“Obliterating Everything”: 30 Of The Most Monumental Mistakes In History

Giving religions tax free status.

Corporations are people. Money is speech.

These simple assertions have guided America toward more greed and more war than any other decision in history. It has set us on the path towards far worse ends than most other single events.

In American history: Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which made corporate bribery legal. Government no longer served the people from that point on.

In retail history, probably Sears not realizing that they were basically Amazon before Amazon. Mail order with warehouses all over the United States. How could you improve that business model?

Oh, the Internet you say? Never heard of it.

Brexit.

Some guy introduced rabbits to Australia in 1788 so that he could hunt them for sport.

A governor of the Khwarazmian Empire killed a peaceful emissary from a neighboring empire, who had been sent to establish trade relations and political connections between the two powers. The emissary was sent by Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan replied by invading the Khwarazmian Empire, obliterating everything in his path, burning basically the entire thing to the ground, and then destroying any record of the Khwarazmian Empire that he could find. He finished all of this off by diverting the river that fed the country water, causing the land where the empire once stood to become a dry and barren wasteland. Possibly one of the biggest mess ups in history.

Blockbuster not buying Netflix.

"Mao's push to have farmers in China produce their own steel using backyard furnaces, which lead to a wacky chain reaction eventually leading to a famine that killed millions."

"Mao also ordered the extermination of sparrows in an attempt to protect grain crops. Millions of sparrows were killed, allowing locusts to proliferate.

"The locusts consumed so many crops that there was widespread famine and 45 million people died."

Letting politicians trade stocks.

Allowing a handful of people control the vast majority of media.

The amazing development of chlorofluorocarbons to replace toxic, ammonia, sulphur dioxide, and chloromethane in refrigerators. It was so successful and safe that it rapidly became the refrigerant of choice. Right up until the moment we discovered that it had been reacting with sunlight to produce radical free chlorines that obliterated the ozone layer causing a massive spike in skin cancer rates (among other things).

Or what about Tetraethyllead! This amazing additive made cars massively more efficient saving huge amounts of petrol. It also significantly increased lead levels around the world and is responsible for a significant decrease in intelligence for people born during the time of its use. Although it's hard to call this a fuckup, as GM and its inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. were aware of the dangers and played them down.

Wait a minute, the person that invented chloroflorocarbons was also Thomas Midgley Jr. Environmental Historian, J.R. McNeil once claimed that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history".

Midgley had one more fuckup to give, but fortunately for all of us, it only affected him. Later in life he became disabled after he contracted polio. To aid in his mobility he designed a system of ropes and pulleys to aid getting out of bed. He was found strangled to death by his own contraption at age 55.

So I submit Thomas Midgley Jr. himself as arguably the biggest f**k-up in history.

"20th Century Fox let George Lucas keep all the merchandising r⁷ights for Star Wars because they thought it would be a giant flop and noone would watch it."

"George Lucas is now worth 5.3 billion dollars."

In 1350, the Scots heard that England was having a spot of trouble with the bubonic plague, and decided to launch an invasion that would take advantage of the English, who were dropping like flies and would thus be easy pickings. The Scots invading army lost 5000 men to the plague in very short order. They decided to cut their losses and fall back to Scotland to be safe. Of course they brought the great plague with them, which devastated Scotland too.

The IPCC decision to go with the more conservative climate change modeling in the 1980s. Essentially the question at the time was 'does heat accumulate at the poles, or does it dissipate into space'? They went with the dissipation models, even though they were in contradiction to geological evidence, because it had never been directly observed. And now, everything is 'sooner than expected' and 'faster than anticipated.'

Yeah because you guys f****d up. The biggest f**k up in history, by orders of degrees. Haha.

So that one fish decided to try what happens when you leave the water.. That's when it really started to go downhill!

The wrong turn that driver made in 1914.

Chernobyl! Only a f**k-up of epic poportions can cause a nuclear incident while doing a saftey test!

April 26th! Annivarsay of the accident is today.

Yahoo not buying Google.

If Parliment had just given the colonies their own representation in the House of Commons they could have likely avoided the entire revolutionary war and the US would not have formed. We’d likely have like 9 smaller versions of Canada on the east coast with a large Mexico and several interior Native American nations today.