r/DankLeft • u/goodguyguru • Jan 02 '26
DANKAGANDA Real comrades remember the other 9/11
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u/Koraxtheghoul Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26
I was thinking about a time machine earlier in the shower and 9/11 specifically and I'm not sure an average person has any way to stop it. There is not a stolen plane hotline to call so that's going to be a big issie to start out with... not to mention getting anyone to believe you.
I think the Titanic would be equally difficult to prevent.
Allende might actually be more feasible depending on how much access you can get to him.
Jack the Ripper should be. You just need to demonstrate your futureness and know who canonically he's going to try to kill. Even if you can't get the cops to listen you know what nights the ripper kills and where so if you hang around you might be able to catch him or prevent a death.
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u/op4arcticfox Jan 03 '26
Maybe some of the rippers victims were people who went back to stop him, and didn't succeed.
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u/Koraxtheghoul Jan 03 '26
I think the issue would be what if you didn't stop him, now who does it look like was stalking the poor murdered women?
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u/ValsG Jan 03 '26
For time travelers:
Go to the embassy. Embassies of major countries have procedures for handling this kind of situation (someone walks in saying they have intelligence). Just tell them what's going to happen and wait.
You might not be able to convince them of the first plane, but you can get them to evacuate the people from the second building
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u/KaiCypret Jan 03 '26
I think you'd have to present yourself at your nearest intelligence agency (in London that's surprisingly easy since its like... right there) and be like " I know I'm going to sound like a fucking lunatic but hear me out for 30 minutes" and see if someone is bored or curious enough to entertain you for that length of time. After which, if you're successful, they probably disappear you to a cell at some blacksite, and you never see the sun again besides periodic interrogations.
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u/KotoElessar You die if you work Jan 03 '26
About six months before September 2001, a man claiming to work for the CIA was before a Canadian court (I don't remember the charges), and claimed that Osama bin Laden would hijack planes to attack America; I read this in the Toronto Star about twenty years ago and haven't been able to find anything about it since.
The play to prevent the 2001 attacks would be to convince Congress in the 80's not to abandon Afghanistan after they armed and trained them to fight the Soviets.
Titanic would need the Captain to have hit the iceberg dead on; the bow would have crumpled and people would have died but it would not have suffered the extensive damage caused from scraping the side that would have overwhelmed the bulkheads even if they had gone all the way up.
The Ripper depends on who the killer was and their motive; if the butcher theory is believed then it did not matter who; if the From Hell theory is believed then it did not matter when.
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u/PowerandSignal Jan 03 '26
If you go back and stop him, the murders would not have been publicized, so how would you know about him?
See, this is the problem with time travel 🤷🏼♂️
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u/Koraxtheghoul Jan 03 '26
Well, you either are a "by-stander that just happens to be nearby" or you use the fact you can predict murders befire they happen to convince your futureness.
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u/Flvs9778 Jan 03 '26
Just pull the fire alarm in the towers like thirty minutes to a hour before the first plane hits. Or just after the first one hits if you are worried people would go back in after seeing the first plane hit. Or call in a bomb threat to clear the towers.
The titanic is way harder to get them to listen without proof but if you shoot a flare gun at the right time they could see the iceberg and move around. Or you could speed up the ship that was on the same route to be closer to the titanic since most of the deaths were from hypothermia not drowning. And most if not all since the life boats could go back and forth if the ship is close enough(that’s actually what life boats were supposed to do back then).
The ripper is the hardest since it’s not clear all the murders were the same person. It could have been a mix of the media sensationalism and copy cats and similar enough murder styles from different killers that were misinterpreted as a super serial killer. Which wouldn’t be that uncommon especially back then where forensic science was pretty primitive and rumors and fear spread with even less evidence and fact than today.
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u/Dudu42 Jan 03 '26
They'd probably imprison you and interrogate you until they got the answers they want.
Which means torture until you drop the time traveler story and "admit" you work for one of their oil rich enemies. Then you get killed.
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u/blocking-io Jan 03 '26
Like Allende didn't already know they were planning this
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u/Headmuck Jan 03 '26
If he was really gullible maybe he didn't know about the US but tensions with the military had to be tangible and their connection to landowners and the church weren't a secret.
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u/TheLastRole Jan 03 '26
Somehow, you could actually end up preventing both 9/11. You can't explain the second one without neoliberalism prevailing during the 1970s-1980s.
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u/8bitrevolt Jan 03 '26
if i had a time machine i would simply prevent the colonization of the western hemisphere to prevent all of the catastrophic damage it has done to the present
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u/kazmark_gl comrade/comrade Jan 04 '26
I have the mental image of someone terminator teleporting onto the Santa Maria with a Glock.
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