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USA’s presidents have all been awful humans
USA’s presidents have all been awful humans
128 comments
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@Confidant6198 That's why I like to call them the Genocidal Regimes of America.
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Not to mention defacing a mountain by putting a bunch of faces on it
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Not just a mountain. A mountain holy for native americans
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Defaced then refaced
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I understand the point, but as an exercise, try to find four historical figures without glaring character defects. Eventually, I figure we’ll all be either judged or forgotten in time.
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I dunno Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, seem to have been personally good people. That's two recent US presidents. Then I guess I would add some super low hanging fruit like Nelson Mandela, Frederick the Great, John II Komnenos, any of the Five Good Emperors, Cyrus the Great, Ashoka, and one could keep going.
EDIT: To all those pestering me about how US presidents presided over criminal imperialist policies, here is my answer from down below:
OP talked about “glaring character defects”.
These are policy failures and state crimes, arguably attributed to the American state as a whole, and the long term US imperialist policies, rather to the singular person of the president.
You might have noticed that I added Frederick the Great in the list, which tells you exactly what my understanding of the challenge was.
I'm not here to defend US imperialism, don't @ me.
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Carter supported Pol Pot and Obama was a monster to people in the Middle East, neither can be considered to be "good people."
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I mean we absolutely could call out their flaws too, someone with that much power/responsibility is going to do abhorrent things (drone strikes with Obama being an easy one to bring up). Just like the four on Mount Rushmore these things aren't what we typically call out because they either were "of the times" or not on the same scale as their accomplishments.
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We only learn about the ones with defects, because they are the most interesting. Most people in history were fine.
One historic figure who had no known defects: Alan Turing
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Its telling that your example is someone explicitly kept out of the public eye during his life. Basically any account of Turing is from personal friends or his professional work. He was a generally good person and great scientist that helped defeat the nazis, but he's only celebrated by progressives for his persecution as a gay man.
I struggle to find any major social cause he publicly championed or records of his views on controversial topics. I'd like to be wrong, but it's easy to not have a mixed record as a private citizen. Nobody was grilling him to free slaves or asking his opinion on systemic injustice.
Einstein is a contemporary comparable. He was a great scientist, opposed the nazis, and by most accounts a decent guy. He was even had to flee his homeland to escape persecution as a jew. Clearly lots of parallels. The main difference being he was an idol in his own day so we have way more first hand accounts.
Turns out he was a socialist with varying views on communism, had shifting support for zionism and wrote rascist shit in his travel diaries. You could probably find a quote like Roosevelt's and slap it on a picture of him, that doesn't sum up his life.
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These are a little more than character defects... theres lots of historical figures who didn't rape and murder.
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Yeah every political leader have little oopsies like being called "town destroyer" by the people which land they invaded and towns they destroyed. They also were proud of it, used it to invade even more land, and their grandpas were also called that because it's their family and nation thing to do for generations.
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Who here hasn't made dentures from unwillingly donated teeth?
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Seems like a good time to link the list of US atrocities
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Lincoln also commuted the sentence of 264 other Dakotans that had to be executed the same day. If he didn't intervene the executions would've been 303
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Yeah. Cherry-picking can be used for good AND evil.
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So what's the real dirt on Lincoln? Did he snore or something? :P
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Honestly the worst thing Lincoln ever did was choosing Johnson as his VP. Even then, I learned recently that he asked a different (better) guy, Benjamin Butler, to be VP but he turned him down. Had he lived to do Reconstruction, we might have more to critique, certainly he'd have done better than Johnson (not a high bar), but since he died he's off the hook for figuring that one out.
You could also criticize him for not being committed enough to ending slavery from the start. But really, other than the mass hangings of the Dakotas (which could've been worse but was still not great), most criticism of him is just Lost Causers whining about "authoritarianism" by freeing the slaves and expanding the scope and power of the federal government as was necessary to free the slaves.
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It is telling that while you can't think of something cartoonishly evil he did off of the top of your head- you definitely remember that he was assassinated.
Edit: Apparently this edit is required. Whether Lincoln held the mission of abolishing slavery personally or not, he was associated with it. And was shot in cold blood for it. Do something less than the worst thing you could do as president and the American project will answer your arrogance.
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Not pictured: the giant, shitty looking pile of rubble under them.
They just blasted chunks off the mountain and left the mess behind
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My wife and I found ourselves near Mt. Rushmore by happenstance durin a road trip several years back. We knew the history, but stopped in to see it for ourselves. We found it to be extremely shitty and underwhelming. The natural area behind the monument was incredible, and I absolutely understand why the indigenous people believed this place to be sacred, but the front was small, tacky, and depressing. I wish I could refund our admission and give it to some chill natives at a gas station instead.
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Also not pictured: that the mountain is a spiritual site for the local tribes.
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The history of Washingtons teeth is uncertain. The evidence that those were slave teeth seems to show that the teeth were purchased.
Internet pictures with words are fucking dumb.
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I'm 30 and this is the first I've ever heard about this. my southern Baptist homeschool curriculum told me that his teeth were made of wood and it was never something i thought to fact check as an adult.
gotta love homeschooling 🙄
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According to a documentary I watched in passing on tv some years back, he had several types of dentures and most of them caused him great pain. One could even say his need for teeth helped in small part advance denture technology in the US.
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Washington owned slaves. He was not some moral high ground individual. The only reason why they even got independence from Britain was that Britain wanted to stop the expansion of the territory and the people in the colonies wanted to continue it and kill all the natives.
Edit:
In 1784, Washington paid unnamed “Negroes” for nine teeth. We don’t know the precise circumstances, says Van Horn: “The president’s decision to pay his slaves for their teeth may have been a recognition on his part that teeth were something sacrosanct and personal.” On the other hand, being enslaved meant that any economic exchange was inherently not fair.
He literally took advantage of enslaved people to get their teeth and you consider it as just “bought”. Top tier cracker mindset. I guess that to you it was also fair for him to own his slaves because he “bought” them.
https://daily.jstor.org/were-george-washingtons-teeth-taken-from-enslaved-people/
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Wow that's such a dumb thing I didn't expect to read today. I can see why you would think so, but still... Wow.
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I was at the museum at his estate on the potomac; the dentures were there. The plaque underneath claimed it was slaves.
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Is that not how dentures worked at the time? Any tooth you got was from someone so poor they had to sell it or who had it taken from them.
Modern equivalent would be displaying shoes made in a sweatshop. Yeah terrible practice, but so commonplace its generally not a huge reflection on the character of the owner.
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Internet pictures with words are fucking dumb
Memers in shambles right now. Webcomic artists, to shreds. Researchers who use diagrams with legends in their publications, pulverized. Journalists, atomised.
A child draws a picture of his father and writes "I love you" for it is the man's birthday. He posts the picture online.
YOU FOOLS!
Yells the mother, as she beats them both to death with a large brick.
In the halls of the United Nations, an envoy reads the latest finding of his commission: "I'm afraid every character of every alphabet is ultimately a drawing."
"But that would mean..."
"Yes, I'm afraid. Every text online counts as internet picture with words. Including the meeting reports that Stephanie posts on our site." Sound of typing stops, as Stephanie looks up, aghast The discussion resumes, the tone rises and descends again, a consensus is reached. It is a hard choice, but a fair one. All the lettered people are to be buried alive.
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Walk up honey, new copypasta just dropped!
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Lulz, good points. I should clarify that internet pictures with "facts" are fucking dumb. While that wording has gaps as well, maybe we can hone in on some specificity.
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Washington's teeth were made of diamonds and you can't convince me otherwise.
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All four of them carved onto a sacred natural site known to the Plains Indigenous people of the area as the 'Six Grandfathers'
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This is why I find it surprising when USAians say "This is not us." When talking about Trump. No bro, it was always you, maybe you just weren't paying attention.
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As a Native American this attitude is so grating. People outside the US really don’t seem to understand that it’s 55 different states, districts, and territories, along with dozens of sovereign tribes, all being forced to pretend to be one nation. Many of us can and do claim “this is not us” in the same way many Europeans would say the same about Viktor Orban.
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"Why don't Americans just march on DC and take their country back??"
If I lived in Lisbon, Portugal, Moscow would be the equivalent distance of how far away DC is from me.
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I can't and don't want to argue with your point, however in the faceless internet space unless you specify you speak from the name of a specific subgroup, the blanket 'American' is implied. It's not a lack of understanding, it's a lack of context.
Contrary to that Europe doesn't have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally. I don't have the power to vote for/against him or influence that country in any way, where that's different in your case.
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Me sowing: Hell yeah this is great
Me reaping: This is not us. What a somber moment in world history 😔
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I didn't have a choice to be born here, and, had I had the option, I wouldn't have defaced a Native American monument in the first place. This is on top of the fact that the US is currently trying to find ways of disowning/executing me (trans).
Quite honestly, maybe I shouldn't be offended by being lumped in with other Americans, because maybe I'm not actually being included in these kinds of sweeping statements. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people imply that Americans as a whole are responsible for the things our government has and is doing.
Again, I didn't ask to be born in the US. I don't like that I'm "American". No one asked me, please don't lump people like me in with the others.
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As a European, I think it's because of all the "land of the free", "we're #1", "the american dream" and "the american melting pot" bullshit.
Whatever that means when looking at history. It was only as an adult that I found out america is the villain.
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Every single democracy in Europe is younger than America's by an order of magnitude. Most have gone through 2 or 3 forms of government since it was founded. You have the luxury of not "being the villains" because your governments haven't been around long enough to have nasty shit stick to them. They were all emphatically on board with doing vile stuff to stop the communist boogeyman, they just let America's guns to do it.
The American exceptionalism narrative was born out of WWII, because they really were the "best" industrialized country by virtue of not being a smoking crater. Every state that has reached or is on the path to being a modern nation has blood on their hands, America just hasn't had the chance to symbolically wash them.
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I mean, in so much as a single person representing a county goes. The first colonies were a mix of religious zealots, Virginian drug dealers (well, tobacco but that's almost worse), and a little Dutch (who were quite active in slave trading at the time). Quickly got a few more from French and Spanish, too.
However, the US also includes annexed Mexican territory (which has its own mixed history of subjegation and torture) and slews of different immigrant populations (with their own mixed intentions). A section of my own family is here cause they tried for Scottish independence, although there's a good chance they were sent here for being belligerent drunks.
That said, ain't a single country on this earth without their fair share of bullshit. America is just a lovely mix of those assholes, honestly.
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That would require the democrats to actually do something
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I'm picturing 200 dems walking slowly chanting "we shall overcome" on the way to brunch. George Bush is there. No one tips.
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That would require democrats to have fundamentally different goals than Republicans.
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Nooo how dare you suggest the Democrats aren't on our side. You're gonna make people note VOTEE
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You could look at any country in the world and find leaders that were just as bad and even worse throughout history. I think the takeaway should be that shitty people exist. Some of it is a product of the times, some of it just being awful people. Shitty people have and always will exist.
Edit: With these downvotes it almost seems like y'all thought I was defending them. I absolutely was not defending them. :)
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The US Empire is definitely one of the worst States to exist in history, though, consistently.
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Can't deny that. The ratio of good/bad presidents is definitely abysmal.
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This is an ml community. Anything that praises the USA or normalizes it (that is, reducing the awfulness) is gonna get down votes.
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Okay, fella - take a few breaths and relax. People are products of their times. The better ones fight for virtues and values they see as better at the time. They see an opportunity others do not and rally people around those.
Others they don't see and continue wi5h those norms, or they see the wrongs but don't believe they can rally people around fixing them.
Do not demonize people in the past who do not meet current norms. There will never be anybody who will meet those standards.
Judge them against the standards of their peers.
What if MLK did not support feminists? Would he now be considered scum, thus negating everything good he ever did?
Heck, i don't know if he had a stance on women's rights explicitly. Maybe he didn't. Is he evil if he didn't?
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There were plenty of peers, even UK and European ones, that opposed the US colonial project. Read Losurdo - Liberalism, a counter-history if you want an in-depth look at the debates of the time.
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Yeah, nobody at that time knew slavery was wrong. Well, I mean, except for all the slaves, obviously, they knew, but there was no way for them to get their perspective heard because they were cut out of the political process. Who cut them out of the process? Well, uh, well you see...
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People are products of their times.
You hear this a lot, but then you and look at "the times" and find arguments in favor of cultural integration dating back thousand of years.
It is true that people are the products of their time, but those times are not as radically distant moral wise as it is usually assumed.
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What if MLK did not support feminists? Would he now be considered scum, thus negating everything good he ever did?
he literally addressed the national organization for women in 1966 and espoused their ideals.
giving a pass to the people from history is problematic because the same ideals of progressiveness that we pride ourselves on today were present in the past and people knew that it existed; they simply weren't as popular back then as they are now and anyone espousing them back then were treated like tankies of their own time.
giving them a pass only helps to excuse regressivism and anti-progressive sentiment like both the republicans and democrats (respectively) practice today; this is a key reason why we have trump as president today and probably jd vance tomorrow.
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Do not demonize people in the past who do not meet current norms. There will never be anybody who will meet those standards.
"Nazis were just a product of their time!"
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Lots of "what-ifs" to dismiss people highlighting historical genocidal slavers.
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Okay. There were staunch abolitionists across the US and especially in the UK. Many of whom were operating on the basis of equality, i.e. not the American belief that black people are a subspecies that were sent from heaven to serve whites, like all the leaders of the US though before the 1900s.
So by your own method, Washington was a disgusting human being, one would argue a demon.
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What a horrible, out of touch thing to say in response to this image and all its context
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Product of the times isn't a great way to put it, but you can certainly make the argument that most people have shades of grey morality.
Science can back you up, too, as I teach social psychology and when you dig in, you find that normative human nature is pretty complex but generally very supportive for in-group and mildly empathetic even with strangers. It's only when you dehumanize a group do you get the worst behavior, and in all four cases you see that, be it slaves or indigenous people.
When you look at those times, it's people who recognized their humanity that ended up in the just side of history.
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That's four of them. I rather think Carter was a good human being, regardless of whether or not you think he was a good president.
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Read "The Jakarta Method"
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Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
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