Fox News reported on some new presidential rankings, which purportedly show Barack Obama as the #6 president in U.S. history and Donald Trump dead last, and MAGA was not happy.

Fox News on Sunday posted an article about the new rankings by the Presidential Greatness Project, which Fox describes as “a group of self-styled experts.” It states that Abraham “Lincoln topped the list of presidents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project expert survey for the third time, following his top spot in the rankings in the 2015 and 2018 versions of the survey.”

“Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five,” according to the report. “Trump was ranked in last place in the survey, being ranked worse than James Buchanan at 44, Andrew Johnson at 43, Franklin Pierce at 42, and William Henry Harrison at 41.”

The report states that Obama and Joe Biden “ranked an average of 6th and 13th, respectively, among Democrat respondents, and 15th and 30th by Republicans.”

  • @UnderpantsWeevil
    link
    04 months ago

    That’s temporary

    That’s cyclical. More heat generating larger stormfronts is the norm. A destabilized jetstream that triggers more polar drift is the norm. The fundamental hazard of the next century isn’t simply going to be higher-than-average temperatures but enormous hurricanes plowing through urban areas, unleashing megatons of wind force and teraliters of water, onto real estate wholly unprepared for the damage.

    But the notion that we’re simply not going to have rain anymore because of rising heat is… incorrect on a few very basic levels.

    We’re past the point of fixing the soil.

    We’ve made more progress reclaiming desert territory in the last twenty years than humans have achieved in the last millennia. The question isn’t whether we can but whether we choose to dedicate the human labor and industrial capital to actually do the thing.

    And concrete production, which is a cornerstone (pun not intended) of our civilization.

    The great thing about a shrinking global population is a decreased demand for new concrete.

    At this point, there is no viable electric alternative for commercial transport

    Denying that trains even exist.

    there’s no viable way to make public transport work in about 99% of the country

    Denying that buses actually exist

    You would need to entirely re-build the infrastructure of the US

    You would not. If anything, we’ve overbuilt infrastructure and would do well to tear down a bunch of the surplus and consolidate in denser urban centers. But we can get by just fine on what we’ve already built, assuming we’re willing to maintain it and shift to bus/train transit over everyone driving their own cars.

    Let’s say you could do that in a mere ten years (which is hopelessly, impossibly optimistic); you’d still have ten years of increasing carbon emissions that have already started to create a cascading, self-perpetuating chain reaction.

    Industrial scale changes are going to take place whether we want them to or not. The current pace and direction of development isn’t sustainable.

    But huge drop-offs in human activity - the Mississippi cultural collapse being a classic example as is the Chernobyl zone - can and does result in quick reversals and reclamation of territory by wildlife.