Oda Nobunaga is sometimes depicted as not just villainous, but actually demonic. And he probably was pretty ruthless, because you don't get to be the warlord that nearly united the whole of Japan by being nice.
He also had an interest in economics, promoting trade with foreign nations, abolishing monopolies and laying down roads everywhere (although this was also to help him move his armies around).
Tokugawa likely would have never risen to power if not for his alliance with Nobunaga
Hideyoshi basically conquering Japan for him probably also helped.
Tokugawa knew how to take advantage of other people, I'll give him that. :P
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited July 2010
I could see feeling conflicted about him, but flagrantly violating the rule of law by aligning executive resources into an elaborate conspiracy to persecute political opponents pretty much keeps you off my "top five favorite presidents" list.
He opened up talks with China, negotiated the ABM treaty with the USSR, and got us the fuck out of Vietnam. He also founded the EPA and OSHA.
He was actually a pretty damn good President. Unfortunately he started the drug war as we know it, but the good that he did vastly overshadows that.
Does no one remember Watergate?
It's kind of a big deal.
But actually somewhat less of a deal than the good he did.
(He's still evil though)
Nixon never ceases to fascinate me. I had to do a report on him in College (pick a President, basically), and I had known next to nothing about him outside of watergate and the bad stuff, and afterwards I was totally blown away by how much of a complex and conflicted person he really was. This isn't to downplay his bad stuff though, because, you know, it was bad. But the point was that I found out that Nixon wasn't some mustache-twirling characature of a villain that most media made (and make) him out to be.
I could see feeling conflicted about him, but flagrantly violating the rule of law by aligning executive resources into an elaborate conspiracy to persecute political opponents pretty much keeps you off my "top five favorite presidents" list.
Oh, gotcha. I agree with you there.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
He opened up talks with China, negotiated the ABM treaty with the USSR, and got us the fuck out of Vietnam. He also founded the EPA and OSHA.
He was actually a pretty damn good President. Unfortunately he started the drug war as we know it, but the good that he did vastly overshadows that.
Does no one remember Watergate?
It's kind of a big deal.
Man, Watergate was so weird. And totally meaningless when it came the 1972 election. Nixon won that election by a huge margin. Spying on the Democratic Party was pointless- in that political climate, Nixon had a huge advantage.
The man was his own worst enemy. He would have cruised to victory in 1972 and ended the Vietnam war. His presidency would have been considered a major success. Combined with the Democratic party's internal conflicts, there probably would have been a couple of decades of Republican domination of the presidency and Congress.
So, I guess if you're a Democrat, you should be grateful that Nixon was so paranoid and weird.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
edited July 2010
Maleficent looked awesome in that dress, held onto her girlish figure quite well, and was justifiably upset at being forgotten in favor of the three tiny fat fairies.
She's really just as misunderstood as the Witch from the West.
Maleficent looked awesome in that dress, held onto her girlish figure quite well, and was justifiably upset at being forgotten in favor of the three tiny fat fairies.
She's really just as misunderstood as the Witch from the West.
Maleficent was such a great Disney villain.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Maleficent looked awesome in that dress, held onto her girlish figure quite well, and was justifiably upset at being forgotten in favor of the three tiny fat fairies.
She's really just as misunderstood as the Witch from the West.
He opened up talks with China, negotiated the ABM treaty with the USSR, and got us the fuck out of Vietnam. He also founded the EPA and OSHA.
He was actually a pretty damn good President. Unfortunately he started the drug war as we know it, but the good that he did vastly overshadows that.
Does no one remember Watergate?
It's kind of a big deal.
Man, Watergate was so weird. And totally meaningless when it came the 1972 election. Nixon won that election by a huge margin. Spying on the Democratic Party was pointless- in that political climate, Nixon had a huge advantage.
I used to think that, but in May of 1972, Nixon had a mid-single digit lead of McGovern for the most part.
He would have cruised to victory in 1972 and ended the Vietnam war. His presidency would have been considered a major success.
He ended the war by abandoning it--which was more or less the right thing to do--but not without bombing the shit out of them first. He may have scaled down troop presence, but he certainly scaled up bombing: 600,000 Cambodians died in his operation Menu. I suppose that what I'm saying here is just that Nixon's end to the war was not a humanitarian one, and his peacemaking consisted in a retreat that was largely forced anyway.
I understand an appreciation for the good things he did. I don't, however, understand the degree of forum love.
He would have cruised to victory in 1972 and ended the Vietnam war. His presidency would have been considered a major success.
He ended the war by abandoning it--which was more or less the right thing to do--but not without bombing the shit out of them first. He may have scaled down troop presence, but he certainly scaled up bombing: 600,000 Cambodians died in his operation Menu. I suppose that what I'm saying here is just that Nixon's end to the war was not a humanitarian one, and his peacemaking consisted in a retreat that was largely forced anyway.
I understand an appreciation for the good things he did. I don't, however, understand the degree of forum love.
Sure the Cambodian bombings sucked, but this is a villain compliment thread, we are suposed to focus on the good things.
With Nixon its this: If he had been self-assured enought to know that he had 72 in the bag. Laid of the watergate/Creep shit. He would be remembered as on of the greatest post-war presidents(maybe in the top 10 overall).
I mean look at JFK. What did he do apart from getting killed in office? Even the Cuba Crisis could be said to have been the result of the bay of pigs(up for debate), meaning his greatest moment was cleaning up his own shit. Yet he gets the love...
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
He opened up talks with China, negotiated the ABM treaty with the USSR, and got us the fuck out of Vietnam. He also founded the EPA and OSHA.
He was actually a pretty damn good President. Unfortunately he started the drug war as we know it, but the good that he did vastly overshadows that.
Does no one remember Watergate?
It's kind of a big deal.
Man, Watergate was so weird. And totally meaningless when it came the 1972 election. Nixon won that election by a huge margin. Spying on the Democratic Party was pointless- in that political climate, Nixon had a huge advantage.
The man was his own worst enemy. He would have cruised to victory in 1972 and ended the Vietnam war. His presidency would have been considered a major success. Combined with the Democratic party's internal conflicts, there probably would have been a couple of decades of Republican domination of the presidency and Congress.
So, I guess if you're a Democrat, you should be grateful that Nixon was so paranoid and weird.
Exactly. He was a brilliant but flawed individual who accomplished a lot of great things, but he was brought down by his own paranoia.
After not knowing what the hell you people were talking about WRT the vong shit, I have done research on Wookieepedia and realize that at least the Empire seemed to have a fucking clue what it was doing, and that the Jedi order seems to just be a fucking breeding ground for genocidal nutcases. Anakin/Vader had the right idea when he killed all those kids in the third movie.
Being a Jedi is like being a Psyker in WH40k, but without all the pre-screening for psychotic tendencies.
I don't see how it couldn't be. Isn't their primary method of recruitment taking small children from their parents and their own societies to serve in their clerical warrior league, regardless of how the parents (or children) feel?
How could not that lead to a bunch of psychotics eventually?
EDIT: Also, here's something that could be "saying something nice". Compared to the ancien régime that they replaced (and subsequently replaced them when they lost disastrously), the armed forces of the Empire were more accepting of women serving as general-grade officers. Wookipedia named at least two women who were admirals, and at least one who was a general, compared to zero among the Rebels/Republicans even after their military grew to the scale of the Empire's.
I think the Emperor had the right idea. Keep the number of Jedi low, and just concentrate on having maximum centralized military power.
The amount of forum love that Nixon gets continues to baffle and horrify me, but then I remember that the only misdeed that Nixon seems to be remembered for was Watergate and not all the other horrific shit that he was responsible for.
Nixon's post-Presidency PR makeover remains one of the most inexplicably successful rebrandings in modern American history.
The amount of forum love that Nixon gets continues to baffle and horrify me, but then I remember that the only misdeed that Nixon seems to be remembered for was Watergate and not all the other horrific shit that he was responsible for.
Nixon's post-Presidency PR makeover remains one of the most inexplicably successful rebrandings in modern American history.
There's a lot of debate with actual historians over Nixon's presidency. It's also somewhat too soon to get still the full ramifications of everything.
Didn't Watergate basically boil down to the equivalent of a kid looking over another kid's shoulder to make sure he had the right answers?
I'm not backing the guy or anything, but recently what's annoyed me are the crowd of people who think he was this fire-and-brimstone breathing doomsday device without explaining why.
I can guarantee you that probably 90% of today's young crowd knows nothing of his regime, was trained to memorize that he was "that bad guy president", and i'm lowballing on that statistic.
I can't make fair judgement on the guy because I know nothing about the situation, paranoia and circumstances at that time. I don't think any President during war has ever come out with a clean slate, and i'd bet cash money that Nixon gets the most shit for it cause Vietnam was the first nationally televised war, well, ever. Imagine how WWII would have gone down if this was the case.
The amount of forum love that Nixon gets continues to baffle and horrify me, but then I remember that the only misdeed that Nixon seems to be remembered for was Watergate and not all the other horrific shit that he was responsible for.
Nixon's post-Presidency PR makeover remains one of the most inexplicably successful rebrandings in modern American history.
There's a lot of debate with actual historians over Nixon's presidency. It's also somewhat too soon to get still the full ramifications of everything.
True, but Nixon has had nothing but benefit from revisionist history, plus the fact that the one misdeed that directly contributed to his downfall, the Watergate cover-up, is on the mild end of his crimes and has also been watered down to a punchline.
For example, when Nixon ordered the round-the-clock carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos? That was illegal. He had to keep it a secret from the Congress. Plus the main result of those bombings was a groundswell in popular support for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Not to mention that Nixon gets credit for leaving Vietnam in 1973 but as a candidate in 1968 he actively sabotaged the Paris peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam.
And that Nixon felt that, as President, he had the "inherent authority" to order the warrantless surveillance of domestic anti-war groups, something he only stopped when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
It baffles me that the same folks who disparage GWB for his delusions of an Imperial Presidency are more than willing to forgive and forget Nixon for originating the concept.
Didn't Watergate basically boil down to the equivalent of a kid looking over another kid's shoulder to make sure he had the right answers?
I'm not backing the guy or anything, but recently what's annoyed me are the crowd of people who think he was this fire-and-brimstone breathing doomsday device without explaining why.
Watergate boiled down to two things:
First, the sitting President using the power of the United States government to actively and illegally subvert the democratic process.
Second, the sitting President using the power of his office to cover-up those illegal actions, including destroying evidence and refusing to co-operate with Congress.
If you really equate that to cheating on an exam, then I really don't know what to say.
Well to contrast Nixon, take Reagan. He did every crime Nixon was accused of(lying to congress, violating laws and coverups), while doing next to nothing good(the cold war does not count).
Nixon is remembered as a crook. While there is a movement to kick Grant of the 50$ bill in favour of Reagan.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Didn't Watergate basically boil down to the equivalent of a kid looking over another kid's shoulder to make sure he had the right answers?
I'm not backing the guy or anything, but recently what's annoyed me are the crowd of people who think he was this fire-and-brimstone breathing doomsday device without explaining why.
The initial crime was hiring people to break into the opposing party's headquarters, and I assume that's what you're going for with the schoolyard analogy. Suffice it to say, I don't think they're the same. But in any case, the "smoking gun" tape was the one that revealed Nixon and his cadre using the CIA to try to block the FBI's investigation by claiming national security concerns. That is itself an additional and quite serious crime, over and above paying criminals for a break-in.
Not to mention that Nixon gets credit for leaving Vietnam in 1973 but as a candidate in 1968 he actively sabotaged the Paris peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam.
I did not know about this at all. Can you elaborate?
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Neoconservatism gets a lot of shit. However, I feel like its heart is in the right place. Neocons are right that the world would be a better place if more countries were democracies, and if individuals had more basic freedoms. They are also right in that America should be using our power to spread freedom and democracy. Where they went wrong were the means to do this.
They should have gone with development rather than blowing shit up.
Also, I don't see any glaring problems during his time as Bush Sr's Sec of Defense. He actually argued for (and got) cuts to defense spending, which I can't imagine any Republican not named Paul arguing for today. Desert Shield/Storm went pretty well, except that requesting, and getting, US bases in Saudi Arabia pissed off bin Laden.
Not to mention that Nixon gets credit for leaving Vietnam in 1973 but as a candidate in 1968 he actively sabotaged the Paris peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam.
I did not know about this at all. Can you elaborate?
Nixon had developed contacts with the South Vietnamese government during his years as Eisenhower's VP (where he was pretty much the "globe-trotting foreign policy guy").
I guess OJ Simpson was pretty fun in the Naked Gun movies.
Saddam Hussein was able to keep the peace in Iraq and occupied Iran's attention for decades.
Bin Laden and the other insurgents that eventually would form Al Qaeda did a good job of forcing the Soviets to waste money in Afghanistan.
Not to diminish Nixon's evil (the guy was pretty fucked up), but much of the South's leadership didn't need the encouragement to make up their mind. Just as bad, though, they might have thought that they had the United States' blessing, as had Ngo Dinh Diem (before he died).
I think the Emperor had the right idea. Keep the number of Jedi low, and just concentrate on having maximum centralized military power.
Dunno if that counts as a "good thing", so much as common sense, from an Earth history standpoint. Compare the number of clerical armies/warrior cults that exist now, versus a hundred years ago, and versus five hundred years ago. The Jedi seem like kind of an anachronism--self-policing, above the authority of the law the rest of the Senate is at least expected to obey, above the sovereignty of member worlds (seeing how they can basically take children at their leisure), yet still funded by the Republican Government, and basically exercising almost complete control of the officers corps. All the power, none of the responsibility. They bring back a time before the idea of written constitutions, checks of government, and professional civil service/bureaucracy, and professional military academies. The purge just seems like Star Wars catching up with modernity, taken by itself. The Knights Templar and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church (essentially its own arm of Imperial Russia) wouldn't survive either.
Bin Laden and the other insurgents that eventually would form Al Qaeda did a good job of forcing the Soviets to waste money in Afghanistan.
I was gonna go with him being awesome at hide-and-seek but whatever.
Well, he's really good at it. He was good at making the Soviets (in Afghanistan) run around in circles, and he's good at making the Americans (there too) run back and forth.
All this while being unusually tall (or so I've heard).
Not to mention that Nixon gets credit for leaving Vietnam in 1973 but as a candidate in 1968 he actively sabotaged the Paris peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam.
I did not know about this at all. Can you elaborate?
Nixon had developed contacts with the South Vietnamese government during his years as Eisenhower's VP (where he was pretty much the "globe-trotting foreign policy guy").
Bin Laden and the other insurgents that eventually would form Al Qaeda did a good job of forcing the Soviets to waste money in Afghanistan.
I was gonna go with him being awesome at hide-and-seek but whatever.
Well, he's really good at it. He was good at making the Soviets (in Afghanistan) run around in circles, and he's good at making the Americans (there too) run back and forth.
All this while being unusually tall (or so I've heard).
He's also on dialysis. Well, was. Probably dead now.
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They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Tokugawa knew how to take advantage of other people, I'll give him that. :P
Does no one remember Watergate?
It's kind of a big deal.
But actually somewhat less of a deal than the good he did.
(He's still evil though)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Nixon never ceases to fascinate me. I had to do a report on him in College (pick a President, basically), and I had known next to nothing about him outside of watergate and the bad stuff, and afterwards I was totally blown away by how much of a complex and conflicted person he really was. This isn't to downplay his bad stuff though, because, you know, it was bad. But the point was that I found out that Nixon wasn't some mustache-twirling characature of a villain that most media made (and make) him out to be.
Oh, gotcha. I agree with you there.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The man was his own worst enemy. He would have cruised to victory in 1972 and ended the Vietnam war. His presidency would have been considered a major success. Combined with the Democratic party's internal conflicts, there probably would have been a couple of decades of Republican domination of the presidency and Congress.
So, I guess if you're a Democrat, you should be grateful that Nixon was so paranoid and weird.
Rigorous Scholarship
She's really just as misunderstood as the Witch from the West.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
Maleficent was such a great Disney villain.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Girlish figure?
More like Ghoulish figure, right?
Honestly Watergate looks like nothing today
GWB did shit worse than watergate more or less openly and nobody really gave a shit
He ended the war by abandoning it--which was more or less the right thing to do--but not without bombing the shit out of them first. He may have scaled down troop presence, but he certainly scaled up bombing: 600,000 Cambodians died in his operation Menu. I suppose that what I'm saying here is just that Nixon's end to the war was not a humanitarian one, and his peacemaking consisted in a retreat that was largely forced anyway.
I understand an appreciation for the good things he did. I don't, however, understand the degree of forum love.
I've got some Disney obsessed friends who know I love her, so I've got all kinds of Maleficent stuff.
I've got a dragon that guards my lab bench, and pins on my lab coat.
Purple dragons everywhere.
Not that it wasn't a bad thing, just, the Legend of Watergate kind of outclasses the reality.
Sure the Cambodian bombings sucked, but this is a villain compliment thread, we are suposed to focus on the good things.
With Nixon its this: If he had been self-assured enought to know that he had 72 in the bag. Laid of the watergate/Creep shit. He would be remembered as on of the greatest post-war presidents(maybe in the top 10 overall).
I mean look at JFK. What did he do apart from getting killed in office? Even the Cuba Crisis could be said to have been the result of the bay of pigs(up for debate), meaning his greatest moment was cleaning up his own shit. Yet he gets the love...
Exactly. He was a brilliant but flawed individual who accomplished a lot of great things, but he was brought down by his own paranoia.
Kind of a tragic figure. I love the guy.
I think the Emperor had the right idea. Keep the number of Jedi low, and just concentrate on having maximum centralized military power.
Nixon's post-Presidency PR makeover remains one of the most inexplicably successful rebrandings in modern American history.
There's a lot of debate with actual historians over Nixon's presidency. It's also somewhat too soon to get still the full ramifications of everything.
Andrew Jackson could pull off a mustache unlike most evil jerks in history
I'm not backing the guy or anything, but recently what's annoyed me are the crowd of people who think he was this fire-and-brimstone breathing doomsday device without explaining why.
I can guarantee you that probably 90% of today's young crowd knows nothing of his regime, was trained to memorize that he was "that bad guy president", and i'm lowballing on that statistic.
I can't make fair judgement on the guy because I know nothing about the situation, paranoia and circumstances at that time. I don't think any President during war has ever come out with a clean slate, and i'd bet cash money that Nixon gets the most shit for it cause Vietnam was the first nationally televised war, well, ever. Imagine how WWII would have gone down if this was the case.
Just throwin' some perspective to this mess.
True, but Nixon has had nothing but benefit from revisionist history, plus the fact that the one misdeed that directly contributed to his downfall, the Watergate cover-up, is on the mild end of his crimes and has also been watered down to a punchline.
For example, when Nixon ordered the round-the-clock carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos? That was illegal. He had to keep it a secret from the Congress. Plus the main result of those bombings was a groundswell in popular support for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Not to mention that Nixon gets credit for leaving Vietnam in 1973 but as a candidate in 1968 he actively sabotaged the Paris peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam.
And that Nixon felt that, as President, he had the "inherent authority" to order the warrantless surveillance of domestic anti-war groups, something he only stopped when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
It baffles me that the same folks who disparage GWB for his delusions of an Imperial Presidency are more than willing to forgive and forget Nixon for originating the concept.
Watergate boiled down to two things:
First, the sitting President using the power of the United States government to actively and illegally subvert the democratic process.
Second, the sitting President using the power of his office to cover-up those illegal actions, including destroying evidence and refusing to co-operate with Congress.
If you really equate that to cheating on an exam, then I really don't know what to say.
Nixon is remembered as a crook. While there is a movement to kick Grant of the 50$ bill in favour of Reagan.
The initial crime was hiring people to break into the opposing party's headquarters, and I assume that's what you're going for with the schoolyard analogy. Suffice it to say, I don't think they're the same. But in any case, the "smoking gun" tape was the one that revealed Nixon and his cadre using the CIA to try to block the FBI's investigation by claiming national security concerns. That is itself an additional and quite serious crime, over and above paying criminals for a break-in.
I did not know about this at all. Can you elaborate?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
They should have gone with development rather than blowing shit up.
Yeah.
Cheney supports gay marriage.
Also, I don't see any glaring problems during his time as Bush Sr's Sec of Defense. He actually argued for (and got) cuts to defense spending, which I can't imagine any Republican not named Paul arguing for today. Desert Shield/Storm went pretty well, except that requesting, and getting, US bases in Saudi Arabia pissed off bin Laden.
Nixon had developed contacts with the South Vietnamese government during his years as Eisenhower's VP (where he was pretty much the "globe-trotting foreign policy guy").
In 1968, folks in Nixon's campaign reached out to those contacts and urged them to walk away from the Paris peace talks, claiming that South Vietnam would get a better deal from peace agreement brokered by a Nixon administration than they would from a Johnson administration. This caused South Vietnam to boycott the peace talks, causing them to collapse.
I guess OJ Simpson was pretty fun in the Naked Gun movies.
Saddam Hussein was able to keep the peace in Iraq and occupied Iran's attention for decades.
Bin Laden and the other insurgents that eventually would form Al Qaeda did a good job of forcing the Soviets to waste money in Afghanistan.
Dunno if that counts as a "good thing", so much as common sense, from an Earth history standpoint. Compare the number of clerical armies/warrior cults that exist now, versus a hundred years ago, and versus five hundred years ago. The Jedi seem like kind of an anachronism--self-policing, above the authority of the law the rest of the Senate is at least expected to obey, above the sovereignty of member worlds (seeing how they can basically take children at their leisure), yet still funded by the Republican Government, and basically exercising almost complete control of the officers corps. All the power, none of the responsibility. They bring back a time before the idea of written constitutions, checks of government, and professional civil service/bureaucracy, and professional military academies. The purge just seems like Star Wars catching up with modernity, taken by itself. The Knights Templar and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church (essentially its own arm of Imperial Russia) wouldn't survive either.
I was gonna go with him being awesome at hide-and-seek but whatever.
Well, he's really good at it. He was good at making the Soviets (in Afghanistan) run around in circles, and he's good at making the Americans (there too) run back and forth.
All this while being unusually tall (or so I've heard).
Jesus christ.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
He's also on dialysis. Well, was. Probably dead now.