Fighting Terrorism By Becoming Terrorists

[sparhawk]

They are not stuffed with ordinary people. The higher you get the more power hungry you have to be to get into such a position and stay there.

[OrbWeaver]

But you don't have to be high up to be able to abuse power. I have worked in the Civil Service doing IT support, and with a root account I could view anybody's files or email in the whole department if I had wanted to. Although the particular department I worked for had little relevance to the ordinary citizen, imagine if I had been supporting the ID card database or something.

 

That's the problem people don't consider - not senior managers calling in favours and wielding their power, but lowly grunts with access to information that could be abused.

[sparhawk]

But this is a different kind of power we are talking here. Of course you can abuse information that you have access to, but often this is just happenstance, BECAUSE you got in a position to get such access. In order to get higher up you have to be determined to go there and pursue your goal constantly. You don't become president of the US just because you happen to apply for the job.

[obscurus]

No, you get to be president because daddy is very rich and your cousin rigs the ballot in Florida. Dubya is an imbecile with the intelligence of a squashed snail, but he has puppet masters in high places who pushed him into a position where they could rule by proxy through him. Hell George can't even string a coherent sentence together without a teleprompter, and even then he is so illiterate that he fucks that up too. You can become president if you happen to be an easily manipulated fool who serves as a useful puppet for the behind the scenes movers and shakers.

[sparhawk]

I know all that. But I still don't believe that this is enough. Bush certainly wanted to get into this position and he had all this "help" to push him along. I never said that you must be able to lever yourself, it's enough if you have the right friends, or relatives for that matter. But you still have to be ambitious enough to actually go there.

[Macsen]

Karl Rove is both Bush's ambition and his brains. When someone asks you "You want to be President in twenty years?" who isn't going to say "yes, please"?

[obscurus]

And it is invariably the case that the people who desire power the most are the ones who should be prevented from attaining their goal at any cost. The desire for power should automatically disqualify anyone from possessing it. This is the flaw with representational democracy, and elective oligarchies like the Westminster System - it encourages the sort of people you don't want to have any power to seek it.

 

The ones you really have to watch out for though, are the people who sit in the shadows exerting their influence over the power-seekers. Few people know they exist or how much power they really have...

[Ishtvan]

Actually there have been a lot of presidents that only served 1 term. The current president's daddy for one, although this one is pushing the same shit economic policies that lost his daddy the re-election, and this time he was re-elected. Go figure.

 

Sometimes I think the urban areas should just secede from the rest of the nation. Virtually all the major cities voted against Bush. Cities are a bastion of civilization and culture... go figure.

[John D.]

The U.S. needs to make me it's Absolute Ruler!