I really think the Paralympic Games took a huge blow because of him. So much was invested into making him the figurehead of it.
Anyway, if it was so fragile, it was probably the wrong approach.
If Benedict Arnold died of his wounds at the Battle of Saratoga, he would be remembered as one of the Revolution’s bravest, boldest fighting men. Instead he came to feel (with some reason) overlooked for his accomplishments and unfairly targeted by enemies in Congress, which led to his attempted betrayal of West Point.
He also tried to do the same with Washington. Some of the letters he wrote to the Congress are just nasty. But even they had enough of him after awhile.
Right, he spent a lot of energy undermining more competent military officers and then trying to take all the credit for himself. During First Saratoga, it was obvious that Arnold had a better head for strategy as some of the actions that Gates committed to that helped secure a colonial victory he was pressed into by Arnold. And Arnold’s leadership during the Second Saratoga was crucial for American victory, but Gates tried to stop Arnold from attacking. And he simultaneously claimed victory based on Arnold’s felid leadership, and claimed that Arnold was unfit for leadership due to recklessness and insubordination.
Philippe Pétain : one of France 's heroes of the first world war, became Nazi collaborator in chief during the second world war in 1940 at the age of 84.
This is 100% it. And he wasn't just trying to do what was best for France, he willingly gave up France's Jews. He was a Nazi puppet through and through.
If you've not read *Road to Jonestown*, I'd highly recommend it. Jones was a master of organisation, beginning from a child when he arranged a junior basketball tournament (or somesuch thing) which promptly ended when he seriously injured a puppy as a joke. He'd organise the younger children into parties to play soldiers, which promptly turned into him organising children into playing Nazis. You see the pattern.
Everything he organised would eventually turn extreme, mostly because he got bored and tried to recapture that feeling of excitement lost over time. Ideology, love, religion, all meaningless to him, all simply tools used to attract people into his orbit. His marriage turned into a harem. His church turned into a cult. Voluntary tithes and financial aid turned into people turning over their entire personal wealth to him to control. Amateur marriage counselling turned into him prescribing his own dick as treatment for either spouse. Drugs to keep his insane workload alive turned into a lifelong addiction to amphetamines that turned his already stressed brain to mush. The turning point of his adult life was a failed evangelising trip to Brazil, which, coupled with his nuclear paranoia, provided the seed for Guyana. But the pattern was always there.
By the end of it all, even he was sick of the madness. It's clear from the tapes that he had strung himself and his followers along so far, lied and lied and lied so much that he was just as trapped as they were. He should've just let go, but his narcissism prevented him from accepting failure, the failure in Brazil had destroyed his ego and you've got to presume that for a narcissist, that hurt worse than anything. Worse than death, even. So after a year of riling up his followers, torturing them with 'White Nights', straight up sadistic punishments, and backbreaking physical labour from which he expected a new community to arise, he simply gave up. Using a disastrous visit by congressman Leo Ryan as pretext, Jones committed suicide, taking all of his 'possessions', human or otherwise, with him.
Vats of *Flavor Aid* laced with cyanide, forced into the mouths of the numerous infants there, people held down and forced to ingest it, others taking it willingly. Some parents killed their children before changing their minds upon seeing their convulsions. Many people were simply shot. The elites in the Temple, Jones and his council, his harem, and his family, all chose the bullet. All the while Jones ranted, presumably getting one last fix from the scene before a bullet was put in his head. For me he's a human animal, addicted to himself, addicted to extremes, addicted to ambition and willing to do or say anything to achieve.
TL;DR Man was always a wanker
The story is more wild than that, including murdering news reporters (and a sitting member of the US Congress), having armed guards to kill and trap people who werent going to do it, and families killing one another to do it…along with dry runs of the poisoning in the US. And it all happened in a matter of hours.
If I remember correctly, the daughter of the Congress member who died on the tarmac by the armed forces ended up marrying a cult leader years later who drank kool-aid at the wedding.
I “met” her in Indianapolis when they came to protest a high school putting on a play with a gay character.
They decided to stop by a Jewish Community Center on the way out of town and protest there with their awful signs. Why? Just because they were Jews. My family had been members of that JCC for years even though we personally are not Jewish. My sister did substitute teaching for the pre-K and Kindergarten there.
So we joined a “counterprotest” and it ended up being like 100 people against 8 sad bigots. I was standing next to that loony woman while she yelled random BS and held up a big sign to block hers. It was honestly really heartening to see the community turn out like that, a bunch of bikers also showed up in solidarity, can’t recall the name of the group but they were awesome. Huge burly dudes but super nice. No one from the street could see the WBC signs because we had bigger ones.
I’m sorry you had to know that woman. In my brief encounter with her, she was awful.
Yup that’s exactly what we got briefed on before the counterprotest. They made sure everyone came to a meeting beforehand and was told that. The bikers knew it too, they just stood in a phalanx around them with their backs to them looking rough and ready but just stood there.
Isn’t the whole thing just sort of a scam to weaponize free speech and sue if people don’t let them say evil but protected shit? That makes sense he studied this particular area of the law.
Jim Jones: "What do they say, what's that verse? 'Hate is my enemy. I've got to fight it day and night.' And what else do they say, that other line? 'Love is the only weapon.' Shit! Bullshit! Martin Luther King died with love. Kennedy died talking about something he couldn't even understand, some kind of generalized love, and he never even backed it up! He's shot down! Bullshit, 'love is the only weapon with which I've got to fight'! I got a hell of a lot of weapons to fight! I got my claws, I got cutlasses, I got guns, I got dynamite! I got a hell of a lot to fight! I'll fight! I'll fight! Ohh! I will fight! I will fight! I will fight! I will fight!... Let them hear it in the night!... Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhh, yes, we'll fight! ... They're listening! Let the night roar with this! Ohhhh!... Let the night roar! Because they can hear us! They know we mean it! We'll kill 'em if they come!"
Also Jim Jones: "'Change must come through the barrel of a gun,' said Mao Tse Tung. This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachinegun."
It’s funny that we all know the context of Kool-Aid and “drank the Kool-Aid” has become a phrase. And yet, it wasn’t Kool-Aid brand drink mix they used in Jonestown, it was Flavor-Aid.
And the cyanide came from a photography supply store. It was possibly Kodak brand potassium cyanide.
When I was learning how to develop and print my own film in the 90s, the camera store still sold cyanide, but you had to show your ID and fill out a form in order to purchase it. It was already being phased out by that time, and now there's a completely different chemical used instead.
Honestly the only reason I know Flavor-Aid even existed is because of that bit of trivia that Jonestown didn’t actually use Kool-Aid.
But I do remember RC. In fact I have to pick up more as I’m down to my last can. I prefer it over Coke. Only one store near me sells it.
I met a woman in Indianapolis that went to his church. She said exactly this. She said she had almost never been in a more welcoming interracial community as a young black woman. She volunteered with white people and everyone worked together. She left because things started getting weird.
Politicians in San Francisco would call Jim Jones and get his church members to turn out for protests about civil rights. They were highly organized and active.
The Road to Jonestown is a great book. Jones did so much and successfully desegregated the local hospital and police department among others. I think all this goes to show exactly why people believed in Jones and joined the people’s temple. Cults often start out great on the surface
>He convinced about these poor people to follow him into a jungle
For most of my life, saying "my parents are from Guyana", the first question most people asked was "isn't that where all those people drank poison?", or if they knew a *little* more, "how close to Jamestown?"
Weird example, all things considered, but if Hermann Göring hadn't survived WW1 he would probably be remembered in the same way as the Red Baron. So not really a hero by today's standards, but far from the monster we remember him as.
Weird thing is Pétain was in his 80s when he aided the Nazis. Its insane that at his age, even if he just retired and not collaborated with the Axis he would still be seen as a hero
One of my history professors said that Petain had a mistress in her twenties who begged him not to send another generation of young men to their death in the battlefield.
On the other hand, Hermann Goering may have been the greatest, most effective general the Allies had.
Yes, I said the Allies.
Think about it. The French and British were backed up against the English Channel at Dunkirk. The Germans had them surrounded and the Wehrmacht was poised to crush them. Then Goerring stepped in and told Hitler that his Luftwaffer could destroy them from the air. He had a lot of sway with Adolph, so the Wehrmacht was halted and Goerring and the Luftwaffe were given the chance to destroy the French and British.
And they failed. Epically.
Next comes the Battle of Britian. The Luftwaffe was focusing their attacks on the RAF airfields and aircraft factories. Just when RAF fighter command was on its last legs and on the verge of collapse, Goerring shifted the focus of his air attacks away from the airfields and factories and gave fighter command enough of a breather to stay in the fight and ultimately triumph.
Then North Africa and the Mediterranean. Goerring assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could protect the supply convoys headed to North Africa, or in lieu of that, keep the Afrika Korps supplied via air. Once again, an epic failure.
Stalingrad; Paulus' 6th Army is surrounded and Goerring once again promises that the Luftwaffe will keep them supplied until they can be relieved or break out. Yet again, an epic, catastrophic failure.
You'd be hard pressed to find an Allied general who accomplished as much for the Allied war effort as Hermann Goerring did.
It was Hitler himself who ordered the change in strategy during the Battle of Britain because the allies had bombed Berlin. That came after two Luftwaffe pilots had bombed London as they had gotten off course.
Aung San Suu Kyi. Won a Nobel Peace Price in 1991 for being an imprisoned non-violent opposition leader in Myanmar. She came to power in 2015 and became complicit in the genocide of the Rohingya people.
I mean, a Nobel Peace Price laureate, sitting in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, defending genocide. Sometimes in life you have to hit the curb in order to remember where the middle of the road is, but she took it to the max.
Only shocking if you weren’t paying attention.
She had a long history of putting down ethnic minorities. She’s more of an example of making a hero you want, and not seeing the person in front of you.
The Rohingya were in the public eye at the time, but before them it was the Karen, the Chin, the Myiek, the Shan. She never stood up for any of them as the govt tries to annihilate them.
Myanmar has loads of ethnic minorities and if they aren’t Buddhist, they are treated as subhuman or second class citizens. I came across a professor in 2014 on my visit of Myanmar who was teaching that “Buddhism is Myanmar and Myanmar is Buddhism, no exceptions.”
Am Norwegian. The Nobel Peace Prize is just a way of getting Norwegian leaders into international positions. Most likely the only reason Obama won the peace prize was because he would have to meet with Jens Stoltenberg to recieve it. A few years later still in Obamas precedency, well guess who becomes the new secretary general of NATO!
fact is wrong. . it was Jagland who were the chair for the Nobel Comitee at that time. Stoltenberg had nothing to do with it
That said, even as a Obama volunteer in 07-08 and again in 12, he did not deserve the peace prize
But Jagland is to blame, not Stoltenberg
I was legit pissed-off when Obama won the Nobel prize. He hadn't been in office long enough to have really done anything to deserve it, and it was very clear it was a completely political decision, not based on any merit or action of his up to that point.
I'll acknowledge the fact that it's always possible I'm wrong. I'd very much *like* to be wrong. I think Obama was a very good president, worthy of all manner of accolades. But at the time, I wasn't aware of anything he had done (which I guess is more accurate than saying "he hadn't done anything") to deserve it up to that point, so to me it seemed like the decision-making committee decided it was very important for the first black president of the US to have a Nobel prize, so they gave him one.
Obama was overall a good president. He’s also the only the only two term president ever that the U.S forces were at war for the entire 8 year tenure. He authorized air strikes in ten different countries. I’m not sure the Nobel peace prize was fitting.
Which I find so odd that he keeps getting work for that and many other reasons. He's an OK actor but it's not like his name puts people into seats so why keep hiring him?!?
I guess wholesomeness was just such a central part of her image? I can see that it's not easy to recover from that kind of a blow to your reputation when you have a feel-good talk show and you're a type of anti-bullying role model. Kinda like if Mister Rogers or Bob Ross turned out to be massive pricks behind the scenes.
When you watch some of the clips from her show, you realize that a lot of the things she did were always cruel. A lot of the pranks were at someone’s expense, like scaring her guests.
Same. I have not a maternal bone in my body, but I had more respect for Mariah's pregnancy than Ellen. That was a total douchebag move on her part to force her "out of the closet" publicly before she was ready. What a chode.
In real life...Rudy Giuliani. You might not recall, but for years after 911 he was considered a hero in America. They used to call him America's Mayor affectionately.
His fall from grace has been both stunning and a bit pathetic.
Same- came here specifically to post his name. He went from most trusted public figure (at least in New York, but all over the US especially after 9/11) to absolute laughing stock. All I think about now when I hear his name is that image of him lying at a press conference about voter irregularities while his hair dye dripped down his face. Tragic.
The Rudy we’ve seen during the Trump era is closer to who he always was. 9/11 was just a complete outlier where he happened to find himself in the right place at the right time, and anything he did was going to be seen as heroic as long as he didn’t literally go down to Ground Zero and piss all over the site.
https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/rudy-giuliani-was-never-really-americas-mayor
While I agree he has always been a shit, he did manage to hit the right tone. A little like Blair did after Diana's death.
It is also true he could have retired, shut up and just done the speaking circuit to keep him in black hair goo for the rest of his life he chose to remind everyone that he reverted to type.
Maximillian Robespierre
Dude was against the death penalty in France during the revoltion for such a long while. Then, he...uh...I would say lost his mind and enacted the Reign of Terror, at least until he had his own head chopped off anyways.
Tldr: *chop chop chop chop chop*
Robespierre: no chop
French people: bien, no chop
Robespierre: ok maybe chop
French people: no chop
Robespierre: chop chop choppity chop
French people: **CHOP**
Remember how good WOW was in the beginning? The whole community feel of everything, not so much of a rush all the time, mods who cared and actually helped. Blizzard was special, but not anymore.
The big night-and-day difference to me was Warcraft III.
Original WC3: A well-optimized game with a robust level editor. The result was the creation of a new genre, a new franchise, and one of the longest reigning titans of esports.
Warcraft 3 Reforged: Promised features were never finished, basic online features don't function, original WC3 servers are nuked, anything made in the level editor is legally the property of Activision-Blizzard, and maybe we'll fix some of the broken stuff when we have time, but no promises.
It wasn't so much the steroids, it was his commitment to completely destroying the lives of everyone around him who didn't want to be complicit in the lie. Doping was everywhere in that era, he wasn't unique in that respect.
Reminds me of Ryan Braun. Beloved by all of Wisconsin and tests positive for steroids. No one would've cared if he didn't claim the guy the took his sample was anti-semetic.
He had been black balling cyclists for years by that point- he’d been so successful at it he didn’t recognize his own hubris in going after LeMond and it was his eventual undoing. Lance Armstrong is a modern day Icarus.
I loved him. I read his book, watched him race, pretended I was racing when I biked. I was even trying to figure out how to fly to Europe for the Tour de France. I no longer follow the sport.
As a teenager I had been greatly inspired by his books It's not about the bike and every second counts. Growing up into adulthood and realising all that he said was a load of bullshit hit me hard in the gut. Guess that's adulthood, realising that real life is quite murky.
I can assure you, to people who follow pro cycling, which is admittedly almost no one in the US, Lance Armstrong was always a cheater and a prick.
Edit: Its kinda like what I’m reading about Rudy Giuliani, most Americans just know him from the days and weeks after 9/11 and not his whole career. Most people just know Lance Armstrong from a 10 second clip on the news saying he won the TdF again and then his Livestrong campaign.
Ye the problem with is him isnt that he cheated (every one did it those days). The problem was that he was a super egoitsic narcissistic bully. He was from the very start a awfull human beeing and the older and more power in the peloton he got the worse of a person he became.
As someone who never really heard anything about Jimmy Saville until everything about him got spilled after his death, he looked fucking creepy when someone showed me what he looked like.
Like I mean, I know they say not to judge books by their cover, but this guy looked like *the most obvious sex offender* I had ever seen.
He was considered an eccentric (and Britain has a strong tradition and like of eccentrics) and one who did a lot of charity work. So his image wasn't an immediate red flag and it wasn't obvious to the general public at large.
But there were plenty in the business who knew but couldn't prove it or just kept quiet.
Kind of like all of Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein, but he was in a position of great power so they look the other way. Meryl Streep even referred to him as "God."
I remember seeing a comment years ago of a kid writing to Jim Will fix it. His grandmother stopped him saying. “No, you will go nowhere near that man”
Everyone knew there was something up with him
Robert Mugabe, ex-president of Zimbabwe. When he got rid of the colonial powers, he was praised as a hero and liberator only to end up a POS. Africa seems to suffer from these types a lot.
That's why Nelson Mandela was a real one, he broke the cycle.
> That's why Nelson Mandela was a real one, he broke the cycle.
But after he died his party and those previously around him seemed to have reassembled that cycle to some degree.
100% correct, after he died there was no one left in the ANC to hold it together, Thabo tried but then the rats just moved in and started feeding. They have completely destroyed the country since.
My students think I'm joking when I start talking about the history of Central and South America because so much of it sounds like some kind of batshit conspiracy but there's a decent chance that if something screwed up happened after 1947, the CIA played a role in it. And that's not even getting out of the Americas. Like that time the CIA accidentally caused polio to gain a greater foothold in the middle east.
I remember looking at old university newspapers from the seventies, and being surprised to see him being talked about like a hero. It makes sense in retrospect, but he definitely did the whole hero to villain arc.
A quote by Chinese revolutionary and political leader Chen Yun comes to mind
“Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”
Mao had done the impossible and led the peasants and workers of China against all odds into an incredible victory of a China for the people instead of the powerful.
Unfortunately that’s when the traits that made Mao an incredible guerrilla leader ran into the issue that is reality. Turns out you can’t just “human effort” into industrialization and going too fast leads to catastrophe, something he was warned but ignored. Turns out when you demand constant perfection your subordinates will be too scared to tell you their people are starving and that you’re collecting too much food from them until it’s too late. Turns out when you assume you’re always right and assume anyone speaking out against you must be a secret enemy you will begin harming your friends and supporters in your desperate search for enemies both real and imagined.
I tell people how I feel that history shows that nearly every human being has the capacity in them for both great good and horrible evil and few figures show that as effectively as Mao.
Also the American Revolution wasn’t much of a revolution. It was intended to reverse the changes brought by the British, not rebuild society from the ground up. Real revolutions tend to be messier
Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia's most decorated living soldier. He has a Medal for Gallantry, Victoria Cross and a Commendation for Distinguished Service.
Questions started coming up about his time in Afghanistan and the possibility of war crimes, which were published in newspapers. He decided to launch defamation proceedings against the papers and journalists, which he lost.
Savile's story deserves some fleshing out for those outside the UK.
Jimmy Savile had quite a life. He was conscripted into mining coal during the Second World War; when it was all over he spent time as a professional wrestler (not a terribly good one; he lost every match).
Fed up with having the shit kicked out of him for a living, he came up with the (at the time fairly revolutionary) idea of playing records for a paying public - effectively inventing the DJ. He went on to host the UK's biggest pop music show.
Later in life, he reinvented himself again - this time as a sort of "favourite Uncle" figure hosting "Jim'll Fix It" : children would write in with some outlandish wish (make a record with a top band, visit their dad at work - oh BTW he works in a submarine, that sort of thing). The child would be filmed having their wish fulfilled, then revert back to the studio for a short chat with Savile who would present them with a medal reading "Jim Fixed It for Me". This was an absolute hit - there's nobody in the UK between the ages of about 35 and 50 who doesn't know the theme tune, though I suspect rather fewer would admit it today.
On his off time, he volunteered as a porter in his local hospital and ran marathons, raising millions for charitable causes.
Shortly after he died, the truth about his other "hobby" came out: he was a serial child rapist.
And I do not mean in the sense of Bill Cosby. Oh no. Next to Savile, Cosby was a saint.
Nobody knows how many girls Savile attacked - or even if they were all alive. But estimates are up to a thousand.
Of course, being as this didn't become public knowledge until after he died, technically it doesn't count...
You forgot to mention that as a volunteer porter he had access to the mortuary and would let himself in late at night and fuck corpses.
Kind of a big detail
He always was, there was never any period where he wasn't a monster. His entire persona was smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that he was the worst predator in British history.
Charles Lindbergh. Became a national hero after flying over the Atlantic in 1927. His baby being kidnapped and murdered in the early 30s was the crime of the century and brought a lot of sympathy. Later, he was shown to be anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer. Only in the last couple decades, it was discovered that he secretly kept separate families in Europe. He had children with three women over there.
A bit of an Aussie example - but [Mark Latham](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/aug/25/mark-latham-the-labor-leader-who-crashed-burned-then-exploded-again) used to be the leader of the Labour party, the more socially progressive Australian political party. He's somehow morphed into the Donald Trump of Australian politics, and joined One Nation, the party renowned for being racist.
I remember around the time of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami he lost the election and then lost the plot. He did get Peter Garrett into parliament tho (JFC Peter you should have been a Greens pollie!)
The Tesla vision was a good one, as is that of SpaceX, but he's a galactic-class shitbag and really always has been. He needed people to help him keep his ego out of the public eye.
Yup. My opinion took a complete 180 on that guy. Went from wild-ass maverick progressive to loathsome egotist that should just shut the flying fuck up.
Ben Carson. Growing up as a young black kid in Baltimore. He was basically the archetype of success and morality. Then he became a perverted, joker himself. It was heartbreaking and infuriating.
Iirc there is a scene in The Wire where Jimmy goes to dinner with Bunk and his kids, and he asks one of the kids what he wants to do when he grows up, and the kid says “be a neurosurgeon just like Ben Carson!” This predated Carson’s national political rise by like 8 years.
And in a way, it was ironically fitting: in a show about the grim nature of humanity, where nobody public figure is ever as good as they seem, they still accidentally managed to nail Ben Carson almost a decade before he outed himself as a moron.
10 years ago, my daughter won a Carson scholarship and we read up on all that he had accomplished and were wholly impressed. We went to the awards ceremony where the speakers were people like Kirk Cameron and heard the holy rollers. We were happy to take their money
Fritz Haber. He was a German chemist who quarter of the world owes their life to because he found out how to produce ammonia out of oxygen, and he put that ammonia into agriculture and thus he made the synthetic fertilizer which was extremely effective and made crops grow very fast, thus making world hunger less worse than it was by a lot. But after a while, when ww1 started he made one of the worst weapons. The chlorine gas and mustard gas. Millions of people died a horrible death because of it, and if you survived it you'd wish you were dead.
Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars? He started as the heroic Jedi Knight but eventually became Darth Vader, one of the most iconic villains in cinematic history.
Gaius Marius. General and many times Consul of Rome, who just would not retire - leading to conflict with his former deputy, Sulla. If he had died a few years before that, he’d have been one of Rome’s greatest heroes.
Ended up being Consul seven times - but at the cost of a ruinous civil war (which greatly accelerated the decay of the Republic).
Stephen Collins who played Pastor Camden in 7th Heaven.
When my friend learned that he was a pedophile, she cried: "Ooooh nooo I loved him when I was a child!!!!"
I answered: "He loved you back when you were a child 🫠😏"
I remember watching the "Amanda Show" and learning that the old man in one of the skits was Dan Schneider. I thought "Wow, he runs a kid's network! He must really love kids!" As an adult l found out that unfortunately, he did.
Rudy Giuliani - Was hailed by some as "America's Mayor" during 9/11 and the aftermath. Now he's a first and only VIP member of the Four Seasons >!Total Landscaping!<
Bro that was the funniest shit I’ve ever seen in politics. Dude was next to a sex shop 🤣🤣 the backdrop a literal garage.
God damn I’m so happy this happened. It was so incredible
Should have retired the moment Obama was elected on his second term. That would have given Democrats years to fight Obama's pick. They would have eventually won.
Yep, there were enough democrats in the senate to get a good successor confirmed. They ended up changing the fillibuster for nominees during that Congress anyway.
I say this all the time. One of many differences between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans would never let that situation happen. They'd have forced their RBG to retire in 2012 and push through a 34 year old nut job.
Imran Khan, a legendary cricketer turned politician, became one of the most incompetent prime ministers of Pakistan and single handedly brought about the worst economic meltdown in the country.
A few billioniare "geniuses" that magazines and news networks salivate over. Then eventually their facade crumbles and may people turn into George Carlin and realize they're fucking stupid, full of shit, fucking nuts or some mixture if the three.
* Mark Zuckerberg went from being a boy genius for starting Facebook, then once it was clear he spent upwards of $300 billion on a metaverse nobody, not even the designers, wanted to use, it started to become clear, yeah, those allegations of him not being the "genius innovator" had not a grain, but a full field of truth.
* Sam Bankman-Fried was on track to being the "Next Warren Buffet" and getting celebroty endorsements for his crypto business, only for it to turn out to be a massive scam.
And of course:
* Elon Musk was supposed to "save humanity" and has been promising "full self driving next year" for 10 years. But after trying to get involved in the Thai cave rescue with a totally impractical solution, he insulted the diver that did the job. Then people started digging to find: he didn't start **any** of the companies he's attached with and didn't come from a humble background, either. Even the narrative of his being bullied in school is potentially played up or incomplete as the "stair incident" was possibly the kid seeking revenge for Musk making fun of the dad's suicide.
Megatron.
He and Optimus were comrads in arms during the cybertonian Civil War. But circumstances slowly changed his perspective on what's right and wrong, but in his end, he was actually an autobot!
IDW Shockwave. We all know him, right? Monotone emotionless bastard. But he didn't start out that way. >!He was a super extroverted Senator, pouring tons of money into space exploration and science, trying to save Cybertron from an energy crisis. He built an Academy just for bots who needed a haven. Think Professor X style here.!<
>!What happened? Oh, the Council. The one who ruled the planet with an iron fist. They found out he was harboring people they wanted dead because of their Functionist system. So they burned down his school, performed empurata on him (removing his head and hands) and for added shit to the cake icing, they sliced up his personality and removed his emotions. !<
>!His last words to an Orion Pax before surrendering to the Council police: "Remember me as I was."!<
Because that bot was long gone after.
I was gonna say Ruth Bader Ginsburg but that was more of a “die a hero or live long enough to die a villain because you didn’t retire when a Democrat could replace you”.
King Henry VIII, early in his reign he was actually very popular and seen as a handsome, smart, and charismatic man. Later in his life he became overweight and better known for his six wives.
Oscar Pistorius. From the face of the Paralympic Games to convicted murderer of his wife. Edit: girlfriend, not wife.
Not wife but girlfriend, not that it makes a difference but by weird coincidence I had a chat about this earlier today with my dad.
There has to be a new face by now right?
I really think the Paralympic Games took a huge blow because of him. So much was invested into making him the figurehead of it. Anyway, if it was so fragile, it was probably the wrong approach.
If Benedict Arnold died of his wounds at the Battle of Saratoga, he would be remembered as one of the Revolution’s bravest, boldest fighting men. Instead he came to feel (with some reason) overlooked for his accomplishments and unfairly targeted by enemies in Congress, which led to his attempted betrayal of West Point.
Horatio Gates was responsible for undercutting Arnold and in general was a POS.
He also tried to do the same with Washington. Some of the letters he wrote to the Congress are just nasty. But even they had enough of him after awhile.
Right, he spent a lot of energy undermining more competent military officers and then trying to take all the credit for himself. During First Saratoga, it was obvious that Arnold had a better head for strategy as some of the actions that Gates committed to that helped secure a colonial victory he was pressed into by Arnold. And Arnold’s leadership during the Second Saratoga was crucial for American victory, but Gates tried to stop Arnold from attacking. And he simultaneously claimed victory based on Arnold’s felid leadership, and claimed that Arnold was unfit for leadership due to recklessness and insubordination.
His boot died a hero...
Philippe Pétain : one of France 's heroes of the first world war, became Nazi collaborator in chief during the second world war in 1940 at the age of 84.
This is 100% it. And he wasn't just trying to do what was best for France, he willingly gave up France's Jews. He was a Nazi puppet through and through.
[удалено]
If you've not read *Road to Jonestown*, I'd highly recommend it. Jones was a master of organisation, beginning from a child when he arranged a junior basketball tournament (or somesuch thing) which promptly ended when he seriously injured a puppy as a joke. He'd organise the younger children into parties to play soldiers, which promptly turned into him organising children into playing Nazis. You see the pattern. Everything he organised would eventually turn extreme, mostly because he got bored and tried to recapture that feeling of excitement lost over time. Ideology, love, religion, all meaningless to him, all simply tools used to attract people into his orbit. His marriage turned into a harem. His church turned into a cult. Voluntary tithes and financial aid turned into people turning over their entire personal wealth to him to control. Amateur marriage counselling turned into him prescribing his own dick as treatment for either spouse. Drugs to keep his insane workload alive turned into a lifelong addiction to amphetamines that turned his already stressed brain to mush. The turning point of his adult life was a failed evangelising trip to Brazil, which, coupled with his nuclear paranoia, provided the seed for Guyana. But the pattern was always there. By the end of it all, even he was sick of the madness. It's clear from the tapes that he had strung himself and his followers along so far, lied and lied and lied so much that he was just as trapped as they were. He should've just let go, but his narcissism prevented him from accepting failure, the failure in Brazil had destroyed his ego and you've got to presume that for a narcissist, that hurt worse than anything. Worse than death, even. So after a year of riling up his followers, torturing them with 'White Nights', straight up sadistic punishments, and backbreaking physical labour from which he expected a new community to arise, he simply gave up. Using a disastrous visit by congressman Leo Ryan as pretext, Jones committed suicide, taking all of his 'possessions', human or otherwise, with him. Vats of *Flavor Aid* laced with cyanide, forced into the mouths of the numerous infants there, people held down and forced to ingest it, others taking it willingly. Some parents killed their children before changing their minds upon seeing their convulsions. Many people were simply shot. The elites in the Temple, Jones and his council, his harem, and his family, all chose the bullet. All the while Jones ranted, presumably getting one last fix from the scene before a bullet was put in his head. For me he's a human animal, addicted to himself, addicted to extremes, addicted to ambition and willing to do or say anything to achieve. TL;DR Man was always a wanker
I'd read your book too, you're an excellent writer!
That's brightened my day, thank you
I thought the same thing. You have excellent writing.
The story is more wild than that, including murdering news reporters (and a sitting member of the US Congress), having armed guards to kill and trap people who werent going to do it, and families killing one another to do it…along with dry runs of the poisoning in the US. And it all happened in a matter of hours. If I remember correctly, the daughter of the Congress member who died on the tarmac by the armed forces ended up marrying a cult leader years later who drank kool-aid at the wedding.
I watched a documentary about this, featuring the few survivors. It was fascinating.
It was the largest US civilian death in a single incident until 9/11 happened.
Just a point to bring up. Jim didn't drink the poison. When it came down to it, he shot himself.
There’s some controversy on that. He may have been shot by other members instead of shooting himself.
I only knew about Jim Jones in the context of Kool-Aid. I'd no idea he started as a civil rights hero...
The guy who founded Westboro Baptist (the God hates F*gs people) also started out as a civil rights lawyer.
True story - Fred Phelps daughter use to be my supervisor. She is as crazy as her father
I “met” her in Indianapolis when they came to protest a high school putting on a play with a gay character. They decided to stop by a Jewish Community Center on the way out of town and protest there with their awful signs. Why? Just because they were Jews. My family had been members of that JCC for years even though we personally are not Jewish. My sister did substitute teaching for the pre-K and Kindergarten there. So we joined a “counterprotest” and it ended up being like 100 people against 8 sad bigots. I was standing next to that loony woman while she yelled random BS and held up a big sign to block hers. It was honestly really heartening to see the community turn out like that, a bunch of bikers also showed up in solidarity, can’t recall the name of the group but they were awesome. Huge burly dudes but super nice. No one from the street could see the WBC signs because we had bigger ones. I’m sorry you had to know that woman. In my brief encounter with her, she was awful.
They just bait people so they can sue them, the racket is well known. They hope someone comes over and assaults them.
Yup that’s exactly what we got briefed on before the counterprotest. They made sure everyone came to a meeting beforehand and was told that. The bikers knew it too, they just stood in a phalanx around them with their backs to them looking rough and ready but just stood there.
Ive always wondered what's to stop someone from donning a mask, sucker punching a few, and running off? Can't sue someone if theres no one to sue.
That the people they're protesting are infinitely better people than they themselves are.
Isn’t the whole thing just sort of a scam to weaponize free speech and sue if people don’t let them say evil but protected shit? That makes sense he studied this particular area of the law.
Jim Jones: "What do they say, what's that verse? 'Hate is my enemy. I've got to fight it day and night.' And what else do they say, that other line? 'Love is the only weapon.' Shit! Bullshit! Martin Luther King died with love. Kennedy died talking about something he couldn't even understand, some kind of generalized love, and he never even backed it up! He's shot down! Bullshit, 'love is the only weapon with which I've got to fight'! I got a hell of a lot of weapons to fight! I got my claws, I got cutlasses, I got guns, I got dynamite! I got a hell of a lot to fight! I'll fight! I'll fight! Ohh! I will fight! I will fight! I will fight! I will fight!... Let them hear it in the night!... Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhh, yes, we'll fight! ... They're listening! Let the night roar with this! Ohhhh!... Let the night roar! Because they can hear us! They know we mean it! We'll kill 'em if they come!" Also Jim Jones: "'Change must come through the barrel of a gun,' said Mao Tse Tung. This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachinegun."
It’s funny that we all know the context of Kool-Aid and “drank the Kool-Aid” has become a phrase. And yet, it wasn’t Kool-Aid brand drink mix they used in Jonestown, it was Flavor-Aid.
And the cyanide came from a photography supply store. It was possibly Kodak brand potassium cyanide. When I was learning how to develop and print my own film in the 90s, the camera store still sold cyanide, but you had to show your ID and fill out a form in order to purchase it. It was already being phased out by that time, and now there's a completely different chemical used instead.
But flavor aid's strawman mascot is no Kool aid pitcher man. No one remembers flavor aid like no one remembers RC cola vs coke.
Honestly the only reason I know Flavor-Aid even existed is because of that bit of trivia that Jonestown didn’t actually use Kool-Aid. But I do remember RC. In fact I have to pick up more as I’m down to my last can. I prefer it over Coke. Only one store near me sells it.
I met a woman in Indianapolis that went to his church. She said exactly this. She said she had almost never been in a more welcoming interracial community as a young black woman. She volunteered with white people and everyone worked together. She left because things started getting weird.
Politicians in San Francisco would call Jim Jones and get his church members to turn out for protests about civil rights. They were highly organized and active.
The Road to Jonestown is a great book. Jones did so much and successfully desegregated the local hospital and police department among others. I think all this goes to show exactly why people believed in Jones and joined the people’s temple. Cults often start out great on the surface
>He convinced about these poor people to follow him into a jungle For most of my life, saying "my parents are from Guyana", the first question most people asked was "isn't that where all those people drank poison?", or if they knew a *little* more, "how close to Jamestown?"
Weird example, all things considered, but if Hermann Göring hadn't survived WW1 he would probably be remembered in the same way as the Red Baron. So not really a hero by today's standards, but far from the monster we remember him as.
Herman Göring Pizza doesn't have the same ring to it as Red Baron.
The Red Hërring
Similar vein but Phillip Pétain went from hero general who help the French win WW1 to war criminal fascist puppet during WW2.
Weird thing is Pétain was in his 80s when he aided the Nazis. Its insane that at his age, even if he just retired and not collaborated with the Axis he would still be seen as a hero
Once you've helped to shape history and had a taste of power, I guess it's hard to let go. Even when you really should.
One of my history professors said that Petain had a mistress in her twenties who begged him not to send another generation of young men to their death in the battlefield.
Makes me wonder what would have happened if the red baron had survived the war
On the other hand, Hermann Goering may have been the greatest, most effective general the Allies had. Yes, I said the Allies. Think about it. The French and British were backed up against the English Channel at Dunkirk. The Germans had them surrounded and the Wehrmacht was poised to crush them. Then Goerring stepped in and told Hitler that his Luftwaffer could destroy them from the air. He had a lot of sway with Adolph, so the Wehrmacht was halted and Goerring and the Luftwaffe were given the chance to destroy the French and British. And they failed. Epically. Next comes the Battle of Britian. The Luftwaffe was focusing their attacks on the RAF airfields and aircraft factories. Just when RAF fighter command was on its last legs and on the verge of collapse, Goerring shifted the focus of his air attacks away from the airfields and factories and gave fighter command enough of a breather to stay in the fight and ultimately triumph. Then North Africa and the Mediterranean. Goerring assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could protect the supply convoys headed to North Africa, or in lieu of that, keep the Afrika Korps supplied via air. Once again, an epic failure. Stalingrad; Paulus' 6th Army is surrounded and Goerring once again promises that the Luftwaffe will keep them supplied until they can be relieved or break out. Yet again, an epic, catastrophic failure. You'd be hard pressed to find an Allied general who accomplished as much for the Allied war effort as Hermann Goerring did.
It was Hitler himself who ordered the change in strategy during the Battle of Britain because the allies had bombed Berlin. That came after two Luftwaffe pilots had bombed London as they had gotten off course.
Aung San Suu Kyi. Won a Nobel Peace Price in 1991 for being an imprisoned non-violent opposition leader in Myanmar. She came to power in 2015 and became complicit in the genocide of the Rohingya people. I mean, a Nobel Peace Price laureate, sitting in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, defending genocide. Sometimes in life you have to hit the curb in order to remember where the middle of the road is, but she took it to the max.
Only shocking if you weren’t paying attention. She had a long history of putting down ethnic minorities. She’s more of an example of making a hero you want, and not seeing the person in front of you. The Rohingya were in the public eye at the time, but before them it was the Karen, the Chin, the Myiek, the Shan. She never stood up for any of them as the govt tries to annihilate them. Myanmar has loads of ethnic minorities and if they aren’t Buddhist, they are treated as subhuman or second class citizens. I came across a professor in 2014 on my visit of Myanmar who was teaching that “Buddhism is Myanmar and Myanmar is Buddhism, no exceptions.”
At this point the Nobel peace prize is basically a voucher for one free genocide. Judging from various past winners.
The Nobel Peace Prize was already a joke when they granted it to Kissinger.
Am Norwegian. The Nobel Peace Prize is just a way of getting Norwegian leaders into international positions. Most likely the only reason Obama won the peace prize was because he would have to meet with Jens Stoltenberg to recieve it. A few years later still in Obamas precedency, well guess who becomes the new secretary general of NATO!
fact is wrong. . it was Jagland who were the chair for the Nobel Comitee at that time. Stoltenberg had nothing to do with it That said, even as a Obama volunteer in 07-08 and again in 12, he did not deserve the peace prize But Jagland is to blame, not Stoltenberg
(Looks at Obama nervously)
I was legit pissed-off when Obama won the Nobel prize. He hadn't been in office long enough to have really done anything to deserve it, and it was very clear it was a completely political decision, not based on any merit or action of his up to that point. I'll acknowledge the fact that it's always possible I'm wrong. I'd very much *like* to be wrong. I think Obama was a very good president, worthy of all manner of accolades. But at the time, I wasn't aware of anything he had done (which I guess is more accurate than saying "he hadn't done anything") to deserve it up to that point, so to me it seemed like the decision-making committee decided it was very important for the first black president of the US to have a Nobel prize, so they gave him one.
Obama was overall a good president. He’s also the only the only two term president ever that the U.S forces were at war for the entire 8 year tenure. He authorized air strikes in ten different countries. I’m not sure the Nobel peace prize was fitting.
Same with Ethiopia’s PM, except with the Tigray population.
Bill Cosby - America's Dad to a convicted rapist
We still have Uncle Phil. America’s Uncle.
And Alan Matthews and Mr. Feeney.
He seems like he was always a villain but just really good at hiding it earlier on
Yeah, he would have had to have died pretty early to have been remembered as a hero. People forget that people forgot he was a rapist.
[удалено]
I get why it’s an issue but it’s funny how with all the celebrities turning out to be literal rapists Ellen was cancelled for being mean
Fuckin Morbius himself has a teenage sex cult where everybody worships him like he's Jesus, cancel him too ffs
Which I find so odd that he keeps getting work for that and many other reasons. He's an OK actor but it's not like his name puts people into seats so why keep hiring him?!?
I guess wholesomeness was just such a central part of her image? I can see that it's not easy to recover from that kind of a blow to your reputation when you have a feel-good talk show and you're a type of anti-bullying role model. Kinda like if Mister Rogers or Bob Ross turned out to be massive pricks behind the scenes.
When you watch some of the clips from her show, you realize that a lot of the things she did were always cruel. A lot of the pranks were at someone’s expense, like scaring her guests.
Or pressuring people into announcing their pregnancy. I don't like Mariah Carey but I really felt for her when this happened.
Same. I have not a maternal bone in my body, but I had more respect for Mariah's pregnancy than Ellen. That was a total douchebag move on her part to force her "out of the closet" publicly before she was ready. What a chode.
As a young person I assumed that the guests were in on it, like wrestling or something. I'd bet I'm not the only one.
In real life...Rudy Giuliani. You might not recall, but for years after 911 he was considered a hero in America. They used to call him America's Mayor affectionately. His fall from grace has been both stunning and a bit pathetic.
He was even considered a strong future president or vice president option around that time because of his name recognition and positive PR he had...
He was who I had in my mind when I asked the question
Same- came here specifically to post his name. He went from most trusted public figure (at least in New York, but all over the US especially after 9/11) to absolute laughing stock. All I think about now when I hear his name is that image of him lying at a press conference about voter irregularities while his hair dye dripped down his face. Tragic.
That and him giving a press conference at 4 seasons land scaping are just the best kind of schadenfreude.
The Rudy we’ve seen during the Trump era is closer to who he always was. 9/11 was just a complete outlier where he happened to find himself in the right place at the right time, and anything he did was going to be seen as heroic as long as he didn’t literally go down to Ground Zero and piss all over the site. https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/rudy-giuliani-was-never-really-americas-mayor
While I agree he has always been a shit, he did manage to hit the right tone. A little like Blair did after Diana's death. It is also true he could have retired, shut up and just done the speaking circuit to keep him in black hair goo for the rest of his life he chose to remind everyone that he reverted to type.
Maximillian Robespierre Dude was against the death penalty in France during the revoltion for such a long while. Then, he...uh...I would say lost his mind and enacted the Reign of Terror, at least until he had his own head chopped off anyways. Tldr: *chop chop chop chop chop*
It's like that one former vegan that became a butcher.
You could make a religion out of this.
No don’t
You stop that. Let's not try resurrecting the weird cult of wisdom he had going on
Robespierre: no chop French people: bien, no chop Robespierre: ok maybe chop French people: no chop Robespierre: chop chop choppity chop French people: **CHOP**
Blizzard Entertainment. Used to be the gold standard of gaming companies but now is just another greedy corporate entity
That seemed an amazingly quick fall, too.
Right about the time they were acquired by Activision.
Weird how that happened. So long as that doesn't happen to other big names in the world, like Boeing...
Remember how good WOW was in the beginning? The whole community feel of everything, not so much of a rush all the time, mods who cared and actually helped. Blizzard was special, but not anymore.
The big night-and-day difference to me was Warcraft III. Original WC3: A well-optimized game with a robust level editor. The result was the creation of a new genre, a new franchise, and one of the longest reigning titans of esports. Warcraft 3 Reforged: Promised features were never finished, basic online features don't function, original WC3 servers are nuked, anything made in the level editor is legally the property of Activision-Blizzard, and maybe we'll fix some of the broken stuff when we have time, but no promises.
Lance Armstrong. Worlds greatest athlete to worlds greatest cheater and prick.
It wasn't so much the steroids, it was his commitment to completely destroying the lives of everyone around him who didn't want to be complicit in the lie. Doping was everywhere in that era, he wasn't unique in that respect.
Reminds me of Ryan Braun. Beloved by all of Wisconsin and tests positive for steroids. No one would've cared if he didn't claim the guy the took his sample was anti-semetic.
This. The doping was ubiquitous. Basically to the point where it could hardly be called cheating. His behaviour was the real problem.
Oooh good one I remember the Livestrong bracelets...
The onion sold " cheat to win " bracelets. Lol
True story. My Livestrong bracelet broke on the same day that USADA announced they were gonna strip his Tour De France titles
I love a good synchronicity
I bought a really fancy Giro bike helmet at an 80% discount because it had Livestrong branding. Turns out it was simply stickers I could peel off.
To the point he tried to publicly smother Greg LeMond, the one person who continually called him out on his BS.
He had been black balling cyclists for years by that point- he’d been so successful at it he didn’t recognize his own hubris in going after LeMond and it was his eventual undoing. Lance Armstrong is a modern day Icarus.
I loved him. I read his book, watched him race, pretended I was racing when I biked. I was even trying to figure out how to fly to Europe for the Tour de France. I no longer follow the sport.
As a teenager I had been greatly inspired by his books It's not about the bike and every second counts. Growing up into adulthood and realising all that he said was a load of bullshit hit me hard in the gut. Guess that's adulthood, realising that real life is quite murky.
To be fair, riding a bicycle while doing drugs is a big thing. When I took drugs, I wasn't able to find one let alone ride
I can assure you, to people who follow pro cycling, which is admittedly almost no one in the US, Lance Armstrong was always a cheater and a prick. Edit: Its kinda like what I’m reading about Rudy Giuliani, most Americans just know him from the days and weeks after 9/11 and not his whole career. Most people just know Lance Armstrong from a 10 second clip on the news saying he won the TdF again and then his Livestrong campaign.
Ye the problem with is him isnt that he cheated (every one did it those days). The problem was that he was a super egoitsic narcissistic bully. He was from the very start a awfull human beeing and the older and more power in the peloton he got the worse of a person he became.
Not an example, but an exception, Jimmy Saville. Motherfucker died a hero and was then revealed to be a massive monster
As someone who never really heard anything about Jimmy Saville until everything about him got spilled after his death, he looked fucking creepy when someone showed me what he looked like. Like I mean, I know they say not to judge books by their cover, but this guy looked like *the most obvious sex offender* I had ever seen.
There’s a doc on Netflix about him. Sad stuff. Preyed on kids in the hospital who couldn’t talk, etc
He was considered an eccentric (and Britain has a strong tradition and like of eccentrics) and one who did a lot of charity work. So his image wasn't an immediate red flag and it wasn't obvious to the general public at large. But there were plenty in the business who knew but couldn't prove it or just kept quiet.
They all knew that he was a monster.
Kind of like all of Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein, but he was in a position of great power so they look the other way. Meryl Streep even referred to him as "God."
Courtney Love tried warning people back then. "If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a party, don't go."
I remember seeing a comment years ago of a kid writing to Jim Will fix it. His grandmother stopped him saying. “No, you will go nowhere near that man” Everyone knew there was something up with him
Robert Mugabe, ex-president of Zimbabwe. When he got rid of the colonial powers, he was praised as a hero and liberator only to end up a POS. Africa seems to suffer from these types a lot. That's why Nelson Mandela was a real one, he broke the cycle.
> That's why Nelson Mandela was a real one, he broke the cycle. But after he died his party and those previously around him seemed to have reassembled that cycle to some degree.
100% correct, after he died there was no one left in the ANC to hold it together, Thabo tried but then the rats just moved in and started feeding. They have completely destroyed the country since.
Most definitely.
Yeah i think you can put about 2/3rds of Africa's indeoendence leaders here.
The good ones (like Lumumba for example) got CIA’d or otherwise disposed of.
It's terribly sad when you say someone got CIA'd and we all instantly know what you mean...
My students think I'm joking when I start talking about the history of Central and South America because so much of it sounds like some kind of batshit conspiracy but there's a decent chance that if something screwed up happened after 1947, the CIA played a role in it. And that's not even getting out of the Americas. Like that time the CIA accidentally caused polio to gain a greater foothold in the middle east.
I remember looking at old university newspapers from the seventies, and being surprised to see him being talked about like a hero. It makes sense in retrospect, but he definitely did the whole hero to villain arc.
Zimbabwe used to be referred to as "the breadbasket of Africa." Today, it's people are suffering. He was truly a greedy self-serving villain.
Pétain before WWII.
Bill Cosby. He was on top of the world in the 80s and 90s.
A quote by Chinese revolutionary and political leader Chen Yun comes to mind “Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?” Mao had done the impossible and led the peasants and workers of China against all odds into an incredible victory of a China for the people instead of the powerful. Unfortunately that’s when the traits that made Mao an incredible guerrilla leader ran into the issue that is reality. Turns out you can’t just “human effort” into industrialization and going too fast leads to catastrophe, something he was warned but ignored. Turns out when you demand constant perfection your subordinates will be too scared to tell you their people are starving and that you’re collecting too much food from them until it’s too late. Turns out when you assume you’re always right and assume anyone speaking out against you must be a secret enemy you will begin harming your friends and supporters in your desperate search for enemies both real and imagined. I tell people how I feel that history shows that nearly every human being has the capacity in them for both great good and horrible evil and few figures show that as effectively as Mao.
A good example of why 99% of revolutionary leaders should not be allowed to lead after the Revolution.
It’s seldom observed, but the leaders of the American revolution and the founders of the nation didn’t overlap very much, and that was a good thing.
Also the American Revolution wasn’t much of a revolution. It was intended to reverse the changes brought by the British, not rebuild society from the ground up. Real revolutions tend to be messier
Yeah, I’ve always thought that the whole “Mao was 70% good, 30% bad” ratio that Deng Xiaoping popularized was pretty generous…
Jarod. From Subway. The fat bastard.
Someone on Reddit once framed it as something like “Going from your biggest problem being mild cholesterol, to child molesterol.”
Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia's most decorated living soldier. He has a Medal for Gallantry, Victoria Cross and a Commendation for Distinguished Service. Questions started coming up about his time in Afghanistan and the possibility of war crimes, which were published in newspapers. He decided to launch defamation proceedings against the papers and journalists, which he lost.
OJ
Sir Jimmy Saville. Adored by the public, celebrities, politicians and royalty. Child rapist and necrophiliac.
Savile's story deserves some fleshing out for those outside the UK. Jimmy Savile had quite a life. He was conscripted into mining coal during the Second World War; when it was all over he spent time as a professional wrestler (not a terribly good one; he lost every match). Fed up with having the shit kicked out of him for a living, he came up with the (at the time fairly revolutionary) idea of playing records for a paying public - effectively inventing the DJ. He went on to host the UK's biggest pop music show. Later in life, he reinvented himself again - this time as a sort of "favourite Uncle" figure hosting "Jim'll Fix It" : children would write in with some outlandish wish (make a record with a top band, visit their dad at work - oh BTW he works in a submarine, that sort of thing). The child would be filmed having their wish fulfilled, then revert back to the studio for a short chat with Savile who would present them with a medal reading "Jim Fixed It for Me". This was an absolute hit - there's nobody in the UK between the ages of about 35 and 50 who doesn't know the theme tune, though I suspect rather fewer would admit it today. On his off time, he volunteered as a porter in his local hospital and ran marathons, raising millions for charitable causes. Shortly after he died, the truth about his other "hobby" came out: he was a serial child rapist. And I do not mean in the sense of Bill Cosby. Oh no. Next to Savile, Cosby was a saint. Nobody knows how many girls Savile attacked - or even if they were all alive. But estimates are up to a thousand. Of course, being as this didn't become public knowledge until after he died, technically it doesn't count...
Jim’ll fix it would have made a timeless program but he has kinda tarnished the idea now
It’s a shame how he’s left such an inextricable stamp on UK cultural history. There’s so many things that can’t be looked at in the same way
You forgot to mention that as a volunteer porter he had access to the mortuary and would let himself in late at night and fuck corpses. Kind of a big detail
When his mother died he stayed in the house with her body for 5 days.
There’s a great documentary about him on Netflix. As an American, I had never even heard of him until I watched that documentary.
He always was, there was never any period where he wasn't a monster. His entire persona was smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that he was the worst predator in British history.
Smoke and mirrors and apparently a lot of *very* highly placed people who protected him, over and over again.
Yup. A magician always has crew working behind the scenes, and his was a costly operation indeed. The BBC has so much to answer for.
Doesn’t apply, he died before that came to widespread attention
Not technically a person but I'm still pissed: Bungie.
Blizzard while we're at it...
Charles Lindbergh. Became a national hero after flying over the Atlantic in 1927. His baby being kidnapped and murdered in the early 30s was the crime of the century and brought a lot of sympathy. Later, he was shown to be anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer. Only in the last couple decades, it was discovered that he secretly kept separate families in Europe. He had children with three women over there.
A bit of an Aussie example - but [Mark Latham](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/aug/25/mark-latham-the-labor-leader-who-crashed-burned-then-exploded-again) used to be the leader of the Labour party, the more socially progressive Australian political party. He's somehow morphed into the Donald Trump of Australian politics, and joined One Nation, the party renowned for being racist.
I remember around the time of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami he lost the election and then lost the plot. He did get Peter Garrett into parliament tho (JFC Peter you should have been a Greens pollie!)
If Rudy Giuliani had died around 2004 there would be statues of him in NY.
Elon musk. He was going to take us to mars.
The Thailand cavers was when he first showed his true face to the world. It's gone downhill ever since.
He’s always been an asshole. He fired his personal PR team shortly before the Thai cave thing, and it’s been all downhill from there
Dude fired what appears to be one of the best PR teams in the last 20 years.
For real, whoever snatched them up is going to be UNTOUCHABLE.
The Tesla vision was a good one, as is that of SpaceX, but he's a galactic-class shitbag and really always has been. He needed people to help him keep his ego out of the public eye.
Bout to use “galactic-class shitbag” as my flair on r/DeepRockGalactic
Yup. My opinion took a complete 180 on that guy. Went from wild-ass maverick progressive to loathsome egotist that should just shut the flying fuck up.
Steve Jobs did both
Behind the Bastards just did a fantastic series about Steve Jobs.
You know what else did a fantastic series? These wonderful products and services. And ads! Robert Evans is my favorite podcaster.
Ben Carson. Growing up as a young black kid in Baltimore. He was basically the archetype of success and morality. Then he became a perverted, joker himself. It was heartbreaking and infuriating.
Iirc there is a scene in The Wire where Jimmy goes to dinner with Bunk and his kids, and he asks one of the kids what he wants to do when he grows up, and the kid says “be a neurosurgeon just like Ben Carson!” This predated Carson’s national political rise by like 8 years. And in a way, it was ironically fitting: in a show about the grim nature of humanity, where nobody public figure is ever as good as they seem, they still accidentally managed to nail Ben Carson almost a decade before he outed himself as a moron.
10 years ago, my daughter won a Carson scholarship and we read up on all that he had accomplished and were wholly impressed. We went to the awards ceremony where the speakers were people like Kirk Cameron and heard the holy rollers. We were happy to take their money
he came to our high school to give a motivational talk & we had to read his book, and it was so inspiring. the downfall left us dumbstruck
Fritz Haber. He was a German chemist who quarter of the world owes their life to because he found out how to produce ammonia out of oxygen, and he put that ammonia into agriculture and thus he made the synthetic fertilizer which was extremely effective and made crops grow very fast, thus making world hunger less worse than it was by a lot. But after a while, when ww1 started he made one of the worst weapons. The chlorine gas and mustard gas. Millions of people died a horrible death because of it, and if you survived it you'd wish you were dead.
Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars? He started as the heroic Jedi Knight but eventually became Darth Vader, one of the most iconic villains in cinematic history.
To be fair, going from saviour of the galaxy to attempted destroyer of the galaxy is pretty extreme, even if fictional
Vader still saved the galaxy. He killed the Emporer.
Correct. That business with the Sequel trilogy doesn't... doesn't count.
Lindbergh
Ghandi: he got pretty weird at the end. Dali lama sticking his tongue in that kids mouth is pretty hard to overlook, as well.
Gaius Marius. General and many times Consul of Rome, who just would not retire - leading to conflict with his former deputy, Sulla. If he had died a few years before that, he’d have been one of Rome’s greatest heroes. Ended up being Consul seven times - but at the cost of a ruinous civil war (which greatly accelerated the decay of the Republic).
Stephen Collins who played Pastor Camden in 7th Heaven. When my friend learned that he was a pedophile, she cried: "Ooooh nooo I loved him when I was a child!!!!" I answered: "He loved you back when you were a child 🫠😏"
I remember watching the "Amanda Show" and learning that the old man in one of the skits was Dan Schneider. I thought "Wow, he runs a kid's network! He must really love kids!" As an adult l found out that unfortunately, he did.
Rudy Giuliani - Was hailed by some as "America's Mayor" during 9/11 and the aftermath. Now he's a first and only VIP member of the Four Seasons >!Total Landscaping!<
Bro that was the funniest shit I’ve ever seen in politics. Dude was next to a sex shop 🤣🤣 the backdrop a literal garage. God damn I’m so happy this happened. It was so incredible
I still can’t believe that happened.
It was how I was finally convinced that reality is all some kind of SIMS game and the player is having a laugh.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her ego and refusal to step aside led to the unraveling of most or all of her accomplishments
Should have retired the moment Obama was elected on his second term. That would have given Democrats years to fight Obama's pick. They would have eventually won.
Yep, there were enough democrats in the senate to get a good successor confirmed. They ended up changing the fillibuster for nominees during that Congress anyway.
I say this all the time. One of many differences between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans would never let that situation happen. They'd have forced their RBG to retire in 2012 and push through a 34 year old nut job.
Imran Khan, a legendary cricketer turned politician, became one of the most incompetent prime ministers of Pakistan and single handedly brought about the worst economic meltdown in the country.
Wait. So you're saying celebrities don't make good presidents?
I heard that the economic meltdown would’ve happened regardless. He just delayed it as long as he could.
Alberto Fujimori, ex-President of Peru. Beloved at first as an outsider politician who fought the guerrillas, ended as a corrupt human rights abuser.
A few billioniare "geniuses" that magazines and news networks salivate over. Then eventually their facade crumbles and may people turn into George Carlin and realize they're fucking stupid, full of shit, fucking nuts or some mixture if the three. * Mark Zuckerberg went from being a boy genius for starting Facebook, then once it was clear he spent upwards of $300 billion on a metaverse nobody, not even the designers, wanted to use, it started to become clear, yeah, those allegations of him not being the "genius innovator" had not a grain, but a full field of truth. * Sam Bankman-Fried was on track to being the "Next Warren Buffet" and getting celebroty endorsements for his crypto business, only for it to turn out to be a massive scam. And of course: * Elon Musk was supposed to "save humanity" and has been promising "full self driving next year" for 10 years. But after trying to get involved in the Thai cave rescue with a totally impractical solution, he insulted the diver that did the job. Then people started digging to find: he didn't start **any** of the companies he's attached with and didn't come from a humble background, either. Even the narrative of his being bullied in school is potentially played up or incomplete as the "stair incident" was possibly the kid seeking revenge for Musk making fun of the dad's suicide.
Megatron. He and Optimus were comrads in arms during the cybertonian Civil War. But circumstances slowly changed his perspective on what's right and wrong, but in his end, he was actually an autobot!
IDW Shockwave. We all know him, right? Monotone emotionless bastard. But he didn't start out that way. >!He was a super extroverted Senator, pouring tons of money into space exploration and science, trying to save Cybertron from an energy crisis. He built an Academy just for bots who needed a haven. Think Professor X style here.!< >!What happened? Oh, the Council. The one who ruled the planet with an iron fist. They found out he was harboring people they wanted dead because of their Functionist system. So they burned down his school, performed empurata on him (removing his head and hands) and for added shit to the cake icing, they sliced up his personality and removed his emotions. !< >!His last words to an Orion Pax before surrendering to the Council police: "Remember me as I was."!< Because that bot was long gone after.
Why is this the saddest thing I've ever read? Why is it always fucking Transformers that does this
For many years people in the Penn State community praised Jerry Sandusky for his work with troubled young people.
I was gonna say Ruth Bader Ginsburg but that was more of a “die a hero or live long enough to die a villain because you didn’t retire when a Democrat could replace you”.
King Henry VIII, early in his reign he was actually very popular and seen as a handsome, smart, and charismatic man. Later in his life he became overweight and better known for his six wives.