Not in a great man theory sort of way, but who would you say is the worst living human today? Sometimes I get too bogged down with thinking about our issues as systematic and forget that all policy has someone signing off on it and that got me thinking and I've arrived at Bill Gates. With his work in Africa, how he ruined computers for the world, and the Epstein ties I'd say he's gotta at least be up there.
I don't think Bill Gates is at all a sensible argument. He's done a lot of bad shit, of course but to respond to your arguments:
His Africa work is some eugenics population control shit, but he also worked to improve health care access in some areas.
How have privatized, shitty computers meaningfully and directly lead to large scale death?
Epstein stuff is horrifying but a) it was not truly large scale enough to register for your premise and b) he was just a participant, not the one making it all happen
I think the premise of your question has a major issue: how do we assign responsibility for death and destruction? For example, I'm sure you could make an argument that Gates's limitation of computers has lead to death and destruction downstream, but is there any way at all to measure such a counterfactual? How many lives would have been saved by global Linux? The other element of this is who gets assigned what portion of responsibility. Who's responsible for government violence? The rich person who lobbied and gladhanded to push for it? The politicians who wrote and passed the bills to enable it, and which specific politicians involved? Or, who's responsible for the US's military adventurism? Either of those prior groups, or the military leaders who actually organized their skills and resources to make it happen?
You say "not in a great man theory sort of way", but I think the question inherently must be framed that way.
All of that aside, I'd put forward a few candidates:
Bush/Cheney. Architects and leaders of the war on terror, which has lead to millions of death in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Massive bulwarks to climate change progress and uncompromising servants to/beneficiaries of the fossil fuel industry. Long term, this will lead to a massively magnified degree of death and destruction compared to what they've done so far, but the worst of it is yet to come.
Gorbachev and other architects of the collapse of the USSR (but again, who specifically is truly responsible?). With an immediate massive increase in excess death within the former USSR, the development of many despotic gangster governments (including Putin's), the loss of a state to oppose destructive US hegemony.
Trump: #1 thing for him is his massive failure of a COVID response, that enormously exacerbated the situation both in the US and abroad. He also continued to scale up and grow the US imperial machine and sanctions regime. Could it have gone any other way? Probably not. Does he still bear responsibility? Yes.
Whichever Koch brother is still alive. The ultimate architect of modern American reactionary politics who has arguably done more than any politician to make it a reality.
I think you undersell Gates by not mentioning that he pushed for the Oxford COVID vaccine to be patient protected. I've no idea how to try and calculate it, but there are a lot of dead or debilitated people in the global south because Gates lobbied to limit access to a vaccine that could have otherwise been more easily mass produced and distributed.
Yeah, but Trump's administration was part of that too, so he wins by default since he was also POTUS.
Gates basically controls the WHO as the Gates foundation is one of their biggest benefactors, almost spending as much as the U.S. government. If you want to work in global health and run afoul of capitalist interests you're going to have a bad time.
I disagree, Gates gets to rule over the world until the day of his death, whoever the POTUS is only gets a term or two.
The question is just difficult because yes the American war machine has killed more than Gates but even if you figure out the US leader who greenlit the most deaths it probably doesn't reach the number Gates has killed over his entire life
Those are some really good points. And I definitely get the problems with the premise of my question. That's why it's worded weirdly, I wasn't really able to square the question with reality. I know they're all guilty Im just trying to find out who other people think is the most guilty and learn about some evil deeds along the way. Ty for your well thought out response!
One of the top grievances of my life is not just how personally annoying windows is, but the immeasurable economic damage from how unnecessarily shitty and anti-user windows is. And the weird thing is, probably 99% of my complaints about MS and windows are based on things that happened after Gates retired. That's not to say Gates did nothing wrong, he did much economic damage, but things got worse after he left.