Terrible people you respect.

[Bobbity]

Alexander the Great. He was a murderous bastard, but he spread Greek culture all over the world, and helped to pave the way for the renaissance.

Genghis Khan and Hittles.Sure,one unites a world and the other destroys it but a formidable enemy is one you respect.To do otherwise is stupid and warrants underestimation on the part of the idiot.

Genghis Khan? Really? He achieved the destruction of China's greatest era, and murdered something like thirty/forty million people.

The one thing going for him was that he was a brutally effective commander; an ability that his grandson lacked entirely.

Fidel Castro holds a special place in my heart. However Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Kim Jong Il, and Alexander the Great, who have been mentioned regularily in this thread, I frankly do not respect at all. Butchers of the world, and of their own people. Though I give props to Genghis Khan, until his son fucked everything up.

Grandson. his son was actually reasonably capable.

Didn't Genghis also support religious freedom? Something not very common in those times? I also remember something about adopting war orphans, and exempting taxes for teachers and doctors. He would also give people who surrendered full protection. He didn't discriminate people based on race, either, and anyone who wanted to join him was welcome, and wasn't a second class citizen. He also had fair laws made, and would punish anyone regardless of their position in society. Those are all off the top of my head, and I'm sure that there's probably more. Oh, and depending on how you look at it, uniting the Mongol tribes after centuries of bloody war could also be seen as a good thing.

Although that's arguably true, it's his means that I take issue with. The man murdered more people than Hitler, to achieve less than a century of stability. Besides which, he brought down -well, almost - the Song dynasty, and by extension, China's greatest cultural era.

You have an almost idealistic view of what the mongols were like - true, they did do most of those things, but they were savage, murderous barbarians. Had the Song dynasty not been in a position to fall during Kublai's reign, Western Europe would have fallen to the mongol hordes, and history would have turned out very differently - not necessarily for the better.

Still, it's not as if he didn't do good things; I just view the bad as, in his case, more important.

 

[Nouw]

Myself.
[sub]See what I did there?[/sub]

 

[FalloutJack]

Tyler Durden. Do I really have to explain?

 

[park92]

Vlad Putin Sure hes a dictator and caused lots of reporters to die.
BUT, he saved the russian economy and everything he does is so badass.

 

[park92]

Putin, president of russia.

He might be a bit of an idiot and douche but he is one BAMF

well he did save the russian economy and also i agree that he is a total BAMF

 

[ScumbagEddie]

I'm gonna have to go with the Great God-King Ramesses II. Though the worst thing i can think of him doing is desecrating the temples and burial sights of previous pharaohs, he did it hilariously by scratching out their names and writing in his own, then claiming it was always that way.

Coming in second would have to be Albert Einstein. Only reason - The man created nukes.

And the continent of Australia. That place has the largest concentration of the most evil brutal ass kickers nature has ever seen, and I earnestly respect that and every last human being who dwells there.

 

[Azrael the Cat]

Hitler. If he wasn't a bigot, he would possibly be the greatest leader ever.

That's a common misconception, actually.
Hitler was just little bit below average.

The only reason he took over continental Europe was because everyone had been completely fucked because of WW1.
He "recovered" German economy by manipulating the currency and enacting simple Keynesian reform.
Diplomatically, he was a retarded ape. (Start with, "pitting America and Russia against him" and end with "pitting Russia and America against him.")
Even his "Master Race" theory was wrong.

(Also, he inadvertently ended Anti-Semitism in the West, destroyed all credibility of Socialism, totally ruined Germany and any chance for a Pan-Germanist Europe, and ruined a perfectly good mustache.)

Quoted for truth. The guy was a moron - Mein Kampf is such a laughably goddawful misinterpretation of Nietzsche, I'd actually call it one of the top 10 most plain statements of stupidity ever published. He never 'recovered' the German economy - he simply stopped making their goddamn loan repayments, while spending the entirety of the government's coffers on war preparation. He had literally nowhere to go economically - in a few years, the country would have run out of money due to his expenditure, and given that his 'cure' for unemployment was, again, 'massive military spending to hire lots of people in the army, building tanks, etc', the country would have been in an even worse position than before.

The only positive economic development for Germany during his time was that after he started defaulting on Germany's loans, the Americans convinced the French that the terms of the WW1 peace treaty had been a bit harsh, and that they should hold off on claiming on Germany's debt. That's not 'mastermind' stuff. That's 'drug-addict mom with 5 kids and no job stops making her mortgage payments, bank manager takes pity on the kids and decides not to foreclose on the mortgage'.


His military decisions from halfway through the war onwards were goddawful, supporting the Allied psychiatric assessment of him that he was in the early stages of the onset of schizophrenia, and that he was likely to start developing mild dementia. Hitler came about because under the German conditions post-WW1 some extremist group HAD to arise. Plenty of intellectuals in Germany were predicting that something like that was going to happen 50-100 years before anyone had every heard about Hitler. In the 1890s, Nietszche called it. As did Heinrich Heine as extremist political movements started developing in the mid 1800s Germany. And the Weinmar Republic just screamed 'extremist takeover', as you had a razor-thin majority of social democrats in parliament, with a morally bankrupt conservative faction (who eventually allied with the nazis to put Hitler in power - Hiter never got up on his own numbers), and communist and fascist groups who were causing riots in the streets. The social democrats found themselves in the same position that they were in earlier under the Kaiser, and later in post-WW2 East Germany - everybody to the right of them politically wanted to kill them, but rather than the radical left communists agreeing to ally with the moderate centre-left social dems they either actively opposed them or went underground and left them to get killed (literally). Same thing happened in the Russian Revolution, with the moderate social democrats running a 'everyone to the left of us is friends' policy in overthrowing the Czar, only for the Marxists to stab them in the back as soon as the revolution was over.

OT: I'd say Einstein. Wife-beating bastard who also had an affair with his cousin (while married to his first wife, as well).

 

[emeraldrafael]

I always respected jesse james. Not really sure why, but just did.

maybe it was the strong family values.

 

[Aetera]

Definitely Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler. He lowered crime in Wallachia to basically nil, greatly improved the economy and agricultural output, and opposed the Ottoman Empire. In Romania he's considered a hero to this day. He was ruthless and bloodthirsty, but he did some amazing things.

One of my good friends moved here from Romania, and she has a lot of respect for him.

 

[velcrokidneyz]

Tempted to say Mussolini made the trains run on time.

But I'll go for Zynga CEO Mark Pinkus, totally immoral and unethical business practices, but they worked.

Are you for serious? I have no idea what you are talking about, would you mind elaborating for me? I am intrigued about this.

I don't mean this in a "I can't believe you would say such a thing." I am just curious.

Well, if you google Zynga CEO the first result is a direct quote from him, saying "I did every horrible thing in the book" That's the kinda guy he is.

Zynga is a gaming company he started that takes other successful casual games, rips off their gameplay and workings to a plaigertastic degree, and rebrands it with microtransactions (Paying small amounts of money for ingame content) Then they use obnoxious marketing techniques to stick their new game everywhere, flooding the market so people will get curious and play it. They do all the facebook games: "Farmville"(ripped from farmtown) "MafiaWars" (ripped from MobWars) "CafeWorld" (I'm told ripped from Restaurant city)
Basically their entire business model involves finding casual MMO type games on social networking sites, copying them, and pushing the original out of the market.

He also puts lawsuits up against the companies he copied for plaigerism against him, so they will go bust (Because they are all small, new companies)

And he messed up March Mayhem last year by almost winning best developer!!!

I was aware of what Zynga is but wow I didnt realize that the whole lawsuit and plagarism stuff. he seems kinda like a douche.

 

[Valknott]

Mine is Stalin, too. Because he had an excellent "fuck you guys, I do what I want" attitude, and pulled it off on an epic scale.

Though he was the only man in Russia that didn't see that Hitler was going to invade, and led more of his own people to death then any man in history.

Literally he exsecuted his own spies that found documents pertaining to Hitler's invasion, and he denied that Germany was invading for several hours after it happened.

You gotta make decisions and stick by them if you're the leader. Even if it involves two super powers suddenly not communicating well at the end of WW2 which resulted in a cold war.

And, Stalin executed a lot of his own people. Some of them just for not agreeing with him. This does not affect my opinion of him.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Mine is Stalin, too. Because he had an excellent "fuck you guys, I do what I want" attitude, and pulled it off on an epic scale.

Though he was the only man in Russia that didn't see that Hitler was going to invade, and led more of his own people to death then any man in history.

Literally he exsecuted his own spies that found documents pertaining to Hitler's invasion, and he denied that Germany was invading for several hours after it happened.

You gotta make decisions and stick by them if you're the leader. Even if it involves two super powers suddenly not communicating well at the end of WW2 which resulted in a cold war.

And, Stalin executed a lot of his own people. Some of them just for not agreeing with him. This does not affect my opinion of him.

I didn't say exsecutions, I meant much worse.

Did you know their were squads of Russians who were made of run away soldiers, condememned crimminals, and Russians freed POW's (I.E. their own captured men) who were put in jobs that were to dangerous for "real soldiers." These jobs included running straight into Germany machine gun fire as a distraction, being the front line bullet shields, and clearing minefields.

If your thinking the last one wasn't so bad, if you were lucky you were told to dig up live mines with a shovel.

Not lucky? Told to run into a minefield in hopes at stepping off as many mines as possible.

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

Varg Vikernes. Guy's a racist murderer, but he does know how to write some cool tunes.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Thomas Edison. He beat Tesla to a patent, chewed him out for his conflicting views on electricity and the harnessing thereof and, lived on not dying at the hands of an irate Tesla who very well could have melted Edison with a doomsday device. Edison was also generally a prick, if Cracked is to be believed.

There was also that whole Elephant thing:

 

[SckizoBoy]

Coming in second would have to be Albert Einstein. Only reason - The man created nukes.

Fairly sure that was J Robert Oppenheimer (directly, at least)... don't think Einstein was anything to do with the Manhattan Project... was he?!

Here's an original one, Otto Von Bismark.

Don't know who he is?

Their are only three reasons why you have ever even heard of this guy.

1. You took a more advanced history class aimed at European history.

2. Your German and he was part of your history class.

3. You played a Civilization game.

Bismark was the Chancellor of Prussia under William I, he was a master malipulator, taking his semi-nation of Prussia and unifying into the German empire. He never technically was in control of the nation, but he twirled his King more easily then the hairs of his mustache. He is was the most important German figure between Martin Luther and Hitler, and by far is the most interesting. Of course he also malipulated the populous into thinking he was giving them what they wanted (he gave some socialist programs that only worked for a tiny percent of the population and created a paraliment that had no control of the army or international affairs).

International politics wouldn't be duly studying history if they left out Bismark. He was an awesome guy.

Must disagree. Before 1876(-ish), yes, he was awesome, with the whole unifying Germany under the Kleindeutsche Losung, but the political troublemaker extraordinaire (as I refer to him) was also greatly responsible for the downfall of the German Empire (by turning the young Prince Wilhelm against his parents, which showed terrible foresight, and it came back to bite him when he was sacked in 1891).

 

[Sarcastic_Applause]

mine really goes down to a populace of sorts, not individual. The japanese soldier of ww2; i hate them for their savageness toward the allies, due to the horrible conditions they put their captives under, the death march many of these poor should met their end on as well as the flat out immoral actions against POW's.
However, the principles of honour are what i deeply respect, as well as their absolute loyalty to their convictions and to what they believe in, even American veterans say how they conduct themselves with honour and respect their sheer devotion (to the degree that they would give their lives).

 

[darkonnis]

Don't really see what you all have against ghengis khan? he was god awful to his enemies, but from my understanding wasn't so bad to his own men.
Jo Stalin does it for me, completely unafraid to be as ruthless as was necessary to do what he believed. We should all be so fortunate.