It Has to be Genghis Khan.

Oh dear, I'd forgotten, the rest of the world still thinks football is really football instead of football...if that made sense to you, good for you--buyt you might want to get your brain checked out. ;)

Hmmm...that WOULD pose a problem, can't go to a sports bar and sit there and not watch and like the sport...let's see, the "other" football, rubgy, and cricket...baseball's king with me, so cricket can never top it, I don't want to hear it's more difficult or baseball's rounders and a kiddie's game, tell that to a pitcher throwing 98-100 mph and see how "kiddie" that really is, nope, cricket can't work...I like football for the plays, not just a scum, so no rugby, I guess it could be fun towatch, but how can I get involved in that...and then the World Cup was fun, but what interest can I have in a regional team when I'm not of the regionor even the country (and besides, when I fan for the 49ers, Mets, or Anaheim Ducks I know my stuff, I get into a sporting argument and I know how to win it...er, at least verbally, that is, with a bar stool, not so much, but see, how can I avoid the inevitable bar stool to the head rooting for the wrong English football team and not knowing my stuff...damn, not hockey, even, in England? Surely it's snowy and cold enough, you have ponds--no ice hockey league?) :p

And Genghis Kahn?

Horse Archers are NOT going to cut it in the 21st century...even if we want to update those and make him head of a huge army of tanks, he'd still get crushed (and personally I don;t think he's the greatest of all time, Alexander the GREAT...an undefeated record and that's won by gobbling up Egypt and the entire Persian Empire, and marching all the way to India...hmmm...actually, that'd be a good matchup, Alexander vs. Khan, the horse archers vs. the Hoplites..,Khan'd have the speed, but if Alexander could induce a charge and get them to come AT them, they'd be toast and skewered by the trained phalanx spearmen...hmmm...Casear vs. Alexander would also be an interesting matchup, Legionaries vs. Phalanx at the height of each of their games...)

President:
I'm tempted to go for TR, for everything obi said and because, I can't help it, I'm just drawn to the man. But it will have to be Lincoln. Lincoln is the frist great leader I've found that actually cared about each and every individual. Look at his presidential pardons. Everyone in his administration made fun of him (and the military got real pissed) because he if he found the tinniest excuse he would pardon the soldier who had fallen asleep on duty from his death penalty. Beofre meeting Lincoln I didn't know you could have empathy and be a great leader.

Haven't got time to write about the other categories.

No baseball and no ice hockey, not in a pub anyway, though it is played a bit in the uk, there is a british ice hockey league, it is never shown on national television! Due to the gulf stream it's more just miserably wet in the uk as opposed to freezing cold, Scotland gets a lot of snow and ice. But when the whole of Britain get snow we are so il-prepared that the entire country grinds to a halt!

So it's just wet enough to be freezing but never enough to ever get any good snow out of the matter, and when it does on a rare occasion the whole area shuts down?

Sounds exactly like my hometown, lol (really, the saying is that if you don't like the wather in our valley, wait a few minutes, summer's always very hot but then the about August to March is Russian Roulette with the weather, some years it's been mild, some all rain, some DROVES of rain and mud and flooding everywhere, and the rare times we get snw WE GET SNOW, my senior year of high school it ahhpened, and the day before winter break, no less--about 6 inches at least! And here we are, all these Southern Californian teens ready to graduate, and for the first and only day ever we're at school with a ton of snow...so of course all hell broke loose, it was awesome, complete with snow football...er, that's AMERICAN snow football...kind of funny to see my theatre friends, though, they complained when it was windy or frosty out in the early mornings, so this was NOT their kind of weather...but it was still so much fun it's ridiculous...so let that be a lesson about Southern California--it's most enjoyable when it has six inches of snow and is thus nothing LIKE Southern California.) ;)

Well, I guess if I ever do get to study English in England I'll have to read up on some soccer teams first...

haha I love hearing southerners talk about their snow experiences. Try 2 feet in one go and then talk haha. I usually get somewhere around 4 feet over the course of the winter, and that's really not much compared to what some other people have experienced. But obi, where do you want to study in England? I am planning on doing that in two years, going to the London School of Economics. And if you go premier league, manchester city, manchester united, chelsea are all safe bets.

Atahuallpa

@obiwan - a little history lesson for you...

Washington was an independent.
Jefferson was "Democratic-Republican", neither Democrat nor Republican as those parties didn't exist.
Lincoln was a Republican.

The Mongols in their prime could and would defeat any pre-gunpowder army. Primarily because their mobility means that no one can ever force them to fight a battle that is not in their favor. And Roman legions were clearly superior to the Greek Phalanx. Pydna proved that first, as did several other battles where the phalanx proved unable to cope with Roman tactical flexibility.

From an American perspective, I pretty much have to vote Franklin Roosevelt. Even if he's got two gigantic blotches on his record (internment and failure to sign Executive Order 9981), Leaving aside the whole WWII thing, his first hundred days set in motion the broadest prosperity any state had yet seen whilst saving capitalism from its own excesses.

The Mongols were defeated by Mamluks. Not exactly impressive. But more to the point nobody wanted to live under Mongol rule. All they did was destroy civilization.

@Draugnar:

I'm aware of their ffiliations...why are you telling me this? I said party issues with the Democrats and the GOP might decide who loves JFK and hates him and ditto for Reagan, not for the others...?

@goldfinger0303:

I want to study English in England (rather fittingly enough, I think) and, if possible, philosophy...I know my college offers a program, Fall is London and Spring is Spain, I wanted to do London this Fall but parents wouldn't hear of it, and unfortunately I don't have the cash yet to make my word as an adult stand up agaisnt theirs as adults with real incomes...hopefully that'll change with this job in a couple of years...shame, because the program is great, you get to go for a few thousand dollars and get roundtrip both ways, tuition, and room and board, or at least some money towards R&B, depending on which housing option you choose...and beside the college you get to visit Scotland as well to see castles and David Hume's birthplace as part of the philosophy program (so obviously I'd LOVE to go there) and then an additional couple weeks somewhere on the Continent is available for a thousand or so more, and it can be Amsterdam, Northern France or somewhere in Germany, if I recall (I'd take Germany in a second and try and find NIETZSCHE'S stomping grounds, as many other great German philosophy and music and art sites as I could find...and then a German beer hall, because that'd be awesome, even an awesome place to die, look cool on the tombstone, "Died in German Beer Hall Over Football Dispute After Mistakenly supporting An English Team Over Germany's.")

;)

It'll happen someday, I don't drive so I'm saving what I can from my job for college and a move back East before I'm thirty (so a window of sometime this decade) and also for at least that semester abroad studying English and Philosophy in England...because frankly, I am pretty much one of the best English and Philosophy people on my campus of a few thousand...straight A's and always ready to discuss and usually the best marks on papers and I jsut live and breathe the two topics (in case you haven't guessed from my posts on the site) so really a semsester studying there would just be amazing...

Hell, T.S. Eliot left for England, and look what that did for his career (not that I'm anywhere as good as him, but I can hope and dream, and try, can't I? I STILL think he's the best poet of the 20th Century, but while I think his critical idea of the Objective Correlative within litearture is an interesting idea and perhaps very plausible, his usage of it in probably the most famous attack on "Hamlet" ever, his essay "Hamlet and His Problems," is atrociously fouled up...his case that Hamlet has no reason for his actions based on what occurs around him, particularly with Gertrude, seems utterly implausible and riddled with holes, not the least of which is he refusesd to acknowledge Hamlet's motivation, or at least a great deal of it, is fueled by his love for hisn FATHER and tha abscence of his FATHER and Claudius usurping the throne of his FATHER and the fact he sees a ghost of his FATHER telling Claudius murdered him and to avenge his FATHER's foul and unnatural murder, to focus almost exclusively on the MOTHER, then...but now I've gone off on a tangent and lost the way, sorry. T.S. Eliot--greatest poet of the 20th Century (and I'll stand by that, even though a couple of my professors might really make a push for Sylvia Plath, whom I regard reasonably OK but not nearly as greatly as I do Eliot) and I'll go so far as to go out on an even more precarious limb and name "The Waste Land" the best and possibly most influential poem of the 20th Century, and certainly one of the greatest works of the century, and he was a great critic of Shakespeare as well...but when someone not only picks "Coriolanus" as Shakesepare's best work but also describes "Hamlet" AND The Mona Lisa as "artistic failures," I believe that's a failure of the CRITIC, unless the best case this side of Johhny Cochrane is made...and I simply don't see Eliot making that, as it very well be an impossible case to make. Yes--I most certainly DO live and breathe English and Philosophy...)

;)

@obi: do they pay you per-word? Just a little advice: PARAGRAPHS.
thanks.

obiwan, can I say, and I mean this with complete sincerity, I honestly hope some day you become very famous so that I can tell people, "I used to talk shit about obi on the Internet *before* he was famous." : )

@fiedler:

For me, that IS a paragraph...and everyone who's read my uber-paragraphs before I started breaking it down THIS much can attest to that. ;)

@abgemacht:

If I ever DO get my writing published, I'll so put it on the site and I'd really just give it away for no profit, I'd be cool with a modest income as long as I could get folks to read my stuff...Spinoza was just a lens polisher and Wittgensteina nd Nietzsche and a whole bunch others were just teachers...

But if I ever get famous, I'm definitely putting my WebDip conversations in my memoirs or something...I feel I've really fine-tuned a lot of my ideas and garnered a FAR greater understanding talking with you and TGM and Draugnar and really just about everyone on the site (except Miro Klose, though I suppose I learned there that there ARE instances where Sartre's old adage about "agreeing to disagree" being of no use is just not the case, or at least that there's sometimes less use in talking to a person than just letting them let their hot air out...not that I haven't had my fair share of bullshit sessions.) ;)

(Why do I use that ;) thing so much, I feel like I use it to end every goddamn post or something, lol...)

@Obiwan - You mentioned "one for the republicans in Reagan" or something to that effect as if Lincoln weren't a Republican. The implication was that Democrats had all but one of the great presidents. I was just clarifying.

There is absolutely no resemblance between Lincoln's Republican and a present-day Republican. It's a different party in all but name.

Not at all. The GOP has always been the party of Big Business. It was in Lincoln's time, and continues to be so today (Lincoln was a lawyer and lobbyist for the railroads).

Both parties have had candidates that have been the product of corporations...

I just had the product of a corporation for dinner. It was delicious.

Nikita Kruschev

Juan Domingo Perón.

Cthulhu

all depends on the circumstances (if we overlook the time-gaps, that is). for instance, in time of global war, i'd go for alexander, or if sticking to presidents, eisenhower. in current us climate, no question would have to go washington -- famed indepenedent who could bridge partisan gap and with not a little experienxe dealing with insurgent fighting :)

Otto von Bismarck

Drew Brees

Louis XIV. The Sun King.

Joseph Stalin