• BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      The bottom of the list is definitely a crowded field. No way Trump comes close to worst.

      Least bad president is really just between Lincoln and FDR. Unless someone wants to make an arguement for William Henry Harrison for dropping dead a month after being elected

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      6 months ago

      I’m not about to rank US Presidents but Lincoln was no good guy. Perhaps the bar for presidents is just that low and he might still be top 5 dunno don’t care.

      Check out “Black Reconstruction in America” by W.E.B. DuBois - excellent book about the revolutionary aspect of slave liberation, and how Lincoln tried his damnedest to avoid liberation then went way soft on former Confederates, and really curtailed actual power change to the freedmen. (Johnson of course cranked this to 11 and REALLY fucked shit though)

      And of course MANY atrocities were committed against indigenous peoples under Lincoln.

      Lincoln was largely uninformed and reactionary on Native American issues and defaulted to policies set by his predecessors, writes University of Texas historian Thomas Britten. That meant making and breaking treaties, confiscating ancestral lands, forcing removal, pushing cultural assimilation—and, at times, turning a blind eye to acts of genocide committed by the military on the western frontier. Among the bitterest pills served to Native peoples during his administration: Lincoln signed laws that gave away millions of acres of tribal land to support white westward expansion, and he approved the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux warriors, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

      During his time in the White House, Lincoln displayed the common paternalistic attitude that tribal peoples required white men’s “civilizing” influence. The president, wrote biographer David Herbert Donald, “rather enjoyed playing the role of their Great Father, [sometimes] addressing them in pidgin English," as in one encounter with Potawatomi Indians in which he asked them, “Where live now? When go back Iowa?”—even though they spoke fluent English. In March 1863, when hosting Plains Indian dignitaries at the White House, Lincoln told them: “I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do, by cultivation of the earth.” He also argued, without a trace of irony, that despite being engaged in a bloody civil war, white men were “not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.”

      https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-native-americans

      amerikkka

      • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        Yeah, like you say I was working off the bar being incredibly low since every president is a mass-murdering psychopath. Certainly not trying to argue that he was a good person, we’re in agreement on that. rat-salute

      • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        for me it’s johnson. most US presidents have no choice but to suck, the myriad of forces that put them in power all suck also so they are just representing their shitty base. Johnson wasn’t elected and destroyed reconstruction and botched maybe the one moment in American history with any potential to improve this shithole. He went out of his way, above and beyond, to permanently make America worse.

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    6 months ago

    Normally I try not to care much about what individual celebrities think about politics. Mark Hamill is a lib, “so what?” I figure. Most Americans are libs of one stripe or another, usually it’s not worth getting worked up about.

    But this one in particular, whooee. What the hell has Biden even done, other than not be Trump? He’s a President without vision, “nothing will fundamentally change”. He passed an infrastructure bill and appointed some not so terrible NLRB picks. What else did he even do? Some bullshit loan forgiveness that looks good in a headline but actually does jack shit for most people in debt? Ditto on climate stuff and green energy?

    Like, obviously there’s a lot from a left perspective to criticize about the likes of FDR, JFK, and LBJ, but from a liberal perspective they were all Presidents with a strong vision who wanted to create a soft domestic welfare state. So that’s easily way better than Biden. Hell, even Obama had the ACA under his belt. Surely, from Hamill’s perspective, Clinton’s America was better than Biden’s? Surely, from a liberal perspective, Biden doesn’t compare favorably to any post-WWII democratic President except maybe Carter?

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        6 months ago

        Ehh, Hamill was born in Truman’s era. Truman was miles worse than Biden. IMO he’s almost as bad as Andrew Johnson; by choosing to use nuclear force to stop Japan from going communist he made all of humanity live under the fear of nuclear armageddon, killed more than 200,000 Japanese people, and set back progress into world socialist revolution by many decades.

        However, as far as presidents he could’ve voted for, Carter, Clinton, or Biden are fair game for worst in different ways IMO. And if we’re talking all presidents D or R during Hamill’s adulthood then Reagan wins hands down, and to Hamill’s credit Star Wars is very critical of Reagan.