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Would you kill a baby boy if you knew he would become Hitler?
No, I would just make him become a lawyer instead.
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Would you kill a baby boy if you knew he would become Hitler?
No, I would just make him become a lawyer instead.
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You have to be able to do better than a lateral move.
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Given no assurances that there would be a beneficial change to the world no. As bad as Hitler was, if the Germans followed a similar program under a more skilled leader we could all be speaking German right now. Perhaps the question should be if killing baby Hitler would have prevented ww2 from ever happening would you?
I'm presuming that if I am able to kill baby Hitler, then I am time-travelling.
If this is so, I would instead zip forward a bunch of years and buy some of his paintings. Maybe with a little cash in his pocket and a little confidence in his artistic ability he'd be less inclined to frequent biergartens and hang out with anti-Semites.
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If I could alter history in a benificial way by killing one man would I? Yes, without regret or hesitation.
Would I kill Hitler? It depends; in the much longer view (centuries) would the world be better off united under a single leadership even if the initial uniting power was monstrous? WW2 was going to happen and a more competent leader could have resulted in a victorious Germany.
Step 1, go back to 1930.
Step 2 Use Future knowledge to make oodles of money
Step 3: Drop a load of cash on Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. I don't care how bad you think his paintings are, you're taking him, full scholarship.
Actually i (with my philistine sensibilities) don't see why people call his paintings bad, especially for someone that didn't go to art school.
Wait... am I me or one of HItler's contemporaries?
Because I (as me) know how HItler turns out if he's allowed to follow his path.
But I (as one of Hitler's contemporaries) exists in time with Hitler... so the whole "mutability of the future" thing is still a major factor.
My first thought was that the OP has just watched Looper.
That's exactly what I came here to say.
Also, is this using Back to the Future's laws of time? I mean, if I go back as me and kill Hitler, am I in danger of slowly fading from existence using dated special effects?
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Wait, Stalin killed more than Hitler.
More seriously, the ethics of it are questionable. Baby hitler hasn't done anything yet. Can we condemn him for what he will do?
If you're going to kill Hitler, why not kill his mom, so Hitler won't be born?
Etc etc.
(Aside, I've read that the Fourth Doctor's concerns in Genesis of the Daleks came from Tom Baker's worry about the message it would send. In some ways it's worse in hindsight since his (Baker's) concerns were worked into the script and led to the destruction of both* races in the new series)
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*standing over the corpse of a child*
Uh...right! I totally KNEW he was going to become Hitler. I didn't just kill him to make stew or something! I resent the implication. I'll be going now...
<gurgle>
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Also, is this using Back to the Future's laws of time? I mean, if I go back as me and kill Hitler, am I in danger of slowly fading from existence using dated special effects?
You need to understand something about time here Eben - at the time that move was made those special effects were not dated.
So if you went back in time – at around the time the first Back to the Future movie was being filmed - and someone saw you begin to fade (mimicking the movie) the effect would not be dated - they would be pretty damn awesome!
It’s all about context…or something
Excellent point, Auxmaulous!
So if this happened back in the days of Hitler's youth, it'd be some serious futuristic bad-assery!
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People try these things over and over. It never works out. If you act to change the future that spawned you, you cease to have ever existed thus undoing any change you might have made. You undo Hitler, you get a Stalin who probably killed as many people as Adolf did. You overthrow Stalin, you get a Pol Pot or a Yeltsin.
While replacing Hitler may not have stopped the rise of the Nazi party or prevented WWII, it could easily alter the outcome. Decisions made by Hitler did have a direct impact on the outcome of the war, to the benefit of the Allies.
Longer term, would humanity be better off if Germany had unified the world under a single government? We'll never know. The only way to find out would be to travel in time and replace Hitler with somebody more effective, preferably with less extreme predujices. That, or have access to the equivilent of the HOLMES IV.
Locking thread. Violence against children, hypothetical or otherwise, is not cool.