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Jeb Bush has said that if he could travel back through time he would kill baby Hitler. And this is one of the more sensible candidates for the US Presidency. Democracy is seriously fucked.
I am all one for hypothetical questions as they do reveal a lot about a person, but this is dumb as fuck for a lot of reasons. Firstly if you really want to kill Hitler, do you really have to choose to do that when he's a baby? Even if someone is definitely going to go on to be evil (and it's debatable whether that was inevitable in this case), killing a baby is surely just as evil. If you have time travel powers why not go back to a time when Hitler was a young man and then at least you won't have murdered a baby. But if you ever do murder a baby a good defence might be that you are from the future and you know that baby was going to grow up to be evil. It'd be interesting to see how the public and the courts reacted. Probably with gratitude and garlands. Give it a go.
But mainly it's stupid (and I don't think I can say this enough times, because people don't really seem to get it) because if you change one thing in history, you change everything in history). Bush even acknowledges this danger but still thinks it's worth it.
But if you killed any baby in 1889 then the repercussions of that would mean that nobody currently living would exist. Because all our lives impact on each other and if you remove a person from existence then you change the lives of everyone around them (for starters Hitler's parents' lives would change considerably) because every human interaction changes the course of the life it touches and so on and this quickly spreads out to change the course of everyone on the planet (with the possible exception of tribes in the Amazon jungle, but you can't even guarantee that). All time travel drama seems to make the mistake of thinking that all our lives are mapped out and would carry on as they were even if you altered the time line of one figure. But this is obviously wrong. Because everything you do affects other people. In “A Wonderful Life†George Bailey is not around to save his brother from the accident on the ice (from memory, forgive me if incorrect), but if George Bailey hadn't existed then his brother's life would have been so different that he wouldn't have been on the ice that day. Or if he's a younger brother he wouldn't have existed at all as his parents' time-line would have been so different that they would not have followed the path that led to them creating him. Whether we're good or bad our actions have positive and negative implications on other people.
And even if the death of any child from 1889 wouldn't change the population of the entire world in 2015 (and I think it would) then the death of the baby Hitler certainly would. Even if the Nazis had still risen to power with a different leader, even if there had still been a World War, the actions of Hitler changed the life of everybody in the world and without him different people would have lived and died, different people would have met and procreated. Not a single human being alive today would have existed. On the plus side he would have saved the lives of billions of people who never got the chance to exist, so they'd love Jeb Bush and he'd be their hero. And no one would care you weren't here because you wouldn't have ever been anyway.
Except that if Jeb Bush killed the baby Hitler then he himself would never have been born and so couldn't go back and kill the baby Hitler so everything would be the same as it had been.
Ultimately Jeb Bush is a fucking idiot who wants to kill a baby who has done nothing wrong. And it's ridiculous that he'd want to be President of the most powerful nation on earth when he can't understand hypothetical situations. Still in a world where an idiot like Donald Trump has a genuine shot at becoming President maybe it would be better if we went back and killed baby Hitler and hoped that the alternate time-line doesn't make such an enormous fuck up of things. Hopefully they wiped themselves out and left the planet in peace.
Next Sunday's RHLSTP guests are Hal Cruttenden and Scroobius Pip. Book here.
