The greatest President

[Bob The Mercenary]

Originally Posted by 01d55

Frankly our standards today are pretty fucking awful. I mean you say the people who fought in WW2 hated homos? Look at the shitstorm that people kick up right now over the possibility that we might stop using the awesome power of the government to crush their hopes and dreams.

At least it's not an impossibility anymore. The fact that the government is even considering laws concerning homosexuals is leaps and bounds from the old way of things. Even half of the country is for it.

I know humans can be awful, but based on the standards of other countries and those of the past U.S., I think we're doing pretty darn good.

[Lady Cygnet]

In my opinion, William Henry Harrison was the greatest President of the USA.

[01d55]

Originally Posted by Bob the Mercenary

I know humans can be awful, but based on the standards of other countries and those of the past U.S., I think we're doing pretty darn good.

Doing good by those standards is like saying your diet is doing pretty good under the standards of Jabba the Hut.

Going from awful to pretty bad isn't the same thing as going from okay to pretty good. They're both progress, sure, but there's a fundamentally different underlying situation at work. We've had over 200 years of progress and we're still doing awful shit that destroys peoples live basically at random.

And which other countries are we talking about? If you're referring to the countries that vote the same way as we do on U.N. resolutions on human rights, then yeah we're doing a bit better than Syria. If you're talking about countries that aren't impoverished shitholes, we're actually pretty consistently in or near last place.

Also:

Originally Posted by Yglesias

The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.