WI: Anyone but Curtis LeMay in '68

[Paul V McNutt]

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Wallace doing better does not cause any of this to happen.

QUOTE=Whanztastic;6843852]The amount of coincidences that led Arthur Bremer to be a potential assassain could easily be washed away with an alt-1968 election result.

On May 22, 1971, his one known friend, Thomas Neuman, committed suicide after playing Russian Roulette. If this doesn't happen he probably doesn't snap, at least not as much as he did.

Read his wiki page, it was extremely possible for him to be arrested earlier or commit earlier crimes. He was picked up for concealed carry. A thousand possible events could have happened, for example a fight with a cop or arrested for stalking.

As previously mentioned, his first target was Nixon. A better window of a chance and Bremer is shooting rounds at the POTUS, not some Governor.

Or he could simply miss...[/QUOTE]

 

[Emperor Norton I]

Here's the thing: History based on a whim and chance changes on a whim and chance. If you change things slightly, you can change outcomes in other areas. Bremer decided to go after Wallace and (try to) assassinate him, but there is no destiny in that, given things could have stopped him or changed who he targeted, just as much as a change in history could have resulted in him successfully killing Wallace instead of just crippling him.

 

[Paul V McNutt]

I don't see scenes and effect relationship between Wallace doing better in 1968 and the events that would stop Bremer from shooting him. I think he would have the same strategy and therefore the same schedule.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

I don't see scenes and effect relationship between Wallace doing better in 1968 and the events that would stop Bremer from shooting him. I think he would have the same strategy and therefore the same schedule.

We're going to go meta for a moment.

Do you realize that every action any individual takes is based on a neuron firing off just a certain way at a certain moment in the brain? There's no such thing as destiny or predetermination. Think about your day today. You didn't plan how everything went. It just went how it did based on a series of events happening at random but in reaction to one another. The same neuron firing that made you go to the cupboard could have made you go to the refrigerator instead. That's all history is and all life is; all those quadrillions of things firing off the way they did one after another after another, and the collected volume of all of that.
There's all the millions of neurons firing off that day, which could have changed how everything went. Not just in Bremer, but in every individual which lead them to act the way they did and do what they did, all of which went into that event. Not just that, there's all the days and months and years before that.

Now to pull back from that meta complexity, there are larger trends at play all the time, and things like who a person is and how they act, and that's what we use to play the alternate history game of figuring out what would likely have happened or could have happened. But there are also more fickle things in history, like assassinations where it is an individual with a certain chain of events and impulses totally on the wind up until that moment when they instantaneously affect absolutely everything in an instant. As said before, Bremer's decision to go after Wallace was just one of a few potential targets, among them President Nixon. And Bremer being at that place at that time could so easily have been different. And Bremer could have run into a multitude of things like getting arrested. Assassinations are really fickle things, and frankly, think of all the other people in this world who made have had thoughts to do something like that, and would have changed history, but never actually did anything. For that reason, it is fair to say that it could be butterflied away.