What would Morris do with a Tardis?
Pointless convective thought.

Not sure why this item updrafted to the top of consciousness, but I'll go ahead and write it. This thought grew from the Paine vs Morris essay.

A recurring topic in various forums and sci-fi stories is what you'd do with a time machine, given a limited amount of power. Three Tardis wishes.

The standard answer, of course, is abort Hitler.

Nope, wouldn't work. If Adolf hadn't been born, the backwash from Versailles would still have produced a similar leader. Given the basic nature of Krauts, another leader would have been more effective. Adolf was sloppy and unfocused. The typical Kraut is relentlessly persistent and infinitely thorough. Krautistic.

In general killing any bad leader is useless because the leaders are responding to existing pressure, filling a niche.

Revolutions kill leaders along with a lot of innocent bystanders, in the hope of eliminating the niche. It never works, always achieves the opposite result. Worse people** fill the niche.

A Morris-style counterrevolution would ruin the bad leaders while they are fully representing the niche, so that the leaders AND their goals are tainted by uniform distaste.

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So what would I do with my three Tardis wishes? I'd go back to 1946 and ruin the reputation of Roy Cohn, James Byrnes and Bernard Baruch. If those three men had become untouchable after they started to gain power, Deepstate would have been seriously delayed. The tripod of bankers, leftist activists and intel agencies would need to reset and start from scratch. Unlike Hitler, those three were ideally suited to their roles. Other players were less effective.

And if I had any power left after that, I'd stay in 1946 and jump to Detroit. I'd sway the minds of Studebaker's leaders toward an immediate merger with Nash, and I'd persuade Packard's CEO to switch from cars to corporate jets. With those two changes, the car industry would have remained competitive a lot longer, and the monopolistic idiocy of the big three might not have reached terminal coma in the '70s.

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** Footnote 1: Why are the new leaders inevitably worse? Because they WANT POWER more than the existing leader, who typically inherited his position. The revolutionaries WANT POWER enough to kill thousands of people for it.

Footnote 2: I'm not retrofitting my ideas onto Morris. His real behavior in the Paine incident gave me the idea. Briefly: Tom Paine was a violent criminal asshole who spread the genocidal plague of "rights" wherever he placed his bloody hands. After ruining this side of the Atlantic he moved to Paris where he used the brain-eating "rights" virus to create an even crazier tyranny. The Frogs, even though fully infected, got tired of Paine and put him in prison to await the chop. Morris was in Paris to negotiate our debts with the new government, and Paine begged him for rescue. Morris wrote an extremely pro-forma letter, basically implying "You asked for him, you got him. He's your problem." Since Paine had thousands of idiot Twitter followers in many countries, the Frogs were stuck with keeping him alive. Thus Morris undermined both Paine and France without killing anyone.

Labels: Answered and unnecessarily asked, From rights to duties

  ¶ 11:54 PM