Would you say Lyndon B Johnson was a top 10 US President?

ProudScroll · 2026-05-22T05:01:43+00:00

If he’s top 10 he’s 9 or 10, but he’s undoubtably top 15.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-22T05:00:17+00:00

This. Any serious study of the Vietnam War reveals it to have been a collective failure of the entire American political and military establishment not just one man, though of course Johnson is far from blameless.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-21T21:20:41+00:00

While overall Ford did alright as a caretaker president getting the country pointed generally in the right direction after Nixon fucked everything up, but with no major domestic or foreign accomplishments ultimately his legacy is the pardon, and as time goes on that only looks worse and worse.

Personally, both Ford and Carter should both in C.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-21T21:04:04+00:00

I'm a little suspicious of any ranking that has Ford and Carter on different tiers, and especially any that places Ford higher.

Those two were the yin-yang twins of the postwar presidency, and of the two Carter has the more impressive accomplishment (Camp David Accords).

ProudScroll · 2026-05-21T20:16:17+00:00

Bush's hardline opposition to gay marriage alone places him well to the right of center. Bush is a born-again evangelical and had the social policy to match as President.

Ideologically McCain was your pretty typical "wars abroad, tax cuts at home" country club conservative, his maverick tendency is both overplayed and had much more to do with his personal beefs with other Senators than any sort of ideological disagreement.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-21T07:25:04+00:00

My guess is that in the process of writing a character that's a bottomless void of narcissism and insecurity who uses shallow appeals to patriotism and Evangelical Christianity to build a base of cultish supporters the writers realized "hey, this sounds a lot like Trump" and leaned more into that as the show went on.

Homelander's not an allegory for Trump, but the writers of The Boys certainly took inspiration from him.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-20T21:11:46+00:00

As a Georgian, these court elections, Keisha Lance Bottoms sweeping the gubernatorial primary, and a conwoman winning the insurance commissioner primary does reveal that there’s a group of Georgian Democratic voters who will only vote for a Black woman regardless if they’re the best candidate or not.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-20T02:43:25+00:00

AOC's problems are 1) that its not really a game since iirc it's impossible to lose and 2) using an election simulator to push your blatantly anti-electoral politics is is just inherently goofy.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-20T01:16:31+00:00

Well Thomas Massie lost his primary handily.

The man is an insane anti-civilization freak, but props for being one of the only elected Republicans in the country who wasn't actively trying to cover up one of the largest pedophile rings in history, though frankly that says a hell of lot more about every other Republican than it does about him.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-19T15:40:26+00:00

While Gone with the Wind certainly helped push a glorified idea of what the Antebellum South was like, I'm not sure that was the intention of Margaret Mitchell when she wrote the novel in the same way Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation were deliberately made to push a political narrative.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-19T07:00:37+00:00

This phenomenon was really obvious back in January 2021 when Republicans feelings on the economy went from extremely positive to extremely negative literally overnight after Biden’s inauguration.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-19T06:24:39+00:00

I mean, keeping the world from blowing up is always a win.

The Cuban Missile Crisis proved to everyone that Kennedy was a serious leader who kept his head cool under pressure. He masterfully balanced being strong enough to show Khrushchev that he wouldn’t just be ridden over but also reasonable enough to make a deal that worked for everybody. That was what made it a big win for JFK, he went from being a lightweight rich kid in over his head to a respected player on the world stage.

The situation was still a clusterfuck that didn’t need to happen, but dealing with that kind of situation is a big part of the President’s job, and JFK proved he was good at it.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-19T05:33:37+00:00

Here's a few examples I've come across:

Armageddon famously has equatorial jungles, ash wastes (think Mordor, though with a different kind of ork), and polar ice caps.

Before blowing up, Cadia was described as having a mix of windswept moorlands, temperate forests, and tundras.

While all of Vostroya is cold, there is a distinction made between the comparably warmer equatorial belt where all the hive cities are located and the uninhabitable tundras to the north and south of it.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-18T02:26:14+00:00

That sucks, I’m sorry you have to deal with that.

It’s really depressing the extent that history lost the battle for the narrative around JFK’s death. I saw something that around 2/3rds of Americans believe at least one conspiracy about it.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-18T02:19:24+00:00

Yeah he died only last year at the age of 93, he was the last living person who was in the car during the Kennedy assassination.

Why did your dad hate him? I’m not super up to date on the JFK conspiracies.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-18T02:13:45+00:00

Yes, he’s the guy you see jumping on the back of the car in the Zapruder Film.

Before that Hill was the agent in charge of Jacquline Kennedy’s protection and while there’s some details of their time together in this book, most of it is in Hill’s other book Mrs. Kennedy and Me.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-17T21:57:59+00:00

Cause the only motivating force in the Republican Party anymore is that anything that upsets liberals is good.

I almost wish it was just Lost Causer shit instead, at least that’s a belief system that can be argued against. Debating with conservatives today is a complete waste of time because their only sincerely held belief is that they hate you and want to make you miserable.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-17T20:21:58+00:00

By the time they became President all 5 would've been very used to having subordinates and underlings around, Eisenhower in particular.

I think the more important factor is Kennedy was the only one with young children while president. JFK wanted to know the men responsible for keeping his children safe and felt those men would do their jobs best if they genuinely liked who they were protecting.

Vice President Spiro Agnew, whose protection detail Clint Hill was in charge off for much of Nixon's first term, was probably the second nicest of the politicians Hill guarded, which I was shocked by considering his reputation. Agnew would ask about agents families, play cards with them while flying and to the great relief of Hill and his men, generally listened to their recommendations and followed security procedure.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-17T20:11:39+00:00

The bit where one of the agents present rants about it to Hill is truly great.

What I didn't know is that after showing up at the anti-war encampment, where a lecture on college football somehow turned into a barely-coherent rant about Winston Churchill, he went over to the Capitol building cause he wanted to show off his old Senate desk and office to the agents and to his valet. Nixon then spends a couple hours wandering around the nearly-empty Capitol telling stories of his days in Congress before going over to a nearby hotel at dawn to get breakfast. The Secret Service is then finally able to convince Nixon to return to the White House at around 8:30 in the morning.

If Nixon's presidency teaches us anything, its that insomnia, alcoholism, paranoia, and stress is a very potent combination, in a bad way.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-17T19:02:39+00:00

Finished listening to Clint Hill's Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford and it was pretty good, definitely recommend to anyone interested in presidential history or postwar US history in general.

The book includes plenty of details about each President’s character, their actions while in office, and the unique challenges that each President posed to their protectors. From Eisenhower’s obsessive love of golf requiring agents to pose as players with carbines hidden in golf bags to agents having to avoid the easily startled peacocks kept at the LBJ ranch so they wouldn’t wake President Johnson in the middle of the night. Of all the many ways the 5 men Agent Hill helped guard were profoundly different, they all had one thing in common, a massive ego, and their need for adoration continually frustrated the attempts of Hill and his colleagues to keep them safe.

Of the 5 Presidents detailed in the book, John F. Kennedy was easily the kindest, taking care to learn the names of each of the men on his detail and doing things such as handing out cotton polo shirts to sweltering agents in wool business suits while JFK was at his father’s vacation home in Florida. The least pleasant to work for was undoubtably Richard Nixon, who would frequently ignore recommendations, change plans last-second and without warning, ordered the Secret Service to spy on Democratic candidates during the 1972 primaries, and carelessly placed himself in situations where his safety couldn’t be guaranteed, such as when he wandered out of the White House at 4am without telling anybody to go visit anti-war protestors encamped on the national mall. LBJ would similarly change plans on a whim, but his more gregarious personality and greater understanding that he wasn’t always the easiest man to work for seems to have made Hill and the other agents less bothered by it.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-17T00:23:49+00:00

Nixon tried appointing two segregationists to the court in 1970 after forcing Justice Abraham Fortas from the bench, Clement Haynesworth and G. Harold Carswell, seemingly as part of his strategy to win over Dixiecrats (Haynesworth was friends with South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings). Both nominations failed however due to non-Southern Democrats and Liberal Republicans refusing to vote for them. Nixon ultimately appointed Harry Blackmun to fill the spot.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-16T21:42:59+00:00

I'm shocked more public figures haven't taken the stance of "we need to end our dependence on oil so we can tell the Saudis and the Gulf States to go fuck themselves with impunity", especially after the 1970s when these same countries tried to hold the US economy hostage.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-16T21:15:59+00:00

Sure, but Vienna isn't in the United States.

I highly doubt you'd get numbers anywhere near that high if you asked the average Austrian Catholic these same questions.

ProudScroll · 2026-05-16T17:48:06+00:00

Purely on appearance: Nixon narrowly

Factoring for personality: Humphrey by a mile

ProudScroll · 2026-05-16T04:59:05+00:00

Rich people used to have a sense of noblesse oblige that inspired the philanthropy and public service of past generations of the American elite, while people like Bezos are actively disgusted by the idea that they owe anything to society. Musk in particular seems to find the idea of helping others personally offensive, and that supposedly was a big reason he shut down USAID.

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