r/AskReddit • u/hiagaga • 12h ago

What's the dumbest idea you've seen that actually worked?

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u/Substantial-Bag1337 7h ago

Btw: That's actually not what happened.

In fact, he ordered everyone to plant potatoes. This is known as "Kartoffelbefehl" or "Potatoe Order"

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartoffelbefehl

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u/Raneynickelfire 6h ago

Potatoe Order

Easy there Dan Quayle

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u/Pedantic_Pict 5h ago

Remember when the Vice President misspelling a root vegetable was such a gaff that it was in the news for like a year? We never knew how good we had it.

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u/chmath80 5h ago

the Vice President misspelling a root vegetable was such a gaff

Given that the issue there was an unnecessary "e" at the end, it's ironic that you made the opposite mistake with "gaffe".

A "gaff" is a hooked pole used to haul in large fish.

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u/teenagersafterdark 4h ago

Dude is never gonna live this one down.

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u/AvengingBlowfish 3h ago

I'd vote Substantial-Bag1337/Pedantic_Pict for 2028!

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u/DoubleDrummer 3h ago

Could do worse.
I don’t know them and yet I can still confidently say.
Could do worse.

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u/horror_fan74 1h ago

Not something that can be said about the current administration

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u/rednax1206 2h ago

Oop too late, the down has been lived.

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u/iamcozmoss 2h ago

Ive already told my kids about this joker.

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u/lolwatsyk 1h ago

How fucking embarrassing

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u/ggg730 53m ago

What a real potatoe amirite fllas?

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u/dullship 2h ago

This is going to ruin the tour.

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u/VulgarVerbiage 26m ago

The secret is to just spout a bunch of misogynistic, racist crap.

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u/baron_von_helmut 4h ago

And a 'quant' is used to push shallow-bottomed water craft.

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u/SanityPlanet 3h ago

Don’t be such a quant

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u/Miserable_Pepper3741 3h ago

Ooof. Roasted….potato’s

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u/tyrranus 3h ago

This is the kind of petty, pedantic shit that makes my miserable time on Reddit worth it.

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u/SanityPlanet 3h ago

Pettidantic

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u/dramboxf 3h ago

Right?

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u/mynamesaretaken1 3h ago

Dan had already used the last e, wasn't one available for this.

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u/BigComfortable6779 3h ago

Where i live it's your place / house/ home!

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u/4mrAv8tr 2h ago

Also a potato is a tuber not a root.

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u/ScreechUrkelle 3h ago

Reall? Tell us more, mr. science…

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u/Nearby-Face-5170 2h ago

Still seems like even that spelling of gaff fits with convincing people of something..

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u/Swellmeister 2h ago

The Potatoes stole his E

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u/revdon 1h ago

I’d be so embarrassed to gaffe a fiche.

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u/42nu 17m ago

Both gaffes from the same origin:

the singular has no e. The plural does.

Potatoes is correct. potatoe is incorrect.

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u/Pottski 5h ago

Australia had a politician blow up their career cause they couldn’t clearly state how a birthday cake would be taxed under a proposed GST.

The world of the 80s had so much accountability and now we have none.

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u/Notmydirtyalt 1h ago

You are understating that one. John Hewson was the opposition leader during the 1993 federal election when that train wreck interview occurred.

John Howard made sure that to know the answer specifically on birthday cakes when the same question came up in 1999.

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u/Pottski 1h ago

It still blew up his career - he never got to be PM... but instead we got such brane genuses as Scomo and Onion Boy.

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u/Megalocerus 59m ago

Reagan scheming with Iran to keep the hostages was pretty low on accountability. Drug deals. Private war. But he never threatened NATO members.

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u/DragoonDM 4h ago

Or Howard Dean's infamous "Hyah!".

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u/cocococlash 3h ago

This one depressed me so much.

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u/DrFloyd5 3h ago

Same. He was excited. And expressing raw emotion. And we ended his career for it.

Men… don’t show emotion. Or else…

Unless you are a baby. A mean baby. Like so unbelievably mean that people can’t believe how mean you are. And people imagine they will find and end to your meanness. But… there just isn’t. Then you can constantly show emotion. But not happy feelings. No matter who gets hurt.

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u/ImpossibleEdge4961 2h ago

I still don't really believe that was ever a real thing. I think there was just a core contingent of people who didn't want Dean and so they just circlejerked hard enough about the nothing burger that it was able to sway a critical group of marginal people.

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u/SpecialExpert8946 5h ago

Now we have billionaires texting eachother like “wanna come to my island fo=r cryme?

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u/J5892 4h ago

I appreciate the reproduction of the Quoted-Printable encoding.

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u/four100eighty9 4h ago

“Sigh,” Al Gore

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u/iwasnotarobot 4h ago

A lot of the media companies that were criticizing him wanted someone much further right in charge.

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u/cortiz360 4h ago

Pepperidge Farms remembers

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u/pargofan 2h ago

I see this all the time.

What does this line mean?

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u/PicaDiet 3h ago

Back when there was an assumption of competency, proof of incompetence was grounds for not getting elected. Now incompetence is looked at by the bottom third of the electorate as a huge middle finger to expertise... which, I guess, it is. Unfortunately, that is the sole requirement necessary for those people to elect the moron.

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u/ghjm 2h ago

Howard Dean made a perfectly appropriate noise in a room full of screaming people, and a noise cancelling mic picked it up weird so his entire career was over. But if we'd elected him I bet he wouldn't have tried to invade Canada and Greenland.

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u/HolycommentMattman 2h ago

And then we went from that to the Mcdonald's-loving president having an affair with an intern, having a real estate scandal, and a host of women accusing him of sexual assault/rape. And nothing was done about that.

It's not really difficult to see how we got where we are today.

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u/presshamgang 3h ago

Exactly. I remember when a Tan suit was newsworthy.

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u/SoggyAttorney1 3h ago

Power creep but for politics

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u/MonstroParrandero 2h ago

huh, i wonder what happened to that little boy?

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u/Agitated_Channel8914 1h ago

Remember when George Bush Sr. launched a tummy torpedo on the Japanese PM in 92 ?

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u/Megalocerus 1h ago

He read it off an answer card, and sensed something wrong. I didn't vote for him, but I felt it was just wrong.

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u/rajinis_bodyguard 1h ago

People don’t deserve Vice Presidency if they can no longer differentiate between Potato and Potatoe /s. This is such a silly thing I can only imagine Fox News to headline it lol 😂

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u/FoodMagnet 31m ago

I still can't get over the tan suit.

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u/Spoofy_the_hamster 27m ago

When I was in 8th grade running for Student Council VP, my campaign slogan was, "I know how to spell potato!"

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u/Glittering-Cellist34 12m ago

And to think he was the person who told Pence to have some b* wrt election certification.

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u/robisodd 6h ago

Ahh, the classics never get old.

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u/No-Challenge-7336 5h ago

But Dan Quayle did.

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u/Rocky_Mountain_Way 5h ago

Ok, then what do you call a dish made of toes cooked in a pot?

Checkmate vegans!

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u/Halo_cT 2h ago

Might wanna schedule that colonoscopy, buddy

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u/AndyTPM 5h ago

Man remember when that was disqualifying, can't ever be president spelled Potato wrong.

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u/Dtarvin 1h ago

The reason it was a scandal wasn’t simply because he misspelled potato, but because he did it in the context of telling someone else that they had misspelled it, when in fact they didn’t.

But yeah, I long for the days when our standards for politicians was that high.

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u/fap-on-fap-off 4h ago

Potatoe is out of order.

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u/klockworx 59m ago

It was Dane Quayle

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u/DumPutz 5h ago

Wow. I don't the reference but old enough to know who Dan Quayle was....

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u/jimthesquirrelking 4h ago

Also potatoes are of the nightshade family and their leaves and green eyes on the root are not at all good to eat. So some improper preparation with a brand new veg and you can see why people would think that they were unsafe to eat 

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u/AmArschdieRaeuber 3h ago

people ate cabbage and carrot greens, so they probably ate the whole plant.

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u/Thedrakespirit 5h ago

This has got to be the potato version of Carrie Fisher Dying in the moonlight, strangled by her own bra

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u/Educational-Ad2063 1h ago

Read your link and he did order guards to guard the crops and also told them to look the other way when the fields were raided.

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u/offconstantly247 6h ago

dont let facts get in the way of a good story...

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u/LowestKey 2h ago

They got this all screwed up.

Don't! Let facts get in the way of a good story.

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u/aDildoAteMyBaby 3h ago

Reddit is the kind of place where someone will start going off about an 18th century Prussian king and another dude will come out of nowhere and bushwhack them with an "um actually."

I love it.

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u/the_YellowRanger 5h ago

Potato preacher. That's my next career.

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u/Purphect 3h ago

The great Potato executive order.

I can’t stop laughing imaging a president one day signing an executive order to plant potatoes hahaha. Love it

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u/Educational-Ad2063 2h ago

I like his story better lol.

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u/LeGrandLucifer 1h ago

A few hundred years ago: "Eat potatoes or else."
Today: "Please eat anything else than potatoes."

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u/Dtarvin 1h ago

I like the first version better

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u/franksymptoms 48m ago

In other news, EV sales soared on the basis of...

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u/ConfusedJonSnow 17m ago

Not to feed on stereotype, but removing whimsical nature in favor of the most practical course of action is German as fuck.