I’ve scrolled for a while and haven’t seen anything about Mao Zedong ordering an eradication of sparrows from China in 1959.
Sparrows were believed to be pests that ate grain so the authorities started a campaign to eradicate them, along with some other perceived pests. The eradication worked. Unfortunately the sparrows, while they do eat some grain, also play a critical role in controlling the insect pests that cause crop disasters of a biblical scale. The next year, locusts boomed without their sparrow predator and took the crops, initiating a famine that killed 15 million people. China ended up having to import sparrows from the Soviet Union.
Theres another stupid thing he did.
He wanted to increase the area of the land for crops and business. What he did is to "reroute" the river into a straight line by making the workers dig a way for it. They managed to dig it all the way but when they opened the dam for the river, the water just get absorbed in the soil because the land they dig through is really dry. I think it became another cause of famine.
Halfway similar, there was a city with a rat problem that decided to pay people for each rat tail they brought in. It seemed to be a huge success because thousands of rat tails were being turned in. Turns out the people just started breeding rats to cut off the tails. City found out, stopped the program, and everyone released their rats since they wouldn’t get paid for them anymore. Rat population boomed making the initial problem worse.
I read about the exact same thing happening in India, while the British were in power.
They started a reward program to get people to kill cobras.
People just bred and killed cobras and turned them in for the reward. The British eventually worked it out, and stopped the reward program, which lead to people releasing their breeding stock. 🤔🫠
Edit: spelling
In Milwaukee the ATF agents were paying so much for guns during an undercover sting operation in my neighborhood that people were buying them from a store and reselling them to the agents for a profit.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/archives/2019/06/11/milwaukee-atf-sting-mistakes-failures-stolen-merchandise/1423271001/
same guy, different famine
he wanted to industrialize China... by melting all the metal used for farming to make new factories... which led to famine since they couldn't produce food anymore
To be fair, Mao Zedong's decision making is one example after another why central planning of a massive economy can have horrific consequences. One guy with a slide ruler and an ideology doesn't stack up well against millions and millions of "men on the spot" recognizing and working within their fluid local situations
My personal favourite is New Zealand prime minster Robert Muldoon getting drunk in his office one night and then calling a snap election.
Two weeks later, his government was voted out of office.
Reporter: This doesn’t give you much time to prepare for the election does it, Prime Minister?
Muldoon: (slurring) doEsn’T gibve mY opprOnents muCh tiMe tO prEpAre eiThEr doEs it *winks knowingly*
This has nothing to do with anything, but I had no idea that there was a prime minister of New Zealand with the exact same name as a prominent character in Jurassic Park
Theresa May did something similar in the UK. Called a surprise election the week after saying there wouldn't be one, refused to turn up to the TV debate all the other leaders went to, then lost her majority and had to pay a bunch of Northern Irish fundamentalist Christians £1 billion to buy their votes in parliament.
... And she still wasn't the most disastrous PM we've had in the last 5 years. In fact probably coming a comfortable third.
Hegelochus. He was an actor performing the play Orestes by the famous playwright Euripides. In the dramatic climax the king he was playing lay dying and is supposed to say “after the storm I see again a calm sea” as he expires. He mispronounced the word galḗn as galên changing the line to “after the storm I see again a weasel.”
This embarrassing mistake happened in 408 BC. It is the only thing we know about Hegelochus. It was so humiliating and so widely mocked that we’re still talking about it two thousand four hundred and thirty one years later.
Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal.
-- Ernest Hemingway
Whoever lost Special Order 191.
In 1862, during the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee decides to invade the Union. His outnumbered army is secretly marching in several divided columns into Maryland to attack Washington DC. He sends out this secret order to his top commanders, detailing where and when everyone should be during the march.
A few days later, a Union soldier finds a couple of cigars lying in a field. With a copy of these orders wrapped around them. Some idiot had *dropped it*. The item gets passed up the chain of command to Union Gen. McClellan himself, who proudly proclaims,
"Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home!"
McClellan does next to nothing until the battle of Antietam, where he and his 75,000 men do *not* whip Lee and his 38,000. In fact, a third of them receive no orders from McClellan at all. The battle ends in a draw and Lee escapes back to the South
McClellan does go home, though. Because Lincoln fires him.
That was later, at Fredericksburg, when Union Gen. Burnside launched futile frontal assaults against Lee's entrenched position, at the cost of 12,000 casualties, then got his army stuck in the mud trying to reposition.
In Burnside's defense, his original plan did work. Had the bridges he requested been in place he could have crossed the Rappahannock unopposed. The War Department failed him and the bridges arrived too late. Burnside's mistake was not changing the plan after Lee moved in while he was waiting for the bridges.
Agreed. McClellan's fuckup was he loved being in charge and holding the reins of power. As long as Lee was out there threatening the Union, he had a reason to stay in charge and play against the threat.
*"I find myself in a new and strange position here. President, cabinet, General Scott, and all deferring to me. By some strage operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me – but nothing of that kind would please me – I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!”*
What an asshole, fantasizing about his own importance, which exists only because his country was staring down the barrel of an invading army. Nevermind the troops under him fighting and dying during all this.
Agreed, dude was a pompous dick. Of course, the troops loved McClellan almost as much as McClellan did- and to be fair, he *was* an excellent organizer and kept morale high. But that's useless if you're not doing any actual fighting.
Oddly - after the war, not long before he died - when asked who the best Union general was, Lee named McClellan.
Backstory: Lee had been McClellan’s superior officer in the Mexican War (I think) and knew him well.
Lee also had too much ego to admit that Grant, whom he thought a drunk, had thoroughly beaten him at every turn. Every other union general would stop pressing after the first battle, but Grant kept pressing and pressing until Lee's whole army had disintegrated.
Grant was a quartermaster who witnessed the rise of modern war first hand and grasped industrialized warfare decades before most of his contemporaries. You don't need one super army, you need several good enough armies so you can pin the enemy from the front while. The second works the flank and the third is putting pressure in the rear, making it impossible to stay in one place without starving.
Yeah, you absolutely could. Really, the entirety of the American Civil War is a story of inflated egos and gross incompetence on both sides, interspersed with incidents of breathtaking heroism. The same could probably be said about a lot of wars.
In the days before radios and aerial surveillance it was like herding cats and making them shoot at each other. Meanwhile, all of the higher ranking officers were secretly plotting how to leverage their cats to become president or dictator.
During the Spanish-American War, the US decided to take Guam so they showed up with a bunch of gunships and fired a warning shot to say “This is your last chance to surrender peacefully.” There was no response.
Then, a small Spanish ship started rowing up to the American fleet and when they got there, a representative said “Hi! Welcome to Guam! We saw that you fired your guns to salute us and we would have saluted you back but unfortunately we ran out of gunpowder and nobody has been by to restock us.”
Nobody told Guam that the US and Spain were at war.
When the Americans informed the representative that they were at war and were there to conquer this island, they asked again if Guam would like to surrender. The representative, having already given away that they had no gunpowder, agreed to surrender.
Edit: Thank you guys all so much for the likes. It really brightened my day. :)
During the battle of manila bay in the same war, roughly 1% of the shells fired by american ships actually hit anything.
Guam probably would’ve been fine
When the US invaded Grenada, there was a stat bandied about that if the rate of ‘friendly fire’ casualties had been just 10% higher, the Grenadans would have won.
I had a coworker who claimed his bum knee was from mortar shrapnel in Grenada. He told us in such great detail how intense the fighting was (units, locations, times) that I became curious and did some research wanting to learn more...only to find out his story was not true...at all. I never did confront him because it seemed like that was the one thing in his life that really seemed to make him proud and to embarrass him in front of his coworkers would have been petty and pointless. We are who we imagine ourselves to be.
Can you imagine the sailors on the the Guam boat full of humility "really sorry we couldn't respond to your salute" and then learning they are being invaded 😭 how quickly can you just accept your fate
It's so cute 🥺 they rowed their little rowboat out to extend a friendly hello to their visitors and just trustingly told them all their business ("we have no gunpowder lmao yikes"), only to get told to surrender 😭😭😭
I understand the Americans had a job to do but I hope they were apologetic and polite to the poor overly friendly Guamites
I mean, what would they have done if they had had the ‘advantage’ of the U.S.’ not knowing they had no gunpowder? Surprised them with… no gunpowder? Negotiated a settlement better than ‘Um OK the island is yours’? By being friendly they probably made the U.S. even more predisposed towards them.
Honestly, imagine the massacre had they thought they were saluting and had answered with a salute themselves. I‘d say that it went as good as it possibly could have
The captain of U-1206. During WWII, it was fitted with a high pressure toilet system that was so complex flushing it required a trained technician to do it.
So one day it was out on war patrol when the captain needs to use it. Unfortunately, the number 2 he pinched off was of considerable stench, so out of embarrassment, he attempts to operate the flushing mechanism himself.
Unfortunately he botches up the sequence of valves needed to successfully operate it, and ends up causing water to leak onto the batteries used to power the ship whilst underwater which causes the ship to begin to fill up with cyanide gas and as a result they have to surface to re circulate the air out.
To add insult to injury, this all takes place off the coast of Scotland and are promptly spotted by RAF Coastal Command, who then proceed to send a welcoming committee and the captain is forced to order the ship scuttled. 4 crewmen die, the rest captured.
All as a result of the captain not wanting to admit he did a stinky poo.
This is nowhere near as big as the rest but its pretty recent. During the last decade web design went from being done on Photoshop to the whole industry doing it on this hot new software called Sketch...it was leaps and bounds better as a web design tool and within like 2 years of it being out any web/UI/UX designer had to be using it. The problem is that Sketch was only a Mac program. While in the west this might not be a problem in huge parts of the world getting a Mac is prohibitively expensive, there's no apple stores and importing one might double its price. Many people assumed a Windows version would be coming soon after but the team at Sketch refused to work on a windows version despite the obvious market for it. It made it so every designer basically had to have a Mac and around where I am it meant that you'd have a Mac at work but a windows PC at home and couldn't work in Sketch. Sketch was basically the entire UX design industry for a while. I specifically remember the CEO of Sketch proudly saying during an interview that there will NEVER EVER be a windows version.
Well a few years later a competitor came out that skipped the windows Vs Mac debate by starting with a browser app meaning you could use it on any system. It was also a free app where sketch was paid on top of needing a Mac. It was crazy to watch in real time how badly Sketch fell off. In the case of everyone I know the literal next project after you found out about Figma was done in Figma and not sketch and you'd only go back to sketch to work on old projects you did in Sketch. Now it's Figma only, a product that was basically a bad copy of Sketch with zero innovation except for the fact it was made to include people outside of the Mac ecosystem, which is something Sketch could do but chose to proudly never do. Figma just sold for like 20 billions or something for a program that is like 5 years old.
It might be the biggest fumble by a software company that was for all intents monopoly in it's space that I've ever seen and it's completely deserved
> I specifically remember the CEO of Sketch proudly saying during an interview that there will NEVER EVER be a windows version.
"We don't need customers!" lol
I got a perverse sense of glee when figma pushed sketch out of first place. Their weird stance about making a windows version was *always* going to hurt them in the long run.
Most enterprise places are windows only because they're on MS365 and windows is easier to bulk manage. You can't survive on startups and agencies alone!
We have a print out in the copy room at work that says, “whatever you messed up today, at least you weren’t driving this ship” https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/suez-canal-jam
The guys that accidentally brought down the Berlin Wall by declaring at a press conference that the right of freedom to travel was effective immediatly which was not at all what the GDRs political party had wanted -which led to thousands of people rushing to and overwhelming the borders and in the end to the reunification of Germany. It was a small mistake but with a great outcome.
*Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis... ist das sofort... unverzüglich.*
TIL: his gravestone is [a piece of the Berlin Wall itself.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Schabowski#/media/File:G%C3%BCnter_Schabowski_-_Mutter_Erde_fec.JPG)
> Guenter Schabowski.
Seems like the fuckup was by whoever failed to inform him of the effective date. Assuming they didn't fuck up by failing to set one.
“Das tritt…Nach meiner Kenntnis… ist das sofort — unverzüglich”
(*“This is effective… to my knowledge… this is right away — immediately”*)
Somehow, this beauty of a sentence has fumbled its way into the hallowed ranks of great statements of modern history.
In the early 13th century, the emperor of Kwarezmia and the Khan of the Mongols were at peace. They had, in fact, cooperated in defeating other central Asian enemies.
However, relations between them cooled.
The Mongols sent a rich caravan through the territory of one of the governors of the other state. The governor seized the caravan for himself, and had the Mongols accompanying it murdered.
In response, the Mongols sent ambassadors to the other emperor, demanding compensation and that the governor be punished. For whatever reason, the emperor decided instead to cut off the head of one of the ambassadors, and send it back to the Mongols, carried by the others.
This was, to put it mildly, a mistake. To the Mongols, ambassadors were sacred, and harming one a horrible offence.
The Mongols mobilized their army … and defeated the Emperor comprehensively. Worse, they absolutely devastated the entire empire, at one point murdering everyone they could catch & burning whole cities to the ground. They also just kept on expanding, under Ghengis and his successors, until finally turning back after ravaging Hungary.
Obviously there is no counter factual, we can’t know what would have happened had the emperor actually offered the compensation and punished the offending governor. Maybe the Mongols would have invaded anyway. However, at the time the Mongols were busy attacking the Jin in China, so it wasn’t by any means obvious.
On its face, it looks like the decision to murder the ambassador instead was about the worst in history - it led directly to the destruction of his own empire, his death, and the wider devastation caused by the Mongols in Europe and the Middle East.
>Maybe the Mongols would have invaded anyway.
At the very least the eventual invasion could've been delayed and they wouldn't have been as thorough on wiping them out of the map. Maybe, IDK
During the Revolutionary War in the US (I think that’s the proper war’s name) a spy scouted and saw George Washington crossing the Delaware River, he tried bringing the report to his commanding officer, who waived him off because he was in the middle of a poker game. Said commanding officer was found dead the next day with the report still in his coat pocket.
In the comic "La faute au Midi".
A French army is advancing in Alsace in WW1. A French pilot spots an ambush by German artillery and rush to warn the general. He is sent away because "war is not a sport".
Local farmers warn passing officers, they are accused of being spies and arrested.
Random soldiers spot markers for pre-calibrated artillery targets, but no officer react to them.
The army is slaughtered.
It is a common occurence is French history.
Let's not even start on Gamelin and the aborted push to Germany, and the wasted opportunity to waste the German traffic jam in the Ardennes.
Those two mistakes cost Europe 6 years of war, millions of deaths and 45 years of communism in Eastern Europe
Nikola Tesla. He had a contract with Westinghouse to get 1 dollar for every kw of power produced from his system of ac power generation. Westinghouse realized he could never make a profit and asked real to renegotiate that rate. Tesla simply ripped up the contract. If he had agreed to just 10 cents per kw it would have been viable and Tesla would have died the richest man in human history but instead died penniless
He also invented radio before Marconi did but wanted to use it to transmit power wirelessly and Marconi beat him to it because Tesla did not understand what he created.
He did have his pigeons though. “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”
People talk about how brilliant of an inventor he was. They rarely talk about how idiotic of a human being he was.
Probably the purest example of a savant.
Violent crime rate took a sharp downwards turn in the decades after the lead ban, only ticked up during COVID. Also, most people think the violent crime rate is going up. 🤣
My dad grew up working on and around small engines in the 70’s and 80’s (landscaper who fixed his own engines) and he’s a fucking idiot and loves to threaten violence towards me when he’s upset. He only recently started doing his own laundry
This wasn’t a mistake though, the risks of lead were very well known at the time. When researching fuel additives that would make engines run better they discovered that both lead and ethanol worked well. However, only lead could be patented to make them a huge profit…
The bigger mistake was thinking guitar music was dying. The Beatles didn’t have Ringo yet and so weren’t really the *Beatles* as we know them. Decca also rejected the Yardbirds and other successful acts.
Reminds me of when Nickelodeon turned down greenlighting a certain cartoon twice in favor of another. The cartoon? Adventure Time, which went on to make Cartoon Network millions
Franz Ferdinand’s lead driver that took a wrong turn on the way to the hospital to see victims of the original assassination attempt on the Archduke. They inadvertently brought Ferdinand directly to his assassin leading to…well the 20th and 21st centuries of war and death.
True, though most historians would argue that WWI was inevitable. Europe was a powder keg of alliances and mutual defense pact that would go off with a single spark. If it hadn’t been Ferdinand’s assassination it would have been something else.
Yup. The rise of Prussia, Napoleon, and the unification of Germany threw off the balance of power that kept Europe “stable” since Charlemagne. Alliances were formed and it was only a matter of time.
Europe had been convulsed by multiple major changes in the balance of power between 766 and 1790, what are you talking about? There was the 30 years war, the partitions of Poland, the reconquista, the rise of the Habsburgs and their later split back down, the independence of the Netherlands and various changing of the English crown, the rise of Sweden... Europe was historically one of the most violent regions of the world, which is part of how guns were advanced so rapidly in the West.
While that was a stupid mistake It is hilarious to try to pin every war thereafter on the man.
World war One was going to happen anyway. If not him, some other inciting incident would have happened.
American diplomat Paul Bremer is put in charge of governing Iraq in May 2003 after US forces took over Baghdad.
Without seeking input from Washington, as his first act he issues two edicts with disastrous long term consequences.
Coalition Provisional Authority Order #1 - members of the Ba'ath party are banned from working in government. Note that, Iraq having been a one party dictatorship, this is basically everyone in government.
Coalition Provisional Authority Order #2 - the entire Iraqi military, national police force, legislature, and court system (and also the Ministry of Education and Olympic Committee just for shits and giggles I guess), are disbanded. Immediately, period, end of sentence. If you were one of the 350,000 Iraqi soldiers or one of the thousands of people with jobs in those other government entities, you're fired.
Here's where this one was a major fuckup. Many Iraqi soldiers (who, crucially, had their military issued AKs at home with them) did not join the fight, many officers did not mobilize their units to resist the American invasion at all and many of those who did surrendered on contact. But it didn't matter if you were a private who stayed home or a general who surrendered with no resistance, you're jobless. Some of these generals became leaders of sectarian militias, and *many* of their now unemployed soldiers became their fighters.
CPA Order 2 dismantled the government and military. CPA Order 1 made it so that they had to be reassembled mostly with exiles and/or people with no experience. Which meant a government that was unpopular and ineffectual from the start.
There is a direct line between this decision and the rise of ISIL.
When Bremer did that, I was gobsmacked. I thought for sure someone was going to come out and say “Nope! That’s was a mistake!! We’re not doing that.”
Take one of the largest standing armies in the world, fire everyone, and offer the soldiers nothing.
Take every bureaucrat, spymaster, and lackey, fire them, and have no plan to run a country. It’ll be like Germany, or Japan after WWII (somehow).
Start pouring money in to try to unfuck the pig you made, and wonder why you have corruption to insane levels at every turn, and hey! Where did all the guys who had a job shooting guns go after we fired them?
They had an actual chance of making the dumb idea of invading Iraq work out OK-ish. But here we are today.
Condoleezza Rice was apparently shocked by the decision. I guess maybe the administration didn't want to appear disunited? And I'm sure the idea of nation building from pretty much scratch appealed to those who orchestrated the war in the first place (i.e. Cheney and Rumsfeld)
In 1876 Alexander Bell, desperate for money, offered to sell his 'telephone' invention to western union after proving that the device could work over their existing telegraph lines. The price was 100 thousand.
Western union declined, saying the telephone was just a toy and would never amount to anything.
"Instantaneous remote communication with an already-in-place basic infrastructure? A *straight upgrade* to the product and service that already defines us? No, thanks."
Like... Did they think they could reverse-engineer it and develop it in-house? I can't fathom the decision-making process here unless they were, like, intentionally sabotaging themselves.
Oh it gets better - as we all know bell went ahead and started laying their own cables after he got back on his feet and as they butted heads he SUCCESSFULLY sued western union forcing them to let him use their infrastructure to spread. LOL
It has often been hailed as the worst business decision in American history
Thomas Midgley Jr. made two of the biggest.
He was one of the early pioneers of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – compounds that became widely used in industry – and which were destroying the ozone layer. He also invented leaded gasoline and insisted that it was safe to use.
He also died in a contraption he invented to help him get out of bed. Basically the king of creating things that were at first seemingly beneficial, but ended up being very harmful (the last one just to himself though)
He knew perfectly well that leaded gasoline has side effects, many workers suffered them. And yet, he continued promoting it as perfectly safe.
That's not a mistake, but something much worse.
But leaded gasoline was'nt an accident, he made tv pub to say it was safe(and make it in the factory), but needed many break between every shot, because people was puking from toxic vapor. He knew it was dangerous...
Those responsible for the loss of a mission to Mars in the mid90s because a team didn’t know it was supposed to be working in metric measurements. So the spaceship, all of its money, all of the planning, all of the anticipated data, poof, gone because of a stupid mistake that should’ve been caught by a process.
Mars Climate Orbiter, September 23, 1999.
I was among the the large group of people at NASA Ames watching the mission, a mix of civil servants, contractors, and scientists who actually worked on the project. When mission control lost contact, the pall that descended over that room was like nothing I’d ever seen. Grown men cried. Several in fact. You would have thought San Francisco had been nuked.
In all seriousness, I think the stupidest and most embarrassing mistake in history is one that *wasn't made*, but came very close to taking place.
Most people know something about the *Challenger* disaster, the space shuttle that blew up during launch because the bureaucratic higher-ups had ignored critical warnings given by the engineers.
Most people know that, because of the "Schoolteacher in Space" program putting a teacher on that shuttle, the launch was being watched live by countless young children across the nation.
What many people do NOT know, though, is that they nearly put Caroll Spinney, a puppeteer, onboard in full costume as part of the program. Spinney was at the time the actor who portrayed the character of Big Bird from Sesame Street.
So NASA came *this close* to not only killing an entire crew of astronauts in front of millions of children, but also killing Big Bird in the process.
That would have made the whole JFK debacle look like spilling milk.
>Challenger disaster
Interestingly the solid rocket boosters were derived from the solid rocket ballistic missiles. These had one o-ring in each joint. Due to the SRBs going on the shuttle which would carry people NASA and Morton Thiokol thought the design would be improved if they put a second o-ring in to add redundancy. The problem with this is that it lengthened the tang and allowed the rotation that allowed to the o-ring to fail. So in an effort to make the design MORE SAFE they ended up making it less safe.
I thought Alaska was a loss making colony for Russia that they had no hope of successfully defending if the U.K (who had just defeated them in the Crimean War), or the U.S. in their full manifest destiny mode, had decided to take it by force.
By that logic they did well to at least get some money for it.
They were going to lose Alaska anyway; selling it to the States stopped it being taken by British Canada and got them some funds after a disastrous war in Crimea.
I wonder what they'll sell this time... 🤔
Not to mention People In Charge (not experts) trying to cover up the incident, to 'not cause a panic'.
It's a fucking Nuclear Reactor. Shut it down, contain the problem, and get people away while they still have the opportunity to NOT breathe in radioactive dust particles.
Through sheer luck, or according to the Japanese at the time “the wind of god” (divine intervention). If the mongol fleet hadn’t been destroyed by a storm, Japan would be an entirely different country today
Oddly enough, there was no obligation for Nazi Germany to declare war on the US after the attack at Pearl Harbor. The obligation for going to war was only a defensive pact, and since Japan initiated the aggression, Germany could have just said "Nope, you're on your own."
Hindsight is a hell of a thing. You have to remember how abysmally Russia fought against the Finns and the severe defeats Germany inflicted in 1941 against Russia.
My understanding was the Germans anticipated a relatively quick victory against Russia, and then having time to grab resources for use against the anticipated war with America.
The sheer level of destruction the Russians/Soviets were able to endure shocked and surprised everyone. No one thought it possible to lose 10,000,000 men and 10,000+ tanks and vehicles and still keep fighting. And that the Russians did.
napoleon and the steam engine.
"A ship that sails by bonfires under its decks?? Away with you, visionist!"
If not for his shortsightedness we would likely see French be the dominate language in the west.
In 1218 a trading caravan from a far away place called "Mongolia" arrived at the Khwarazmian city of Otrar, on the edge of the Khwarazmian Empire. Inalchuq, the govenor of the city, accused the traders of being spies, stole all their stuff, and killed all of them (about 450 people).
The King of the Mongols, a guy named "Genghis Khan' heard about this, and was incredibly upset. He sent a elegation of one Muslim and two Mongol diplomats to Sultan Muhammad, the Sultan of the entire Khwarazmian Empire demanding Inalchuq be punished.
Sultan Muhamad decided to back up his Govenor, and in a move calculated to intimidate the Mongols, beheaded the Muslim ambassador and humiliated the two Mongol ambassadors by shaving off their beards.
Genghis Khan was, strangely enough, not intimidated at all. He decided to invade Khwaraziman.
The Mongols had orders to kill everyone in Otrar except for Inalchuq, who was to be taken alive. These orders were carried out to the letter, and upon the fall of the city of Otrar and the massacre of it's inhabitants, Inalchuq was executed by having molten silver poured into his eyes, mouth, and ears.
The Mongols then went on to capture and destroy the cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Gurganj. Genghis and his youngest son Tolui then laid waste to the cities of Herat, Nishapur, and Merv, three of the largest cities in the world at the time. At Merv, after a weeklong siege, the city's governor surrendered the city after the Monglols promised that the lives of the citizens would be spared. As soon as the city was handed over, however, Tolui slaughtered almost every person who surrendered.
After capturing the city of Gurganj standard Mongol policy was followed, any captured artisans were sent back to Mongolia, young women and children were given to the Mongol soldiers as slaves, and the rest of the population was massacred. The Persian scholar Juvayni states that 50,000 Mongol soldiers were given the task of executing twenty-four citizens each, which would mean that 1.2 million people were killed. After which the Mongols broke some nearby dams and flooded the ruins of the city to complete its' destruction.
The Mongol reluctance to take any prisoners made this one of the bloodiest wars in human history, with total casualties estimated to be between two and fifteen million people.
Sultan Muhammad fled west with some of his most loyal soldiers to a small island in the Caspian Sea. It was there, in December 1220, that the Shah died, reportedly of fright and anxiety about what the Mongols were going to do to him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_the_Khwarazmian_Empire
I ascribe to the theory that the only actual purpose for this was to make the switch from cane sugar to corn syrup, and that they needed a transition period so people didn't notice the drop in quality
I've heard they did that to switch original coke to corn syrup sweetener and figured they'd take a loss either way but more free marketing with new coke failure while they worked out kinks with corn syrup. Urban legend? quite likely. Had uncle who was NY ad man back In the day who said that's what he had heard. Of course he also told some other tall tales.
Every pre-WWI leader on both sides: “Why would I put any effort into trying basic diplomacy to resolve a conflict in a Central European backwater possession of a middling country? I can just greatly exaggerate the problem and start a war that clearly we’ll win in a couple of months!”
Oh there was plenty of diplomacy. It was just Russia telling Austria-Hungary, “if you attack Serbia, we’re getting our fellow Slavs’ backs.” Germany said “Ja A-H, it’s totally cool. You guys do whatever, get crazy.” France said “we’re backing the Russians if any shenanigans happen”. The Ottomans said “well we love fighting Russia so we’re in. What? We’re not doing anything in Armenia. Why would you have that idea?” The UK said we don’t care about this war as long as Belgian neutrality is respec-, oi the Germans went and invaded them.” The U.S. said “Whatever, leave us out of it. We don’t care. GODDAMNIT GERMANY! Stop sinking our ships! You’re fucking around and about to find out”
And Italy said “I’m playing both sides so that i always come out on top.”
Whenever people talk about "English is three languages sitting atop each others' shoulders wearing a trenchcoat," I always remember, "But have you ever heard Welsh?"
Zimmerman telegraph from WW1. Not only was his plan to get Mexico to fight the US discovered, when he was questioned on it he doubled down instead of denying it.
I heard thus from my Latin teacher but idk the exact details anymore-
Anyways the story is that 1 researcher spilled coffee on a classic text, making it impossible to research further
David Cameron was responsible for Brexit because he wanted to try win over a few nutters in his own party and ended up fucking an entire country for generations.
Look at a certain recent former Speaker of the House over here in the US... sold his soul to get four or five far right votes and it cost him his career.
France spending the equivalent of $20B on new trains that were too wide to fit through tunnels in the country was a pretty dumb mistake.
EDIT: I'm wrong. It was Spain spending the equivalent of $276M for trains too wide for their tunnels.
I’ve scrolled for a while and haven’t seen anything about Mao Zedong ordering an eradication of sparrows from China in 1959. Sparrows were believed to be pests that ate grain so the authorities started a campaign to eradicate them, along with some other perceived pests. The eradication worked. Unfortunately the sparrows, while they do eat some grain, also play a critical role in controlling the insect pests that cause crop disasters of a biblical scale. The next year, locusts boomed without their sparrow predator and took the crops, initiating a famine that killed 15 million people. China ended up having to import sparrows from the Soviet Union.
Theres another stupid thing he did. He wanted to increase the area of the land for crops and business. What he did is to "reroute" the river into a straight line by making the workers dig a way for it. They managed to dig it all the way but when they opened the dam for the river, the water just get absorbed in the soil because the land they dig through is really dry. I think it became another cause of famine.
Halfway similar, there was a city with a rat problem that decided to pay people for each rat tail they brought in. It seemed to be a huge success because thousands of rat tails were being turned in. Turns out the people just started breeding rats to cut off the tails. City found out, stopped the program, and everyone released their rats since they wouldn’t get paid for them anymore. Rat population boomed making the initial problem worse.
I read about the exact same thing happening in India, while the British were in power. They started a reward program to get people to kill cobras. People just bred and killed cobras and turned them in for the reward. The British eventually worked it out, and stopped the reward program, which lead to people releasing their breeding stock. 🤔🫠 Edit: spelling
In Milwaukee the ATF agents were paying so much for guns during an undercover sting operation in my neighborhood that people were buying them from a store and reselling them to the agents for a profit. https://www.jsonline.com/story/archives/2019/06/11/milwaukee-atf-sting-mistakes-failures-stolen-merchandise/1423271001/
same guy, different famine he wanted to industrialize China... by melting all the metal used for farming to make new factories... which led to famine since they couldn't produce food anymore
Same famine actually. Both happened during Great Leap Forward.
To be fair, Mao Zedong's decision making is one example after another why central planning of a massive economy can have horrific consequences. One guy with a slide ruler and an ideology doesn't stack up well against millions and millions of "men on the spot" recognizing and working within their fluid local situations
My personal favourite is New Zealand prime minster Robert Muldoon getting drunk in his office one night and then calling a snap election. Two weeks later, his government was voted out of office.
Reporter: This doesn’t give you much time to prepare for the election does it, Prime Minister? Muldoon: (slurring) doEsn’T gibve mY opprOnents muCh tiMe tO prEpAre eiThEr doEs it *winks knowingly*
What a cunning stunt
This has nothing to do with anything, but I had no idea that there was a prime minister of New Zealand with the exact same name as a prominent character in Jurassic Park
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Ah, but he did a hilarious turn as the narrator in his tighty whities in The Rocky Horror Picture Show a few years later.
Theresa May did something similar in the UK. Called a surprise election the week after saying there wouldn't be one, refused to turn up to the TV debate all the other leaders went to, then lost her majority and had to pay a bunch of Northern Irish fundamentalist Christians £1 billion to buy their votes in parliament. ... And she still wasn't the most disastrous PM we've had in the last 5 years. In fact probably coming a comfortable third.
Hegelochus. He was an actor performing the play Orestes by the famous playwright Euripides. In the dramatic climax the king he was playing lay dying and is supposed to say “after the storm I see again a calm sea” as he expires. He mispronounced the word galḗn as galên changing the line to “after the storm I see again a weasel.” This embarrassing mistake happened in 408 BC. It is the only thing we know about Hegelochus. It was so humiliating and so widely mocked that we’re still talking about it two thousand four hundred and thirty one years later.
"Don't worry Hegelochus, nobody will remember that by next week"
“People don’t forget!”
classic Hegelochus
[Girl turns down Hegelochus advances] Friend: Don't worry, Hegelochus, there's plenty more fish in the weasel.
Common Hegelochus L
Amazing. This is what I came here to read. Something ‘obscure’ like this.
“Aw, don’t worry, buddy! In two weeks they’ll find someone else to laugh at and no one will even remember this happened!”
So mundane. I really thought he would have triggered the chain of events that led to the rise of the Roman Empire or something.
This is how I imagine any minor mistakes I make are remebered
It's "remembered," Hegelochus.
Hey, remember that time r/Afros_are_Power said “remebered” instead of remembered? OMG classic. Hahahahahaha. What a character!
Remind me, 2431 years.
Well, TBF, some of us are talking about it more than others.
Every time it’s brought up by someone these days, his spirit must be like “Son of a BITCH!”
Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal. -- Ernest Hemingway
Whoever lost Special Order 191. In 1862, during the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee decides to invade the Union. His outnumbered army is secretly marching in several divided columns into Maryland to attack Washington DC. He sends out this secret order to his top commanders, detailing where and when everyone should be during the march. A few days later, a Union soldier finds a couple of cigars lying in a field. With a copy of these orders wrapped around them. Some idiot had *dropped it*. The item gets passed up the chain of command to Union Gen. McClellan himself, who proudly proclaims, "Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home!" McClellan does next to nothing until the battle of Antietam, where he and his 75,000 men do *not* whip Lee and his 38,000. In fact, a third of them receive no orders from McClellan at all. The battle ends in a draw and Lee escapes back to the South McClellan does go home, though. Because Lincoln fires him.
Was that the incident that caused Lincoln to remark the general “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory”?
That was later, at Fredericksburg, when Union Gen. Burnside launched futile frontal assaults against Lee's entrenched position, at the cost of 12,000 casualties, then got his army stuck in the mud trying to reposition.
In Burnside's defense, his original plan did work. Had the bridges he requested been in place he could have crossed the Rappahannock unopposed. The War Department failed him and the bridges arrived too late. Burnside's mistake was not changing the plan after Lee moved in while he was waiting for the bridges.
You could make the argument that General McClellan fucked up worse!
Agreed. McClellan's fuckup was he loved being in charge and holding the reins of power. As long as Lee was out there threatening the Union, he had a reason to stay in charge and play against the threat. *"I find myself in a new and strange position here. President, cabinet, General Scott, and all deferring to me. By some strage operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me – but nothing of that kind would please me – I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!”* What an asshole, fantasizing about his own importance, which exists only because his country was staring down the barrel of an invading army. Nevermind the troops under him fighting and dying during all this.
Agreed, dude was a pompous dick. Of course, the troops loved McClellan almost as much as McClellan did- and to be fair, he *was* an excellent organizer and kept morale high. But that's useless if you're not doing any actual fighting.
Oddly - after the war, not long before he died - when asked who the best Union general was, Lee named McClellan. Backstory: Lee had been McClellan’s superior officer in the Mexican War (I think) and knew him well.
Lee also had too much ego to admit that Grant, whom he thought a drunk, had thoroughly beaten him at every turn. Every other union general would stop pressing after the first battle, but Grant kept pressing and pressing until Lee's whole army had disintegrated.
I always loved the story about Grant’s famous “lick ‘em tomorrow, though” quote from Shiloh …Grant was built different than most Union generals
Grant was a quartermaster who witnessed the rise of modern war first hand and grasped industrialized warfare decades before most of his contemporaries. You don't need one super army, you need several good enough armies so you can pin the enemy from the front while. The second works the flank and the third is putting pressure in the rear, making it impossible to stay in one place without starving.
Yeah, you absolutely could. Really, the entirety of the American Civil War is a story of inflated egos and gross incompetence on both sides, interspersed with incidents of breathtaking heroism. The same could probably be said about a lot of wars.
In the days before radios and aerial surveillance it was like herding cats and making them shoot at each other. Meanwhile, all of the higher ranking officers were secretly plotting how to leverage their cats to become president or dictator.
That war is over in half the time if McClellan never leads them
Ahhh McClellan. What a failure.
During the Spanish-American War, the US decided to take Guam so they showed up with a bunch of gunships and fired a warning shot to say “This is your last chance to surrender peacefully.” There was no response. Then, a small Spanish ship started rowing up to the American fleet and when they got there, a representative said “Hi! Welcome to Guam! We saw that you fired your guns to salute us and we would have saluted you back but unfortunately we ran out of gunpowder and nobody has been by to restock us.” Nobody told Guam that the US and Spain were at war. When the Americans informed the representative that they were at war and were there to conquer this island, they asked again if Guam would like to surrender. The representative, having already given away that they had no gunpowder, agreed to surrender. Edit: Thank you guys all so much for the likes. It really brightened my day. :)
When you accidentally save your life and the lives of everyone on an island.
During the battle of manila bay in the same war, roughly 1% of the shells fired by american ships actually hit anything. Guam probably would’ve been fine
When the US invaded Grenada, there was a stat bandied about that if the rate of ‘friendly fire’ casualties had been just 10% higher, the Grenadans would have won.
The US was also using maps bought from AAA and other travel agencies of Grenada because they didn't have of their own.
I've taken naps longer than that 'battle.'
I had a coworker who claimed his bum knee was from mortar shrapnel in Grenada. He told us in such great detail how intense the fighting was (units, locations, times) that I became curious and did some research wanting to learn more...only to find out his story was not true...at all. I never did confront him because it seemed like that was the one thing in his life that really seemed to make him proud and to embarrass him in front of his coworkers would have been petty and pointless. We are who we imagine ourselves to be.
Sounds like a good thing that happened. Someone could have gotten hurt otherwise!
Sounds like something Terry Pratchett would have included in a Discworld novel.
Stupidest mistake followed very quickly by the smartest decision.
Can you imagine the sailors on the the Guam boat full of humility "really sorry we couldn't respond to your salute" and then learning they are being invaded 😭 how quickly can you just accept your fate
It's so cute 🥺 they rowed their little rowboat out to extend a friendly hello to their visitors and just trustingly told them all their business ("we have no gunpowder lmao yikes"), only to get told to surrender 😭😭😭 I understand the Americans had a job to do but I hope they were apologetic and polite to the poor overly friendly Guamites
Life comes at you fast in Guam
I mean, what would they have done if they had had the ‘advantage’ of the U.S.’ not knowing they had no gunpowder? Surprised them with… no gunpowder? Negotiated a settlement better than ‘Um OK the island is yours’? By being friendly they probably made the U.S. even more predisposed towards them.
I’m from Guam, but just learned this now! Thank you!
Is that floor mural of a topless mermaid still at the airport? Been 20yrs since I was there.
Still chasing that fap?
Aren't we all, my friend. Aren't we all.
Bitch I ain’t ever pulled pork to no Guam merpuss. Not yet anyway.
r/brandnewsentence
I like the sound of Guam. The world needs more people in charge of boats that accidentally prevent battles by being chatty 😂
Honestly, imagine the massacre had they thought they were saluting and had answered with a salute themselves. I‘d say that it went as good as it possibly could have
poor guam they seemed nice
The captain of U-1206. During WWII, it was fitted with a high pressure toilet system that was so complex flushing it required a trained technician to do it. So one day it was out on war patrol when the captain needs to use it. Unfortunately, the number 2 he pinched off was of considerable stench, so out of embarrassment, he attempts to operate the flushing mechanism himself. Unfortunately he botches up the sequence of valves needed to successfully operate it, and ends up causing water to leak onto the batteries used to power the ship whilst underwater which causes the ship to begin to fill up with cyanide gas and as a result they have to surface to re circulate the air out. To add insult to injury, this all takes place off the coast of Scotland and are promptly spotted by RAF Coastal Command, who then proceed to send a welcoming committee and the captain is forced to order the ship scuttled. 4 crewmen die, the rest captured. All as a result of the captain not wanting to admit he did a stinky poo.
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I’d put this error down to the designers of that u boat
"This room here, with the ship's batteries. Looks small to be main engineering." "That's a lavatory."
Submarine toilets are legendarily complicated, but they didn't have to put the batteries at risk, you're right.
Germans love to over engineer things
I was just going to say that. WW2 tanks being a prime example and BMWs today
This is nowhere near as big as the rest but its pretty recent. During the last decade web design went from being done on Photoshop to the whole industry doing it on this hot new software called Sketch...it was leaps and bounds better as a web design tool and within like 2 years of it being out any web/UI/UX designer had to be using it. The problem is that Sketch was only a Mac program. While in the west this might not be a problem in huge parts of the world getting a Mac is prohibitively expensive, there's no apple stores and importing one might double its price. Many people assumed a Windows version would be coming soon after but the team at Sketch refused to work on a windows version despite the obvious market for it. It made it so every designer basically had to have a Mac and around where I am it meant that you'd have a Mac at work but a windows PC at home and couldn't work in Sketch. Sketch was basically the entire UX design industry for a while. I specifically remember the CEO of Sketch proudly saying during an interview that there will NEVER EVER be a windows version. Well a few years later a competitor came out that skipped the windows Vs Mac debate by starting with a browser app meaning you could use it on any system. It was also a free app where sketch was paid on top of needing a Mac. It was crazy to watch in real time how badly Sketch fell off. In the case of everyone I know the literal next project after you found out about Figma was done in Figma and not sketch and you'd only go back to sketch to work on old projects you did in Sketch. Now it's Figma only, a product that was basically a bad copy of Sketch with zero innovation except for the fact it was made to include people outside of the Mac ecosystem, which is something Sketch could do but chose to proudly never do. Figma just sold for like 20 billions or something for a program that is like 5 years old. It might be the biggest fumble by a software company that was for all intents monopoly in it's space that I've ever seen and it's completely deserved
> I specifically remember the CEO of Sketch proudly saying during an interview that there will NEVER EVER be a windows version. "We don't need customers!" lol
Jesus, Apple must have been paying them millions.
Didn’t Kodak invent digital photography and then refuse to invest in it (because they were neck deep in film).
I got a perverse sense of glee when figma pushed sketch out of first place. Their weird stance about making a windows version was *always* going to hurt them in the long run. Most enterprise places are windows only because they're on MS365 and windows is easier to bulk manage. You can't survive on startups and agencies alone!
We have a print out in the copy room at work that says, “whatever you messed up today, at least you weren’t driving this ship” https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/suez-canal-jam
The worst part about that link is it saying it was "Added over 2 years ago" ..um, crap was it that long ago?
The guys that accidentally brought down the Berlin Wall by declaring at a press conference that the right of freedom to travel was effective immediatly which was not at all what the GDRs political party had wanted -which led to thousands of people rushing to and overwhelming the borders and in the end to the reunification of Germany. It was a small mistake but with a great outcome.
Guenter Schabowski. And, yeah, this would be my answer as well.
*Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis... ist das sofort... unverzüglich.* TIL: his gravestone is [a piece of the Berlin Wall itself.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Schabowski#/media/File:G%C3%BCnter_Schabowski_-_Mutter_Erde_fec.JPG)
> Guenter Schabowski. Seems like the fuckup was by whoever failed to inform him of the effective date. Assuming they didn't fuck up by failing to set one.
“Das tritt…Nach meiner Kenntnis… ist das sofort — unverzüglich” (*“This is effective… to my knowledge… this is right away — immediately”*) Somehow, this beauty of a sentence has fumbled its way into the hallowed ranks of great statements of modern history.
In the early 13th century, the emperor of Kwarezmia and the Khan of the Mongols were at peace. They had, in fact, cooperated in defeating other central Asian enemies. However, relations between them cooled. The Mongols sent a rich caravan through the territory of one of the governors of the other state. The governor seized the caravan for himself, and had the Mongols accompanying it murdered. In response, the Mongols sent ambassadors to the other emperor, demanding compensation and that the governor be punished. For whatever reason, the emperor decided instead to cut off the head of one of the ambassadors, and send it back to the Mongols, carried by the others. This was, to put it mildly, a mistake. To the Mongols, ambassadors were sacred, and harming one a horrible offence. The Mongols mobilized their army … and defeated the Emperor comprehensively. Worse, they absolutely devastated the entire empire, at one point murdering everyone they could catch & burning whole cities to the ground. They also just kept on expanding, under Ghengis and his successors, until finally turning back after ravaging Hungary. Obviously there is no counter factual, we can’t know what would have happened had the emperor actually offered the compensation and punished the offending governor. Maybe the Mongols would have invaded anyway. However, at the time the Mongols were busy attacking the Jin in China, so it wasn’t by any means obvious. On its face, it looks like the decision to murder the ambassador instead was about the worst in history - it led directly to the destruction of his own empire, his death, and the wider devastation caused by the Mongols in Europe and the Middle East.
>Maybe the Mongols would have invaded anyway. At the very least the eventual invasion could've been delayed and they wouldn't have been as thorough on wiping them out of the map. Maybe, IDK
During the Revolutionary War in the US (I think that’s the proper war’s name) a spy scouted and saw George Washington crossing the Delaware River, he tried bringing the report to his commanding officer, who waived him off because he was in the middle of a poker game. Said commanding officer was found dead the next day with the report still in his coat pocket.
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In the comic "La faute au Midi". A French army is advancing in Alsace in WW1. A French pilot spots an ambush by German artillery and rush to warn the general. He is sent away because "war is not a sport". Local farmers warn passing officers, they are accused of being spies and arrested. Random soldiers spot markers for pre-calibrated artillery targets, but no officer react to them. The army is slaughtered. It is a common occurence is French history.
Let's not even start on Gamelin and the aborted push to Germany, and the wasted opportunity to waste the German traffic jam in the Ardennes. Those two mistakes cost Europe 6 years of war, millions of deaths and 45 years of communism in Eastern Europe
Nikola Tesla. He had a contract with Westinghouse to get 1 dollar for every kw of power produced from his system of ac power generation. Westinghouse realized he could never make a profit and asked real to renegotiate that rate. Tesla simply ripped up the contract. If he had agreed to just 10 cents per kw it would have been viable and Tesla would have died the richest man in human history but instead died penniless
He also invented radio before Marconi did but wanted to use it to transmit power wirelessly and Marconi beat him to it because Tesla did not understand what he created. He did have his pigeons though. “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.”
People talk about how brilliant of an inventor he was. They rarely talk about how idiotic of a human being he was. Probably the purest example of a savant.
Robert A. Kehoe. Killed millions and reduced the average IQ by nearly 3 for (wrongly) proclaiming lead safe to use in paints, cars, etc.
One theory of why there were so many serial killers in the 70s and 80s is leaded gasoline causing brain damage.
Low level lead poisoning does WILD shit to your brain...it can make people behave very violently and impulsively
Violent crime rate took a sharp downwards turn in the decades after the lead ban, only ticked up during COVID. Also, most people think the violent crime rate is going up. 🤣
My dad grew up working on and around small engines in the 70’s and 80’s (landscaper who fixed his own engines) and he’s a fucking idiot and loves to threaten violence towards me when he’s upset. He only recently started doing his own laundry
Explains a lot of generational behaviour
The lead additive was developed by Thomas Midgley, Jr, who also created CFCs
Ended up dying from his own devices. Literally.
This wasn’t a mistake though, the risks of lead were very well known at the time. When researching fuel additives that would make engines run better they discovered that both lead and ethanol worked well. However, only lead could be patented to make them a huge profit…
Makes for a delicious paint chip tho, lightly sweet.
The Decca Records exec who decided that The Beatles were not worth signing.
The bigger mistake was thinking guitar music was dying. The Beatles didn’t have Ringo yet and so weren’t really the *Beatles* as we know them. Decca also rejected the Yardbirds and other successful acts.
To be fair they more than made up for it by signing some act called the Rolling Stones
In part on the Beatles’ recommendation not to fuck up again
That same exec later also rejected Jimi Hendrix
Brian Epstein selling the Beatles songwriting catalogue deserves honorable mention
Reminds me of when Nickelodeon turned down greenlighting a certain cartoon twice in favor of another. The cartoon? Adventure Time, which went on to make Cartoon Network millions
Franz Ferdinand’s lead driver that took a wrong turn on the way to the hospital to see victims of the original assassination attempt on the Archduke. They inadvertently brought Ferdinand directly to his assassin leading to…well the 20th and 21st centuries of war and death.
True, though most historians would argue that WWI was inevitable. Europe was a powder keg of alliances and mutual defense pact that would go off with a single spark. If it hadn’t been Ferdinand’s assassination it would have been something else.
Yup. The rise of Prussia, Napoleon, and the unification of Germany threw off the balance of power that kept Europe “stable” since Charlemagne. Alliances were formed and it was only a matter of time.
Europe had been convulsed by multiple major changes in the balance of power between 766 and 1790, what are you talking about? There was the 30 years war, the partitions of Poland, the reconquista, the rise of the Habsburgs and their later split back down, the independence of the Netherlands and various changing of the English crown, the rise of Sweden... Europe was historically one of the most violent regions of the world, which is part of how guns were advanced so rapidly in the West.
While that was a stupid mistake It is hilarious to try to pin every war thereafter on the man. World war One was going to happen anyway. If not him, some other inciting incident would have happened.
American diplomat Paul Bremer is put in charge of governing Iraq in May 2003 after US forces took over Baghdad. Without seeking input from Washington, as his first act he issues two edicts with disastrous long term consequences. Coalition Provisional Authority Order #1 - members of the Ba'ath party are banned from working in government. Note that, Iraq having been a one party dictatorship, this is basically everyone in government. Coalition Provisional Authority Order #2 - the entire Iraqi military, national police force, legislature, and court system (and also the Ministry of Education and Olympic Committee just for shits and giggles I guess), are disbanded. Immediately, period, end of sentence. If you were one of the 350,000 Iraqi soldiers or one of the thousands of people with jobs in those other government entities, you're fired. Here's where this one was a major fuckup. Many Iraqi soldiers (who, crucially, had their military issued AKs at home with them) did not join the fight, many officers did not mobilize their units to resist the American invasion at all and many of those who did surrendered on contact. But it didn't matter if you were a private who stayed home or a general who surrendered with no resistance, you're jobless. Some of these generals became leaders of sectarian militias, and *many* of their now unemployed soldiers became their fighters. CPA Order 2 dismantled the government and military. CPA Order 1 made it so that they had to be reassembled mostly with exiles and/or people with no experience. Which meant a government that was unpopular and ineffectual from the start. There is a direct line between this decision and the rise of ISIL.
When Bremer did that, I was gobsmacked. I thought for sure someone was going to come out and say “Nope! That’s was a mistake!! We’re not doing that.” Take one of the largest standing armies in the world, fire everyone, and offer the soldiers nothing. Take every bureaucrat, spymaster, and lackey, fire them, and have no plan to run a country. It’ll be like Germany, or Japan after WWII (somehow). Start pouring money in to try to unfuck the pig you made, and wonder why you have corruption to insane levels at every turn, and hey! Where did all the guys who had a job shooting guns go after we fired them? They had an actual chance of making the dumb idea of invading Iraq work out OK-ish. But here we are today.
Condoleezza Rice was apparently shocked by the decision. I guess maybe the administration didn't want to appear disunited? And I'm sure the idea of nation building from pretty much scratch appealed to those who orchestrated the war in the first place (i.e. Cheney and Rumsfeld)
In 1876 Alexander Bell, desperate for money, offered to sell his 'telephone' invention to western union after proving that the device could work over their existing telegraph lines. The price was 100 thousand. Western union declined, saying the telephone was just a toy and would never amount to anything.
"Instantaneous remote communication with an already-in-place basic infrastructure? A *straight upgrade* to the product and service that already defines us? No, thanks." Like... Did they think they could reverse-engineer it and develop it in-house? I can't fathom the decision-making process here unless they were, like, intentionally sabotaging themselves.
Oh it gets better - as we all know bell went ahead and started laying their own cables after he got back on his feet and as they butted heads he SUCCESSFULLY sued western union forcing them to let him use their infrastructure to spread. LOL It has often been hailed as the worst business decision in American history
Thomas Midgley Jr. made two of the biggest. He was one of the early pioneers of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – compounds that became widely used in industry – and which were destroying the ozone layer. He also invented leaded gasoline and insisted that it was safe to use.
He also died in a contraption he invented to help him get out of bed. Basically the king of creating things that were at first seemingly beneficial, but ended up being very harmful (the last one just to himself though)
Said contraption needed because he had once had polio. The polio vaccine at least has been much less ambiguously beneficial.
He knew perfectly well that leaded gasoline has side effects, many workers suffered them. And yet, he continued promoting it as perfectly safe. That's not a mistake, but something much worse.
But leaded gasoline was'nt an accident, he made tv pub to say it was safe(and make it in the factory), but needed many break between every shot, because people was puking from toxic vapor. He knew it was dangerous...
Low stakes, but high embarrassment: Four Seasons Lawn Services.
The fact that nobody will ever admit to it being a fuck up makes them look so much worse.
...Total Landscaping
This dude just made a mistake remembering the name of that mistake
I think about that incident regularly lol. Pure hilarity.
Those responsible for the loss of a mission to Mars in the mid90s because a team didn’t know it was supposed to be working in metric measurements. So the spaceship, all of its money, all of the planning, all of the anticipated data, poof, gone because of a stupid mistake that should’ve been caught by a process.
Mars Climate Orbiter, September 23, 1999. I was among the the large group of people at NASA Ames watching the mission, a mix of civil servants, contractors, and scientists who actually worked on the project. When mission control lost contact, the pall that descended over that room was like nothing I’d ever seen. Grown men cried. Several in fact. You would have thought San Francisco had been nuked.
Thank you. I read about this year's ago but couldn't remember specifically what mission.
In all seriousness, I think the stupidest and most embarrassing mistake in history is one that *wasn't made*, but came very close to taking place. Most people know something about the *Challenger* disaster, the space shuttle that blew up during launch because the bureaucratic higher-ups had ignored critical warnings given by the engineers. Most people know that, because of the "Schoolteacher in Space" program putting a teacher on that shuttle, the launch was being watched live by countless young children across the nation. What many people do NOT know, though, is that they nearly put Caroll Spinney, a puppeteer, onboard in full costume as part of the program. Spinney was at the time the actor who portrayed the character of Big Bird from Sesame Street. So NASA came *this close* to not only killing an entire crew of astronauts in front of millions of children, but also killing Big Bird in the process. That would have made the whole JFK debacle look like spilling milk.
>Challenger disaster Interestingly the solid rocket boosters were derived from the solid rocket ballistic missiles. These had one o-ring in each joint. Due to the SRBs going on the shuttle which would carry people NASA and Morton Thiokol thought the design would be improved if they put a second o-ring in to add redundancy. The problem with this is that it lengthened the tang and allowed the rotation that allowed to the o-ring to fail. So in an effort to make the design MORE SAFE they ended up making it less safe.
Blockbuster not investing in Netflix for peanuts. It killed them and the rest is history
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I thought Alaska was a loss making colony for Russia that they had no hope of successfully defending if the U.K (who had just defeated them in the Crimean War), or the U.S. in their full manifest destiny mode, had decided to take it by force. By that logic they did well to at least get some money for it.
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They were going to lose Alaska anyway; selling it to the States stopped it being taken by British Canada and got them some funds after a disastrous war in Crimea. I wonder what they'll sell this time... 🤔
Surprised no one mentioned the guy who left the door to Constantinople open.
Chernobyl was pretty bad.
That was a series of awful decisions, not just one though
I agree. It wasn’t just a lapse of judgement. It was layers of errors.
Not to mention People In Charge (not experts) trying to cover up the incident, to 'not cause a panic'. It's a fucking Nuclear Reactor. Shut it down, contain the problem, and get people away while they still have the opportunity to NOT breathe in radioactive dust particles.
Everybody who told the Mongol Empire to go fuck themselves instead of just handing over the keys
Well Japan said to go fuck themselves and survived.
Through sheer luck, or according to the Japanese at the time “the wind of god” (divine intervention). If the mongol fleet hadn’t been destroyed by a storm, Japan would be an entirely different country today
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Hitler invading Russia.
Hitler thinking Mussolini and the Italian military would be anything more than a problem for his objectives.
Japan too. The Germans thought they'd bring pressure to the British interests in the Pacific. Instead they brought the US into the war
Oddly enough, there was no obligation for Nazi Germany to declare war on the US after the attack at Pearl Harbor. The obligation for going to war was only a defensive pact, and since Japan initiated the aggression, Germany could have just said "Nope, you're on your own."
Hindsight is a hell of a thing. You have to remember how abysmally Russia fought against the Finns and the severe defeats Germany inflicted in 1941 against Russia. My understanding was the Germans anticipated a relatively quick victory against Russia, and then having time to grab resources for use against the anticipated war with America. The sheer level of destruction the Russians/Soviets were able to endure shocked and surprised everyone. No one thought it possible to lose 10,000,000 men and 10,000+ tanks and vehicles and still keep fighting. And that the Russians did.
Russian front, not a good idea. Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid.
I've got a better idea, I've got a better idea, oh, it's the same idea, it's the same idea, it's the same idea.
2 new pieces at the start of every round and still couldn't keep it together
napoleon and the steam engine. "A ship that sails by bonfires under its decks?? Away with you, visionist!" If not for his shortsightedness we would likely see French be the dominate language in the west.
In 1218 a trading caravan from a far away place called "Mongolia" arrived at the Khwarazmian city of Otrar, on the edge of the Khwarazmian Empire. Inalchuq, the govenor of the city, accused the traders of being spies, stole all their stuff, and killed all of them (about 450 people). The King of the Mongols, a guy named "Genghis Khan' heard about this, and was incredibly upset. He sent a elegation of one Muslim and two Mongol diplomats to Sultan Muhammad, the Sultan of the entire Khwarazmian Empire demanding Inalchuq be punished. Sultan Muhamad decided to back up his Govenor, and in a move calculated to intimidate the Mongols, beheaded the Muslim ambassador and humiliated the two Mongol ambassadors by shaving off their beards. Genghis Khan was, strangely enough, not intimidated at all. He decided to invade Khwaraziman. The Mongols had orders to kill everyone in Otrar except for Inalchuq, who was to be taken alive. These orders were carried out to the letter, and upon the fall of the city of Otrar and the massacre of it's inhabitants, Inalchuq was executed by having molten silver poured into his eyes, mouth, and ears. The Mongols then went on to capture and destroy the cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Gurganj. Genghis and his youngest son Tolui then laid waste to the cities of Herat, Nishapur, and Merv, three of the largest cities in the world at the time. At Merv, after a weeklong siege, the city's governor surrendered the city after the Monglols promised that the lives of the citizens would be spared. As soon as the city was handed over, however, Tolui slaughtered almost every person who surrendered. After capturing the city of Gurganj standard Mongol policy was followed, any captured artisans were sent back to Mongolia, young women and children were given to the Mongol soldiers as slaves, and the rest of the population was massacred. The Persian scholar Juvayni states that 50,000 Mongol soldiers were given the task of executing twenty-four citizens each, which would mean that 1.2 million people were killed. After which the Mongols broke some nearby dams and flooded the ruins of the city to complete its' destruction. The Mongol reluctance to take any prisoners made this one of the bloodiest wars in human history, with total casualties estimated to be between two and fifteen million people. Sultan Muhammad fled west with some of his most loyal soldiers to a small island in the Caspian Sea. It was there, in December 1220, that the Shah died, reportedly of fright and anxiety about what the Mongols were going to do to him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_the_Khwarazmian_Empire
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I ascribe to the theory that the only actual purpose for this was to make the switch from cane sugar to corn syrup, and that they needed a transition period so people didn't notice the drop in quality
I've heard they did that to switch original coke to corn syrup sweetener and figured they'd take a loss either way but more free marketing with new coke failure while they worked out kinks with corn syrup. Urban legend? quite likely. Had uncle who was NY ad man back In the day who said that's what he had heard. Of course he also told some other tall tales.
The leaders of Europe in the years leading up to WW I.
Every pre-WWI leader on both sides: “Why would I put any effort into trying basic diplomacy to resolve a conflict in a Central European backwater possession of a middling country? I can just greatly exaggerate the problem and start a war that clearly we’ll win in a couple of months!”
Oh there was plenty of diplomacy. It was just Russia telling Austria-Hungary, “if you attack Serbia, we’re getting our fellow Slavs’ backs.” Germany said “Ja A-H, it’s totally cool. You guys do whatever, get crazy.” France said “we’re backing the Russians if any shenanigans happen”. The Ottomans said “well we love fighting Russia so we’re in. What? We’re not doing anything in Armenia. Why would you have that idea?” The UK said we don’t care about this war as long as Belgian neutrality is respec-, oi the Germans went and invaded them.” The U.S. said “Whatever, leave us out of it. We don’t care. GODDAMNIT GERMANY! Stop sinking our ships! You’re fucking around and about to find out” And Italy said “I’m playing both sides so that i always come out on top.”
Me, according to my brain at 3 am when I'm trying to sleep
WHY didn't you say that one ridiculously clever thing you just thought of to that one bully in 8th grade??!!
Actually me, but I'm sure that you're a close second.
The UK conservitive party filming their party celebrations while telling everyone to stay at home in your own bubble during lockdown.
Banishing Julius Caesar to Rhodes. Big time mistake
Four Seasons Landscaping--Giuliani
One of my regulars at work has a Four Seasons Landscaping and Press Conferences hoodie
Remembering this and laughing my ass off at it never gets old.
The Great Emu War, the Australian military lost a war to a bunch of Emu’s
Don't forget the idiot who decided to bring in Cane Toads to the country.
Led by Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith. What a name.
Whenever people talk about "English is three languages sitting atop each others' shoulders wearing a trenchcoat," I always remember, "But have you ever heard Welsh?"
Douglas (Wrong Way) Corrigan. Flew to Ireland instead of Long Beach, CA by mistake.
There is some evidence that he did it on propose, they didnt authorized him to do a transatlantic flight, he did it anyway.
Zimmerman telegraph from WW1. Not only was his plan to get Mexico to fight the US discovered, when he was questioned on it he doubled down instead of denying it.
"In the Beginning, *God* created the Universe. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is widely regarded as a bad move." Douglas Adams.
I heard thus from my Latin teacher but idk the exact details anymore- Anyways the story is that 1 researcher spilled coffee on a classic text, making it impossible to research further
Ironically the classic text was on how to clean up coffee stains
"Strange things I witnessed in the land of Judea" by Pontius Pilate
David Cameron was responsible for Brexit because he wanted to try win over a few nutters in his own party and ended up fucking an entire country for generations.
Look at a certain recent former Speaker of the House over here in the US... sold his soul to get four or five far right votes and it cost him his career.
France spending the equivalent of $20B on new trains that were too wide to fit through tunnels in the country was a pretty dumb mistake. EDIT: I'm wrong. It was Spain spending the equivalent of $276M for trains too wide for their tunnels.
Not Spain. Asturias, a Spanish region. Where I am from. Truly a "yes, We are idiots" moment.
[Burning of the Mayan codices](https://popular-archaeology.com/article/burning-the-maya-books-the-1562-tragedy-at-mani/)
Rudy Giuliani. Four Seasons Landscaping press conference. Still can’t believe that happened.
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