4w ago

If you could Thanos snap one person, thing, or event from history...what would you choose?

87 comments

Reagan probably. If my understanding of history is correct, its the only thing that doesn't delete me but helps the most.
- How would removing Reagan help?
  If it's about the Berlin Wall, it's not as if it wasn't inevitable no matter who was president.
  
  He broke basically every single pro middle class policy in the US. Unions, pensions, social security, taxes on the rich, exploded the deficit, congressional partisanship, brutal " better dead than red" foreign policy, on and on. He constantly broke every political "taboo" that protected these middle class bulwarks, and it worked. Our country has been brutalized for 40 years and counting, and most of the ugliness can be traced back to his administration.
  He single handedly did more destruction to our nation than any other president so far, and yes that includes Trump.

The Thanos Snap has sooo many problems associated with it. It's developed by an evil multinational that doesn't listen to its users and keeps trying to force itself on the universe.
People should use the Thanos Flatpak instead...

Ronald Reagan
- I'd even settle for Newt...
- Came here to say this
- Why him? Why not someone who did something of note?
  
  A LOT of the current Republican policies are based on the stuff that happened during his administration.

Jack Welch's whole business philosophy.
Before him, it was more or less understood that business owners had a responsibility to do what was best for their customers, their employees, their communities, and their company's long-term sustainability; the companies that didn't (or didn't at least make it look like they were) were looked down upon.
Welch was the first one to popularize the notion that short-term shareholder value was the CEO's highest priority. He normalized companies' c-suites being cutthroat, craven capitalists.
To be sure, not everything that's wrong with the world today can be laid at his feet. But late-stage capitalism can.
- It was more Milton Freedman’s philosophy. Welch was teacher’s pet who implemented it to the fullest extent.

The Big Bang was a mistake.
Snap
- "In the beginning was the Creation of the Universe. This has made a lot of people angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

I say this as an American, from the bottom of my heart I wish Christopher Columbus never existed.
- There was a French explorer who "discovered" America four years before Columbus. So Columbus' erasure wouldn't even affect the one purpose he had.
  
  The acts of Christophorus Columbus directly perpetrated by him range from holocaustic to apocalyptic in scale.
- Well there goes me but at least my native ancestors would have had a chance to thrive.
  
  I'm a white dude that's obsessed with Mesoamerican history. Holy fuck I would prefer the civilization your ancestors would come up with than what my idiot dirt farmer progenitors from Europe ended up creating.
- I've good news, the continent's fate was sealed long before that because colonialism was never going to stop.

Jimmy Carter losing to Ronald Reagan, shits just rolled downhill gathering size and pace from that unfortunate event.

Mosquitos. I'm so fed up with those things.
- I work in pest control and controlling mosquitos is a big part of what we do. What I've noticed over the years is some people, like myself, never get bitten while others, like my wife, are constantly attacked. I've never looked into why that is but I find it interesting. I haven't had a mosquito bite in probably 3 or 4 years. Granted, I treat my home for them but I'm always working places that have them bad but I'm never bitten. Couples I work for often relay the same things to me about one being bit but not the other.
  
  One interesting thing I've noticed about mosquitoes is that this phenomenon seems to depend on location. The local mosquitoes favor my husband. In other states or countries the situation is often reversed. When we visited Cuba the government was doing aggressive mosquito control due to Zika. I still got disproportionately attacked.
  
  I have had mosquitos land on my arm and then fly away without stinging me, all before I could wave them away.
  
  I theorize that it's somehow based on skin undertone? Maybe? Just by my very limited personal experience, me and my mother have Olive tone skin and we get left alone and my dad and my other three sisters have pink toned skin and get devoured and I've seen that pattern play out in about 20 of my close acquaintances as well. I don't know why that would possibly cause any sort of change besides maybe there's some chemical makeup in olive tone skin that smells bad to mosquitoes? I don't know, but me and my Olive friends seem to get left alone and the pink babies get munched.

Ronald Reagan.
Also, while I've got control of the wishfish, I need it to happen paradoxically. I need him to both get turned to ash at the end of his life, so he knows why he deserves it, and before he's able to collude with Iran.

Henry Kissinger. Easy. Godfather of horrific war crimes and if we all die of nuclear annihilation one day he will be the person I would put the most blame on. It irritates the shit out of me that he died peacefully. A man who made sure napalm gets poured on civilian children? Gets to die like that? Fuck that goof and I hope he was afraid when he died and I hope it hurt.
- This guy! This guy right here!! Holy fuck he lived for so fucking long too.
  I listened to the Behind the Bastards series on him and it was a lot to unpack.

Im thanos snapping Ea Nasir, he sold me inferior quality copper for way too much money >:c

Hate.
If it has to be something tangible, then idk, pickles maybe.
- I choose this poster, for wanting to take away my beloved pickles.
- What about hate for pickles?
  
  If hate for pickles was snapped away, then I suppose I wouldn't be minding so much when errant pickle juice gets on my food.
  It's not a disagreeable compromise.
- Greed or dishonesty are other abstract ones to consider. Worried that removing dishonesty could cause some harms, but I guess anything in the thread probably could.
- We would just replace hate with something else.
  "I love you so much that I'm stabbing you with this sword so that you are spiritually preserved at your current status for all of eternity", something like that.
  
  That's basically the "plot" to the song Miss Murder.

It'd have to be something fairly pivotal, but nothing so important or so far back that it prevents myself from existing amidst the swirl of history. I think I'd take the risk and say Reagan never became president. That would domino Reaganomics out of history, and remove the precedent of celebrities becoming president.
- I'd have gone for Nixon, personally.
  
  Like I said, if you go too far back, you might remove yourself from history. Reagan is close enough to my birth that I'll risk it, but Nixon would definitely unmake me.

Jesus would be funny. Honestly any key religious figure or even their betrayers (Judas) would just make for just a wildly different human race.
- Would this delete the religion or make the religion undeniably false? I’m asking from the historical fact he existed as a human. If he definitely did not exist but it continued to exist idk if that would change much. If Christianity never existed in sure we would be speaking Arabic.
  
  Or alternatively, Christianity only exists because in an attempt to prevent it, someone from the future snapped Jesus out of existence. But it turns out that Jesus was just some dude who liked to do nice things for people until one day he poofed out of existence in front of a crowd and everyone suddenly figured he must be a god.
  
  Interestingly, we may not be speaking Arabic anyway.
  Christianity wouldn't exist without Jesus as a central figure, and Islam probably wouldn't exist without Christianity, as there would be no background for archangel Gabriel to deliver God's "final" revelation, and he would just be the defender of Israelis as told in Hebrew Bible (correct me if I'm wrong).
  Without Islam, there would be no single force to fuel Arabic expansionism, and so Arabs would find themselves on a similar ground with European civilizations. Israelis, on their end, could actually expand and permanently settle the land instead of rebuilding their country millennia after.
- Judas' betrayal was a canon event for christianity, so I'm pretty sure Jesus would just snap him back to life.
  Like this
- I'm sure it's been done, a novel where this exact thing happens would be kinda interesting.

Save the snap. Use it as leverage to shape the future by threatening tyrants into standing down, for I have no idea what might happen absent of a historical event happening.
Now. Who to start with? Bibi? Putin? MBS? Closer to home?
- You do realize they're going to ask you for a demonstration of your power before they'll ever kowtow
  
  They don't have to know you can only do it once.

Every republican since Nixon.
Update: enjoying my cake 🍰

Newton's third law.

If it can be abstract I would snap away the acceptance of hierarchy as a method of social control, like historically speaking go back to the first people who decided that there should be a person in charge of all the things and have the people say "Naw, that's fucked" and then that just not happen. Not that the idea of hierarchy not be in existence at all, because I think it would be more effective to have people recognize that it's bullshit and intentionally build societies antithetical to hierarchy rather than to have society's that are ignorant of its potential harm.
If it had to be a tangible thing that I could physically dissolve.... Parasites? Would all parasites count or is that too broad? Cuz if we got rid of fleas and leeches and mosquitoes and ticks that would wipe out huge swaths of vectors of disease transmission. No black plague, no zika, no dengue fever. If we wanted to expand the definition of parasites even broader than the the bourgeoisie class might be included but I wouldn't want to get my hopes up. XD

The collision with Theia
- Why do you hate the moon?
  
  No public toilets

Trump winning 2016. He needs to loose, so he never attempts again.
- Too recent. Let Gore win back in 2000.
  
  Antonin Scalia would be your best bet in that case. He's the most directly responsible for cutting off the vote recount that would have seen Gore win. Wm. Renquist might be a better choice though, since he set the stage for Scalia.

If I Thanos snapped myself, wouldn't that just delete half of me? Left or right? Top or bottom half?

Richard Nixon

I'll snap the neurons that cause you to post this question so that
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Myself
- Honestly, this was my first thought too. I wouldn’t mind getting off the wheel with absolutely no consequences.

Tough call. There are so many possible points of inflection, and it's hard to know where history goes when you eliminate any single point. Let's say that you snap Adam Smith; does that mean that capitalism never happens, and that we live in a system of mercantilism forever? Or does the system get described by someone else and happen inevitably? What about Ghengis Khan? How does history change if the Mongol empire never happens? Do we all end up speaking Chinese? I you snap Julius Ceasar so that the library of Alexandria never burns, and the Roman empire remains democratic--for a time, at least--then what?

The tiktaalik that though leaving the waters is a good idea, or the monke that thought walking up right is a good idea
- Why stop there? There's an energy gulf between the evolution of DNA and the first thing we could call a cell. Eliminate the first cell to ever exist on the planet, and the right conditions to evolve to that point may never be replicated again.

A certain guy named ~~Davel~~ Putin, he's Stalin's aggression mixed with Beria's inconsideration at this point.

Carbon dioxide, I'm curious what that would do.
- Prevent all known life.

If it was an event, I would choose World War 2. I'm Bohemian (Gypsy) and my people were just as hated as Jews (I'm also like 10% Jewish). So snap Hitler out of history please.

I'd go back to the very beginning, the Prime Mover, and prevent all of it from happening in the first place.

We can propagate effects through time? Perfect. I'm going send a snap forward into the future. From now on, anyone that attempts to gather up the infinity stones gets instantly dusted.
- I feel like it's one snap per attempt.
  Like, thanos couldn't permanently limit population, his one snap was big but finite.
  Might as well Snap away the stones. They're a thing. Much easier, very finite, just make sure you Snap away the stones deep into the past.

Whoever invented circular toilet seats and 1" long sink spigots.

I think the birth of Hitler is an easy choice. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that eliminating some earlier event could both right another wrong and negate Hitler's existence.
Aside from that there's the existence of the internet, which I'm not sure has been an overall benefit to humankind. I think about this often.
- Mao is probably a lot more impactful than Hitler - I'm just uncertain if it'd successfully abort the damage.

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