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PEEEEEEEEAAAAAAKKKKKK HAAAAAAAAAAAATE Draft Picks/Discussion thread PEEEEEEEEAAAAAAKKKKKK HAAAAAAAAAAAATE Draft Picks/Discussion thread

03-05-2011 , 06:18 PM
[Note that this pick write-up is out of chronological order.]

With our ninth pick, team Sholar and Not_In_My_Name select:
Spoiler:



Herbert Hoover


Spoiler:
Every team needs to select a US President, and despite the fact that several have been taken from the board already, a strong case can be made that this is the most hated of them all. Unfairly? Maybe, but American haters are a fickle bunch, and who else are you going to blame when you live in a Hooverville?


Spoiler:
Hoover may seem like an odd choice. He wasn't an evil man (his humanitarian work in WWI and the aftermath is notable in this regard) and to a certain extent, his image has been rehabilitated over time.

But for the purposes of this draft, it doesn't matter whether your peak hate was earned, or just the boon of historical accident. When you preside over the Great Depression, millions of people will hate you for it, and deeply.


Migrant Mother (Dorothea Lange)

"When in doubt, eat potatoes."
Herbert Hoover
(This quote is wildly out of context, to the point that putting it here is radical intellectual dishonesty. Tough!)


Spoiler:
Hoover's name, used as an adjective, become a common way to express that hate:


Hoover Blanket
(Richard Cardona, 2008)


Hoover Flag

Hooverville as a synonym for shantytown needs no further introduction, but there were, of course, variations:

Quote:
Originally Posted by nytimes
In September 1932, 29 men were arrested "with apologies and good feelings on both sides" in what the Parks Department itself described as "Hoover Valley."
When was the last time people were arrested with apologies and good feelings? It requires a powerful common hate for that to happen.

And so on...


FDR Campaign Sign
(Photo Credit: Tony the Misfit, 2008)

The economic damage done to the US (spreading to the rest of the world) during the Great Depression is hard to overstate. Sure, maybe the entirety of the assault on GDP per capita during his time isn't his fault, the 600% increase in unemployment, or the 50-70% decrease in industrial production and trade.

But that doesn't mean that he didn't get hated for it. see him here, celebrated in song! (From Annie: We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover.)

But we should first take care to note that Hoover doesn't get a free pass, either. Without diving into the various economic theories as to the causes.

We should recall how he started his presidency:

"We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land."

But it didn't work out as planned.

The famed Smoot-Hawley Tarrif -- raising ad valorem rates from around 26% to 50%, and almost certainly a big factor in reducing worldwide trade -- helped to spread the pain (if not the hate) worldwide.

The Revenue Act of 1932 -- raising taxes with a top rate on personal income of 63% and big increases in corporate and estate taxes, as well as imposing a stamp tax on bank checks, which made the effective monetary contraction even worse.

We could have some fun picking at some of Hoover's other missteps: the promotion of ownership single-family homes, or his attachment to the so-called "efficiency movement" should both be bugaboos for this forum's regulars.

And we can also mention his hypocrisy: supporting Prohibition (making it easier for proxies attack his Catholic opponent as a drunk Irish papist, in no particular order) while he stopped by the Belgian Embassy on his way home for work to enjoy a nice drink at the end of a tough day at the Commerce department. (Yes, that's what he was doing right before being elected president: drunkenly sitting at the wheel of the government's financial arm.)

It is interesting -- especially in the context of today, and also because it is relatively unknown -- to mention the so-called Mexican Repatriation. This was a program from 1929 or so in which "Mexicans" (around 60% or so American citizens according to Wikipedia's sources). Sound familiar to anyone? On the order of 500,000 individuals were impacted, through a combination of INS raids and intimidation (although precise numbers are hard to come by, and migration patterns during times of economic stress are hard to account for.)

For kicks, I'll remark that Hoover sometimes gets partial credit for originating the "Southern Strategy" although this was largely forgotten as that hate was transferred elsewhere.


Spoiler:


Haters gonna hate.


Sholar/NIMN
Genghis Khan
Judas Iscariot
Joesph Goebbels
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
Hernan Cortes
Ariel Sharon
Henry Kissinger
Herbert Hoover
03-05-2011 , 11:39 PM
ikestoys is past due...on to Wynton/Ineedaride2?
03-05-2011 , 11:49 PM
I missed out on several days of this so I'm getting caught up. It is proving to be quite a reminder as to how young most of y'all are. I had a couple picks in mind early ITT, one of them went in the sixth round, the other (which I'd rate as 3rd-4th round quality) hasn't been selected.
03-06-2011 , 12:46 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sholar
ikestoys is past due...on to Wynton/Ineedaride2?
Yep.
03-06-2011 , 04:01 AM
i'm caught up.
03-06-2011 , 02:12 PM
Wynton/INAR2 skipped. Riverman autoskipped. Sholar/NIMN on the clock.
03-06-2011 , 02:52 PM
ZZZZZZZZZ
03-06-2011 , 03:33 PM
Team Norris takes Hassan-i Sabbah, the founder of the Hashshashins. He got the haters so mad that political killings are named for his group. He also rounds out the much needed muslim component of any rosters.
03-06-2011 , 05:38 PM
For our tenth and final pick, Sholar and Not_In_My_Name select:

Spoiler:



Spoiler:

Spoiler:
Barbarossa "Redbeard" Hayreddin Pasha


A full write-up will follow by the close of the drafting day, as this fine gentleman merits better treatment than I can give him in the next few minutes.
03-06-2011 , 07:18 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ikestoys
Team Norris takes Hassan-i Sabbah, the founder of the Hashshashins. He got the haters so mad that political killings are named for his group. He also rounds out the much needed muslim component of any rosters.
Looked at him. Nice pick.
03-06-2011 , 08:05 PM
For our final pick, team mjdemaine pick one of the great generals of American history, a man who got the haters furious by winning, killing, and completely owning other dudes. Figuratively, of course.

Spoiler:


Spoiler:
Also, the haters got mad because he actually did literally own other dudes. We pick Nathan Bedford Forrest with our tenth round pick.


Forrest is universally regarded as one of the best generals of the American Civil War, pioneering the concept of mobile warfare. He was also slightly racist. A self-educated man, he made a fortune in slave trading in the 1850s and enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private, giving him the distinction of being one of a handful of American Civil War generals who enlisted as private.

Like Charlie Sheen, Forrest learned that nothing gets the haters angrier than winning. And Forrest did a lot of winning, raiding the Union supply lines and defeating Union cavalry forces that sometimes outnumbered his own forces 2 or 3 to one. An associate of Grant said that "Forrest was the only Confederate cavalryman of whom Grant stood in much dread." Forrest didn't lose a battle until the summer of 1864, three years into the war.

While Union soldiers were among his haters, they are certainly not his core constituency. Forrest got African-Americans FURIOUS. He was the commander of a raid that captured Fort Pillow, garrisoned by 600 Union troops, 300 of which were black. After a short battle, 60% of the white soldiers and 20% of the black soldiers were taken prisoner by the Confederated forces. While it is unclear exactly how events transpired, one Confederate sargent described the aftermath of the battle: "the poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hand scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The New York Times described the battle

Quote:
The blacks and their officers were shot down, bayoneted and put to the sword in cold blood... . Out of four hundred negro soldiers only about twenty survive! At least three hundred of them were destroyed after the surrender! This is the statement of the rebel General Chalmers himself to our informant.
Whether the massacre was ordered by Forrest is unclear (and indeed, it is unclear the extent of the war crime), but it became known as the Fort Pillow Massacre in the north, and Forrest was the man held responsible. "Remember Fort Pillow" became a rallying cry for the North.

But Forrest was just getting warmed up. After the war, he became (probably) the first Grand Wizard of a little origination called the Ku Klux Klan. When first told about the Klan and its philosophy, Forrest is alleged to have said "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the ******s in their place." While Forrest denied any involvement with the organization in public, he later became known as the most prominent member of the Klan, and even the founding of the much-hated KKK has often been incorrectly attributed to him.

Team mjdemaine:

Osama bin Laden
Adolf Eichmann
Nikita Khrushchev
Tony Blair
The Shah
Dick Nixon
Robespierre
Malcolm X
Alexander the Great
Nathan Bedford Forrest
03-06-2011 , 08:17 PM
Alright, pwnsall's on the clock, and then I get to finish it up. Riverdaddy can wrap up his team at any time, but I'm not holding my breath.
03-06-2011 , 09:36 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sholar
For our tenth and final pick, Sholar and Not_In_My_Name select:
Spoiler:



Spoiler:

Spoiler:
Barbarossa "Redbeard" Hayreddin Pasha

Spoiler:

Everyone knows that the Mediterranean climate is the best place to live.


So why would it be the case that for hundreds of years, no one lived on the southern coasts of Italy and Spain for centuries (~15th to 19th)?

The answer is what the Ottoman Empire called "our navy" and what the rest of the world called "pirates". (This is actually a true statement.)

With our tenth pick, we rich back to the golden era of Barbary Coast, and to perhaps the best-known of the pirates there: Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha.

Some disambiguation is needed here: the term Redbeard was more or less originated by this guy's older brother, but he was not nearly as dominant on the sea as our pick, and in fact, relied on his younger brother to spring him from the Knight's Castle in Bodrum where he was imprisoned for a few years.

We'll let Wikipedia narrate for a little while:
In 1510 the three brothers raided Cape Passero in Sicily and repulsed a Spanish attack on Bougie, Oran and Algiers. In August 1511 they raided the areas around Reggio Calabria in southern Italy. In August 1512 the exiled ruler of Bougie invited the brothers to drive out the Spaniards... Later that year the three brothers raided the coasts of Andalusia in Spain, capturing a galliot of the Lomellini family of Genoa who owned the Tabarca island in that area. They subsequently landed on Minorca and captured a coastal castle, and then headed towards Liguria where they captured four Genoese galleys near Genoa. The Genoese sent a fleet to liberate their ships, but the brothers captured their flagship as well. After capturing a total of 23 ships in less than a month, the brothers sailed back to La Goulette.
And this was just getting started. Barbarossa captured Algiers from the Spanish, and then continued the reign of terror against the Meditteraen coast, repeatedly defeating in battle the Italians, Spanish, and whoever else showed up over and over again, providing a steady stream of Christian slaves and destroying entire coastal cities.

Lipari, and island off the Italian coast, was captured. The entire population was deported to be sold into slavery or otherwise ransomed.

Barbarossa's career as the undisputed naval power in the region went on for so long that he was able to destroy the same Italian cities multiple times, giving them a generation to rebuild before obliterating the ports once more, taking away the ships of value, liberating the Muslim slaves, and acquiring some slaves of his own to pass along to the Ottoman Empire.

Wikipedia again:
In February 1538, Pope Paul III succeeded in assembling a Holy League (composed of the Papacy, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Venice and the Maltese Knights) against the Ottomans, but Barbarossa defeated its combined fleet, commanded by Andrea Doria, at the Battle of Preveza in September 1538.
Eventually, after Borbarossa had captured all of the Christian outposts in the Ionian and Aegean, and exacted 300,000 ducats in tribute to settle a peave in 1540, Emperor Charles V offered Barbarossa the chance to become the ruler of Spain's territories in North Africa.

Barbarossa declined. When Charles attempted to defeat Barbarossa in battle, he was surely reminded of why he had tried to bribe him in the first place, when he met with another crushing defeat.

Now, Barbarossa was obviously feeling pretty good about his chances in war. When sailing to help the French, he happened to pass by Reggio Calabria. While there, he figured he would ask the city to surrender (why not?). When they declined with cannon fire, Barbarossa took offense and captured the city.

When he finally got to Nice, he was (of course) successful in capturing in. Before leaving, he took a few thousand captives and plundered the city. (He was, however, unimpressed with the quality of his French allies wondering "Are you seamen to fill your casks with wine rather than powder?".)

He retired in 1545, dictated his memoirs Conquests of Hayreddin Pasha which were eventually fictionalized under the more marketable title: The Mediterranean was Ours.


Sholar/NIMN:
Genghis Khan
Judas Iscariot
Joesph Goebbels
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
Hernan Cortes
Ariel Sharon
Henry Kissinger
Herbert Hoover
Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha

(There are a few honorable mentions who can be revealed after the close of the draft.)
03-06-2011 , 09:39 PM
hm that pic confused the hell out of me. I thought the person you were drafting was a drag queen from the soviet era, because i'm an idiot.

anyway good writeup
03-06-2011 , 11:45 PM
benazir bhutto

03-07-2011 , 09:17 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by pwnsall
benazir bhutto

Meh...she was pretty well-regarded and basically just got the militants mad.
03-07-2011 , 09:38 AM
well i haven't been pmed in a few days so checked in and see i'm skipped twice

i'll get my picks up today
03-07-2011 , 10:24 AM
I PMed you when you were on the clock for the first of those picks on 3/1.
03-07-2011 , 12:48 PM
i took hannibal on 3/1 after that pm and caracalla on 3/2 after that, but haven't been pmed since 3/1

it's no big deal; just letting you know why i wasn't making my picks; i'll make them up today, doubt it'll affect me much
03-07-2011 , 12:51 PM
I'm sorry. I thought I'd PMed you about getting skipped.
03-07-2011 , 01:29 PM
For INAR2 and Wynton's 10th and final pick, we choose a man who ranks among the top 3 or 4 generals in ancient history. Much like Hannibal, Alexander the great, and undrafted, this man spent his life fighting wars. Much like Charlie Sheen, he was bi-winning. He won over here, he won over there. According to historians, he never lost a battle.

In sports, nobody gets the haters madder than the greatest athletes. No matter how nice the athlete may be, constantly kicking opposing teams' asses gains him plenty of notoriety. Perhaps even infamy.

War is much the same, except the opposing teams aren't mad about losing the trophy. They're a little pissed because you killed half their family, took their property, and usurped their system of governance. And if you're the leading scorer of one of the greatest teams in history, you might be:

Spoiler:
Scipio Africanus



Spoiler:
He was known as the Roman Hannibal, which probably made him mad because he had beaten Hannibal to conclude the second Punic War. If I were Scipio, I would've preferred Hannibal to be nicknamed "The Carthaginian Scipio." Or better yet, "Poor Man's Scipio."

I found the following to be interesting:

Quote:
Scipio's would-be father-in-law Lucius Aemilius Paullus was killed in 216 BC at the third of these battles, the Battle of Cannae. Despite these defeats at the hands of the Carthaginians, Scipio remained focused on securing Roman victory. Scipio was never again to see a Roman force defeated, for once given command at the age of 25 he never lost a battle.[4][5]

On hearing that Lucius Caecilius Metellus and other politicians were at the point of surrender, Scipio gathered with his followers and stormed into the meeting, where at sword-point he forced all present to swear that they would continue in faithful service to Rome. Fortunately, the Roman Senate was of like mind and refused to entertain thoughts of peace despite the great losses Rome had taken in the war—approximately one-fifth of the men of military age had died within a few years.
I wouldn't call Scipio a warmonger, although I wouldn't not call him that either. He was "patriotic." However, the above leads one to believe that he preferred fighting to peaceful negotiations. This is important, because he was not merely a pawn of the state. He had a hand in getting himself involved in the fighting. Here's another factoid that helps support this theory:

Quote:
In 205 BC, Scipio was unanimously elected to the consulship at the age of 31. Scipio intended to go to Africa, but some people in the Senate were envious of him and only let him to go to Sicily and did not give him an army. Even so, Scipio started a volunteer army when he was in Sicily.
"You won't give me an army with which to win? Fine. I'll build my own army. Why? **** you, that's why."

Most of his campaigns focused on Carthage, and considering I'm not a huge history buff, I have to assume that only Carthage and Rome existed in this point of history.

This is probably not true. It appears that Carthage and Rome were the competing superpowers of the time. Although there were numerous other actors in the field, they were just hoping they could either get generous terms from one of the two, or go unnoticed.

In closing, I would like to explore the problem of selecting ancient people to hate. It's been said a dozen times thus far, but the winners tend to write history. This makes it very difficult to get a handle on how the romans were thought of when they were doing the conquering.

Quote:
The historical study of Carthage is problematic. Because its culture and records were destroyed by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War, very few Carthaginian primary historical sources survive. While there are a few ancient translations of Punic texts into Greek and Latin, as well as inscriptions on monuments and buildings discovered in North Africa,[3] the main sources are Greek and Roman historians, including Livy, Polybius, Appian, Cornelius Nepos, Silius Italicus, Plutarch, Dio Cassius, and Herodotus. These writers belonged to peoples in competition, and often in conflict, with Carthage.[4] Greek cities contested with Carthage for Sicily,[5] and the Romans fought three wars against Carthage.[6] Not surprisingly, their accounts of Carthage are extremely hostile; while there are a few Greek authors who took a favorable view, these works have been lost.[7]

We'll never know how badly Scipio, and the Romans, may have been thought of at the time. But Bush is in the top ten after world meddling that can only be considered piddly in comparison to some of the empire builders of the past. I think it's safe to assume that Scipio is a great 10th pick.

Last edited by Ineedaride2; 03-07-2011 at 01:37 PM.
03-07-2011 , 01:50 PM
Carthage was the home of Hannibal. Hannibal representing Carthage (funnily enough he more or less had to do the same as Scipio as the Carthage leaders didnt want him going off and attacking Rome so he was kind of an independent force too raising his own army independent of the homeland itself) came and curbstomped Rome for years and nearly wiped it out diverting the course of history entirely. They hated the Carthaginians more than any barbarian race and the end result was they completely demolished the city of Carthage after conquering it. The expression "salt the earth" is attributed to it, not that they literally did so, in fact the city was so well situated they had to rebuild it in the end and it became a major hub of the republic at the time, but they all but wiped the entire civilization of Carthage off the history books in revenge for what Hannibal did.

He was known as Rome's Hannibal because he was that good, ive no idea if he was known as that in his time or if its a later attribution but the Romans certainly respected Hannibal's ability in equal measure to hating the fact he used it against them, but its interesting to note it was from him studying Hannibal and the mistakes of those that came before him he really revolutionised the Roman military and its tactics. Without Scipio and Hannibal before him Rome probably wouldnt have gone on to conquer so much of the known world.
03-07-2011 , 02:46 PM
i need a female for my group so i'll take Bloody Mary (aka Queen Mary 1)


"Mary is chiefly remembered for temporarily and violently returning England to Catholicism. Many prominent Protestants were executed for their beliefs leading to the moniker “Bloody Mary”. Fearing the gallows a further 800 Protestants left the country, unable to return until her deatharing the gallows a further 800 Protestants left the country, unable to return until her death"
03-07-2011 , 03:01 PM
My plan was to vary my picks as much as possible...


so, I have covered geography:
Asia
Europe
Africa
America
South America

I have covered ancient civilizations:
Rome
Carthage
Egypt

I have covered both genders with Bloody Mary

I got US covered:
King George III - Reason for Revolutionary War
Dick Cheney - W's puppet master

I covered a variety of political roles:
Kings
Queens
Presidents
VPs
Dictators
Czars
Army Generals
Pharoahs
Emperors

they have gotten to the roles in multiple ways:
Elected
Born into it
Coup
Corruption

I have a variety of motives:
Genocide
Power
Money
Religion
Drugs


My last pick is a US Senator who didn't kill anybody. He's not responsible for genocide or invasions or drugs or religious persecution. You won't even find what he did on his Wikipedia page. But on 2+2, and in the poker world, he got the haters MAD. Heck, he cost me my awesome Party Poker Affiliate income, which personally affected me by a lot of money over the past few years. He got the Online Gambling Ban (non-passable on its own) attached to an unrelated defense bill, getting it expedited through the system and enacted, turning millions of fish away to Facebook Poker, where they pay Zynga for fake chips instead of paying us for value bets.

Bill Frist is my final selection


My lineup:
Ivan the Terrible
Idi Amin
Dick Cheney
King George III
Pinochet
Akhenaten
Hannibal
Caracalla
Queen Mary I
Bill Frist
03-07-2011 , 04:05 PM
People care about Bill Frist?

      
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