Who from history would you bring back to make them punished for the wrongs that they brought onto the world?

Frozyre@kbin.melroy.org to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 69 points –

Mine is Henry Ford. He's the catalyst of the 40 hour work week and 5 days a week that has been standard to the present day. Because we're seeing now how little that really does for anyone anymore, where people are having to sacrifice more of their freedom to work second jobs or more hours than they should.

I don't think it's his fault directly for those reasons, but him thinking the 40 hour/5 day a week plan is a good one is just a poor reading into the future with the way it's gone since the establishment.

79

Fucking Reagan.

Thatcher too while we’re at it.

I would have, but I was only allowed one choice. Of the two, globally, Regan did more harm.

we can't get her, after she died the entire population of the UK north dug a ditch so deep to hand deliver her to Satan himself.

You do know that his 40hours a week was a dramatic reduction in working hours compared to the norm at that time?

Yeah. There are a lot of reasons to give Henry Ford shit, but the 40 hour workweek was one of the better things he did.

he did.

*organized labor forced him to do.

Nope, he did this one himself. The reason? His employees spent so much time at the factory, they didn't have time to actually buy his cars.

Yes, he improved working conditions to make a profit on his cars. A selfish reason, but it inadvertently helped us all.

He paid his workers well enough that a majority of them could buy his cars?

Productivity reduction(or more likely accidents due to tired workers) might be relevant.

I'm going to go with Leopold II of Belgium because of the atrocities this fucker unleashed upon the democratic republic of the Kongo.

Kissinger also come to mind, but he's not been dead long enough to be brought back yet, I think I'll leave that fucker to a generation that doesn't get hypertension just hearing the name.

Henry Fucking War Crimes Kissinger

He lived a long life and died peacefully, thinking he got away with it all. That only means bringing him back for punishment would be the perfect surprise of an afterlifetime.

Solid choice.

I've been reading a book about the Theranos scam and learned he was on their Board of Directors, and it made me a little happy to know that, at least, he got taken in by a con woman and lost a shit ton of money.

No one. There'd not really any point I can think of to "punish" them at this point except satisfying some creepy, sadistic sense of "justice".

The best punishment is undoing their damage and teaching their sins to future generations as a warning.

And using their Graves as a gender neutral bathroom when we wanna scratch the sadistic justice itch

Counterpoint: dictators that died in their beds because of course they couldn't be prosecuted under their own regime and have them undergo fair trial. Bonus points if their victims are still alive so they can get some closure. Spain's Franco comes to mind.

Man, a hard choice here.

I'll go with Columbus. It takes a special kind of motherfucker to arrive in an unknown country, observe peaceful people living in tranquility, and your first thought THAT YOU EVEN WROTE DOWN was: "Holy fuck I can steal all their shit if I want to."

And then you go on to make them basically extinct.

Can you explain more why you think Ford's 40hr week is bad?

I thought it represented a pretty marked improvement compared to typical job requirements at the time?

Ford is no hero. A documented anti-semite with lots of other bad takes, but I am not clear on why you would pick his working hours as the thing to highlight.

Well, as I've said, he made that idea up in a time where it made sense and did well for it's time. But it started to not be a feasible system every turn of the decade and by the time we've reached the 2000s, the idea simply isn't cutting it anymore. Moreso in today's time.

A lot of ideas that were made in the early 1900s through the 50s came about in a time where it made sense and did well, least for a while. But many variables since then just diminished it's use. People aren't making as much in 40 hours than they should and they aren't making ends meet in those 5 days. People are expected now to have two jobs, more hours and no time for themselves or anyone around them.

Why is it his fault that in today's society, the notion of a 40 hour work week is slowly becoming obsolete? Should we not celebrate the invention of the light bulb because LEDs are more efficient?

So his "crime" that you want to punish him for is that he improved things in a way that made sense in the context of his time instead of looking decades into the future and forcing a drastic change immediately long before society was anywhere near ready for it? Seriously?

You want to read more about Jack Welch and shareholder supremacy.

Fuck Jack Welch.

I thought it represented a pretty marked improvement compared to typical job requirements at the time?

To answer your question as written - based only on context - yes, you did think that.

Henry Kissinger. Whenever you needed the most depraved, amoral, anti-democratic take on anything, whether it was the Vietnam war or the Khmer Rouge or the civil rights movement, you could always count on Henry farking Kissinger.

I have a celebratory drink every time I remember he’s dead, I don’t care what else I’m doing, it can wait

For decades I was always surprised he was still alive. He seemed to live forever commenting on foreign policy. Just saw your post and was surprised he had died.

That fish that crawled onto land and spawned humanity.

Hell yeah let’s beat it like a piñata

I bet that's what the bigger fish were doing to it and why it crawled out in the first place.

we just need to bully that nerd fish back into water

Yes exactly, we need to be more unpleasant than the bigger fish in the water were being, and in so doing save humanity.

Reagan and Thatcher.

they wouldn't care unless you literally did a Christmas Carol-esque past/present/future consequence tale with them. They have enough fans here in the present to shield them from guilt.

Phylis Schlafly, one of the main architects behind the modern religious right controlled GOP.

Reading more on her and wow, she's a piece of work. What a turd. She's not even conservative, but reactionary.

How did she get that reactionary in the first place? At least she died of cancer. That's good. But she should have died earlier.

One of the greatest political operatives of the 20th century, in terms of how widespread her horrifying legacy is. She only cosplayed as a frumpy housewife all while trying to lock the US an eternal fictionalized version of the 1950s.

Sorrey I missed your question about her radicalization.

It stemmed from separation anxiety due to her mother working while she was young. Which metastasized into a hatred of women in the workforce. Ironic given how much she worked with men who viewed her as nothing more than a novelty, all while she crafted much of the modern GOP ethos.

Columbus, its personal, I just want to beat the shit out of him

You're from the Caribbean?

I have a passion for mesoamerican history and art

at first I chuckled because I thought that was a coy euthamism for beating the shit out of someone, until I realise you were just answering the question

Thomas Midgley Jr. (leaded petrol, CFCs, lots of deaths at the "ethyl" factory)

"[He] had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history"

The Dulles brothers, Ronald Reagan, ALL billionaires, George Bush Sr., Joe Lieberman, Ben Netanyahu, Henry Kissinger, Hillary and Bill Clinton, David Brock, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Margaret Thatcher, (obviously) Trump, Miatch McConnell, Joe “Corn Pop” Biden, Jon Bolton, Colin Powell, Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill (for the Nakba), Woodrow Wilson, Theodor Herzl, and SO SO many more.

Not the most evil bastard in history, but I think the world would be a vastly different and better place if Klemens von Metternich died young.

Interesting! I learned something here. Thank you.

Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

Had Metternich not stood in the way of "progress", Austria might have reformed, dealt better with its problems of nationality, and the First World War might never have happened.[94] Instead, Metternich chose to fight an overwhelmingly fruitless war against the forces of liberalism and nationalism.[95] Heavy censorship was just one of a range of repressive instruments of state available to him that also included a large spy network.[72] Metternich opposed electoral reform, criticising Britain's 1832 Reform Bill.[96] In short, he locked himself into an embittered battle against "the prevailing mood of his age".[97]

Sounds familiar. He's certainly not the last person to do so...

Not a single person in this thread who says Hitler? Kind of disturbing tbh.

I think he's maybe just too obvious a choice and people are trying to be more creative in their answer.

Also, could the harm Hitler caused truly be inflicted back on his physical form? It seems to me like there is no way he could truly pay for what he'd done (if he were to live again).

Hitler is the kind of person you'd revive, kill again and revive to kill again until he hits the number of holocaust victims. No one single solitary death is sufficient enough.

That goes for any other leader that has allowed their citizens to die or even allowed their soldiers to die recklessly.

Every victim gets to kick his nuts once every 2 hours and he can be tortured until loosing consiousness and then he gets a cooldown to recover until death?

Lennart Poettering

Wait. Is this the start of the dark age of crumbling OS blobs, or the end? Can we still install apps or does it yet violate the terms of the microsoft agreement over linux?