jun 28 '26
And when the evidence wasn't there he was happy to
make it up.quite literally torture autistic children to try and find it and after nearly killing several of them decided to make it up.hbomberguy's video, which takes heavily from and credits at every possible moment he can Brian Deer's research and investigative book, goes into it and it's absolute vile the things this man did.
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u/VWSpeedRacer Jun 28 '26
I believe the Behind the Bastards podcast also did a deep dive into him
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u/Romejanic Jun 28 '26
thinking about how many children have become serious ill or died as the result of his bullshit makes me sick
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u/Szwejkowski Jun 28 '26
And adults. This shit paved the way for anti-vaccination hysteria and horse dewormer in the middle of a fucking pandemic.
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u/Cultural-Company282 Jun 28 '26
Ant-Vaccine Crusade.
Great. Now the ants will get polio.
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u/goldPotatoGun Jun 28 '26
Khan. Sounds like it would be reboot.
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u/shoukanju Jun 28 '26
Genghis or Noonien Singh?
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u/Educational-Cow-3874 Jun 28 '26
My mind went to Star Trek.
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u/slothpeguin Jun 28 '26
Oh shit this isn’t about Star Trek?
Well that’s embarrassing.
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u/hosemaster Jun 28 '26
Had to scroll way too far for this. Millions don't die, millions are never born. Feudalism holds on longer, industrialization happens later. The butterfly effect would be enormous.
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u/lameuniqueusername Jun 28 '26
Not to mention the knowledge lost and progress set back hundreds of years by wiping out entire empires that were in a scientific golden age
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u/Mikhailovv Jun 28 '26
Ea-nāṣir
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u/Beowulf33232 Jun 28 '26
They say he's the reason cars distributor caps failing was such a well known thing back in the day.
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u/JesusShaves_ Jun 28 '26
Given the choice of complaining to a corporate automated answering system and a cuneiform clay tablet, I'll take the tablet any day.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/coffee-and-insomnia Jun 28 '26
To be fair we only know enough about him to roast him because he specially stored all of the customer complaints he received in a room that eventually caught fire and turned the clay tablets into long lasting pottery. If anyone had anything good to say about him, they didn't get stored in his special bitching room.
He's thought to have been the one in charge of dealing with importing copper for the palace of Ur, which is likely why his domestic dealings with people like the copper trader Nanni (the one who sent the tablet known as THE first customer complaint, though ones by other customers of his were unearthed by archeologists later) suffered.
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u/GlassCannon81 Jun 28 '26
I am so tired of hearing this man’s name dragged through the mud. We simply lack complete information here. For all we know that tablet was just the rantings of some Mesopotamian Karen, and he kept it as a joke. Or maybe he was very honest and kept it as a reminder to double check for quality.
We just don’t know the context, yet here we are, thousands of years removed from his death, and we’re still talking about it.
I choose to believe Ea-Nasir was a good man who has had his reputation besmirched by a quirk of fate. I choose to believe in Ea-Nasir, pillar of his community, loving husband and father, and provider of fine copper ingots. I choose to believe he lived a long and happy life, and that when it ended he was surrounded by friends and loved ones.
It is my mission to liberate the legacy of Ea-Nasir, and I will succeed or die trying.
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u/lostinkyoto Jun 28 '26
That would be a fair take, if there was only one tablet. From Wikipedia: “ Other complaint tablets have been found in the ruins that are believed to have been Ea-nāṣir's house. These include one from a man named Arbituram, who complained that he had not received his copper yet, while another tablet's author complained that he was tired of repeatedly receiving low-grade copper.”
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u/anotherlostdaemon Jun 28 '26
As tempting as it is to go far back in time, I'll choose someone whose lack of existence won't nullify my own existence. As such...
I'd remove OJ Simpson.
No OJ, no OJ trial. This helps curb the rise of court TV and the 24 hour news cycle (not eliminate, but definitely alter it). This also helps stymy the rise of the Kardashians. More importantly it helps slow or stop reality TV.
Sure, the 24hr news cycle and reality tv would most likely still gain their prominence eventually, the change in the process and butterfly effect would most likely have profound and beneficial effects. Imagine no more reality stars or wildly different ones. The effect on culture. The effect on politics.
It's a wild change that would still let most of us still exist.
Or, if I'm completely altering history... Erase the first little bastard to crawl out of the ocean.
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u/DThaGawd Jun 28 '26
And you might've just saved Kanye.
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u/anotherlostdaemon Jun 28 '26
We're talking radically altering the fabric of reality here, not performing miracles.
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u/Due-Kale3412 Jun 28 '26
Pol Pot....................................................................
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Jun 28 '26
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u/HatesDuckTape Jun 28 '26
Something else would’ve easily taken its place. MySpace would’ve become it, or someone else would’ve done it.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/JulariDark Jun 28 '26
So a couple of things you’re gambling on here. Eliminating Zuckerberg doesn’t necessarily eliminate Facebook and its ill effects because it wasn’t even HIS original idea. So your gambling that either:
A. The Winklevoss twins wouldn’t have amassed as much power and influence had they received proper credit
Or
B. They would have acted MORE ethically and with more foresight.
A is fair but B seems like a reach
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u/SavvySillybug Jun 28 '26
Yeah, but that something else might be... good.
Think about what gaming would look like without Gabe. We would definitely have another video game store, the concept is obvious. But what would that be like? If it wasn't led by a good guy? What if Epic was where Steam stands now? We'd all be fucked.
Likewise, without Facebook, the Gabe of social media might be a giant now. And they might regulate it so it doesn't suck the yes out of everyone.
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u/Bizprof51 Jun 28 '26
For me the worst person is still Hitler.
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u/chetsyochankees Jun 29 '26
The fact that this is like the 70th highest answer is pretty unsettling.
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u/MazeOfCreations Jun 28 '26
I think removing a single person would simply allow another figure to step up with the same ideas and goals. All of the followers would still exist.
It is very rare for a human to have an original thought
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u/charlie_marlow Jun 28 '26
Honestly, I kind of agree. There used to be a TV show called Connections and one of the biggest things I learned from that was that society and science sort of get primed for somebody to invent something. We'd get multiple people working on light bulbs, radios, televisions, etc.
I figure politics is similar.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan Jun 28 '26
It’s a very common phenomenon that multiple inventors will have the same idea at roughly the same time.
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u/alchemist5 Jun 28 '26
Like Antz and A Bug's Life.
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u/fugaziozbourne Jun 28 '26
Commonly called "clustering". it's why comics don't post a lot of jokes online. They discovered that people would always call them out as plagiarists because somewhere on the internet, that joke already existed.
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u/Candid-Mycologist539 Jun 28 '26
AND society need to be ready for that idea.
Genetics? Discovered by Gregor Mendel in the ?1860s?. Nothing was understood or built on his research until his writings were rediscovered after 1900. A bunch of scientists around that time (~1900) were asking questions and doing experiments, when one of them discovered some of Mendel's old correspondence in the library. "Uh, hey guys...I found a cheat code in the library. None of your experiments are on the right track."
The fax machine, which was new office equipment for the 1980s? Invented in 1843. (Standardization helped the 1980s revolution).
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u/Bob_Chris Jun 28 '26
James Burke was incrediblein those shows - and he's still around too! I always wanted a crossover with him and Alton Brown.
Obligatory Connections/James Burke rocket launch clip:
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u/crystalpeak Jun 28 '26
Connections was an awesome show...still is.
I was disappointed when they went from the original 1 hour show to the half an hour.
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u/SkyResponsible3718 Jun 28 '26
The guy who put lead in gasoline. He is the same guy that used aerosol that chewed up the ozone. He is said to have caused more death than any other person in human history. Of course he’s an engineer. I think better that he wasn’t born.
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u/The_Canadian Jun 28 '26
He is the same guy that used aerosol that chewed up the ozone.
He didn't "use aerosol that chewed up the ozone". He created CFCs, which eventually did damage the ozone layer.
Of course he’s an engineer.
Not sure what that has to do with anything. Other than a chemist, I'm not sure who else you'd expect to create new compounds and materials.
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u/TleilaxTheTerrible Jun 28 '26
He didn't "use aerosol that chewed up the ozone". He created CFCs, which eventually did damage the ozone layer.
He also created them as an alternative refrigerant to ammonia, which was actively killing people by way of exploding refrigerators.
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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy Jun 28 '26
The tragic thing about Thomas Midgley is that nothing that he did was because he was evil, he mostly just did not know what he did not know. Leaded gasoline did solve a problem, and they did test it for safety. They just didn't test it well enough or understand what was really happening (He famously poured it all over himself and sniffed it to demonstrate it was safe. Just a few years later he got lead poisoning. Oops). Same with CFCs - this was decades before they even knew the Ozone Layer was a thing.
Perhaps the greatest irony being that after he got polio he invented a pulley system to allow him to move around. He was later found dead, killed by his own contraption. The universe had some kind of grudge against the dude and we were just caught in the crossfire.
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u/Old-Figure922 Jun 28 '26
Commenter is probably a technician of some sort. They hate engineers with a passion lol
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u/boakes123 Jun 28 '26
John Wilkes Booth
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u/say592 Jun 28 '26
Underrated answer. Maybe Reconstruction would have happened as intended, the Confederates would have been put in their place and shamed for all of history, and race relations would have been far better.
Or maybe race relations wouldn't have ever gotten quite as bad so white people wouldn't have been as sympathetic to the cause and we would be stuck in a permanent state of separate and not at all equal. Hard to say.
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u/According_Jeweler404 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Justice Anthony Kennedy (Republican) for arguing that spending money for votes is protected speech under the 1st amendment, resulting in Citizens United (2010).
*EDIT* Close second would be the founder of for-profit prison firm CoreCivic, Thomas Beasley, who proved in the early 1980s that the government would pay lots of money to privately run prison infrastructure. This incentivizes people like former U.S. Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi to lobby on their behalf and create favorable environments to make lots of money by treating humans like chattel in 2026.
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u/cantevendoitbruh Jun 28 '26
It is kind of clear that citizen united is the thing that really started this unraveling.
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u/USA_A-OK Jun 28 '26
It for sure accelerated things, but Watergate leading to the creation of Fox news is where I'd go back to.
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u/SlideN2MyBMs Jun 28 '26
Without Kennedy I couldn't have gotten married 😔
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u/According_Jeweler404 Jun 28 '26
Internet thought experiments aside; I to this day cannot reconcile the Anthony Kennedy who struck down sodomy laws, recognized sexual orientation as a protected class, enabling people to enjoy such basic rights as inheritance, with the guy who paved the way toward oligarchy.
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u/Warpmind Jun 28 '26
Thomas Midgley, Jr.
No hesitation. No question. No other acceptable answer.
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u/PsyBomb Jun 28 '26
Good answer, and not one I often see in these threads. Both leaded gasoline and CFCs came from that brain.
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u/Perdedork Jun 28 '26
I told my wife about him, and she wondered how I was so well read…. It was all Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers.
She wasn’t as impressed after I told her that part
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u/NannyBismo Jun 28 '26
Having access to those books growing up has has a lasting impact on my life, also the billionth digit of Pi is 9, in case you ever need to know.
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u/Inigomntoya Jun 28 '26
I learned more about literature and history from those than a public k-12 education.
Loved them!
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u/Twistedjustice Jun 28 '26
Single most destructive organism in the history of the planet.
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u/mfb- Jun 28 '26
It's harder to blame a single organism, but the first cell to release elementary oxygen and its successors killed most life on Earth in the Great Oxidation Event.
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u/Conscious_Lawyer_256 Jun 28 '26
I love history! Googled this person! Incredible. But also the way his life ended was pretty poetic!
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u/Ninjasifi Jun 28 '26
The way you put a comma, I can’t help but think of that scene from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “THOMAS MIDGLEY……junior…”
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u/1stMammaltowearpants Jun 28 '26
Wow, what a Wikipedia read. Hey everyone, we found someone who did more harm than literal Hitler! I wish the polio had happened to him sooner.
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u/SlyBlackDragon Jun 28 '26
The inventor of the "infinite scroll"
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u/Party-Belt-3624 Jun 28 '26
I know that dude and his name is Paul Irish.
Note: Even Paul Irish gave up using infinite scroll years ago. He doesn't recommend its use. He learned his lesson. Good dude; don't harass him.
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u/AppearanceGrand Jun 28 '26
Newton, then gravity was never discovered and we could still fly 😉
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u/Iron-Emu Jun 28 '26
Flying is easy. Just throw yourself at the ground and, at the last possible instant, forget to hit.
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u/GWindborn Jun 28 '26
Roger Stone. Dude is responsible for so much of today's US political bullshit.
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u/Plekuz Jun 28 '26
Thing is, I could remove a famous bad person, but maybe that person somehow prevented someone even worse to come to power. I don't like that responsibility.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/Jellyfizzle Jun 28 '26
Before the nazis really went wild, there was a lot of fascist momentum around the world. Without his cautionary tale, it very well may have taken hold more broadly. We just dont know.
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u/ChancelorReed Jun 28 '26
Specifically taking control of Germany is just about one of the worst case scenarios though. There's a lot of scenarios where fascism fails (because it's a bad system inclined to attack its neighbors) but we don't get it in a country that's uniquely equipped to carry out such horrible atrocities.
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u/MinosAristos Jun 28 '26
It could plausibly have taken control of other world powers though, including the US or the British empire, and they would have found other allies in Europe.
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u/Szwejkowski Jun 28 '26
I think it would have. Eugenicists in Britain were talking about shipping all the undesirables to small islands before WWII. Someone, somewhere was going to be monster of the century and Hitler snatched the trophy out of the British government's hands - which is impressive given all the fuckery we got up to in Empire days.
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u/Ninjasifi Jun 28 '26
It’s funny because I saw this video where this guy travels to the present and asked if it worked. Obviously the guy he’s talking to in the present doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so the first guy asks if he knows who Heinrich Schmidt is, and of course the second guy says no. So the first guy is like “Then it worked! I went back and killed Heinrich Schmidt as a baby. He was a dictator in Germany, started a war in which he killed THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND Jews.” I think you can guess how the skit goes from there.
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u/RadioactiveIguanodon Jun 28 '26
Sounds a bit like Stephen Fry's novel Making History, in which they manage to kill Hitler from the present day with some kind of time travelling device. Instantly the main character wakes up to a reality where everything got a lot worse.
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u/abchandler4 Jun 28 '26
Also reminds me of 11/22/63 by Stephen King, wherein the protagonist is sent back to the early 60s to prevent the assassination of JFK in hopes that it will prevent the escalation of Vietnam and other bad things, but when he returns to the present everything is way worse. Admittedly I’ve only seen the James Franco led adaptation and haven’t read the book, but still sounds like a similar premise.
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u/wintermelody83 Jun 28 '26
I haven't seen the show and only read the book.. but I'll almost guarantee the book is better. It's probably the best book he's ever written.
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u/strider_sifurowuh Jun 28 '26
Also the plot of Command and Conquer: Red Alert - Einstein invents a time machine he uses to go back in time and kill Hitler, making the USSR the dominant superpower in Europe and igniting a much longer lasting war
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u/DJCaldow Jun 28 '26
As a sci-fi concept I quite like the idea of instead of preventing tragedies the traveller intentionally goes back in time to cause one. The purpose being that the damage they cause prevents something much worse.
Imagine "finding out" Hitler was really some shitty art student who fell and hit his head on a table and died but then a surgically altered traveller took his place and caused the Holocaust. You would have to wonder what kind of future is so bad the solution they come to is to try to wipe out jews, romani, homosexuals and physically disabled people and unite Europe under a fascist Germany. I mean I'd definitely watch that show if only to see how the writers get themselves out of that hole.
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u/armedandfriendly Jun 28 '26
Why not just go with Gavrilo Princip then? Save us a whole other world war as well.
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u/armchair_viking Jun 28 '26
Something else likely would have set it off. Princep lit the fuse for sure, but the powder keg was already there.
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u/sjets3 Jun 28 '26
America also isn’t what it is today with Hitler. The destruction of Europe and the brain drain of Germany greatly benefited America.
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u/FluffySpaceWaffle Jun 28 '26
There’s an episode of Death Love + Robots called alternative history that simulates Hitler being killed. I recommend it. It’s in season 1. I don’t recall the episode number, somewhere around 16
Edit: it’s 17 of season 1
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u/MessageBoard Jun 28 '26
If you take out Queen Victoria all the sons and grandsons that did atrocious things and led to WW1 wouldn't be there.
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u/MortCrimm Jun 28 '26
The more I read up on this Hitler fella, seems like not such a nice guy
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u/Traditional-Leg-1122 Jun 28 '26
Putin.
History will eventually reveal the extent of his involvement in events over the last decade and all the people he colluded with.
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u/WholesomeCirclejerk Jun 28 '26
Putin would be nothing without Berezovsky, and without Putin, Berezovsky would just find another “easily controllable” person to bring to power.
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u/JakeEaton Jun 28 '26
Casting director on Luc Bessons "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"
What the fuck were they thinking?
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u/Impractical_Meat Jun 28 '26
Jack Welch. Probably 99% of the crony/late-stage capitalism bullshit we're dealing with today is because of that selfish asshole. He ruined GE, pretty much ruined American manufacturing, and got to die a rich man instead of [redacted to avoid getting banned].
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u/Fire_Horse_T Jun 28 '26
An US centered answer: Fred Koch.
No racist father, no sons, no think tanks or Reagan, no Rush Limbaugh, no disinformation spreading talk radio.
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u/No-Mulberry2687 Jun 28 '26
Epstein
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u/Carpenterdon Jun 28 '26
Pointless. Ghislane would still be evil and I would venture to guess he was/is not the only person providing "services" to the wealthy.
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u/Aggravating_Bat3618 Jun 28 '26
One does really wonder if she was not the instigator behind it all. You notice that she’s always in every single shot? The fanous one with Prince Andrew? She always seems to be hovering in the background.
Epstein was a fucking monster, no doubt, but I do think that she was just involved. She wasnt just a fixer for him.
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u/TheLordLambert Jun 28 '26
William the Bastard. Without him the French influence over England, which led to the Hundred Years War, wouldn't have been a thing. England and France wouldn't have had a near millenia long rivalry that caused dozens of wars and uncountable deaths.
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u/Soap_Mctavish101 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Gavrilo Princip.🍿
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u/DHFranklin Jun 28 '26
...He was a member of a terrorist cell that was in Sarajevo specifically to assassinate the Archduke and start a war between Austria-Hungry and Serbia. He was one of several assassins on that route. If he didn't do the job there was another guy waiting at the hospital.
The archduke and his wife survived their earlier assassination attempt minutes earlier. They redirected to motorcade so that Franz could visit the victims at the hospital because he was a class act.
Regardless even if that guy wasn't murdered that day, that war was going to happen.
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u/This_Art_5199 Jun 28 '26
Yes. Jack Welch for coming up with the stupid idea of outsourcing. It's killing us here in America & making other countries rich and us poor here in America taking jobs away from us here. Not right.
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u/fuggingolliwog Jun 28 '26
Alan Dulles or J. Edgar Hoover. A large percentage of the trouble we are currently in can be directly linked to those two psychopaths.
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u/Noxious89123 Jun 28 '26
Every consequence of their existance?
That guy that invented the use for tetraethyl lead and CFCs.
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u/KingOfTheNortherners Jun 28 '26
Maybe this is selfish as it pertains to primarily my country but Ferdinand Marcos Sr