Obviously excluding like Hitler, that’s a gimme.
Can be a good or a bad person.
My vote goes to Churchill or Reagan. Absolutely ignorant people of history.
I watched a trailer for a documentary about her and was astounded at...uh...the physical appearances of her fans. They were sort of like Dorian Gray but without the magic picture.
Pinochet.
Hitler-stans are all "well ackshully, the holocaust never happened", but Pinochet-stans are all "everything he did was cool and good and he should have done more of it", so they actually manage to be worse.
these people are real. I was at a recruitment event once and everyone had to prepare a speech on literally any subject, to a group of mostly strangers, and one dude gave a speech on Pinochet. Fucking nuts, no one had any reaction except like, good job weirdo?
fwiw I gave mine on how Francis Scott Key was a horrible racist, and that if the author's not dead, then the US National Anthem is by a "benevolent" slave owner that basically founded Liberia.
Let’s be honest, they’re the same people. They just know that you can get away with being pro-Pinochet in public.
Each reply makes me regret posting this as I realize another group of people I hate.
I just read all of the replies in a lin Manuel type of spoken song and didn't take in any information.
Hamilton wanted to be an aristocrat and have a monarchy. Fuck Hamilton
hmm, and upon a quick glance it looks like he never owned slaves? is that propaganda bullshit or actually true?
maybe there were 2 ok founding fathers. news to me
Ben Franklin was part of the anti-italian brigade.
based ben franklin confirmed
seriously though, yeah, that makes sense. i never had any doubt that he'd have bought into the "scientific fact" of races having meaningful differences from one another at the time. i was just wondering if he drew awful conclusions from that idea, like that other races should be excluded from our society or exterminated or relocated or whatever. seems the answer to that is, unfortunately, yes.
can't win 'em all i guess
Pretty sure he was also a bit rapey. definitely shitty to his wife too.
Teddy Roosevelt/Rudyard Kipling the people who loves these guys somehow still believe that paternalistic imperialism is good and genocide is just modernization that helps the poor Natives/Indians/Any subject of the western empires
Yeah this is my thinking with Churchill too. People who quote churchill drive me insane and I’ll usually tell them my “favorite” quote from him about the Bengal famine.
I don't even get the thought process of Churchill stans, even from their own side he oversaw the beginning of the disintegration of the British Empire following the Mau Mau Rebellion, and he was even ousted by his own party
Ah yes how could I forget, democracy for the Europeans and tyrannical imperialism for the rest, this is the British way
He was PM during WWII. That's it basically.
The pro-UK propaganda worked so well that it's still effective to this day.
Genghis Khan. You shouldn't respect the world conqueror just because he did it on horseback & had some glowing histories written about him.
It's cringe to admire any conqueror but at least like Napoleon or Suleiman didn't burn and slaughter every other city they captured
If historical records are anything to go by; drink, sleep, and leech off of Engels.
Extremely relatable character imo
He also had Zhongdu destroyed, a lot a lot a lot of Chinese got killed before the Mongols looked west.
Not even 'refusing to surrender', it was anything short of sublication the day the Mongols showed up. God forbid you try to defend yourselves against a raiding party pillaging the countryside, Merv's garrison beat an early Mongol group but surrendered later, got massacred.
In fact, it's totally fucked framing to act like self-defense is on the same level as an invading army, the Mongols did not deserve revenge for people making their conquest difficult
What glowing histories? Histories of the Mongol empire make the black book of communism look conservative in its accounting.
the primary source that's most detailed--the secret history of the mongols--makes Genghiz look really good & justified
The Romanov apologia that Americans regurgitate whenever the Russian Revolution is brought up
They took Charles Darwin off the fiver to replace him with Churchill and I'm still pissed off about it. I live in the UK and I'm sick of people who know shit all about Churchill acting like he was a good person, all because our media spends its time sucking his limp, necrotic dick.
Even before he became prime minister he was out there fucking shit up as secretary of defense as well, sending the troops to gun down striking miners during the 'pandy riots for example.
the corollary to the Pinochet comment elsewhere in the thread.
Alternatively, Dawkins people are definitely worse than Hitchens fans. I feel like Hitchens fans have a sense of shame they might show you once in a while.
Something about Hitchens just dripped smugness all over the carpet and for some reason I feel like his hardcore fans are more annoying than the Dawkins crowd. They're probably a tad smarter, but still harder to deal with.
okay so as a guy who was Very Online in 2006, Hitchens never commanded the legions that Dawkins did. This could entirely be down to who has a following in 2020 and What That Following Cares About. The Dawkins followers 15 years ago were everywhere on the Left, because the Bush-era right was pretty Christian and Dawkins was avowedly anti-Christian, so the Atheists came over here. They were the vanguard of today's logic guys. It's well known now that the Atheist Community is misogynist and racist, and that exact Atheism Community comes from the Dawkins community.
The only reason I think Hitchens fans are less insufferable is that Hitchens's work is more diffuse, less focused, and rarely interesting, while Dawkins is extremely focused and his public appearances are comically antisocial and hostile. If you want to be a Hitchens fan, you have to put in a fair amount of work before you can get started, with Dawkins you can get a grasp on the basics in about 90 minutes.
I wasn't online until two or three years after that, but yeah you're right. One reason might be that I feel like Dawkins fans grew away from him whereas Hitchens had this punkishness to him that made him stick a bit better. Also he died early enough that his biggest gaffes (dear god do you remember "women will never be funny"?) never caught up to cancel him.
I would say though, Dawkins and Hitchens were both equally New Atheists at the time even if Dawkins was the bigger pop star.
One reason might be that I feel like Dawkins fans grew away from him whereas Hitchens had this punkishness to him that made him stick a bit better. Also he died early enough that his biggest gaffes
I fully agree with you here, I think Dawkins' incredible uncharisma + his number of public appearances undid him, but he is the guy who created Sargon, et al. As someone who briefly affiliated themselves with the Atheism movement, I always found Hitchens' writings to be threadbare and infrequent compared to Dawkins, who wrote voluminously on one of his great points of obsession. In 2006, I wanted to like Hitchens because I was told he was Cool, but always found him hard to grasp.
I think you're right though, if he lived even two years longer that punkishness would be 0.
Tbh I haven't really encountered any Dawkins fans, so I didnt think of him. That Marxist Soccer prick on the other hand...
Oh those people definitely exist... /r/atheism just doesn’t really exist like it used to
The fans are morons, the apostles are the monsters. Maybe a subtle difference.
yeah, the video of him that someone linked recently had tons of stemlords in the YT comments cheering him on for saying women need to ask for a lower salary
Thatcherites is interesting because it’s always been my impression they don’t really exist in the UK, where they would have the most influence?
Got the sense it was always Americans that had nice things to say about her.
Thatcher stans are the worst. I didn't know they even existed until I started using Reddit and Twitter, because it seems to be a universal opinion where I grew up that she was an absolute monster. Imagine how disgusted I was when I saw some lib Twitter take in 2016 about how much of a 'feminist icon' she is. So many American libs just see her as a #girlboss and it sickens me to my core.
I was actually shocked to learn that people like her, all I have seen is anti thatcher propaganda so I thought that everyone hated her
Like 100% of the ruling class in Britain idolize her, along with basically all the Tory voters.
Do they? I mean, I'm studying Applied Maths and Physics so there is lots of space fanboys I know but most people hardly even know the specific people involved. They just care about the rockets and the space shit. He isn't like Einstein or Hawking or Feynman who actually have a fanbase.
Speaking of which, Feynman. He was a creepy sexist prick but all the nerds think he is super cool because nerds think being creepy is being a "cool ladies man". The Feynman worship is extremely annoying and you won't believe how many times I've gotten incredible pushback in various physics fora or even from people irl for just pointing this out.
Yeah I was gonna say, my impression was that any kind of quantum computing is very far into the future and requires us to know a lot more about maintaining superpositions and whatnot, which is why I was kinda surprised that industry cares about this right now.
There are definitely much worse uses of money though. Lots of neat nanoscale engineering experimentation being funded.
I'm a bit confused, are you saying nanoscale engineering experimentation is a bad use of money?
He was racist before his radicalisation. He later wanted the first Indian head of state to be a dalit (untouchable) woman .
His biggest fault was his pacifism which extended the Empire for thirty years.
