• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    3 months ago

    Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it’s a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you’re measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you’re comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn’t really have an end goal, as much as we’d like it to.

    Maybe you just meant a personal failure:

    Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he’s famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing the accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he’s like the real Bloody Stupid Johnson.

    Marathon is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. People regularly make the same trip and are fine. He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn’t want to be him.

    Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn’t bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to take their shit instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.

    The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a sex tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his “virility”. In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB’s presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.

    • tacosplease@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      If it’s the same person I’m thinking about he understood that it was blackmail but didn’t care. He requested copies of the tape to keep for himself.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        3 months ago

        “Thanks bro/comrade!” would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    3 months ago

    Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.

    • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It’s resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can’t afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.

      • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can’t afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

      The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we’d strike a nice balance, but our economies aren’t structured that way.

      A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we’re slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.

      • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I just can’t subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don’t be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I’d say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.

  • spencer@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    ITT people trying to be edgy but I’m going to say invading Russia in the winter.

  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    0·
    3 months ago

    “Let’s just divide up Poland and keep the peace. We can focus our whole energy on the western front, you can save yourselves bloodshed by the tanker load, and in a few short years we can share dominion over a subjugated world.”

    “You so right, that sounds like a great plan”

    “Hey guess what I just decided”

    The whole world would have been different. It was still a pretty close thing with help from the Soviets and with Germany fighting a ludicrous two-front war for literally no military or geopolitical reason at all.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Every time someone tried to make “a weapon so powerful it would make people not want to wage war”.

    Several weapons are on this list, from the cannon to the machine gun to, most famously, the atomic bomb.

    The fact that this happened once would’ve been understandable. The fact this escalated to nuclear weapons because people just tried pushing this idea is nuts though.

    This is not toward so much the technology, with all tech being no less inevitable, but more to do with the intentions/hindsight/foresight of the people making something that can only be produced by an assembly in a seemingly dire setting, as opposed to something like AI, which does not stem from that and which would’ve come around at some time.

    By extension, this extends to populism in general, a mindset that from experience I refuse to compliment. I’m surrounded by people every day who come off as thinking with their feet and not with the methodological part of them, and my experiences with this have never allowed me to be fully at peace.