Excepting you’ve missed my point: I’m not convinced that his numbers are competitive. For all his trying, he’s at best holding his own on the deaths department (if you think that somebody who opens the door for a murderer is as evil as the murderer himself, which I don’t), and he’s a complete pantywaist in the human rights violation department.
It’s a weird question, right?
Which is worse? Killing people, or making them suffer their entire lives?
Which is worse? Killing people with good intentions, or brutal acts of savagery?
I don’t really think there’s any objective criteria to determine which is worse in any of these cases.
Would you rather be in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea all of your life with little food, power, heat, etc…or would you rather live in Iraq or Afghanistan and risk death every day?
Would you rather live as a closeted gay in Taliban-led Afghanistan, or as a dirt-farmer in Africa?
What if you torture a million people yet don’t kill them? That’s pretty bad too.
What makes a person bad? Their intentions? Their actions? or their effect on others?
My vote? Kim Jong Il. Bush is bad, but not Kim Jong Il bad. Bush is stupid and insecure and immature and the fact that he has power means it affects more people than it should. Kim Jong Il has absolute power, and he also is batshit crazy, and he’s also so selfish as to not even pretend to live an austere life. He essentially brutalizes the North Koreans so he can maintain power with his threat of nuclear weapons which leads to embargoes etc…
Not a nice guy.
Bush? Bush is bad in a lot of ways, but there are worse people on the face of the earth at the moment.
Allow me to do a bit of ‘amateur/junior-modding’ myself – or annoying nit-picking. Your choice. Trust it’s no big for you either, but I just as well refuse to allow you to frame the topic as long as the OP doesn’t do it him/herself. That being said, what’s obviously “irrelevant” as per the the OP itself is historical record – it isn’t about Stalin, Hitler, Pol-Pot or Genghis Khan. His/her question wasn’t about “The Worst Person In The World Ever,” but rather, as I understand it – and it appears from his own choice and many other responses – about the worst now. Therefore, my timeline is not only perfectly valid, but right on topic.
So what’s the point of setting that as one of your criteria for the “honor”? Certainly doesn’t advance your argument – if it can be called that as opposed to contradicting your own self.
I refer you back to mine and Elvis’ post vis-a-vis the Lancet Report. Just because some don’t want to accept the exact same methodology used to calculate natural disasters and other conflicts (read Sudan) doesn’t mean it’s not without merit. And even if you discard it, please, name anyone who is as directly responsible as Bush for the amount of innocent people killed since he took POWER. And yes, it needs to be typed in caps and bolded.
Lastly, it’s also worth noting (and it has, though largely ignored by his defenders/patriots) we’re supposedly talking about the democratic leader of the world’s largely self-promoted, number one nation state.
When I read the thread title, I knew this would be fertile ground for Bush-bashing. I didn’t actually expect it in the OP, though.
I would suspect that the worst person in the world is some uknown guy somewhere currently getting away with child molestation in between periods of wife abuse and trying to find new recruits for the Ku Klux Klan.
This is an excellent and relevant post. I don’t agree with its conclusion, but it makes excellent, and depressing, points.
Bush is even in the running for “Worst Person in the World” only if you load the dice by defining things in precisely the right (wrong?) way.
I mean, I’m as anti-Bush as the next man, but claiming that Bush is worse than Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong-Il, without a lot of disclaimers, just makes you look hyperbolic. All you’re (general “you”) doing is confirming the belief of people like Shodan that liberals have lost all touch with reality and proportion.
Fortunately for liberals, these people are NOT representative of the breed. But it is telling that there are so many of them here, and that when they advance an opinion like this, they’re not laughed off the forum by everyone else. They find this place a safe haven, because even the sane liberals, who obviously disagree with the points being raised, don’t want to come out swinging the way they would – and have – if equivalent sentiments from the right were offered up.
Heh. See: roughly half the posts in this thread.
But how is he not worse ? Those two don’t even have the power to be as bad as Bush.
I mean let’s look at the obvious historical example of a bad guy; Hitler. Was he, really, morally worse than any number of other people, past and present ? No. There were and are millions of people who would have cheerfully done everything he did and more; he certainly had plenty such working for him. What made Hitler so bad was that he was who he was, AND that he was in a place and time where he could actually do what he did.
Bush IMHO is the worst person in the world at the moment, at least partly because he has the power to be. There are any number of people who would be even worse if they could be; but they can’t, so they aren’t.
Really? My first post to the thread called the idea “borderline insane.” I think other liberals here have said something similar.
Redfury, I am interested in setting up a reasonably fair set of criteria, not in cherrypicking a set to exclude Bush. As such, having one of the criteria not be in his favor is absolutely not something I care about; it certainly doesn’t contradict my argument.
Daniel
First of all, I find the whole “and we all know that if someone said (x) about (y) then group (z) would react in fashion (w)” thing pretty useless and pointless. I mean, you can say anything there, and you’ll never be proved either wrong or right. You said “and have”. So when precisely did someone start a thread saying that Bill Clinton was the worst person in the world?
And furthermore, I think that by pointing out the partisan nature of the SDMB (and it certainly leans heavily liberal), you’re trying to avoid the fact that these complaints did not spring up in a vaccuum. The amount that people hate Bush, are hyperbolic in describing their hatred of Bush, think Bush is the worst president ever, etc, etc, etc, is not just the same old I’m-against-him-because-he’s-not-one-of-ours that we see with every politician. It’s not the case that, had a different republican been elected in 00 and 04, the liberals would be yelling at him and calling him names and even entertaining the idea that he was the worst person in the world, just because he was a (gasp) republican president! Rather, it’s because of the specific things he has done.
No matter what you might think about Clinton (for instance), the most serious charges levelled at him (barring conspiracy theories about him murdering Vince Foster, which we can safely ignore just as no one in this thread claims Bush is TWPITW because of his planning of 9/11), even if all true, wouldn’t merit discussion of his TWPITW status even when hedged about by disclaimers and redefinitions.
Yes.
Sorry if my nomination of Mr. Selig was not dismissive enough for you.
Oh ? And how was he morally worse than, say, some Christian fundie who wants to kill all non-Christians or touch off the Apolcalypse so Jesus will come back, but can’t ? People don’t like to think of it, but Hitler wasn’t really all that unusual as a person; it’s the fact that he managed to pull off his bloody fantasies that made him unusual. And that so many people kept his particular evils from falling into the memory hole; usually such things are just ignored, then largely forgotten.
Y’know, you took this thread into the realm of personal offense pretty early, (and using the “get your rocks off” phrase is probably a technical violation of forum rules).
I think you need to calm down if you’re going to launch something that purports to be a debate in the Great Debates Forum.
At any rate, I don’t really see a debate, here, either as posted in the OP or as carried on by the subsequent respondents. It all seems rather poll-like with a lot on NSHO thrown in, so I’m sending this over to IMHO where they can either close it or send it to the Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
Do what you must.
Given the general tenor of the thread, I shall immediately launch it Pitward.
Moved from IMHO to the Pit.
Don’t bow down to them, fight them, Godwindamnit. Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Only a complete and utter fuckwit* would suggest that mentioning him in this context meant you’d “lost the debate” or some such crap.
*Don’t you love pre-emptive strikes? 
Great, now I have “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” going through my head.
To hopefully slap the foaming at the mouth Bush haters upside the head with Monkey’s Big Book of Perspective[sup]TM[/sup], let’s look at some actual facts.
Y’all hate Bush (and I’m not a fan of that short bus riding Texan, either) because of a highly unpopular war in Iraq that, at current estimates, has taken the lives of 655.000. OK, I get that. But remember the first Gulf War? Let’s travel back to 1999. Saddam had lost his unprovoked attack on Kuwait and Iraq was undergoing it’s ninth year of UN sanctions. Here’s an interesting CNN article from August 6, 1999.
That was 1999, people. The sanctions weren’t lifted until 2003 when:
They were dying by the dozens before. True, they were dying from starvation rather than by shrapnel with “Lockheed Martin” stamped on the side, but I don’t see a whole hell of a lot of difference. At least now they get a square meal before they’re killed.
I’n not saying it’s an improvement, just… perspective, people.
Wow, what a surprise that this OP would render such a result on this board! I’m shocked, I tell ya. Almost like it was a troll thread. Nah, couldn’t be.