Executioner of the Coffee-Heads
Inheriting an empire that was in something of a state, he made up his mind to assert his authority. Hard. Deciding that his half brother Osman hadn't gone far enough with banning stuff just for the army, Murat banned smoking, drinking and especially coffee for everybody in the Ottoman Empire.
In a list of "movies designed to piss lots of people off," banning coffee in Turkey probably ranks somewhere alongside banning cheese in France, banning guns in America and...well, banning national stereotyping in Britain. But Murad was determined. He hated coffee drinkers so much that he would patrol the streets at night dressed in civilian clothes, looking for people drinking coffee and then executing them on the spot.
When not enforcing his strict anticoffee laws, he liked to wind down by executing people for literally any other reason he could think of: for playing the wrong kind of music, for talking too loudly, for walking or sailing too close to his palace or just for being women. Especially for being women. He really hated women.
Başarılı bir kadın yalnız değildir, aynı başarılı olan bir erkeğin yalnız olmayacağı gibi.
"Bu dünyada hiçbir anne çocuğunu sonsuza kadar tutamaz."
Sayfa 166Kitabı okudu
kahve içti diye öldürülmek mi? harika
Banning coffee in Turkey probably ranks somewhere alongside banning cheese in France, banning guns in America and...well, banning national stereotyping in Britain.
lol wtf
The Bay of Pigs operation was almost certainly the most humiliating incident in America’s long-running and hilarious string of failures to overthrow the government of a small island situated right on its doorstep, although in fairness, it might not be the weirdest. (That would probably be the CIA buying up a large number of mollusks in an attempt to assassinate a scuba-diving Fidel Castro with a booby-trapped shellfish.)
In the hundred years or so following the colonization of the Americas, a fairly conservative estimate is that 90 percent of the continent’s population died from a combination of disease, violence and forced labor
corona: hold my beer...
The American Dust Bowl is one of the more famous examples of the unintended consequences of messing around with our environment. But from mass-scale geo-engineering to tiny plastic beads, from deforestation to rivers doing things that rivers definitely shouldn’t do, it’s not the only one.
This was the first meeting between Europeans and Americans in recorded history, and it went something like this: the Vikings found a group of 10 natives sleeping under their upturned canoes, and so they murdered them.
For fuck’s sake, guys.
6 GOVERNMENT POLICIES THAT DID NOT WORK OUT WELL
Poll Tax
The smartest minds in Margaret Thatcher’s government came up with what they thought a fairer tax: one where everybody, rich or poor, paid the same. It led to widespread nonpayment, large-scale riots and eventually Thatcher was forced to resign.
Prohibition
America’s efforts to ban the drinking of alcohol between 1920 and 1933 did lead to fewer people drinking—but it also allowed organized crime to monopolize the alcohol industry, making crime soar in many places.
The Cobra Effect
As pest control in Delhi, the British government offered a bounty for dead cobras. So people simply bred cobras to claim the bounty. So the British dropped the bounty. So people turned the worthless cobras loose. Result: more cobras.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
As the Great Depression started to bite in 1930, the US introduced large tariffs on imports to try and prop up domestic industries. Instead, the resulting trade war only worsened the global depression.
The Duplessis Orphans
In Quebec in the 1940s and 1950s, the government offered church groups subsidies to care for both orphans and the mentally ill. But the psychiatric payments were double that for orphans—so thousands of orphans were falsely diagnosed as mentally ill.
Hoy No Circula
In 1989, Mexico City tried to reduce air pollution by banning particular cars from being driven on certain days. Unfortunately, rather than taking the bus, people just bought more cars so they’d always have one that was legal to drive.
5 MORE SPECIES WE PUT IN PLACES THEY SHOULDN’T BE
Cats
Everybody loves cats. Except in New Zealand, which didn’t have any predatory mammals until we brought them with us—which was bad news for the local species, particularly the plump, flightless parrot the kakapo.
Cane Toads
Like the rabbits, cane toads (natives of South America) were introduced into Australia with good intentions—in this case, to eat a pest, cane beetles. They didn’t eat the cane beetles. They ate almost everything else, though.
Gray Squirrels
When the American gray squirrel was introduced to Britain and Ireland, it immediately started throwing its weight around and bullying the native red squirrel close to extinction.
Asian Tiger Mosquito
A particularly annoying and potentially disease-spreading mosquito (it feeds at all hours, unlike many other species), it’s notable for how it hopped continents—it traveled from Japan to America in 1985 in a shipment of used tires.
Northern Snakehead
Look, if you’re going to introduce an Asian species into America, maybe don’t make it a ravenous carnivorous fish that can walk across land and survive for days out of water? That’s just asking for trouble.
6 SCIENTISTS WHO WERE KILLED BY THEIR OWN SCIENCE
Jesse William Lazear
American medic Jesse William Lazear proved beyond doubt that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes—by letting one of the disease-carrying mosquitoes bite him. He died, proving his theory right.
Franz Reichelt
An Austrian French tailor who in 1912 confidently attempted to test his elaborate new parachute suit by jumping from the Eiffel Tower while wearing it (he was supposed to use a dummy). Plummeted to his death.
Daniel Alcides Carrión García
Peruvian medical student Carrión was determined to investigate Carrion’s disease. Of course, it wasn’t called Carrion’s disease then. It got that name after he injected himself with blood drawn from the warts of a victim, and died.
Edwin Katskee
A doctor who in 1936 wanted to know why cocaine—then used as an anesthetic—had negative side effects. Injected himself with a ton of it, spent the night scrawling notes on the walls of his office in increasingly illegible handwriting, then died.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele
A genius Swedish chemist who discovered many elements—including oxygen, barium and chlorine—but had a habit of tasting each of his new discoveries. Died in 1786 of exposure to substances including lead, hydrofluoric acid and arsenic.
Clement Vallandigham
A lawyer who pioneered an early kind of forensic science. Defending an accused murderer, he proved that the supposed victim could have accidentally shot himself...by accidentally shooting himself. He died, but his client was found not guilty.
The African slave trade, the invention of the concentration camp, sexual slavery in the Japanese empire, the Spanish encomienda system in the Americas (where conquistadors were personally awarded work gangs of native people, like start-up employees being given human stock options)—the list of horrors is long and almost unbearably grim. And you can add to that the myriad cultures wiped out, the history destroyed and the vast illegitimate transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another, which is still evident in the relative prospects and comfort you’re likely to enjoy today depending on which bit of the world you were born in.