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News Article Time Machine
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Augustus Jürgensen III has just invented a time machine! (Of course the Germans got to the time travel tech first)
And he has invited you to be the first to try it out!
Now, this isn’t an ordinary time machine. It can only send news articles to the past. Don’t ask questions, it’s a time travel thread, I know your tendency is gonna be to pull at threads but just don’t okay? It sends news articles. And the people who receive them believe they are real and not fabricated. Just go with it.
So my question to the Americans here is: if you could only send one news article to the founding fathers, which article would you send, and why? The hope being, of course, that you would provide them with some insight into where their boneheaded framework would send us.
If you’re not American, or your imagination has a different, better idea for how to use Jürgensen’s machine, go ahead! I’m not one to stomp all over your fun! I just posed the initial inquiry to Americans to get things going.
And he has invited you to be the first to try it out!
Now, this isn’t an ordinary time machine. It can only send news articles to the past. Don’t ask questions, it’s a time travel thread, I know your tendency is gonna be to pull at threads but just don’t okay? It sends news articles. And the people who receive them believe they are real and not fabricated. Just go with it.
So my question to the Americans here is: if you could only send one news article to the founding fathers, which article would you send, and why? The hope being, of course, that you would provide them with some insight into where their boneheaded framework would send us.
If you’re not American, or your imagination has a different, better idea for how to use Jürgensen’s machine, go ahead! I’m not one to stomp all over your fun! I just posed the initial inquiry to Americans to get things going.
joshofalltrades on
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Any article about the 2010 Wisconsin state legislative gerrymander so they ban that shit.
I would send as many of those along with articles of what the last president did until the machine breaks and millions of lives around the world are unsnapped from his terrible covid response.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I feel like wrong and bad SCOTUS rulings is the obvious answer, yeah
I feel like it'd be more easily understood and I'm interested in what happens when everyone in the room learns there's a civil war and the south loses.
The impeachment vote results to the Democratic caucus in 2009.
And probably some very thorough summary of the past five years, including the Covid 19 death toll, to James Fucking Comey.
If I was going that route, I would send an article about the filibuster and how it has been abused, in the hope that there are rules inscribed into the framework so a majority party can actually govern.
But the main problem has already been pointed out by ebum, which is that there’s no guarantee the founders would be convinced that what happened is actually bad.
And if I was gonna take a riskier tack, I might send an article which gives statistics on national gun violence, including a breakdown by racial lines. Just as a little “hint hint, black people aren’t always gonna be your slaves, but also your 2nd Amendment needs some goddamn work”.
Another set of articles I consider sending are all the ones that would highlight not only what a fucking idiot Trump was, but also what a fucking crook and authoritarian he was. I'd avoid the racist and sexist stuff because sadly many of the founders would have agreed with that shit. I of course would make sure that it was made clear the fucker only got in to office because of the electoral college, that he didn't win the popular vote and the electors weren't interested in picking the best person for the job. I think there would be hope that they'd quickly realize that the electoral college was a dumb fucking idea and to not go with it.
Let them despair.
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Though for all we know, the founders could have been into really kinky shit. So perhaps some of them don't despair.
It was a group that included Ben Franklin, so.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056
If US politics had involved any kind of rational, reasonable proportional representation from the start and no chance for anybody to squat in a position for life, we'd never have had to worry about the likes of Trump because there would've been no way to scare borderline Republicans into total insanity for fear of the Democrat Menace taking over.
They might, but I'm sure you could find a few SCOTUS decisions that show utter disregard for the bits of the constitution they do care about (Freedom of Religion, for one) to try and convince them to nip that problem in the bud.
Then how his son, George II, became president a few years later.
With no further context.
John Adams could use some cheering up.
This.
Let's be real, folks: the American founders weren't any more enlightened or farsighted than any other group of educated wealthy people of that time or any other time. Even then, they all knew slavery was evil, but only Ben Franklin had actually gone about freeing his slaves in his life (in the 1760s when he started getting serious about this "liberty" thing). All the rest were satisfied with hoping someone else did something about it later, after they were all comfortably dead (and hundreds of thousands ended up dying in that war that most of them thought was probably inevitable, but they wouldn't do anything about).
The only actionable thing would be something very, very relevant to them, and that would be Hamilton getting himself killed. He might be willing to not do that duel, and him staying alive would somewhat change the future course of the country since there were many cases where he was right about the course of coming history and having him there as a foil to Jefferson's BS would be useful. (Though he might also have thought that "maybe if I practice more I'll do better" and still get himself killed.)
Josh. Is this time machine a cat?
Is this time machine a newspaper cat?
I will however send one Bernard Sanders( 28) some info about the modern democratic party
Ah, but if time travel is real, and it's not dimension hopping fake time travel bs, then all consequences of time travel to the past happen as you remember it. By sending them an article you are not changing the past, you're making the past as it happened, and if you don't make the past then the past never happens and you stop existing.
Obviously because you are here the past was made. What did you send them? Also, just imagine how much worse it could have been had you not sent it.
Me, I'm sending them the 1619 project with a note about how only they can stop so much misery. Hell, maybe I did and it only made Mr Franklin do anything about it. I guess only time will tell.
This changes the question to 'What article did you send back that made us deserve this reality, you terrible person?'
Or maybe just one about the Tea Party, so they can weep at what their actions ultimately created.
There's no need to actually be able to follow up.
How to eliminate the senate
Approaching SCOTUS differently vs as an ostensible “co-equal branch”
Slavery
I’m not sure there’s anything we could send them about slavery that would matter given how awful the founders were and also we wouldn’t have had the same country
I think articles about how the votes confirming the 6 justices were cast by senators that collectively represent a minority of the country might address both 1 & 2….but that’s likely a feature to them (especially given they didn’t believe in electing senators anyway)
I don’t know, the founders were non-exceptional assholes who sniffed enough of their own farts to think they were doing something special when really they created a terrible system that nobody duplicates anymore (including us when we nation-build)
Maybe something about space with a picture of earth to blow their minds so thoroughly it instills a sense of empathy and awe that overrides the selfishness written into the core of our founding
Further, I'd show them basically anything about the filibuster because holy shit does that thing need to go.
We probably couldn't entirely skip coal. Coal boilers are just way easy to build compared to good modern windmills and solar cells. A lot of advanced materials and computer aided stuff. Even with all the knowledge you need the tools to build the tools. But it would be enough to get us several decades ahead in deployment a prevent a ton of fossil fuels from being used.
Oil was c. h. e. a. p. Inflation adjusted price was ~$30/barrel and processes for modern solar panels didn't exist in 1950. Coal would have been widely in-use since the industrial revolution too