Would you kill Baby Hitler? Or ....

The forces at play in Germany may have allowed another Hitler type to step in, one smart enough to win the war. I would only use time travel to go back and share some wine with Jack Kerouac.

Its possible that killing baby Hitler would accomplish nothing. Someone else might have taken his place doing the same thing. Its possible that the environment in Germany produced the result rather than the man.

Just look how shocked the ultra left is at a Donald Trump presidency. It was the environment that did most of the work to put him there. Its silly to think he did it on merit.

You can do something both racist and nice at the same time if you had a time machine. What would it be?

To go back and prevent the US slave trade. If you did that none of the African Americans would exist. But it would be a compassionate act but also racist.

couldn't we just kick Hitler's dad really hard in the nuts instead?

Or bribe the admissions director at that art college that denied Hitler's college application.

Kill a baby? Nah,,, maybe abduct him and leave him in the care of natives in Africa.

I'd prefer to install the baby Hitler into a loving Jewish foster family.

Hitler screwed up big time, Operation Barbarossa was poorly thought out, and he tied his general's hands by refusing to let them retreat. That's why towards the end of the war the only people interested in killing Hitler were other Germans.

There is a sci fi story where someone kills baby Hitler and the Nazis end up winning the war. Edgar's got the right idea, but Kerouac wouldn't be my first choice, I'd like to see William Blake.

Absolutely not...tempering with the spacetime continuum is off limits!

I don't agree that Germany would automatically have had a reactionary, militarist government. I do agree that Hitler was the best friend the Allies had in Europe. He was the biggest idiot to ever have controlled a major power.

"Was" is correct.

Attend Woodstock. Then every single Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin concert on the planet in the first half of the 1970s. Then every single Pink Floyd concert in the mid to late 1970s. Maybe intersperse in some more Woodstock attendances (the crowd should be large enough for me to squeeze in a few hundred times without crossing paths with myself).

There could be no guaranteed outcome to changing any aspect of the past. Even my "drink wine with Jack Kerouac" might alter something, negatively.

Obviously. .
People love the idea they control but they barely can phantom the consequences of their actions.
If it wasn't Hitler it would another moron like him or Trump.

If time travel existed, then all the things considered "bad" in the past would already have been undone, and never happened, and we wouldn't know about them, surely?

It might create a circle of events. I kill baby Hitler. Another guy takes over and wins the war. The guy that invented the time machine's father gets killed during the new scenario's fighting. The time machine does not get invented. Then Hitler lives. Then Hitler dies, endlessly.

Or possibly a spiral or a Mobius strip? Given that (as far as we know) there is no time travel, one could go on forever speculating like that.

Time travel worked out pretty well for Alley Oop.

Precisely. Or he might even have turned out as a saint

Unless of course you're a determinist; but then there'll still be diffs