+sighs+ It's just a fic guys... I'm not claiming to have it perfectly thought through - I just want to portray some aspects of the PC(s) that we haven't found the time in the game itself.

And... I felt like it was a good idea.

Hee hee, by this point none of this is really about the fic anymore. The fic is cool, keep it up.

That's why I said that Hitler gets more than his fair share of evil from history.

You could make a similar argument about President Buchanan (i.e. the South would break away from the North sooner or later), and even Bush (there's a strong argument a President Gore would have invaded Iraq). Similarly while Darwin was ahead of his time, evolution would have been discovered by the microscope's discovery of genes if nothing else. Ditto Bill Gates, & Gutenberg... someone else would have taken their role sooner or later.

Others are less clear. Einstein had an extremely unusual brain and he was dealing with things that to my eye don't have the weight of history behind. Ditto Marx, using the power of the state to make life better is obvious; Convincing everyone that forcing people at gun point to give up their farms will lead to more food is not. Bin Laudin founded Al-Quida, without his money and Charisma they probably wouldn't exist.

What level of proof do you want? Steve has the judgment of history and economics on his side.

Unfortunately that's not true. The entire economic community KNEW that Smoot-Hartley would put a "Great" in front of the Depression, more than 1000 of them signed a letter trying to stop Hoover from enacting it.

It is, and it's a good fiction. This is one of those discussions that pop up whenever the PCs have access to time travel.

Please carry on.

I'd say that if you're revolting against unrestrained capitalism (as it was practiced at the time), then the notion of public ownership is actually very intuitive. Marx originally predicted that communism was, in fact, the natural evolution of capitalism...that the innate imbalances of capital ownership would in time destabilize it as a system, leading to revolution and the establishment of communism as a post-capitalism economy. It was mostly those who came after Marx who decided to agitate for revolution sooner rather than later. The Soviet Union was -far- from a Marxist paradise.

Bin Laden started his career in terrorism being trained to fight Soviets in Afghanistan. His money and charisma had very little to do with his initial rise to power. It was his victories in Afghanistan that got him the 'street cred' among radical Muslims that he then used to create Al Quaida. Yes, money and charisma certainly helped, and it's certain that they were factors in why we chose him out of so many...but it didn't HAVE to be him.

And I don't bring all this up to minimalize the impact of personal choice. Just because, in a historical context, it didn't have to be Bin Laden doesn't change the fact that it WAS him, and he DID make the choices that he did. None of this exonerates Hitler and so on.

My only point is that historical forces are deeper and more complicated than a 'great man' approach will reveal. Tampering with them, via time travel, is therefore a risky and subtle game. I'm not even trying to say not to do it, really. I'm just saying that if you want to try to avert WWII, don't just lop Hitler's head off as a baby and expect that to cover it.

This has long been the claim, but *every* *single* *time* Marx's ideas have been attempted we've ended up with basically the same mess. Because Marx's ideas claimed to be perfect and because it was claimed paradise would result, it has been ignored that they have to be implemented at gun point and that they totally ignore basic human nature.

Maybe someone else would have stepped forward and come up with some of his ideas, but stripped of their "and paradise results" content maybe fewer people would have been willing to impose them at gun point.

So the guy with a billion dollars is off in a cave and it never occurred to anyone to maybe use some of that money and contacts to get more gear for everyone else?

Bin Laden's big role from day one was his money. I've never heard of any battle in which he took part, he was an organizer, not a warrior. He might have never picked up a gun during his entire stay there. His big contribution in Afghanistan (which was huge at the time) was paying for things. The groups he funded and worked with had victories which got him street cred (although this isn't my field).

Agreed. Hitler is a good example of history making the man.

lol...I think we're getting wildly off topic.

I think we seem to be more or less agreeing on the basic point though...which is that history is more complex than a list of names and dates.

Ulric will save the day. He's up in rotation. No need to worry.

Tesla. One man who made a major impact on history.

All the things he invented would have been invented without him, but the fact that he did them and did them so early hugely impacted the 20th century. Without his achievements things would not have progressed quite as quickly or probably as smoothly.

Another example. Spindletop 1901, the first major oil strike. (I grew up less than a mile from that location btw.) The guys who made their millions off that first oil boom made a conscious decision to keep the town from growing any larger. Beaumont Tx, had everything that Houston had in terms of resources, but had those resources 15ish years earlier. Had those guys not made that decision and prevented more business from coming in to town around the middle of the 1910-1920 decade, Houston would be a small town right now and Beaumont would be the 3rd largest city in the country.

Point is that not much would really be different from a global perspective but someone in that alternate timeline would be awefully puzzled if you started talking about Houston being a major city because small groups of people really can make a major difference over a long period of time especially with foreknowledge.

Think of it like a massive oil tanker. It only takes one guy to steer it. The changes he makes don't happen instantly though, it takes time for that big ship to be moved from it present course to another heading. Same with the characters messing with history. Little changes like eliminating a tyrant might be a small change and it might not immediately alter the course of history, but it can get that ship turning in a different direction.

WWII almost certainly would have happened without Hitler, but it might not have been recognizible to the observers who know the alternate history. Hitler make some serious mistakes that caused the outcome of the war to be what we know it to be. Without those mistakes it might have been very different.

To give another example, before WWI it was undecided what side America would enter the war on or even if it would enter at all. Had someone else been making policy and had the Lusitania and our shipping not been targeted the war might have gone differently. America was very much a deciding factor in the British/French winning.

Anyway, I'm just pointing out that history could look a whole lot different as a result of minor changes if those changes happen to occur at the right place and time.

So wait...is this game still ongoing or what? Did I leave prematurely?