Not in a great man theory sort of way, but who would you say is the worst living human today? Sometimes I get too bogged down with thinking about our issues as systematic and forget that all policy has someone signing off on it and that got me thinking and I've arrived at Bill Gates. With his work in Africa, how he ruined computers for the world, and the Epstein ties I'd say he's gotta at least be up there.
I don't think Bill Gates is at all a sensible argument. He's done a lot of bad shit, of course but to respond to your arguments:
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His Africa work is some eugenics population control shit, but he also worked to improve health care access in some areas.
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How have privatized, shitty computers meaningfully and directly lead to large scale death?
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Epstein stuff is horrifying but a) it was not truly large scale enough to register for your premise and b) he was just a participant, not the one making it all happen
I think the premise of your question has a major issue: how do we assign responsibility for death and destruction? For example, I'm sure you could make an argument that Gates's limitation of computers has lead to death and destruction downstream, but is there any way at all to measure such a counterfactual? How many lives would have been saved by global Linux? The other element of this is who gets assigned what portion of responsibility. Who's responsible for government violence? The rich person who lobbied and gladhanded to push for it? The politicians who wrote and passed the bills to enable it, and which specific politicians involved? Or, who's responsible for the US's military adventurism? Either of those prior groups, or the military leaders who actually organized their skills and resources to make it happen?
You say "not in a great man theory sort of way", but I think the question inherently must be framed that way.
All of that aside, I'd put forward a few candidates:
Bush/Cheney. Architects and leaders of the war on terror, which has lead to millions of death in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Massive bulwarks to climate change progress and uncompromising servants to/beneficiaries of the fossil fuel industry. Long term, this will lead to a massively magnified degree of death and destruction compared to what they've done so far, but the worst of it is yet to come.
Gorbachev and other architects of the collapse of the USSR (but again, who specifically is truly responsible?). With an immediate massive increase in excess death within the former USSR, the development of many despotic gangster governments (including Putin's), the loss of a state to oppose destructive US hegemony.
Trump: #1 thing for him is his massive failure of a COVID response, that enormously exacerbated the situation both in the US and abroad. He also continued to scale up and grow the US imperial machine and sanctions regime. Could it have gone any other way? Probably not. Does he still bear responsibility? Yes.
Whichever Koch brother is still alive. The ultimate architect of modern American reactionary politics who has arguably done more than any politician to make it a reality.
I think you undersell Gates by not mentioning that he pushed for the Oxford COVID vaccine to be patient protected. I've no idea how to try and calculate it, but there are a lot of dead or debilitated people in the global south because Gates lobbied to limit access to a vaccine that could have otherwise been more easily mass produced and distributed.
Yeah, but Trump's administration was part of that too, so he wins by default since he was also POTUS.
Gates basically controls the WHO as the Gates foundation is one of their biggest benefactors, almost spending as much as the U.S. government. If you want to work in global health and run afoul of capitalist interests you're going to have a bad time.
so he wins by default since he was also POTUS.
I disagree, Gates gets to rule over the world until the day of his death, whoever the POTUS is only gets a term or two.
The question is just difficult because yes the American war machine has killed more than Gates but even if you figure out the US leader who greenlit the most deaths it probably doesn't reach the number Gates has killed over his entire life
Those are some really good points. And I definitely get the problems with the premise of my question. That's why it's worded weirdly, I wasn't really able to square the question with reality. I know they're all guilty Im just trying to find out who other people think is the most guilty and learn about some evil deeds along the way. Ty for your well thought out response!
perhaps Bill Gates not as mass murderous as purported
One of the top grievances of my life is not just how personally annoying windows is, but the immeasurable economic damage from how unnecessarily shitty and anti-user windows is. And the weird thing is, probably 99% of my complaints about MS and windows are based on things that happened after Gates retired. That's not to say Gates did nothing wrong, he did much economic damage, but things got worse after he left.
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Bush II ticks Oil Baron (killing us all), Warcriminal (Iraq & Afghanistan), and social murder (Katrina, shrinking safety nets, directing the IMF & such for 8 years)
but i bet theres a better candidate, its just hard to research this between making sure people involved in bad things are still alive & general capitalist obfuscation
dark horse candidate: every successive round of global leadership not taking decisive action against climate change is responsible for increasingly horrifying amounts of future suffering and death--so like :bolso-joker: & :biden-leftist: are top contendors rn
p.s.
spoiler
i know we're not supposed to make excuses for the terror but i wouldn't mind official charges of 'future murder' certified before the :gui-better:
I do think Bolsonaro is higher up on this list than people might realize
I'm gonna go with a less intuitive one: Carter, depending on what you consider "direct." Between greenlighting a lot of atrocities from US client states, sending weapons to warlords in Afghanistan and to the genocidal Indonesian dictatorship, and helping to mainstream neoliberalism, his actions have without question left a long and bloody wake.
I was also thinking Kissinger but the American invasion of Vietnam lasted for nineteen years — Kissinger was in government for only six of them. I'd posit that Muhammad Bin Salman is the one, given his role in leading the blockade of Yemen, although I can't guess how the Yemeni civil war would be going without Saudi intervention.
Not in a great man theory sort of way
Gorbachev for doing that pizza hut ad is the diamat answer
Gorbachev was responsible for completely giving up to capitalists instead of going Dengist as bare mininum.
Gorbachev was responsible for completely giving up to capitalists instead of going Dengist
Hate to break it to you, that's essentially happened. Difference was the U.S came in and fucked one up while leaving the other alone thinking they'd fuck themselves over
Gorbachev should get credit for preventing chernobyl from being as bad as it could have been
I am gonna go with Bush and company. They utterly crested the pseudo-intellectual gospel of misery and Architected the infrastructure of woe that is the modern age.
ITS YOU! YOURE THE JACK THAT BIDEN IS ALWAYS TALKING OF!
Groups are more apt for this type of question, but if there's one individual that turns up when talking about JFK's assassination, both sidesing the Cuban revolution, Vietnam's Phoenix program, Operation Condor in LATAM, MK Ultra, the coverup of pedophilic conspiracies, Iraq v Iran, Iran v Iraq, Israel v Iran/Iraq, rat lines and the funneling of weapons to Pakistan to genocide eastwards, and much more, it has to be George HW Bush. People will say Kissinger, but HW crystalized the WASP takeover of the world via neoliberal hegemony. Everything since has flowed downstream of those events.
Like it's mind boggling to think just how much Iran-Contra continues to be an influence to this day (the militarization of police is a direct result), and the various financial and physical corpses that have been laid strewn in its path over the decades. It isn't for no reason that HW plausibly "fell on the sword" by not running for a second term so that the Iran-Contra would be buried, and also why Bush the Younger sealed all clandestine activity from those decades.
Yes you're right. Should have clarified that the counsel overseeing the Iran-Contra affair at the time indicted Bush, and played a role in him losing. He never stopped being salty about it basically sinking his campaign. The pardons to others implicated came soon afterwards, via the work of Barr
Also I didn't realize this was talking about living people. Ignore my post
But I guess since Bush W is inextricably linked to his father, maybe we can make an exception for possession beyond the grave. But of course Kissinger is still alive
I think the old American fortunes still have an outsized effect we see on the world today, and while much of that fortune has been diluted, class interests still inform why the Rockefellers played a significant role in something like the Trilateral Commission. And without going full reptilian conspiracy brain, those old families are still influential to this day
And of course that doesn't account for all the new money technocratic overlords
