i’ll go first: our 17th prime minister one day vanished while swimming in the ocean and not only did none of his friends give a fuck, they started slapfighting immediately for who’s gonna be his successor. no joke they didn’t even let his body turn cold before the arguments began it was all so fucking funny.
The US once tired to import hippos as domesticated livestock for meat as an alternative to cows.
Cleveland OH released 1.5M latex balloons in 1986 which resulted in massive environmental pollution, traffic accidents, and prevented the coast guard from possibly saving two fisherman (who later died in Lake Eerie).
Rural towns in New England in the 1800s thought they were being attacked by vampires (it was tuberculosis) so they would dig up corpses and stake them. Some places burned and ate the hearts of the dead.
US scientists stationed in the US Virgin Islands (actually not far from little st james, coincidentally) gave a dolphin LSD in the hopes they could develop spontaneous communication with it. They kept the animal in a small tank and eventually forced cohabitation with a human woman. The woman developed a sexual relationship with the animal. The scientist at the head of all this was heavy into ketamine and LSD use himself. He was never punished for any of this. No telling what other unethical experiments he oversaw.
Andrew Jackson once kept a 200lb wheel of cheese in the White House for years. It could be smelled for miles and he hosted cheese parties in order to get rid of it.
Cornflakes were invented by a religious zealot who thought that spiced and flavorful foods led to sin and masturbation. He was allowed to operate a health retreat where would give people yogurt enemas and put them in a mechanical shaking chair that shook them until they shit. Politicians and celebrities would go to this retreat often.
A higher ranking member of the US navy discovered gay prostitution near a Virginia naval base. He set up a sting operation that sent in straight sailors to solicit sex from the prostitutes. He would have the undercover sailors make detailed reports of the sexual activity. This went on for some time, never being reported by the guy running it. When the President found out he shut it down immediately.
In the 1900s there was massive panic about a comet passing by. People were sold concrete vaults in which they were permanently entombed. I think most people were dug out once the comet passed.
A massive coal vein in PA caught fire. This created an underground fire that consumed an entire town and is still burning to this day. The Mayor of the town was caught trying to do a real estate scheme while tasked with getting people to voluntarily move out for their safety.
In Washington state there is a nuclear waste dump site that are just big holes in the ground filled with waste. They dumped nuclear material into the holes, thinking it would be okay. Then they covered the top. Radiation contamination spread into the soil and made a lot of people sick. It was/is slowly approaching a major river and water source. I haven’t checked on it but a few years ago the problem was schedule to be fixed.
Public swimming pools in the US were basically public baths for most of our history. Also kids and men swam nude. Lots of terrible public health issues and, of course, moral issues until it was modernized after WWII.
Radium was once a popular additive to decorative materials and a health supplement. Lots of people died of cancer.
Jade Helm
George Washington was bled to death in an attempt to treat his flu.
NYC used to be absolute filth. Streets would regularly flood with sewage. They duped sewage and garbage into the East River. They dumped garbage under the docks. The streets had dead animals, especially horses. There was horse and human shit everywhere. One of the surrounding islands was used to process animal remains into products. So if the wind blew right, you would be hit with the smell of slowly boiling death. It’s not that nobody knew better, it was just the way the city was organized. There was so much corruption and lack of common good that there was nobody in place to clean it all up. The sanitation department skimmed money and did nothing.
Enron, an energy company that started out trading natural gas but morphed into tulipmania over fictional national gas derivatives and everyone involved making bank right up until the end.
Meat pies being a way to preserve food but then being banned because they also contained alcohol and caused nightmares and sinful behavior.
This isn’t including all the cults, colorful personalities, or the really dark stuff. America has always been a completely ridiculous and absurd place. It’s part of the foundation. The Dollop is a good podcast for this question, if you can get past the morning zoo bits and banter.
LMFAO as I read this out loud to my partner, I said “this sounds like a summary of The Dollop podcast”… Then I got to the end.
All this, and it is still overshadowed by today, and every subsequent day in American history.
The entite shitshow of the Whites trying to turn Finland into a kingdom by installing a German king here takes the cake for me. Not that this country in particular doesn’t have a lot of unserious mostly bougie history.
Our parliament performed a standing ovation for a literal SS nazi because none of them seemed to remember which side of WW2 that Ukraine was fighting for.
There are many other examples of dumb bullshit.
there were several million ukrainians in the red army, including the highest positions. an unimaginable portion of them lost their lives defending their homeland from nazism and banderism. gun’ka and his gang of fascistremoveds and murderers were hated by the vast majority of the ukrainian population. only through the unrelenting efforts of western (including your governments) intelligence agencies after the illegal and undemocratic dissulusion of the ussr could a fascist dictatorship be established on ukrainian soil.
Pretty sure that wasn’t even the first time that happened. Iirc it happened in the 80s too
Oh yeah, there was the gay bomb (Wikipedia link)
The us wanted to drop bombs of a non lethal variety that would release hormones that would cause adversaries to want to fornicate wildly instead of fighting. It even won an Ig Nobel prize.
holy fuck there is no way that is real. no FUCKING way LMAO WHAT??? GAY BOMB???
it’s not real-real, it was a proposal that didn’t go anywhere.
i wish they’d continued r & d on this
Tomorrow. Only to be surpassed by each subsequent day.
Youre Australian? Didnt even have to click the link to know.
Im in the US. Where the fuck do i start? Criminalization of weed because of Mexicans and blacks? death of Fred Hampton? the puritans who left England and ‘found’ the US because the English werent puritanical enough, thus starting the whole fucking country we know currently?
Theres a lot.
that’s a fair point, most of american history is fuckin’ nuts. is there anything in american history that was both super stupid and super funny? edit: also yes i’m australian lol
Back in the 1960s, the us govt wanted to use something like 520 nuclear weapons to dig a canal alternative to the Suez through the Negev desert in Israel.
link to a declassified paper, but it goes to a US GOV website so beware
I dunno why but this is what popped into mind as super stupid but not necessarily super funny.
One time they decided to dispose of a bunch of nuclear waste off the east coast and when the barrels didn’t sink they had fighter planes strafe them.
We have also accidentally dropped several nuclear bombs on ourselves that luckily did not detonate.
In the Korean War General MacArthur wanted to create a nuclear umbrella Shield against the Chinese when they backed up the Koreans, he wanted to drop 100 or so tactical nuclear weapons all across the border of Korea and China. I think it was Eisenhower as president at the time that told him to fuck off and fired him. MacArthur ran for president at least once and got just crushed.
The soldiers in World War II hated him partly because he changed their food from good real food to like processed crap food like egg beaters for eggs and spam for meat and such.
I think it was Eisenhower
Nope it was Truman, who had enough of MacArthur’s shit after dealing with him through the final months of WWII. The two famously never got along, even when Truman was Vice President. MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War was the last straw when he was contradicting Truman in the press.
Truman also didn’t think he’d look very good if he not only approved nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Korea as well. Either it sets a precedent the US is going to use nuclear weapons in every conflict (which is a diplomatic nightmare), or he’s the only president who used them (which is still true).
MacArthur was such an ass
President Garfield getting assassinated on a Monday is a good one.
George W. Bush choking on a pretzel
Zachary Taylor eating too many cherries on a warm day
William Henry Harrison trying to prove he wasn’t uneducated by writing a ridiculously long speech with ancient Roman references, all so he could give himself pneumonia
George Washington dying because too many doctors wanted to save him, so they all bled him with leeches and for some reason he kept getting weaker
I forgot about the Washington thing that’s a really good one lol
RIP to our driest president
The OG dryboi
Weed was also fearmongering chinese, but was done by timber barons originally, around the 1st world war, that fat bastard William Randolph hearst, Timber Baron and newspaper magnate that was trying to become president himself but failed because he sucks ran the campaign.
They ran marijuana out of business as well as hemp with a ruinous tax to start, and made opium illegal as well.
Later on Nixon super upped the penalties and enforcements of illegalization for the express purpose of criminalizing the population and creating a police state.
Which is ironic in a way because Nixon is more left than any Democratic president we have had in our lifetimes.
American with a more serious answer: I’d pick Lincoln picking a slaver as his VP and then getting shot. Functionally destroyed every good thing he did. Revealed the truth of “compromise” in 1865 and liberals still haven’t learned it.
Since I’m Pasta-American: Italy in general. Going from ruling “the world” to being ruled by a combo of the french, the popes, proto-hyper-capitalists, and vikings. Then they didn’t even have it in them to fully conquer to pope after uniting the peninsula, in the mid/late 1800s. Then stumbling through the late 1800s, helping invent fascism, rejecting the huge support communists gave for freeing them from the upside down man…
Not my nation, and not “stupid” but kind of hard to process for a young American (Like I was when I first read about it): the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom happening because of the Qing state’s decline, their civil service system becoming corrupt, peasant-middle class disaffection, and the influx of Christian missionaries, etc etc. All leading to a guy claiming to be Jesus’ brother and leading a revolt. Late Qing in general was a cluster. Shocked it didn’t collapse into the warlord era earlier.
Bonus to all Americans that still think Bush etal was a good president/did the right things after 9/11. Don’t know how you can look at America now and say “yeah it was right to invade the wrong country twice and waste all these resources and disaffect so many abroad and at home” (and kill people abroad too, but hoping for that from Americans might be asking too much).
damn this is a great answer, but ngl after reading this i’ve realized how shit my knowledge of history is. any book recs you’ve got?
Zinn’s always a good primer on american history.
For American, I agree with Alaska, Zinn is a good start. Critical reading of lib sources can be ok. (IE, Ken Burns’ general messaging is off, but its a decent overview if you can read between the lib brain)
This is the first book I read about Taping. That was like 10 years ago, I don’t really remember how well it was all presented, but might be a decent start. Written by a Yale guy in 96, so it might be a bit… you know. https://archive.org/details/godschinesesonta0000spen/page/n3/mode/2up
it was created
Every day a new answer
The flag at a McDonalds that was serving a blacksite, out of country torture facility was lowered to half mast for a day to honor the death of an unrepentant fascist propagandist
Or pick any day, really
Czechs really like throwing important people out of windows. Idk if it’s stupid just feel there’s a more optimal method.
It’s effective. Mostly passive, once the window breaks gravity mostly takes over. Used by more than one government and still in use currently.
Defenestration is a fun word. Sounds emasculating if you don’t know what it means. There’s a lot of balustrades and mezzanines where oligarchs and their political class servants like to hang out, I hope everyone is mindful to keep their balance and avoid accidents.
For me the crazy part is how many of them usually survive the fall. Real Assassin’s Creed hours.
Germany had a similar thing going on “Fenstersturz”. Before the 30 years wars around 1618.
the event you are referring to literally took place in prague, lol
Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Split
I’m an American so take your pick.
Pissing off it’s great power neighbours by forcefully trying to incorporate an ethnically and politically separate part of the country in a unitary state and going on to suffer a catastrophic military defeat and losing 40% of its territory because its hawkish rulers wouldn’t accept a realistic peace deal.
Are you talking about Denmark or Germany?
4·1 day agoDenmark. 1864.
Not my nation, but where I live: every year crash the government, blame it on the asylum seekers, and then increase the votes and make the same coalition with more in fascist party. Then repeat it 1 year later. Most ridiculous version of the Ratchet effect in existence.
Mahmoud Abbas won the election he was in
