There’s a canny few stridently pointing out that the earth is only 6000 years old as well, but I’m inclined to believe those ones meant it… 
At least one version of it I’ve seen refers to Rommel as the replacement for Hitler, killing twice as many people.
Interesting. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, though. Rommel was by all accounts a decent human being and an outspoken critic of the Nazi party, who treated prisoners well and had no truck with war crimes. AFAIK, he was the only member of the Third Reich leadership who the Allies allowed a memorial. Germany with Rommel in charge might have had a shot at victory, but it would have been a far less brutal victory. He might even have stopped the war himself.
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Something similar has been done several times, I think. Meaning no offense, I find it a bit tiresome. It seems like three-quarters of all time travel stories wind up being about how you either can’t or shouldn’t do anything that would change boring old modern-day Earth as we know it. Just like superhero comics, the status quo must always be preserved…for some reason.
Fritz Leiber’s 1958 novel The Big Time mentioned in passing that the good guys in the Time War had sent agents to make sure the Axis won WW2 and conquered the world, because the timeline where the Aliies won led to something even worse hundreds of years later. Probably. At least, the higher-ups said so. That’s interesting to me.
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I read a comic recently where every time traveller tries to kill Hitler, so eventually he just gets really good at killing time travelling assassins. When the people sending assassins back get invaded by time travelling assassins from their future, who is the one man that can save them?
I’ve no idea what comic this was (I thought it was XKCD), so if anyone has a better memory than me please help.
The satirical stupidity should usually be accompanied by a : p, even though that spoils it a bit…
For every person ignorant enough to actually believe Steven Spielberg hunted and killed a triceratops, there are a thousand dumb enough to believe a significant number of people actually believe Steven Spielberg hunted and killed a triceratops.
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Thinking what this all means is that we need a more general term for the phenomenon of Poe’s Law that states that it is difficult to tell whether someone is joking or not on the internet.
If it doesn’t already exist I say let’s call it “Quinn’s Law.” (j/k)
Mmhmm. Probably why it was just an outline in a creative writing class, and I’m not a professional writer.
Kudos on mentioning Fritz Leiber, though.
Yeah, I maybe could have phrased that better. It just reminded me of a trend I don’t like in published sci-fi; I didn’t mean to jump on you specifically. Sorry.
Or there is subnormality’s take on the time travelers and Hitler:
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You’re assuming that I assumed. What does that make you?
Not all people are as savvy as the readers of Boingboing or have the geek card to know Jurrassic Park AND recognize Steven Spielberg in a photo. The very fact that some Republicans would praise Stephen Colbert’s views should indicate to you that satire is often lost on a significant portion of people. In other words, your faith in humanity may be well-intentioned, but misplaced.
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