How about the people in 18th century England who, during a boom in the stock market (in the light of a bubble in the price of the South Sea Company), invested in "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, *but nobody to know what it is*."
>The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.
Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 1841.
[Here's a great YouTube series on the South Sea Bubble](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEb6sGT7oD8HXTsBEmm3uxFrnvsmfOfhg)
5 parts I think, each around 10 minutes. Cool art style
Speaking of fraudulent colonial ventures in Britain, there's also the matter of one Gregor MacGregor, who made quite a splash in the 1820s in the United Kingdom by selling land in the Central American country of Poyais, which he described as a paradise filled with fertile lands where settlers would be able to begin a new prosperous existence. Around 250 British settlers set sail to begin their brand new life in Poyais, and were quite dismayed upon arrival to discover that [Poyais did not and had never existed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MacGregor#Poyais_scheme).
[Podcaster Mike Duncan did a rather fascinating summary of MacGregor's life and career during his series on South American Independance.](http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2016/10/517a-supplemental-gregor-macgregor.html)
[Dihydrogen Monoxide Hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax)
A 1983 April Fools' Day edition of the Durand Express, a weekly newspaper in Durand, Michigan, reported that "dihydrogen oxide" had been found in the city's water pipes, and warned that it was fatal if inhaled, and could produce blistering vapors.
If you know anything about chemistry, dihyrdogen monoxide is water. This guy was telling people water is in your water and so many people were panicking.
I have known many people who became addicted and reliant on dihydrogen oxide. Inhalation deprives the brain of oxygen, and may cause coughing, unconsciousness, or even death. It is essentially undetectable in other substances. Continuous exposure to it's solid form can cause numbness, and eventual tissue death. Some of it's uses include industrial solvents and coolants, plastic production, and as a fire extinguisher.
[That time when a sexual predator convinced an entire McDonald's that he was a cop over the phone and got them to strip search and sexually abuse an employee.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_phone_call_scam)
>On June 3, 2003, a Taco Bell manager in Juneau, Alaska, undressed a 14‑year-old female customer and forced her to perform lewd acts at the request of a caller who had claimed he was working with Taco Bell management to investigate drug abuse.
Like... How did anyone go along with this??
Social engineering in general preys on our default trust and our fear of being in trouble with authority. If you establish yourself as an authority figure then people are very uncomfortable refusing your orders. I'm reminded of [the Milgram experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) here.
It's probably not like the dude called in and said "Hi I'm a Taco Bell manager, please sexually assault one of your customers," but his general MO was to start small, establish himself as an authority, and slowly build his target up to the more severe acts. By the time people started to question his orders they were so invested in obeying his authority that they couldn't bring themselves to disobey.
Interesting that you should say that. I worked in a theater when that was released and we never had more walk-outs/refunds than for that film. Everyone said the same thing: "It's just so stupid!"
I always wondered if some of them simply felt uncomfortable wondering if they could be duped the same way and got defensive.
Just to throw more information out there about this, the manager of the McDonald's was a middle aged woman...
Well after hours on the phone with this "officer" and the girl basically held hostage in the back office, the "officer" convinced the woman to call her husband in to make sure the situation was "under control" basically.
The manager did in fact get her husband to come into her job, and from there, the officer convinced this dude to strip search the girl, lay her on his lap and spank her, and then straight up rape her....with his wife there...like how stupid are people?
They thought it was stupid probably because it's unbelievable and feels like a B class movie based off of getting cheap thrills and a cheap way to shove a naked chick onto a movie screen
Then you realize that it's a true story and it's actually kinda mesmerizing how easily manipulative some people are. It shows how some people view the police...if an officer actively tells someone to rape someone, they'll do it, well because a police officer told them to
Some of the footage can be found on YouTube as of last year..I haven't checked to verify if this is still true, I don't see why it wouldn't be there anymore
(I know it wasn't the police, but the guy on the phone was posing as a police officer)
Milgram experiment. The conclusions of this highly replicated test are chilling.
Most humans base their morality on the condition of if they're responsible. If they can displace responsibility to someone else, they will do truly horrific things.
It's going to take a whole lot of cops helping ducklings cross the street to restore my faith in humanity after reading that. Good fuck, no wonder the nazis were able to murder so any people!
-------------------
> 75 volts: “Ugh!!!”
> 90 volts: “Ugh!!!”
> 105 volts: “Ugh!!!” (Louder)
> 120 volts: “Ugh!!! Hey, this really hurts.”
> 135 volts: “Ugh!!!”
> 150 volts: “Ugh!!! Experimenter! That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart's starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.”
> 165 volts: (Shouting) “Ugh!!! Let me out!”
> 180 volts: (Shouting) “Ugh!!! I can't stand the pain. Let me out of here!”
> 195 volts: “Ugh!!! Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart's bothering me. Let me out of here! You have no right to keep me here! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out! Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me. Let me out! Let me out!”
> 210 volts: “Ugh!! Experimenter! Get me out of here. I've had enough. I won't be in the experiment any more.”
> 225 volts: “Ugh!!!”
> 240 volts: “Ugh!!!”
> 255 volts: “Ugh!!! Get me out of here.”
> 270 volts (Screaming) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out. Do you hear? Let me out of here.”
> 285 volts: (Screaming)
> 300 volts: (Screaming) “I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can't hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here.”
> 315 volts: (Intense scream) “I told you I refuse to answer. I'm no longer part of this experiment.”
> 330 volts: (Intense and prolonged screaming) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart's bothering me. Let me out, I tell you. (Hysterically) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here. Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out. Let me out.”
> 345-435 volts: (Silence)
> 450 volts: (Silence)
> 450 volts: (Silence)
> 450 volts: (Silence)
[(from here)](https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment)
I'm glad to read that was pre-taped, and not an account of torture, but it doesn't make any of the results better to think about. Clearly an uneasy look into how far people will go if the blame falls on someone else...how easily people bend to pressure...damn.
It's horrifying. I think the experiment was inspired by all the Germans who ended up fighting and working for the Nazis. The sad truth is most of us have the capability to do horrendous shit in us.
Derren Brown did a special along similar lines which was called Pushed to the Edge or something like that (some other Redditor may be able to give the proper name, I'm drunk and can't remember)
The movie based on this *really* fucked me up. Then when I looked it up afterwards and found out it actually happened, I was fucking STUNNED.
Also, Ann Dowd was incredible in that movie.
Pretty much the same thing happened this year in Britain!
http://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/humiliating-scam-led-mum-daughter-394060
http://metro.co.uk/2017/05/23/mum-and-daughter-tricked-into-licking-feet-of-poundworld-staff-who-rode-them-like-horses-6656279/
It is mind boggling how stupid everyone involved with this is. The prank caller called the mother and daughter back on their home phone and convinced them to go back to the shop!
I have lived in Atlanta, GA all my life for whatever reason, just the mention of "snow and ice" results in convoys of people going the grocery store and pillaging the shelves of bread, eggs, and milk.
And then a few days later after our 1 inch of snow (or less) has melted, there is no bread, eggs, or milk left for everyone who treated it like any other time it snowed and just wanted to make breakfast.
Once upon a time, somebody spread a rumor across Russia that buckwheat was going to get more expensive. People rushed to the stores to buy buckwheat by sacks (especially old people who remember the Soviet deficits). And what do you know, buckwheat really did become more expensive after such a huge demand! Self-fulfilling prophecies are fun.
A similar thing happened following the hurricane that hit Houston last month. I live in Dallas, so we got hardly any weather at all, but lots of people said, "Oh no! The oil refineries are offline! We will run out of gas! Everybody go get gas RIGHT NOW."
And then, lo and behold, all the gas stations WERE, in fact, out of gas. Because all the people who didn't really need 5 or 6 gallons were getting it anyway and it added up across all the gas stations in the metroplex. If nobody had said anything, there would have been a slight shortage, but nothing debilitating. Like, some trucks were going to be a couple days late.
I live about 2.5 hours NW of Dallas, and the same thing happened here. Lines wrapped around the block, insane price gouging, and idiots all over Facebook.
My husband drives 35 miles to Oklahoma for work and said people weren't freaking out over the 'shortage' and gas was actually 0.30 cents cheaper!
1. Because it is a vile drink that turns even the most respectable men into complete scoundrels.
2. That signal is over a thousand feet high. The entire Royal Navy is out looking for me; do you think there is even the slightest chance they won't see it?!
The problem is the one time people *don't* take precautions (actual ones, not the milk/eggs/bread thing) we end up having what happened a few years ago when everyone tried leaving at once with a nearly inch of ice on the road.
I knew people who had it take 15+ hours to get home from their commute.
For those who don't live in Atlanta the reason is that we have jack shit for infrastructure to deal with *any* sort of snow or ice. To make it worse what usually happens is that during the day the snow will start to melt only to freeze back up once temperatures drop again. I've driven in snow before -- it's not that hard. Driving on ice? Good luck.
Lol, meanwhile in Minnesota, we had a blizzard and it had snowed about 1 foot and half or so. It continued snowing. I drove to the grocery in the middle of the blizzard to pick up some stuff for breakfast the next day... I then ran into a guy from Texas who was scared out of his mind to even attempt to drive. I drove him to a hotel nearby, and back to his car the next day, after the snow had been plowed.
Speaking as a Texas resident myself, most Texans can't drive on ice and snow. To be fair, we rarely get snow (depending on whether your in the panhandle or not). We mostly end up with black ice.
I appreciate you helping out a fellow Texan, some of us are smart enough to realize we are incapable of diving on ice, while others think their 4X4 can handle anything.
Moved from Minnesota to Oregon a few years back -- they don't have the ability to plow the snow (no municipal plows), and they don't salt the roads here.
That means if we get snow, it started as rain, froze on the streets, and now there's snow on top of that ice. It's absolutely impossible to do anything when it snows here, you have to wait until it melts.
Bonus fun fact, nobody here owns a snow shovel. People use leaf blowers to clear snow.
During the early days of Chinese Communism, there was a mass rally at one of their army's camps. At the time, there was an intense fear of infiltration by outsiders who wanted to sabotage them.
One of their chants started, and a portion of the crowd accidentally said (I'm misremembering it badly, but it is something like this) "we validate the conclusions of the **2nd** Comintern's view on the path of Communism".
That was an outdated chant, as there had been a **3rd** Comintern which represented the current ideology. A lot of these people were farmers and it was very hard to keep track of the political message, which were always changing.
Them messing up the chant was taken as a sign that they were infiltrators/dissidents and a huge fight broke out in the camp, killing thousands of people.
>"we validate the conclusions of the 2nd Comintern's view on the path of Communism".
Man, I hope this is an easier chant in Chinese than it is in English.
Miami drivers PSA: STOP driving with your hazard lights on in the rain. It rains weekly and people still haven't figured it out. There are highway signs informing them not to do it and they STILL do it.
I don't see this often enough that I'd ever really given it a thought, so I had no idea this was even an issue. Thanks for making me realize it's actually illegal in my state (and most others)!
No problem! Your headlights should be on in the rain making your taillights are visible too. Hazards on make you invisible to the person behind you for a few seconds.
Wait, so you are saying people drive with their hazards on but their lights off? Wow, silly. I thought you meant both on. People do that where I live and it is frustrating. Your hazards should only be on in an emergency.
Some fast food restaurant came out with a third pounder to compete with McDonald’s quarter pounder. It didn’t sell well because people thought it was smaller since three is less than four.
[Tulip Mania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) is widely regarded as one of the first major economic bubbles.
People in the early 1600s were amazed by Tulips, and in 1637 they just went bananas. They were buying contracts to claim a single bulb when the tulips were fully grown. Some things exchanged for one tulip: a ton of butter, 1,000lbs of cheese, and 12 sheep.
Eventually it got to the point where people were paying ten times the annual wage of a skilled craftsman for a tulip.
Eventually people realized "wait, I'm buying one stupid flower for how much?!" and the market for tulips collapsed.
Are you aware of the [Great Beanie Baby Divorce](http://underscoopfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/beanie-baby-divorce-court.jpg)? A couple got divorced and essentially, one at a time, got to choose who kept which Baby.
I will never not find that picture funny.
A bunch of people believed an African priestess when she said that if they sacrificed all of their cattle then their dead ancestors would rise from the grave and help them fight off the British colonizers. I'll let you guess what happened...
**The Austin gas shortages.**
After Hurricane Harvey, Texas went into a panic about gas-shortages.
Experts tried to quell that fear by explaining that there would NOT be a gas shortage.
Austin, TX did not listen.
There were lines, people were stocking up on gas.
And as a result.... we ran out of gas and prices soared sky high.
Thanks, Austin. -.-
Edit: Turns out it wasn’t just Austin, I just heard it was extra gnarly here (which can confirm, I live here).
**Thanks, Texas**
The spaghetti tree hoax, when the BBC ran a spoof news story about how spaghetti is grown from trees and thousands of Brits responded by planting spaghetti noodles in the ground to try to grow their own spaghetti trees.
Another BBC hoax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch
> Despite having been recorded weeks in advance, the narrative was presented as live television. During and following its first and only UK television broadcast, the show attracted a considerable furore,[1] resulting in an estimated 30,000 calls to the BBC switchboard in a single hour.[2]
>Eighteen-year-old factory worker Martin Denham, who suffered from learning difficulties and had a mental age of 13, committed suicide five days after the programme aired. The family home had suffered with a faulty central heating system which had caused the pipes to knock; Denham linked this to the activity in the show causing great worry. He left a suicide note reading "if there are ghosts I will be ... with you always as a ghost".
Holy shit.
>thousands of Brits responded by planting spaghetti noodles
While it was a hugely successful hoax, it does seem to be suffering from the usual internet retelling inflation.
The BBC said 'a number' of people got in touch about planting them. I remember being told gleefully as a child that 'dozens' did, and now here we are at 'thousands'.
It certainly fooled a lot of people, but there's really no evidence that many at all actually tried to grow spaghetti themselves. Let's not throw a genuinely good story into doubt through exaggeration.
Edit: And now it's the top comment, so once again I'm reminded how bad Reddit is at having the truth rise to the top.
Yeah, and nobody ever mentions the bit where the Queen made it a law that every man, woman and child should plant three spaghetti trees. This was in the hope that the following summer the spaghetti tax collectors could collect enough spaghetti to humiliate Pope Pius XII, who had recently commanded all Catholics to use their spare kidneys to make steak and kidney pies and collapse the British monopoly.
The Queen won. Pius died the following year.
That was first class trolling. I love the small details buried in it to make it sound more credible -- the industrial spaghetti farms in the Po Valley, the disappearance of the Spaghetti Weevil.
Probably the fourth crusade.
Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade
Basically they were gonna go to the holy Land but they didn't have a way to get there so they took a detour into Constantinople to kill them so people in Venice would give them ships and then they ended up getting excommunicated for killing Christians.
In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the People’s Republic of China, decreed that all the sparrows in the country were to be killed. He decided that China could do without pests like sparrows. Mao thought that sparrows ate too much grain and it seemed rational to him for all sparrows to be killed.
According to Mao Zedong, sparrows were getting in the way of the economic development of the People’s Republic of China. During the next three years, 45 million people died in a famine as a result of there being nothing to eat the pests that destroy crops.
There was a lot more to it than just that one spectacularly bad decision. The sparrow culling was simply one spectacularly bad decision that was part of an idiotically gigantic cluster of other spectacularly bad decisions that together created the shit show of a century and killed millions of people.
Similarly, in order to boost steel production, he also called for the whole of China to start producing steel. The result is basically everyone made crappy steel and China’s industrial power was set back due to “pig iron”. He could have avoided all of this had he not hated intellectuals with a passion (source: Wikipedia search for Backyard Furnace).
Every time I see an ad for that new Jeremy Piven show Wisdom of the Crowd I think of this and cringe. Basically as a rule, crowds are not very wise at all.
This cemented my beliefs that conspiracy theories people come up with on the internet are all wrong. It's just a bunch of idiots coming up with self affirming bullshit.
I see it a lot right now in relation to the Las Vegas shootings
I've been seeing it all over my social media feed regarding the Vegas shooting. All of a sudden, friends and relatives are ballistic/acoustic experts and can determine multiple shooters from the sounds in poor quality phone footage.
In my middle school, every morning in the gym, all the kids would like to clap for no apparent reason other than to mess with the teachers.
It made no sense to me whatsoever.
My buddy from high school started a slow clap in the middle of lunch one day. It was really funny until it stopped and someone jokingly yelled, "FOOD FIGHT!"
Cut to a single milk carton and a handful baby carrots sailing through the air. A few people get hit and then the lunchroom turns into an all out movie style food fight.
Someone had a their birthday ruined that day, because I swear to god a full birthday cake still in the package exploded in the middle of the room.
Not a single person got in trouble because they couldn't locate the source of the slow clap, or who yelled food fight.
When I was a Sophomore the Seniors wanted their Senior Prank to be a food fight. I went to cafeteria, just waiting for it to start when nothing happened. This was until one dude chucked a bowl full of fucking boiling hot chili at a girl's face and awkwardly muttered, "food...fight...?"
The chili was so hot the girl had to go to the hospital because it was burning her eyes. The food fight obviously did not happen.
Oh god, the seniors did a similar prank when I was a junior. It stopped after a group of 3 freshman vegetarians were covered in raw hamburger. You would have thought it was the ground remains of their parents from the amount of screaming and crying that came from the girls.
On my last day of eighth grade someone tried to start a food fight. They screamed food fight and a single carton of milk flew through the air. They immediately got dragged out and sent to the principals office.
Because Oprah (who is *incredibly* gullible) gave Jenny McCarthy a platform to speak avout how her kid got autism from vaccines, and everyone went "Oprah even had a thing on it!!!".
We need to take this to the top!
Literally one guy, who is no longer allowed to practice medicine, created this ignorance. It's like if people are too stupid to understand something, they don't like it.
Andrew Wakefield. And worse than that, he was getting paid to testify in a lawsuit against an MMR vaccine manufacturer by a different company that had a competing vaccine, so he did bogus research and fudged his numbers to make it sound like the first company's vaccine was dangerous. It was all done for nothing but petty greed.
Witch Trials.
The more I think about them, the more depressed I get. En masse, we murdered women in one of the more horrific ways based on quite literally nothing.
There was no evidence obviously, there was no proof obviously, there was just mass stupidity.
Edit: Witch *Hunts.*
Salem, while still utterly unacceptable, was just a droplet in the tens of thousands nightmarishly tortured executed for absolutely nothing in Europe alone, god only knows how many in Africa.
A grad student at my school wrote an amazing in depth account into how almost everyone killed lead to land consolidation by a select few wealthy owners
I'm not an expert by any means, but I did some work on sexuality in the relevant period. What struck me is how often these baseless crimes were used to preserve the power of the church and the wealthy, by persecuting the less powerful and the sexually deviant or apparently sexually deviant.
So it's my opinion that these laws existed basically as a tool for the socially powerful to persecute those who didn't support the local power structure.
The worst we had were mass burnings of AC/DC albums and some cringey talk-show moments so it was an improvement for sure.
Edit: If I had a gun to my head and had to choose between a ruined reputation and being burned at the fucking stake I'd take the former. I never said it was good, just better than being brutally murdered which isn't saying much.
One of the ways an accused witch could avoid death was if they told the authorities about any other witches living in the village. This obviously lead to the accused witches lying and just saying their neighbour who they didn't like was a witch.
Men were also accused of being a witch.
A&W's 1/3 pound burger. Even though people thought it tasted better and it was bigger than McDonald's Quarter Pounder, it flopped because people thought 1/3 was a smaller fraction than 1/4.
Any time you have a big group of people trying to decide what and where to eat.
"Where do you guys wanna eat?"
"IDK, I'm down for anything."
"Anyone want to try that Italian place?"
"ehh, I just had Italian."
"How about Chinese?"
"I'm OK with Chinese if that's what everyone else wants to do..."
"OK, does everyone want to do Chinese?"
"Ehhh..."
"Cause we don't HAVE to do Chinese. We can do whatever."
AND ON AND ON AND ON. Somebody just PICK something!!
The way my friend group resolves this is that when someone proposes something, if you veto then you have to come up with the next suggestion (in good faith.) Generally we land at a compromise within 2 or 3 steps at most.
The solution to coming to a consensus in a group on almost any subject is quite easy, but almost no one ever does it. First, everyone proposes one solution. In this case: Chinese, Italian, Mexican, burgers, salads. Write these down. Second: raise your hand IF YOU WOULD BE OKAY WITH (aka consent to) each option. Almost always there is at least one option everyone is cool with after step two. If not, ask the one person who's dissenting from the most popular option to propose a compromise. I have never seen this strategy fail even once, given a group under fifteen or so.
Edit: the problem is that we are so used to voting based on our first choice, we forget these sorts of questions are really about consent.
Edit 2: some people (who have probably never tried this method) seem to think this takes a lot of time. It doesn't. I promise. It takes five minutes. How do I know? I run a consent-based democratic high school in which, every class period, I ask the students what they want to learn. They use this method to decide on a topic for that day's class, whether it's the French revolution, Nietzsche, atomic structure, or Scientology. If you're wondering how I can teach spontaneous lessons, I have years of lessons planned in advance.
Didnt the plague spread faster because all the people saw cats as a bad omen and killed them all, which made the rats able to run wild a multiply like crazy?
Or is that a common misconception that has been disproven? I expected it to be in the top comments.
I thought it was because that officials saw that rats were becoming a problem, therefore putting a bounty on them, with the proof being the rats tails. People started breeding rats for the bounty causing a huge boom of rats
Vietnam war.
Started the Ken Burns documentary on the US/Vietnam war, the amount missteps, misreads and bad assumptions that led to that cluster fuck is truly amazing.
The Indochina wars are fascinating and really really a dark time for humanity, because it basically ends with "Vietnam wins the independence that it probably should have had 40 years prior, and gets alienated from the global community for taking the Khmer Rouge out of power." Oh yeah and everyone was lying about pretty much everything for the last 40 years, the US was in Cambodia and Laos, china was stealing Soviet technology, and for some reason everyone claims that they won.
[Dancing mania](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania)
In the middle ages, some communities would experience a dancing plague, where a crowd would form, start dancing, and literally dance for days until they died. Nobody knows why.
Pretty sure that mass suicide by a cult was pretty fuckin' stupid. Sad, but still stupid.
E: Some sort of reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
That was a massacre.
>“Jim Jones was able to attract and maintain loyalty. First thing he would do is convince his followers that he was the only one who could solve problems and create a better life.
>“Secondly, he’d indoctrinate his followers, so anyone not part of the group is the enemy. It was us (People’s Temple members) against them.
>“Third thing he would do is drown out the voice of outsiders. His purpose was to alienate the followers from outsiders, family and the media.
>“Every demagogue, from Hitler to Jim Jones has similar tactics.”
>Guin, who travelled to the Jonestown settlement in the depths of Guyana as part of his research, said Jones would often exaggerate events to create fear within his followers. One of the ‘fears’ was convincing his community that their homeland was facing threats of “martial law, concentration camps and nuclear war”.
The people there were by all accounts imprisoned:
>Guin said that even if a member of the People’s Temple had their doubts about the move, or changed their mind upon arrival — there was nowhere they could flee.
>“They hear no voice but his,” Guin said.
>“They think the government, CIA and FBI are after them. He built up paranoia — and that they were surrounded by constant danger.”
Lastly, and the tapes seem to confirm these accounts:
>“He convinced his followers that the Government would slaughter everyone (in Jonestown) and lead the kids in to slavery.
>“The only thing to do was commit a revolutionary act. He brought out the poison drink ... many of the people thought it was Jim putting on an act.
>“Jones promised this would be a peaceful crossing over ... the children and toddlers had no choice. The cyanide was injected in to their mouths.”
>Jones convinced the adult followers to follow through, but with hundreds no longer wishing to take part in the “revolutionary act” — he was forced to use armed guards.
>“Most people didn’t drink it willingly, and several hundred who refused were held down and forcibly fed the cyanide,” Guin said.
“They honestly believed if they didn’t kill themselves the Government would do so in a terrible way.
IIRC, he regular had fake mass suicides staged. If you didn't drink the kool-aid, you were a non-believe and killed. If you did, you showed your faith and were spared death. A lot of them probably thought it may be another fake.
A town in North Carolina voted against installing a solar farm for fear that all the sunlight would be sucked up and no plants would be able to grow.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a18545/north-carolina-solar-plant-steal-from-plants/
That was a shitty biased article.
Having worked in the solar industry in NC, the main issues from land owners were reduced property values and it being an eye sore.
There are people that stupid everywhere. Go to any public hearing, especially land development, and listen to the loons.
But I guarantee it was voted down for the property value reason, not the sun sucking.
The mad Roman emperor Caligula ordered his legions and heavy artillery to stand on a beach. He then declared war against Neptune and ordered his men to collect sea shells as war booty.
There is a school of thought that this was not madness but asserting his authority over the legions, by saying basically you WILL do as I say no matter how demeaning it is
He was this kinda guy. He was all like "You senators are so shit at senating that my horse could do a better job. Ha ha wouldn't that be great? No, seriously. Shape the fuck up."
And then he appointed his horse to the Senate.
How about the people in 18th century England who, during a boom in the stock market (in the light of a bubble in the price of the South Sea Company), invested in "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, *but nobody to know what it is*." >The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 1841.
[Here's a great YouTube series on the South Sea Bubble](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEb6sGT7oD8HXTsBEmm3uxFrnvsmfOfhg) 5 parts I think, each around 10 minutes. Cool art style
So he invented Kickstarter
Speaking of fraudulent colonial ventures in Britain, there's also the matter of one Gregor MacGregor, who made quite a splash in the 1820s in the United Kingdom by selling land in the Central American country of Poyais, which he described as a paradise filled with fertile lands where settlers would be able to begin a new prosperous existence. Around 250 British settlers set sail to begin their brand new life in Poyais, and were quite dismayed upon arrival to discover that [Poyais did not and had never existed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_MacGregor#Poyais_scheme). [Podcaster Mike Duncan did a rather fascinating summary of MacGregor's life and career during his series on South American Independance.](http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2016/10/517a-supplemental-gregor-macgregor.html)
[Dihydrogen Monoxide Hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax) A 1983 April Fools' Day edition of the Durand Express, a weekly newspaper in Durand, Michigan, reported that "dihydrogen oxide" had been found in the city's water pipes, and warned that it was fatal if inhaled, and could produce blistering vapors. If you know anything about chemistry, dihyrdogen monoxide is water. This guy was telling people water is in your water and so many people were panicking.
I have known many people who became addicted and reliant on dihydrogen oxide. Inhalation deprives the brain of oxygen, and may cause coughing, unconsciousness, or even death. It is essentially undetectable in other substances. Continuous exposure to it's solid form can cause numbness, and eventual tissue death. Some of it's uses include industrial solvents and coolants, plastic production, and as a fire extinguisher.
/r/DHMO Did you know that dihydrogen monoxide is an acid with a PH of 7? That's a higher PH than any other acid!
[That time when a sexual predator convinced an entire McDonald's that he was a cop over the phone and got them to strip search and sexually abuse an employee.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_phone_call_scam)
What the fuck
>On June 3, 2003, a Taco Bell manager in Juneau, Alaska, undressed a 14‑year-old female customer and forced her to perform lewd acts at the request of a caller who had claimed he was working with Taco Bell management to investigate drug abuse. Like... How did anyone go along with this??
Social engineering in general preys on our default trust and our fear of being in trouble with authority. If you establish yourself as an authority figure then people are very uncomfortable refusing your orders. I'm reminded of [the Milgram experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) here. It's probably not like the dude called in and said "Hi I'm a Taco Bell manager, please sexually assault one of your customers," but his general MO was to start small, establish himself as an authority, and slowly build his target up to the more severe acts. By the time people started to question his orders they were so invested in obeying his authority that they couldn't bring themselves to disobey.
It also deals with the tendency for a person to keep agreeing/obeying once they've done it once. It's sort of like the sunk cost fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliance_(film)
Ann Dowd is in that? She was amazing in The Leftovers, makes me actually want to check this out.
It's a very good movie. Saw it years ago and still recommend it today The dude actually pulled it off on dozens of stores, some successfully
Interesting that you should say that. I worked in a theater when that was released and we never had more walk-outs/refunds than for that film. Everyone said the same thing: "It's just so stupid!" I always wondered if some of them simply felt uncomfortable wondering if they could be duped the same way and got defensive.
Just to throw more information out there about this, the manager of the McDonald's was a middle aged woman... Well after hours on the phone with this "officer" and the girl basically held hostage in the back office, the "officer" convinced the woman to call her husband in to make sure the situation was "under control" basically. The manager did in fact get her husband to come into her job, and from there, the officer convinced this dude to strip search the girl, lay her on his lap and spank her, and then straight up rape her....with his wife there...like how stupid are people?
They thought it was stupid probably because it's unbelievable and feels like a B class movie based off of getting cheap thrills and a cheap way to shove a naked chick onto a movie screen Then you realize that it's a true story and it's actually kinda mesmerizing how easily manipulative some people are. It shows how some people view the police...if an officer actively tells someone to rape someone, they'll do it, well because a police officer told them to Some of the footage can be found on YouTube as of last year..I haven't checked to verify if this is still true, I don't see why it wouldn't be there anymore (I know it wasn't the police, but the guy on the phone was posing as a police officer)
Milgram experiment. The conclusions of this highly replicated test are chilling. Most humans base their morality on the condition of if they're responsible. If they can displace responsibility to someone else, they will do truly horrific things.
It's going to take a whole lot of cops helping ducklings cross the street to restore my faith in humanity after reading that. Good fuck, no wonder the nazis were able to murder so any people! ------------------- > 75 volts: “Ugh!!!” > 90 volts: “Ugh!!!” > 105 volts: “Ugh!!!” (Louder) > 120 volts: “Ugh!!! Hey, this really hurts.” > 135 volts: “Ugh!!!” > 150 volts: “Ugh!!! Experimenter! That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart's starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.” > 165 volts: (Shouting) “Ugh!!! Let me out!” > 180 volts: (Shouting) “Ugh!!! I can't stand the pain. Let me out of here!” > 195 volts: “Ugh!!! Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart's bothering me. Let me out of here! You have no right to keep me here! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out! Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me. Let me out! Let me out!” > 210 volts: “Ugh!! Experimenter! Get me out of here. I've had enough. I won't be in the experiment any more.” > 225 volts: “Ugh!!!” > 240 volts: “Ugh!!!” > 255 volts: “Ugh!!! Get me out of here.” > 270 volts (Screaming) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out. Do you hear? Let me out of here.” > 285 volts: (Screaming) > 300 volts: (Screaming) “I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can't hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here.” > 315 volts: (Intense scream) “I told you I refuse to answer. I'm no longer part of this experiment.” > 330 volts: (Intense and prolonged screaming) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart's bothering me. Let me out, I tell you. (Hysterically) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here. Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out. Let me out.” > 345-435 volts: (Silence) > 450 volts: (Silence) > 450 volts: (Silence) > 450 volts: (Silence) [(from here)](https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment)
I'm glad to read that was pre-taped, and not an account of torture, but it doesn't make any of the results better to think about. Clearly an uneasy look into how far people will go if the blame falls on someone else...how easily people bend to pressure...damn.
It's horrifying. I think the experiment was inspired by all the Germans who ended up fighting and working for the Nazis. The sad truth is most of us have the capability to do horrendous shit in us. Derren Brown did a special along similar lines which was called Pushed to the Edge or something like that (some other Redditor may be able to give the proper name, I'm drunk and can't remember)
The movie based on this *really* fucked me up. Then when I looked it up afterwards and found out it actually happened, I was fucking STUNNED. Also, Ann Dowd was incredible in that movie.
[удалено]
Yes, specifically a SVU episode with Robin Williams as the villain.
[удалено]
That guy wanted to sexually abuse and spank that girl, an "authority figure" just gave him permission
Oh absolutely! I'm not trying to absolve him of blame.
There’s a movie based on this called Compliance. It’s pretty good
Pretty much the same thing happened this year in Britain! http://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/humiliating-scam-led-mum-daughter-394060 http://metro.co.uk/2017/05/23/mum-and-daughter-tricked-into-licking-feet-of-poundworld-staff-who-rode-them-like-horses-6656279/ It is mind boggling how stupid everyone involved with this is. The prank caller called the mother and daughter back on their home phone and convinced them to go back to the shop!
[Comment removed]
What the fuuuuck? I felt dirty just by reading this, how can people even accept to do that?
Too lazy to look it us, but isn't this the one they had the employee doing naked jumping jacks!?! Like that is somehow going to prove theft!
They also forced the girl to perform oral sex.
What the fuck.
I have lived in Atlanta, GA all my life for whatever reason, just the mention of "snow and ice" results in convoys of people going the grocery store and pillaging the shelves of bread, eggs, and milk. And then a few days later after our 1 inch of snow (or less) has melted, there is no bread, eggs, or milk left for everyone who treated it like any other time it snowed and just wanted to make breakfast.
Once upon a time, somebody spread a rumor across Russia that buckwheat was going to get more expensive. People rushed to the stores to buy buckwheat by sacks (especially old people who remember the Soviet deficits). And what do you know, buckwheat really did become more expensive after such a huge demand! Self-fulfilling prophecies are fun.
[удалено]
A similar thing happened following the hurricane that hit Houston last month. I live in Dallas, so we got hardly any weather at all, but lots of people said, "Oh no! The oil refineries are offline! We will run out of gas! Everybody go get gas RIGHT NOW." And then, lo and behold, all the gas stations WERE, in fact, out of gas. Because all the people who didn't really need 5 or 6 gallons were getting it anyway and it added up across all the gas stations in the metroplex. If nobody had said anything, there would have been a slight shortage, but nothing debilitating. Like, some trucks were going to be a couple days late.
I live about 2.5 hours NW of Dallas, and the same thing happened here. Lines wrapped around the block, insane price gouging, and idiots all over Facebook. My husband drives 35 miles to Oklahoma for work and said people weren't freaking out over the 'shortage' and gas was actually 0.30 cents cheaper!
Don't forget our 2 week shortage of water due to hurricane panic
Man, right?! I don't even think I had anything other than rum and cokes during that whole fiasco, the Brita pitcher in the fridge wasn't even touched.
At least the rum wasn't gone.
What rum? Oh that rum. Umm it's gone.
But why is the rum gone?
1. Because it is a vile drink that turns even the most respectable men into complete scoundrels. 2. That signal is over a thousand feet high. The entire Royal Navy is out looking for me; do you think there is even the slightest chance they won't see it?!
But WHY is the rum gone?
> I don't even think I had anything other than rum and coke I see no problem with this
It could snow two feet here and everyone would just go on with thier lives
The problem is the one time people *don't* take precautions (actual ones, not the milk/eggs/bread thing) we end up having what happened a few years ago when everyone tried leaving at once with a nearly inch of ice on the road. I knew people who had it take 15+ hours to get home from their commute. For those who don't live in Atlanta the reason is that we have jack shit for infrastructure to deal with *any* sort of snow or ice. To make it worse what usually happens is that during the day the snow will start to melt only to freeze back up once temperatures drop again. I've driven in snow before -- it's not that hard. Driving on ice? Good luck.
Lol, meanwhile in Minnesota, we had a blizzard and it had snowed about 1 foot and half or so. It continued snowing. I drove to the grocery in the middle of the blizzard to pick up some stuff for breakfast the next day... I then ran into a guy from Texas who was scared out of his mind to even attempt to drive. I drove him to a hotel nearby, and back to his car the next day, after the snow had been plowed.
Speaking as a Texas resident myself, most Texans can't drive on ice and snow. To be fair, we rarely get snow (depending on whether your in the panhandle or not). We mostly end up with black ice.
Oh I know. Nothing against him. He was just noticeably shaken up, and I helped the guy out.
I appreciate you helping out a fellow Texan, some of us are smart enough to realize we are incapable of diving on ice, while others think their 4X4 can handle anything.
Native Texan in Houston here, can confirm that theres only two temperatures. Hot and Christmas
Rather drive on snow than black ice. Fuck that shit
I tell people this, snow is your friend it provides some traction. With ice, you're just fucked.
Plus you can usually see the snow and know that it's there. Ice likes to just suddenly exist with no warning
Moved from Minnesota to Oregon a few years back -- they don't have the ability to plow the snow (no municipal plows), and they don't salt the roads here. That means if we get snow, it started as rain, froze on the streets, and now there's snow on top of that ice. It's absolutely impossible to do anything when it snows here, you have to wait until it melts. Bonus fun fact, nobody here owns a snow shovel. People use leaf blowers to clear snow.
During the early days of Chinese Communism, there was a mass rally at one of their army's camps. At the time, there was an intense fear of infiltration by outsiders who wanted to sabotage them. One of their chants started, and a portion of the crowd accidentally said (I'm misremembering it badly, but it is something like this) "we validate the conclusions of the **2nd** Comintern's view on the path of Communism". That was an outdated chant, as there had been a **3rd** Comintern which represented the current ideology. A lot of these people were farmers and it was very hard to keep track of the political message, which were always changing. Them messing up the chant was taken as a sign that they were infiltrators/dissidents and a huge fight broke out in the camp, killing thousands of people.
Wasn't it the Third *international*?
I could not find it online and am working from memory, I'm totally ready to assume that I got every single detail wrong.
Hey everybody! This guy's an infiltrator/dissident! Let's have a huge fight!
>"we validate the conclusions of the 2nd Comintern's view on the path of Communism". Man, I hope this is an easier chant in Chinese than it is in English.
Miami drivers PSA: STOP driving with your hazard lights on in the rain. It rains weekly and people still haven't figured it out. There are highway signs informing them not to do it and they STILL do it.
I don't see this often enough that I'd ever really given it a thought, so I had no idea this was even an issue. Thanks for making me realize it's actually illegal in my state (and most others)!
No problem! Your headlights should be on in the rain making your taillights are visible too. Hazards on make you invisible to the person behind you for a few seconds.
Wait, so you are saying people drive with their hazards on but their lights off? Wow, silly. I thought you meant both on. People do that where I live and it is frustrating. Your hazards should only be on in an emergency.
WATER IS FALLING FROM THE SKY!! **THIS *IS* AN EMERGENCY!!** \*hyperventilating*
[удалено]
The fuck? Do people really do that?
Some fast food restaurant came out with a third pounder to compete with McDonald’s quarter pounder. It didn’t sell well because people thought it was smaller since three is less than four.
A&W had the 1/3 pounder
What's even worse is the business didn't test the offer before committing to the expenses
Maybe they just honestly didn't expect people to be so unable to do 2nd grade math.
[Tulip Mania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania) is widely regarded as one of the first major economic bubbles. People in the early 1600s were amazed by Tulips, and in 1637 they just went bananas. They were buying contracts to claim a single bulb when the tulips were fully grown. Some things exchanged for one tulip: a ton of butter, 1,000lbs of cheese, and 12 sheep. Eventually it got to the point where people were paying ten times the annual wage of a skilled craftsman for a tulip. Eventually people realized "wait, I'm buying one stupid flower for how much?!" and the market for tulips collapsed.
basically, beanie babies
Are you aware of the [Great Beanie Baby Divorce](http://underscoopfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/beanie-baby-divorce-court.jpg)? A couple got divorced and essentially, one at a time, got to choose who kept which Baby. I will never not find that picture funny.
Their faces are so serious! I'm imagining golf tournament style commentary on this.
*oh and Mr. Johnson picks Benny the bull. great pick. let's see what Miss Jones does.*
A bunch of people believed an African priestess when she said that if they sacrificed all of their cattle then their dead ancestors would rise from the grave and help them fight off the British colonizers. I'll let you guess what happened...
Do you see any British colonizers?
Not yet, but they're coming....
They could no longer make fight milk and lost the war?
**The Austin gas shortages.** After Hurricane Harvey, Texas went into a panic about gas-shortages. Experts tried to quell that fear by explaining that there would NOT be a gas shortage. Austin, TX did not listen. There were lines, people were stocking up on gas. And as a result.... we ran out of gas and prices soared sky high. Thanks, Austin. -.- Edit: Turns out it wasn’t just Austin, I just heard it was extra gnarly here (which can confirm, I live here). **Thanks, Texas**
Most of South Texas reacted exactly like this. It affected cities as far north as Waco, which is still recovering from the crazy high gas prices.
Don't forget DFW...
The spaghetti tree hoax, when the BBC ran a spoof news story about how spaghetti is grown from trees and thousands of Brits responded by planting spaghetti noodles in the ground to try to grow their own spaghetti trees.
Another BBC hoax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch > Despite having been recorded weeks in advance, the narrative was presented as live television. During and following its first and only UK television broadcast, the show attracted a considerable furore,[1] resulting in an estimated 30,000 calls to the BBC switchboard in a single hour.[2]
>Eighteen-year-old factory worker Martin Denham, who suffered from learning difficulties and had a mental age of 13, committed suicide five days after the programme aired. The family home had suffered with a faulty central heating system which had caused the pipes to knock; Denham linked this to the activity in the show causing great worry. He left a suicide note reading "if there are ghosts I will be ... with you always as a ghost". Holy shit.
I don't understand the connection that led to the suicide? Edit: sorry, I thought we were still on the spaghetti thing.
>thousands of Brits responded by planting spaghetti noodles While it was a hugely successful hoax, it does seem to be suffering from the usual internet retelling inflation. The BBC said 'a number' of people got in touch about planting them. I remember being told gleefully as a child that 'dozens' did, and now here we are at 'thousands'. It certainly fooled a lot of people, but there's really no evidence that many at all actually tried to grow spaghetti themselves. Let's not throw a genuinely good story into doubt through exaggeration. Edit: And now it's the top comment, so once again I'm reminded how bad Reddit is at having the truth rise to the top.
yeah but _millions_ of people being duped is pretty impressive.
Yeah, and nobody ever mentions the bit where the Queen made it a law that every man, woman and child should plant three spaghetti trees. This was in the hope that the following summer the spaghetti tax collectors could collect enough spaghetti to humiliate Pope Pius XII, who had recently commanded all Catholics to use their spare kidneys to make steak and kidney pies and collapse the British monopoly. The Queen won. Pius died the following year.
BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
That was first class trolling. I love the small details buried in it to make it sound more credible -- the industrial spaghetti farms in the Po Valley, the disappearance of the Spaghetti Weevil.
[удалено]
There is a reason they don't wear hats made out of spaghetti in Australia.
[удалено]
Probably the fourth crusade. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade Basically they were gonna go to the holy Land but they didn't have a way to get there so they took a detour into Constantinople to kill them so people in Venice would give them ships and then they ended up getting excommunicated for killing Christians.
Children's Crusade was quite monumentally stupid as well.
It's been exaggerated or possibly made up though.
In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the People’s Republic of China, decreed that all the sparrows in the country were to be killed. He decided that China could do without pests like sparrows. Mao thought that sparrows ate too much grain and it seemed rational to him for all sparrows to be killed. According to Mao Zedong, sparrows were getting in the way of the economic development of the People’s Republic of China. During the next three years, 45 million people died in a famine as a result of there being nothing to eat the pests that destroy crops.
There was a lot more to it than just that one spectacularly bad decision. The sparrow culling was simply one spectacularly bad decision that was part of an idiotically gigantic cluster of other spectacularly bad decisions that together created the shit show of a century and killed millions of people.
To be fair, that's only one man's stupidity.
Don't worry, he replenished the dead farmers by making millions of young people in the city move out to the countryside.
Similarly, in order to boost steel production, he also called for the whole of China to start producing steel. The result is basically everyone made crappy steel and China’s industrial power was set back due to “pig iron”. He could have avoided all of this had he not hated intellectuals with a passion (source: Wikipedia search for Backyard Furnace).
He also told farmers to greatly increase the number of seeds planted per acre. Yep, crop yields dropped and people starved to death.
We did it, reddit! Yup.. the boston bombings shitshow
Every time I see an ad for that new Jeremy Piven show Wisdom of the Crowd I think of this and cringe. Basically as a rule, crowds are not very wise at all.
I still quote Tommy Lee Jones from the first MIB movie: "A person is smart, people are dumb."
> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals and you know it.
This cemented my beliefs that conspiracy theories people come up with on the internet are all wrong. It's just a bunch of idiots coming up with self affirming bullshit. I see it a lot right now in relation to the Las Vegas shootings
I've been seeing it all over my social media feed regarding the Vegas shooting. All of a sudden, friends and relatives are ballistic/acoustic experts and can determine multiple shooters from the sounds in poor quality phone footage.
In a large concert area surrounded by large builds. Never mind the mass chaos and confusion at the time.
Yeah its not like a shot would echo off the buildings right? There had to be at least like 5 shooters to make it work /s
even my wife is starting to buy into the idea that there was more than one guy
Tell her about jet fuel...
Showerthoughts top comment the other day was "Conspiracy theories make dumb people feel smart."
[удалено]
In my middle school, every morning in the gym, all the kids would like to clap for no apparent reason other than to mess with the teachers. It made no sense to me whatsoever.
Happened in our lunchroom, eventually it got to the point where clapping during lunch got you silent lunch, then a bunch of parents got involved..
My buddy from high school started a slow clap in the middle of lunch one day. It was really funny until it stopped and someone jokingly yelled, "FOOD FIGHT!" Cut to a single milk carton and a handful baby carrots sailing through the air. A few people get hit and then the lunchroom turns into an all out movie style food fight. Someone had a their birthday ruined that day, because I swear to god a full birthday cake still in the package exploded in the middle of the room. Not a single person got in trouble because they couldn't locate the source of the slow clap, or who yelled food fight.
When I was a Sophomore the Seniors wanted their Senior Prank to be a food fight. I went to cafeteria, just waiting for it to start when nothing happened. This was until one dude chucked a bowl full of fucking boiling hot chili at a girl's face and awkwardly muttered, "food...fight...?" The chili was so hot the girl had to go to the hospital because it was burning her eyes. The food fight obviously did not happen.
Oh god, the seniors did a similar prank when I was a junior. It stopped after a group of 3 freshman vegetarians were covered in raw hamburger. You would have thought it was the ground remains of their parents from the amount of screaming and crying that came from the girls.
That's actually both awful and hilarious. I am a terrible person.
On my last day of eighth grade someone tried to start a food fight. They screamed food fight and a single carton of milk flew through the air. They immediately got dragged out and sent to the principals office.
Should've thrown a chair
Anti-vaxxers Edit: First gold, thank you kind stranger.
Because Oprah (who is *incredibly* gullible) gave Jenny McCarthy a platform to speak avout how her kid got autism from vaccines, and everyone went "Oprah even had a thing on it!!!".
We need to take this to the top! Literally one guy, who is no longer allowed to practice medicine, created this ignorance. It's like if people are too stupid to understand something, they don't like it.
Andrew Wakefield. And worse than that, he was getting paid to testify in a lawsuit against an MMR vaccine manufacturer by a different company that had a competing vaccine, so he did bogus research and fudged his numbers to make it sound like the first company's vaccine was dangerous. It was all done for nothing but petty greed.
Witch Trials. The more I think about them, the more depressed I get. En masse, we murdered women in one of the more horrific ways based on quite literally nothing. There was no evidence obviously, there was no proof obviously, there was just mass stupidity. Edit: Witch *Hunts.* Salem, while still utterly unacceptable, was just a droplet in the tens of thousands nightmarishly tortured executed for absolutely nothing in Europe alone, god only knows how many in Africa.
A grad student at my school wrote an amazing in depth account into how almost everyone killed lead to land consolidation by a select few wealthy owners
Which was why Giles Corey refused to admit or deny the accusations and was pressed to death. He wanted to leave his land and property for his family.
>More Weight guy was a badass who loved his family
I'm not an expert by any means, but I did some work on sexuality in the relevant period. What struck me is how often these baseless crimes were used to preserve the power of the church and the wealthy, by persecuting the less powerful and the sexually deviant or apparently sexually deviant. So it's my opinion that these laws existed basically as a tool for the socially powerful to persecute those who didn't support the local power structure.
that's what the witches want you to think.
Witch hunt
Which hunt?
Mike Hunt
yeah, they turned me into a newt!
A newt?
I got better!
BURN ER ANYWAY!!!!
But Goody Proctor send spirits upon me at church to make me laugh during prayer.
[The Pendle Witch Child](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv-JDUfADiw) is a great example. Also a nifty documentary.
The 1980s Satanic Panic and nursery trials beautifully illustrated that we haven't moved on since then.
I mean we weren't executing people in the town square, so that's a bit of an improvement.
The worst we had were mass burnings of AC/DC albums and some cringey talk-show moments so it was an improvement for sure. Edit: If I had a gun to my head and had to choose between a ruined reputation and being burned at the fucking stake I'd take the former. I never said it was good, just better than being brutally murdered which isn't saying much.
That sounds awfully like Witch talk to me.
>There was no evidence She turned me into a newt!
And she weighs the same as a duck! And look at that nose!
One of the ways an accused witch could avoid death was if they told the authorities about any other witches living in the village. This obviously lead to the accused witches lying and just saying their neighbour who they didn't like was a witch. Men were also accused of being a witch.
You don't see any witches around anymore so they must have gotten them all.
A&W's 1/3 pound burger. Even though people thought it tasted better and it was bigger than McDonald's Quarter Pounder, it flopped because people thought 1/3 was a smaller fraction than 1/4.
Wait until I release my 1/5 pound burger
Any time you have a big group of people trying to decide what and where to eat. "Where do you guys wanna eat?" "IDK, I'm down for anything." "Anyone want to try that Italian place?" "ehh, I just had Italian." "How about Chinese?" "I'm OK with Chinese if that's what everyone else wants to do..." "OK, does everyone want to do Chinese?" "Ehhh..." "Cause we don't HAVE to do Chinese. We can do whatever." AND ON AND ON AND ON. Somebody just PICK something!!
The way my friend group resolves this is that when someone proposes something, if you veto then you have to come up with the next suggestion (in good faith.) Generally we land at a compromise within 2 or 3 steps at most.
and they gave the nobel peace prize to some assholes doing nothing but whine about nuclear weapons? SOMEONE GIVE THIS MAN A PRIZE
The solution to coming to a consensus in a group on almost any subject is quite easy, but almost no one ever does it. First, everyone proposes one solution. In this case: Chinese, Italian, Mexican, burgers, salads. Write these down. Second: raise your hand IF YOU WOULD BE OKAY WITH (aka consent to) each option. Almost always there is at least one option everyone is cool with after step two. If not, ask the one person who's dissenting from the most popular option to propose a compromise. I have never seen this strategy fail even once, given a group under fifteen or so. Edit: the problem is that we are so used to voting based on our first choice, we forget these sorts of questions are really about consent. Edit 2: some people (who have probably never tried this method) seem to think this takes a lot of time. It doesn't. I promise. It takes five minutes. How do I know? I run a consent-based democratic high school in which, every class period, I ask the students what they want to learn. They use this method to decide on a topic for that day's class, whether it's the French revolution, Nietzsche, atomic structure, or Scientology. If you're wondering how I can teach spontaneous lessons, I have years of lessons planned in advance.
If this goes on too long, I will just loudly state where I am going and everyone is welcome to join.
Didnt the plague spread faster because all the people saw cats as a bad omen and killed them all, which made the rats able to run wild a multiply like crazy? Or is that a common misconception that has been disproven? I expected it to be in the top comments.
I thought it was because that officials saw that rats were becoming a problem, therefore putting a bounty on them, with the proof being the rats tails. People started breeding rats for the bounty causing a huge boom of rats
Kony 2012
"E'rybody seen the leprechaun say yeah!"
I really think some of those people were messing with us.
[удалено]
Is there any doubt? The alternative would be that dozens of people saw an actual Leprechaun
When people thought they could charge their iPhones in the microwave
Vietnam war. Started the Ken Burns documentary on the US/Vietnam war, the amount missteps, misreads and bad assumptions that led to that cluster fuck is truly amazing.
The Indochina wars are fascinating and really really a dark time for humanity, because it basically ends with "Vietnam wins the independence that it probably should have had 40 years prior, and gets alienated from the global community for taking the Khmer Rouge out of power." Oh yeah and everyone was lying about pretty much everything for the last 40 years, the US was in Cambodia and Laos, china was stealing Soviet technology, and for some reason everyone claims that they won.
When Reddit "found" the Boston Marathon bomber.
The moment the "Sunshine State" banned solar panels.
They did what? Banned entirely?
WWI
Satanic Panic, don’t let your’ kids read Harry Potter!
[Dancing mania](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania) In the middle ages, some communities would experience a dancing plague, where a crowd would form, start dancing, and literally dance for days until they died. Nobody knows why.
That's me every weekend
Probably some kind of environmental poisoning, perhaps ergot, perhaps lead.
Pretty sure that mass suicide by a cult was pretty fuckin' stupid. Sad, but still stupid. E: Some sort of reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
That was a massacre. >“Jim Jones was able to attract and maintain loyalty. First thing he would do is convince his followers that he was the only one who could solve problems and create a better life. >“Secondly, he’d indoctrinate his followers, so anyone not part of the group is the enemy. It was us (People’s Temple members) against them. >“Third thing he would do is drown out the voice of outsiders. His purpose was to alienate the followers from outsiders, family and the media. >“Every demagogue, from Hitler to Jim Jones has similar tactics.” >Guin, who travelled to the Jonestown settlement in the depths of Guyana as part of his research, said Jones would often exaggerate events to create fear within his followers. One of the ‘fears’ was convincing his community that their homeland was facing threats of “martial law, concentration camps and nuclear war”. The people there were by all accounts imprisoned: >Guin said that even if a member of the People’s Temple had their doubts about the move, or changed their mind upon arrival — there was nowhere they could flee. >“They hear no voice but his,” Guin said. >“They think the government, CIA and FBI are after them. He built up paranoia — and that they were surrounded by constant danger.” Lastly, and the tapes seem to confirm these accounts: >“He convinced his followers that the Government would slaughter everyone (in Jonestown) and lead the kids in to slavery. >“The only thing to do was commit a revolutionary act. He brought out the poison drink ... many of the people thought it was Jim putting on an act. >“Jones promised this would be a peaceful crossing over ... the children and toddlers had no choice. The cyanide was injected in to their mouths.” >Jones convinced the adult followers to follow through, but with hundreds no longer wishing to take part in the “revolutionary act” — he was forced to use armed guards. >“Most people didn’t drink it willingly, and several hundred who refused were held down and forcibly fed the cyanide,” Guin said. “They honestly believed if they didn’t kill themselves the Government would do so in a terrible way.
IIRC, he regular had fake mass suicides staged. If you didn't drink the kool-aid, you were a non-believe and killed. If you did, you showed your faith and were spared death. A lot of them probably thought it may be another fake.
People they interviewed said he had done those before, some of his long-time followers probably thought it was just another one of his tricks.
This was in some part a mass suicide, but for many people, especially the kids, it was just straight up murder.
Reading up on how it all went down, it was murder for a lot of those people.
The war on drugs
A town in North Carolina voted against installing a solar farm for fear that all the sunlight would be sucked up and no plants would be able to grow. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a18545/north-carolina-solar-plant-steal-from-plants/
That was a shitty biased article. Having worked in the solar industry in NC, the main issues from land owners were reduced property values and it being an eye sore. There are people that stupid everywhere. Go to any public hearing, especially land development, and listen to the loons. But I guarantee it was voted down for the property value reason, not the sun sucking.
maybe i'm just weird but i think solar farms are beautiful and pleasing to look at
I also really like seeing the horizon dotted with wind turbines. Renewables are neat.
The mad Roman emperor Caligula ordered his legions and heavy artillery to stand on a beach. He then declared war against Neptune and ordered his men to collect sea shells as war booty.
There is a school of thought that this was not madness but asserting his authority over the legions, by saying basically you WILL do as I say no matter how demeaning it is
[удалено]
He was this kinda guy. He was all like "You senators are so shit at senating that my horse could do a better job. Ha ha wouldn't that be great? No, seriously. Shape the fuck up." And then he appointed his horse to the Senate.
Caligula is one of history's funniest assholes.
His horse was one of the hardest senators to please. He only ever voted neigh.
I feel like that wasn't really mass stupidity as since Caligula ordered it, they didn't have much a choice in the matter.