Top 10% is the same as top five. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and Teddy have a stranglehold on the top five in most rankings. Other presidents to occasionally make the top five are Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson, who have both had declining reputations over time, and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, who have both been viewed more favorably as time marches on.
This is a meaningless classification when not viewed through a historical lens. Of course there were no presidents in the 19th century who would be considered progressive by todayâs standards. The long arc of history has moved to increased progressivism. This historical momentum means each democratic president is a favourite to be the most progressive regardless of who they are. It also means none will represent some end goal of progress.
Katie Porter has been booted of her committee, sad.
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This is why I think Carter sucked. He was clearly a good person but his economic policy failures brought us Reaganomics because government intervention in markets failed so badly during his time in office. He also was clearly not a stalwart believer in any particular set of economic principles. He wanted to do the Keynes stuff until it didnât work and he moved on.
I was mostly referring to 20th century presidents - I donât see any point in comparing Biden to like George Washington. I think itâs fair to measure Biden against past presidents of the last few decades though. Biden will probably be significantly better than Obama tbh
What exactly do you see as the great things about Jimmy Carterâs presidency? Iâll spot you creating the Department of Education and signing the treaty to return the Panama Canal to Panama.
He campaigned for president by trying to occupy the centrist lane between George Wallace and Ted Kennedy (although Kennedy declined to run and the liberal in the race was instead Frank Church of Idaho). He later fought with Kennedy over health care reform.
Carter was one of the most intelligent men to hold the White House, but he seemed ill-suited for the job. He was a notorious micro-manager to the point that it was said he stepped in to handle the scheduling of the White House tennis courts personally. His inability to delegate made him bad for the job. He would have been better as a Cabinet secretary with a more limited scope that one man can handle.
If heâs significantly better than Obama heâll probably be no. 3 overall since 1900 behind only LBJ and FDR, assuming that weâre ranking on the stuff we all tend to care the most about i.e. progressive domestic policy wins.
Do you have a personal ranking?
Iâve never given much thought to a formal ranking, but I generally lean towards FDR #1 over Lincoln.
Raising the interest rate (appointing Paul Volcker) was a crucial and difficult thing to do. Every POTUS ever just always floods the economy with money as the response to everything. Sometimes itâs the right thing to do and Obama did it when it was necessary, but itâs much easier to make loose money than tight and Nixon was doing that and causing the high inflation that Carter reigned in and then got blamed for.
Also Camp David. Prior to that Israel/Egypt was the biggest conflict among the various Israel v everyone conflicts. Since then it hasnât been. Back in those days there was some hope.
Community Reinvestment Act actually got banks lending in areas that had been underserved/redlined.
AndâŚwe didnât have war during Carterâs Presidency. It wasnât his fault the hostages were taken in Iran. It wasnât his fault the rescue failed. It was to his credit that we didnât go to war in Iran or make a deal with them to send weapons to Central America.
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So I canât watch the video now, but that tweet is dumb. The fact that new diseases emerge doesnât mean that the amount of damage COVID did was foreseeable.
Zika is very minor on this list of diseases, and isnât related to COVID at all.
Ebola was devastating to the communities it affected, but also never had the ability to go global because it was spread by very poor sanitation and some very strange post-mortem practices with bodies.
H1N1 had a lab confirmed deaths of 18.5k. Itâs at least a respiratory virus that makes a sense but still orders of magnitude less. We also have a lot more experience treating flu.
SARS/MERS are the only true warning shots on this list. Both were relatively minor (MERS - 881 deaths, SARS 774), but at least they were in fact similar to these diseases. Ironically, they were probably too deadly to spread efficiently.
Emerging diseases have always been part of our reality. The fact that one hit that sweet spot of transmissibility and mortality rates to spread everywhere doesnât mean that it was foreseeable in any meaningful way.
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I think youâre being too literal with the comparisons. AFAIK health experts have been warning of a global pandemic for a while. Didnât Obama say it was his #1 fear, either in â12 or the run-up to â16?
Yet the US crippled the dept meant to prevent and deal with a pandemic, and the FOX News excuse for Trump is âwho knew?â
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I can only look at the tweet, but the logic of it fails. Something like covid hadnât happened for literally 100 years. Claiming it was foreseeable because of minor events that happen every year or so isnât reasonable. Furthermore, the idea that all would have been much better if only weâd funded this one part of an agency differently is laughable. Real leadership was needed and hard choices needed to to be made. Countries that did that succeeded, those that didnât struggled. That agency wouldnât have changed anything.
The tweet is a gross oversimplification of the video, which is actually quite good.
The actually do have videos of people from years ago making predictions that arenât that far off the mark. The basis for their predictions is not what you think it is based on the tweet.
Not really. They have all one thing in common, they are zoonotic diseases meaning they come from animals and make the jump onto humans. They way we destroy the environment and move closer to the habitats of animals which are suspected to be carriers of hundreds of unknown deseases is the main problem. The graphic of how we destroyed much of the worlds wetlands is devastating to look at.
Zoonotic diseases arenât new though. Theyâve been going on for all of human history. This has nothing to do with wetlands.
The connection to wetland destruction is not intuitive, but once again, if you watch the video, it is explained. Even after watching the video, I donât think itâs a strong connection, but I wouldnât say it is completely unconnected.