• @AA5B
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      229 months ago

      I just did a quick search to brush up on why Andrew Jackson is a bad president, and I found a lot of similarities about corruption, ruling for personal gain or spite, authoritarianism, distrusting professional merit-based employees and replacing with personal loyalty-based amateurs , etc. Jackson starts with a lead as a war hero, but then again Trump didn’t try to destroy native Americans

      • @formergijoe
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        129 months ago

        He did try to get a native casino in Connecticut closed in 1993. Part of his testimony to Congress was “You’re saying only Indians can have the reservations, only Indians can have the gaming. So why aren’t you approving it for everybody? Why are you being discriminatory? Why is it that the Indians don’t pay tax, but everybody else does? I do.”

        Also in 2000 Trump paid over $1 million on a smear campaign managed by Roger Stone against the St. Regis Mohawks in protest of their opening of a casino in the Catskills.

        So nothing while president, but still not a great track record when dealing with native Americans.

      • @Lemming421
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        119 months ago

        but then again Trump didn’t try to destroy native Americans

        He was quite happy for millions of Americans (regardless of ethnicity) to die rather than do the minimum amount of work to get Covid recognised as an actual problem, not to mention actively peddling bullshit theories that probably made things even worse.

        I’m not an historian, but from what I know about Jackson, you could make the argument “he was an asshole, but he was of his time”, whereas Trump is an asshole regardless of what decade it is.

        • @[email protected]
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          49 months ago

          Jackson was not an asshole of his time, he was drastically worse. Do not whitewash the trail of tears

          • @RememberTheApollo_
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            9 months ago

            I conditionally disagree. It’s fine to judge the past by today’s standards, that’s how we know we’ve changed and are doing better.

            However you must also judge them framed in their own time. Was the dude impaling his conquered opponents on spikes normal for the time or did neighboring kingdoms go “WTF, dude?!” If normal, he was NTA then, but definitely the asshole by today’s standards.

            Understanding correctly framed history is not whitewashing. Changing, minimizing for gain, or cherry-picking history to meet today’s standards is.

            • @[email protected]
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              39 months ago

              You’re acting like people in the 1830s just didn’t know that ethnic cleansing and genocide of Native Americans was wrong.

              They did know. And some, including SCOTUS, tried to stop Jackson. They failed. And Native Americans paid the price.

              This country was built on human slavery and genocide. Do not minimize or turn away from those evils

              • @RememberTheApollo_
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                9 months ago

                This country was built on human slavery and genocide. Do not minimize or turn away from those evils

                Can you stop with this shit? Nobody here is denying anything. We are discussing how we frame history from a modern perspective and whether or not the general population (not some minority) in Jackson’s time viewed his actions as unacceptable. If you don’t want to have that discussion, go wear your sandwich boards and earplugs elsewhere.

                • @[email protected]
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                  09 months ago

                  “We” are actually discussing how this country was built on slavery and genocide. Turning away from that fact because it makes you uncomfy won’t bring back those who were murdered by the United States

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
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        89 months ago

        Jackson starts with a lead as a war hero

        Holding New Orleans against the British to preserve southern slavery for another half-century is hardly something to brag about.

      • @Thoth19
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        79 months ago

        Jackson also blatantly committed the high crime of ignoring a lawful court order from the supreme court. But congress knew it was political suicide to censure him for the trail of tears(which was absurdly popular) so he wasn’t impeached for it.

        Trump is pretty bad. But he didn’t order a genocide and flout checks and balances to do it. Not that he isntr trying.

          • @Thoth19
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            19 months ago

            I think successful genocide is worse bc we know he went through with it. It’s theoretically possible that trump wouldn’t even though I’m 99 percent sure he would.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
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        -19 months ago

        Kicked off the “Spanish” Flu because he couldn’t resist mobilizing millions of Americans for war in Europe.

        It makes Trump’s roll in COVID/Ukraine seem quaint by comparison.

        • @[email protected]
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          29 months ago

          Did Wilson know about the 1918 Spanish Flu when he declared war on April 6, 1917?

          Seems a bit of a stretch to me.

          • @UnderpantsWeevil
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            9 months ago

            The flu originated at Camp Funston at Fort Riley in Kansas in March 1918, where troops were mobilizing for deployment to Europe.

            Rather than quarantine in the face of mass infection, the base continued to circulate new units through while covering up the spike in deaths from the diseases. They kicked off a global super spreader event as a result.

            Once infected soldiers reached the cesspit of the European front lines, the disease rampaged all through the continent. But, for national security reasons, nobody would report on the sudden devastating rise in the mortality rate of soldiers. That is, except the Spanish media, which operated from a neutral country.

            Because the Spanish press was the only media network reporting the disease, it earned the moniker “Spanish Flu”.

            But there’s no way Wilson was unaware of the huge spike in mortality figures. His War Cabinet coordinated attempts at medical intervention at that same Kansas military base a year later, long after the cat was out of the bag.

            • @[email protected]
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              19 months ago

              But there’s no way Wilson was unaware of the huge spike in mortality figures. His War Cabinet coordinated attempts at medical intervention at that same Kansas military base a year later, long after the cat was out of the bag.

              He should have known about it a year before they started doing medical intervention? I’m not sure the logic here. The fact that medical interventions at the same place a year later means people should’ve known when the first cases started being reported?

              • @UnderpantsWeevil
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                19 months ago

                He should have known about it a year before they started doing medical intervention?

                His administrative staff should have alerted him to it, at a minimum. And his chief officer corpse should have responded to the skyrocketing mortality rate of soldiers who hadn’t even reached the front lines yet.

                But that would have disrupted the March to War, an unforgivable sin.

                The fact that medical interventions at the same place a year later means people should’ve known when the first cases started being reported?

                The fact that they were actively seeking to inoculate against the spread means they’d already recognized the problem in advance and yet continued to send infected troops to the front line for months.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil
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      09 months ago

      And Polk and Buchanan and Hoover and Nixon.

      There are so many more Presidents worse than Trump that we simply never had to live through. Imagine your capital being burned to the fucking ground because your President decided to launch an ill-conceived invasion of Canada. Imagine being so unpopular a President that you come in third place as the incumbent. Imagine kicking off the “Spanish” Flu because you simply couldn’t resist playing the Great Game of European Powers at the tail end of the First World War.

      Absent a second term to really crank things up a notch, Trump will go down in history as an embarrassment. But he’ll be lucky to break the Top 5 in terms of serious bad shit.

      • @[email protected]
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        129 months ago

        Imagine the President trying to overthrow democracy.

        We don’t have to imagine that because we did live through that. Sure other Presidents fucked up plenty, but only one tried to end democracy.

        • @havokdj
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          -99 months ago

          That is simply just not the case at all

          • @Cypher
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            9 months ago

            I’m not up to speed on US history, which other US Presidents tried to prevent the certification of the election of the President who ousted them?

            • @havokdj
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              -39 months ago

              Who exactly ousted who? Trump lost, he wasn’t ousted by anybody.

              Anyways, pretty much every republican president since nixon has tried to end democracy, that’s kind of the goal of the republican party you know, the one that isn’t called the democratic party? At least Trump didn’t invade native lands and kill innocent women and children on more than one occasion, or literally duel to the death with children. Trump is a terrible president but he doesn’t come close to the worst.

              • @Cypher
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                39 months ago

                Who exactly ousted who? Trump lost, he wasn’t ousted by anybody

                … that’s what being ousted is. An encumbant losing an election has been ousted, as in forced out of a role, yes by an election loss.