Red pill or White pill...
 

I offer you the Red pill or the White pill.

If you elect to take the Red pill, you will be permitted to travel back in time and terminate one person of your choosing who, at present, is already deceased. After one hour, you will return to the present at the exact moment you left.

If you choose the White pill you will take the place of any person you wish for seven days. You will be that person for one week. After seven days, you will return to your own life which will have proceeded normally in your absence - no one will know that you left.

Here are the conditions for the Red pill:

You can choose any post-adolescent point in the person's life to execute them. Your safety will not be in jeopardy - only the person you are scheduled to terminate can see you but you will be granted omnipotence over them. You will be provided with the weapon(s) of your choice. You have one hour. You can elect not to carry out the execution but you will be sacrificed in their place by ceasing to exist at the end of the hour. You can choose to inflict injury on any scale. God agrees to absolve you of your action or inaction should that be a consideration. You must decide before taking the pill whether you will remember nothing never to recall or remember everything never to forget.

Here are the conditions for the White pill:

None. However, the person whose place you took will be responsible for whatever actions you took while you were them as though they themselves took the action. You do not have the option of forgetting. [added: when you return, the knowlege and memories of the person you became are added to your own]

So, what'll it be? Red, White or abstain? Tell us about your adventure.

[edited to add clarification to effects of the White pill]

The white pill is sooooo tempting, but I'd have to pick the red. I'd be better than any superhero because I'd get to save 6 million lives, plus! I'd go after Hitler, of course. A good kill - if murder can ever be considered good, Hitler's death would certainly qualify. I'd pick a German Luger, naturally, tie and gag the beast and inform him that he was going to die an obscure death and be thrown into a pauper's grave with no headstone. Then I'd wax eloquent about the contributions the Jewish people have made to the arts, sciences, medicine, and Western culture, in general. Since Hitler wouldn't have committed his atrocities, yet, I suppose karma-wise, it might not be ethical for me to torture him further. I'd dispatch him with a bullet to the head and choose to forget about the whole thing. WOW! I wonder what the world would look like when I came back?

Will somebody PLEASE take the white pill and take over for George Bush for just a week!!!! ANYBODY could do it better than he is doing :mg:

That was why the white pill was so tempting, Tonchi! It was a tough call, but I don't think Jr. has approached Hitler's death toll yet, although he seems to be working on it.

Oh dear. Am I the only person looking at this in terms of personal gain? From the answers it appears so. My first thoughts were going into my ex's life and have honest conversations with any of the women he is currently involved with. Then write myself (the me currently in my own body) a dirty great cheque to cover all the money he ended up denying he owed me.

But shrugging off the cloak of bitterness, I am still tempted to be someone else for sheer, selfish, personal pleasure. If there are any reports in the newspapers about Angelina Jolie staring at herself in the mirror all day and developing a taste for Winter Warmer pizzas and Stella Artois lager, then you'll know the white pill has arrived via mail order.

Out of interest, aren't you worried that if you take the red pill you might erase yourself of a loved one from existence in the present?

Personal gain may be the way to go.

The problem with offing Hitler is that, no matter when you do it, you can't be assured that some other politician will take the same direction to take advantage of the public conditions at the time.

If one offed Stalin, who arguably killed more people than Hitler, you risk another lame Commie bastard taking his place and using the same approach. In fact you would expect it.

One might take the white and be Himmler or Goering or somebody, and plan for a meeting of the entire government to try to take it out. There doesn't seem to be any place in the rules against being Himmler and killing Hitler and taking the heat for it to be executed as well.

But, I was thinking, to really get the most change, you have to alter the system before it even gets to that point. One could try to do something even loftier, such as being Guttenberg's assistant as he works on the printing press, and just as he comes to the right realizations, explain moveable type to him.

The optimistic hope would be that additional exchange of knowledge leads the human race to understand itself more quickly. But then, it didn't really help the 20th Century. It may be that the human race needs to go through that step in order to find the horror in it and try to do away with it. Hard to say.

So in the end I would probably just be Bill Gates for a week. For a week I would speak about the importance of open protocols as a means to increasing trust in the company. On the last day I would set myself up with a long contract for a cushy consulting job and permanently link the Cellar to the front page of MSN.

Good points UT. History, as a convenience, tends to personify carnages as though the person it assigns it to was the source or cause of the events that set the stage for it. I think you make a good point with the Stalin example.

Would killing Hitler's mother save 6M lives or would 12M lives have been lost in the alternate path? Maybe if instead of killing Hitler, someone went back and killed the guy who ordered the assasination of the Austrian leader whose death led to WWI. Perhaps that would head off the events that created the power vacuum Hitler later filled.

If I could go back and take somebody out I think it would probably be the Pope who initiated the Inquisition or, at least, failed to prevented it. Or maybe the person who initiated the Crusades. Another person I thought about taking out is Cain. I think about how our DNA would be different if Cain's influence on subsequent DNA strands were replaced with Abel's.

As far as the White pill... thinking about that I get to keep all their knowlege and memory... Warren Buffet comes to mind. Thinking about living their life for a week - I wonder about a lot of people - someone who knows they will die in 7 days and one minute - just to feel what that's like and to know that I get to live the rest of my life knowing what I otherwise will likely learn too late.

Thinking about taking over that person's life makes me think about Osama bin Laden. I'd go on all the world's TV networks including Al Jazeera and tell everyone that I was wrong- that Allah came to me in a dream and told me to love the infidels, terminate all jihads, void all fatwas and to live in peace and forever renounce violence. Then, I'd disappear, secretly fly to Central America and covertly report to the CIA's most notorious "interrogation" facility. I would summon the head interrogator and tell him that the TV interview was a hoax designed to make America lower its defenses as part of a new jihad onslaught that would dwarf 9/11. I'd brag that I know the location of every Al Queda cell in the world and what their immediate plans are and -just as the 7-day window is expiring- smile and tell him that Allah will not permit me to share that information with infidels such as yourself.

Decisions, decisions, hmmm.
Be Jesus and leave iron clad proof?
Or be Howard Hughes and rewrite my will?
Maybe Abe Lincoln and skip the theater?
How about Bill Gates banker?
:confused:

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,
And the ones that Mother gives you don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall.
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall,
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call.
Call Alice when she was just small.
When the men on the chess board get up and tell you where to go,
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low,
Go ask Alice. I think she'll know.
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead,
And the white knight is talking backward, and the red queen's off with her head,
Remember what the doormouse said: "Feed your head! Feed your head!"
:idea:
Timothy Leary!!

Say, your ex wasn't the ax murderer was he? Seemed like a nice guy at the time, great musician, and then one day he showed his vampire fangs and left with all your cash?

Oh yeah, on a purely personal, selfish level, I'd be him for a week and wreck some REAL damage and I too would have him come up with a nice chunk of cash to repay me (I wouldn't trust one of that dude's checks as far as I could bounce it!). :eyebrow:

Trying to change the world in an hour or a week is tempting, but not feasible. Even Jesus took 33 years. And I could use the white pill to become Hitler's head chef and poison him and all his cronies, which is much more murder-rific than anything the red pill can do for me. Nope, nothing you can do to any world leader, from Bush on back, would really make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.

I'd become Jessica Alba, fly to my house, and have sex with me.

I'm surprised that none of you Bible thumpers haven't suggested going back as Adam and slapping the shit out of Eve before she bit the apple.

For strictly personal pleasure, I'd take the white pill and be Troy Aikman for a week beginning with the 1992 SuperBowl and ending at the Pro Bowl where he had to leave at half time because of a prior engagement. That was his all time high, IMO, and what a rush it would be to trounce the Bills 52-17.

Fucking around with the past is too uncertain. you might think that a major action would have a major effect, when in actuality it might just get glossed over. someone else may fill that role of destiny. while a minor action may have major impact. You might open a door in a hallway, interrupt someone's train of thought, and the combustion engine or the light bulb never gets invented.

If I was actually presented with this chance, i'd have to make it all about personal gain. I'd go back as my dad, and invest heavily in Microsoft stock as soon as it became available, and set up half ownership with my oldest son, to come under his (my)control at age 21. Then I would lay low, and try not to change anything else until the week was up. I might offer myself some advice (would I remember it as a 10 yr old when i got back to my body?) Maybe I'd write down some lottery numbers before I went back, and play them.

I'd take the red pill, but I'd be tempted to take the white pill to be Brad Pitt for a week or so.

Actually scratch that. I would take the white pill and I would become George W. Bush. I would end the war in Iraq, admit to being a military deserter, a cocaine abuser, a draft dodger, etc. I would then tell everyone all the dirt on Cheney the others in the cabinet, tell everyone that my entire family is crooked, and dirty, and should never be trusted in office, and then I'd resign from office.

all of that in one week?......do you think you could find time to get photographed having wild gay sex while you're at it?

maybe get him hooked on smack? tatoo him? die his hair blonde, and make a mohawk out of it.

I would take the white pill, be myself circa 1982, and make the right decisions about my future ie. dump the asshole pronto, get into a great University, start volunteering right away and get serious. I'd come back as myself and reap all the benefits!

I thought you could kill someone in the past, but become someone alive right now?

That was the general idea.

I'd take the white pill, assume Bill Gates, and then as him give all his stock to the actual me. That'd do two things. First I'd reposition Microsoft along Google's philosophy of doing no evil. Second I'd do something better with the money than building 50,000 sq. ft. mansions.

C'mon now, he makes a million dollars an hour, times 14 hour days, times 6 or 7 days a week. That house cost less than a weeks pay, $63mil if I heard right. :biggrin:

BTW, to clarify history here. The total was 6 millions Jews. While jews were the largest exterminated group, the real total was closer to 13 million, including 7 million 'others' such as gypsies, criminals, political prisoners, and homosexuals.

We just had the distinction of being the largest group.

True, but the Jews also had the courage and the visibility to speak up afterwards and make the world face the truth.

The sum total of Nazi-caused deaths will never be known, especially in places like Russia, where ALL of the inhabitants died or disappeared and there was no one left to tell. It's believed that over a million died as a result of Hitler's invasion of Russia and the Seige of Stalingrad. It's also believed that Idi Amin wiped out a half-million of his own countrymen and other African strongmen have pushed that number far over the million mark since Amin's times, in places like Rwanda, Sudan, and the Congo. At least 25 million indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands and Mexico were exterminated within 80 years after the discovery of the Americas and the administration of these lands by the Spanish. Millions of blacks were sent to die miserably in the jungle plantations of Brazil, many times the number that were ever sent to the British Colonies which later became the USA. It is difficult to say if the removal of any one leader at the time could have prevented any of these atrocities, because the nationalistic, tribal, and religious differences between the killers and the victims were already unresolvable in their minds before the slaughter topped it off.

White Pill, I would become Gwen Stefani. I would divorce the slim Gavin, marry Rock Steady and both of us would live happily ever after.

Couldn't agree more with all you wrote, Tonchi! And the reason why I said six million PLUS in my original response is exactly because we will never know the exact number who died thanks to the Hitler regime.

I picked Hitler to kill because there would have been a chance that the atrocities (at least not on that level) might not have occurred without him. He seized power by guile and force. He did not win the popular vote in Germany to begin with. Thus, there is a chance that Germany and its people might have chosen a different and better path had Hitler not been on the scene.

By comparison, killing Christopher Columbus would not have helped the indigenous people of the Americas any. Someone else would eventually have jumped in a ship and discovered the "New World."

There are reasons I'm not taking either pill ...

Consider, for a moment: The forces of history move things forward, and certain things happen at certain times. Each of these people and events has a web-like interaction with the other. If one strand gets pulled, movement occurs elsewhere.

Now, ask this (or your own question):

How many might Stalin have killed if he hadn't had to fight Hitler?

Arguments like this, though, are pretty much fruitless ... since you can never really answer the "What if" questions.

Sci Fi writers have a blast with that stuff, though!

Actually, this has been an interesting question to think about. We can all pretty much agree that Hitler and Stalin were evil. It is interesting to speculate if they were inevitable evils. Columbus was inevitable. Stalin - I admit to not knowing enough about the forces behind his rise to power to hazard a guess, either way.

Was New Orleans inevitable, given the factors at work in the US in the 21st century? Would the same fiasco have been just as sure to happen under the administration of a different man in the White House? Sure, there would have been a hurricane, no matter what. But given the make-up of present society in the USA, the thinking of the people, the attitudes that are prevelant, would NO have been doomed no matter what?

What if you had taken the white pill, and REALLY been the head of FEMA when Katrina struck? Do you think you could have made a better outcome happen, Wolf? Just curious.

This is a very good point. The further back in the past you pick, the cloudier the outcome.

Given that, I would knock off Justice Clarence Thomas during the Clinton administration. Now that would be good clean fun!

I'm a firm believer that no CEO should be making more than 20-40 times more than the lowest paid employee including all benefits. 50,000 square foot houses are just the most visible proof of the over compensation. And janitors, night watchmen, cafeteria workers, etc. that have been contracted out still count as an employee for these calculations.

Bill is hardly the only CEO who is over compensated but I've got a burning personal hate for all the evil that Microsoft has done. It'd be nice to spend Bill money correcting some of it and making the world a better place for all rather than just MS.

Anyways even if I died the week after Bill got his body back it would be a hoot to transfer all that wealth :D

The real differences come in on the level of city and state government, not just before the storm hit, but over the last 30 years, when the money to strengthen the levees and improve the pumps went into "other <s>pockets</s> projects."

The evacuation could have been handled a lot better, too.

I'm not inclined to be so hopeful as to believe murder, however high-mindedly applied, would be a solution to any problems. Stuff like that can backfire, and how can you know that a worse horror is not unleashed as a result of your choice to eliminate that person? The fate of the world or any group in it rarely hinges on just one person at one time, and what seems obvious to us from our 20/20 hindsight is not what people of that time believed and may not be evaluated the same way in the future either. In other words, WE are not by any means fit to choose solutions. We prove that over and over again throughout history. Suppose the guy who tried to kill Pope JPII had been successful? He (or the people who sent him) believed that to be the best solution. The very foresightful CIA arranged to kill the legally-elected President of Viet Nam, as the best solution to all the problems he was causing them. Our government will make sure that we never know who believed that only the death of JFK would make things come out better somehow; maybe they even thought it would be better for "US", God forbid, because instead we got Lyndon Johnson and you know how many deaths that was worth.

If somebody could start a thread where we would list all the BENEFICIAL murders which occurred throughout history, I think it would soon become apparent that they are few and far between. For that reason, I believe that the little white pill has the potential to accomplish more in the long run. And regardless of which pill you want to try, please use those powers to do something about GWB!

I can't think of too many serial killers, serial rapists or child predators whose premature death would not have benefited society.

Sometimes, the right thing to do is just the right thing to do.

which is precisely why the choices were limited to those already deceased.

Oh, sorry for being a dumb blonde about it. That sure makes it harder.

In some ways those attrocities of Hitler and Stalin may have taught the world some lessons that we could only learn the hard way.

In keeping with the rules, I would hit Lyndon Johnson before the JFK assasination LBJ fucked things up in a big Texas-sized way. Escaladed the Vietnam war big time, and implemented social programs big in the Great Society before figuring out what worked; kinda like WebVan going nationwide while still hemmoraging money. I would choose to forget the incident and previous history.

That's unanswerable because every murder leaves a path untaken. Every person murdered has the potential to great harm. Far fewer have the potential to do great good but we'll never know what any of them "might" have done. :confused:

Why would anyone want to fix the past? Humanity lived those bad experiences once. If the past is fixed, then nothing has been learned; mankind will only relive those experiences again.

As bad as the past may have been, facts remain. We are suppose to live for the future; learn from our mistakes - even if it is a spouse:
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,
One pill makes you richer and one pill cures them all
....
But what the doormouse said: "Feed your head! Feed your head!"

Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. We even put essential military functions in the National Guard so we would never relive Vietnam. How many were so high on drugs (or a Christian agenda) as to let that lesson get repeated?

Ah hell. Where'd I put the bong? My drugs are color blind and therefore politcally correct. Another lesson lost in the haze of pills?

Stepping out of the game for a moment, I wouldn't advocate murder as a solution either, although Beestie has a point about serial killers. If one could somehow know in advance what they were going to do, I think ridding the planet of them woud be quite justified. In fact, I think the key words here are KNOWING IN ADVANCE. In real life, we will never know what someone is going to do down the road. Whacko's assasinate public figures because they somehow believe that they have some gift of prophecy, telling them that this is the right thing to do. Obviously, its not.

However, if one could step into that hypothetical time machine, that's a different story.

PS tw thinks we learn from history! LOL! Nobody even reads history, much less learns from it!

So if you were granted the power to prevent the Vietnam war to preserve the lesson that would prevent us from invading Iraq you would turn it down? Uhhh, well let me put it another way.

The justification you cite for not "fixing" the past seems eerily similar to the reasoning used to justify such wars in the first place: a life lost in the past is worth two lives saved in the present/ a life lost in the present is worth two lives saved in the future.

Put yet another way, "fixing" the past is no riskier than "fixing" the future which we do every day with the choices we make. But, in either case, inaction is itself action so not taking the Red pill does not absolve one of anything - its as much of a choice as taking it. Once you are offered the pill, the consequences of taking it or not taking it are the same.

Ah, but you talking about premeditated removal before the fact of a criminal-in-waiting as opposed to society's retribution after the fact? Nobody would argue that it were better some people had never been born, but that is not the issue posed by the little pills. The premise was take them out, Charles Bronson style, and I replied that it might sound good and feel good but I doubted that social engineering by murder of specific key people would be anything more than a temporary solution, and that history would prove it. I don't believe that, except in movies, when the hero blasts the bad guy leader, the entire structure behind him collapses and slinks away.

I guess the most perfect example of what I am saying is right this minute in Iraq. Take out Saddam, evil dictator, mass murderer and all-around bad guy, and Mission Accomplished! :p

Just give me Warren Buffett for 20 minutes or so. A few wire transfers from his petty cash into my account, and I'll be set. Someone else can kill Hitler and Stalin.

OTOH, if I were to take the red pill, I think I'd take out Jesus (assuming he existed, but that's another thread) before he had a following. And I'd remember. Why take out a few apples when you can upset the entire applecart?

OK, already! I'll take the white pill then and be my Momster for a week. I'll have her rescind the insane power of attorney she gave her evil EX husband, demand to see her only daughter, tell the authorities that the evil ex has been holding her a psychological hostage all this time; write her twin sister in Switzerland that she hasn't spoken to in 15 years and tell her that all is forgiven and beg her forgiveness in return.

This should impact the lives of altogether about 10 people in a positive way and one who richly deserves it in a negative way, have no impact what-so-ever on the course of history, and involve the death of no one.

Its also a rather selfish use of my magical powers, but what the hey?

That's OK, we Harry Potter fans would understand perfectly ;)