Acheron
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If I die in Raleigh, at least I will die free.
is this guy acheron???????? hahaha acheron you big fag
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Reg. Date: Mar 2004
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Reply 20 of 49 (Originally posted on: 04-30-08 05:00:16 PM)
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Oh no! Hillary Clinton or some of her supporters did something underhanded? I am crushed! My entire worldview has collapsed! Woe is me, I shall now burn all of my Clinton For President Memorabillia.
Now let me say that I don't support suppressing the voice of the American people. Tactics like that are stupid, and they shouldn't be used by anyone. Devious is only OK if the target is another politician. If the target is the American people, you should be Jailed. If Clinton was behind it, she should be. Period. Attacking the American Public should have consequences, and if you look at people like Katherine Harris, it does, even if you escape jail time for it.
Look, I'm aware that I'm not going to convince you or anyone here to vote for Clinton, so I'm not going to try, but I think we need to cut the bullshit and talk about reality now.
If you want a clean race where nothing at all untoward happens then you'll have to violate the first amendment and the right to free speech six ways from Sunday. You'll also probably undermine America's power. Neither do I support.
But this is politics. It's always going to be dirty, and it should be dirty. If you are an honest Joe who can't prove yourself to be devious and who really believes in being honorable in all things, you shouldn't sit in the Oval office, although feel free to become the president of Iran.
I want my politicians to be devious scumbags so that they have the kind of mind that can fight off the devious scumbags in charge of other nations.
I want everyone to know that their politicians are devious scumbags because then we won't trust them and will hang them out to dry the first time they do something truly unethical. I want the government to fear the tyranny of the electorate. That's why Obama is dangerous. He'll go in thinking he has nothing to fear from us.
I want politicians to sleep in terror every night about what the American people might do to them because of those skeletons rattling in their closet. I don't want someone who looks like a paragon of light and justice to be the leader of the country. I don’t want some great guy who’s made of Teflon to be able to do whatever the hell they want because people love them. Whenever a politician has the trust and love of the whole nation, horrible things happen because almost no politician is a nice person. And the ones who start nice don’t stay nice.
Those people who we look up to as genuinely good should be the uncompromising social critics like Martin Luther King or Ghandi who couldn't lead a country because they're paragons of truth, light, and justice. If you’re a good person, lead a movement, not a state.
Every time we get someone into power who is a genuinely good person and not at all devious they end up getting torn down.
Look at Jimmy Carter.
Look at William Jennings Bryan, one of the truly good men who ran for public office. As secretary of state he refused to threaten Germany in response to the sinking of the Lusitania because he was afraid that it might lead to war.
He's a great preacher, a good man, and a wonderful leader for the labor and Temperence movements, but he wasn't devious enough to be a good politician.
The truly great leaders we've had have never been wonderful people. You can't be a wonderful person and still have the capability to make the hard choices a politician has to make. Abe Lincoln, John Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, none of them were nice men.
To choose a random example, Dwight Eisenhower was the most effective part of the US Army force used to attack the "Bonus Expeditionary Force," a peacefully assembled group of WWI veterans demanding enough of the bonus pay the government had promised them to feed their families. He was responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians who were trying to feed their families.
I’m OK with Barack because I think he has all the makings of a great president. He's sly, but he hides it. I see it occasionally. He can be devious, but he doesn't act that way because he's selling himself as this hopeful non-devious candidate. That’s why I’m a little bit comfortable with him.
He scares me because I don't know if he's Machiavellian enough to be a good leader yet. Give him a few years in the senate to marinate and he will be.
At least, he better be. Every nation in the world is led by devious snakes. Leaders in this day and age have to be.
Globalization has made the world a much more dangerous place. Acephalous transnational criminal organizations are currently able to move personnel and materiel from place to place faster than the CIA because the US government has to respect the sovereignty of other nations, and the criminals care nothing for the law.
Only about 14% of the worlds small arms are in the hands of government controlled forces. The rest are in the hands of gangsters, rebels, and criminals who thankfully spend more time trying to kill each other than they do trying to kill innocents. Because the soviet governments entire economy was based on lies to avoid death or prison, we have no idea how many nuclear weapons were manufactured by the soviets after 1950. There are only two ways we can know if nukes are floating around in the hands of these groups: when the ATF interdicts two Albanians trying to sell them to south american narco terrorists, or, god forbid, when one has just been used by those assholes against civilians somewhere.
The devious assholes in power in the third world take kickbacks from these groups because it’s easier to become corrupt and take the money of evil men then it is to stand for justice in the third world when the people you’re standing against have skilled sharpshooters and military sniper rifles that can shoot through armored windows.
The community of nations called the UN is nothing but masturbation on an international scale. We only intervene in genocides if there are white people living in the country where the genocide is occurring because the Europeans, Americans, and Pakistanis don't want their soldiers dying on the behalf of black Africans. We don't enforce the Genocide Convention or the Universal Declaration of human rights because all it is is international masturbation. We don’t care, but we want people to think we do. The five most aggressive nations of this half of the twentieth century were China, the US, the UK, France, and Russia. They invaded more countries, used intelligence services to topple more governments, and they account for %98 of the world arms trade. Each of these nations have some of the worst human rights track records in history. They get away with it because they’re the fucking permanent veto seats on the UN Security council.
The UN is designed to keep those five nations in power and punish any other nation that rises to threaten that power.
To top it all of, the people in power everywhere are devious scumbags. You can't be a good person if you desire the power of such offices enough to do what it takes to get into positions of power. Obama has never had to get down and dirty in an election, and so he has a unique product to sell, but if he's selling this product of Change and actually believes it can work, if he believes that there are leaders out there he can trust, then he's fooling himself.
The job of the president, constitutionally, is to deal with everyone else's devious assholes and keep them from shooting at us. The only way you can see a change in that office is if there is a change of every commander in chief, everywhere, to someone just like Obama. Otherwise he'll be the massive failure that Jimmy Carter was, or he'll learn how to be devious.
You're still talking like you think this is Kickball.
It's not. It's evil, it's horrid, and people die alone in dark alleyways every day so that people living stateside can live this comfortable idealized life and not worry about the dirty crap that happens to keep them safe and keep the american empire intact. Or should I say: to force the rest of the world to abide by a European worldview.
And I know you're not Naiive. You've been to Iraq, haven't you? You know that the world isn't gumballs and butterflies. You probably know it better than I do.
Politics is worse. At least the military has some concept of honor. At least the veterans that I talk to say that it's about protecting civilians and lofty goals like that.
The politicians know that it's about maintaining European Primacy. Ever since the invention of the ship, there has been some kind of hegemonic power that everyone else feared. If it's not America, it's going to be someone else, and I‘d rather it be us in a filthy world like this one than some other guy who has different values than mine.
Yes, there's image to consider, and Barack Obama understands that fact much better than that idiot Dubyah and he can play a damn fine image game, but the fact of history and the fact of economics is that someone will rule. Everyone's gunning for the man on top, and right now that's us.
Now I'm a Democrat because I believe in mixing Capitalism with Socialism, respecting the political and civil rights of the individual, and being smart about defending European primacy. We spread those French enlightenment governmental concepts that our society is built like the fertile manure it is. And yes, democracy as a political system is a fertile manure that breeds the kind of scumbags that make good politicians just as well as any other system. It also breeds some significantly better produce than any other kind of fertilizing filth. As democrats, we use cruise missiles and air strikes on the countries that act up so that the news cameras are afraid of getting hit by a stray bomb and don’t take pictures of dying civilians, and then we give massive economic benefits to the countries whose devious assholes cave in and start having elections and allowing freedom of the press.
But building a world that is democratic isn't a clean business because of the people involved, and I think you know this.
Even events that make the world a better place almost always take Deviousness and a high body count to accomplish. Martin had Malcom and the Panthers. Ghandi had Nehru.
Jesus and Bhudda weren't politicians. And look what happened to the Pacifist Humanitarians called Christians when Constantine declared Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire. Look at what happens when a beautiful and peaceful religion like Islam turns into a method of political control. Look what happens when you take an injured and hurting Jewish nation and give them a country of their own. Look at what happened to the Philosophies of Karl Marx, that ethical view that every human being had the undeniable right to gain from the labor he or she did, and look what happened to that philosophy when the Russians, Chinese, and Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge got ahold of it!
Whenever you take something or someone good and ethical and mix them or it in with politics, the result isn't something good or ethical. It's like mixing a fine wine into a bucket of vomit. The vomit won't change much, and the wine is ruined.
If Obama really is this wonderful idealist you think he is, just wait eight years and he won't be anymore. He's selling you a product because it works as an election tactic. And if he's not, if he truly believes this,
If you want sweetness and light, get religion. Politics has always been a dirty business, and it always will be.
You can’t suddenly change the direction of thousands of years of human history. This thing is too big to be stopped right now, and one man cannot change all of this.
But the reason I’m going to vote for him if he’s the democratic nominee is because I think that he’s a veteran of the filthy Chicago politics that have consumed Illinois, he’s mired in the dirt of Machiavellian thought, and He’ll do what’s necessary even if he knows how to keep up appearances.
The reason I won't vote for John McCain is because his foreign policy is idiocy. There's no subtlety or tact to the Bush\McCain approach. The idiot republicans stick our military's neck out on the chopping block and the denizens of the third world who have been abused by the constant fighting between the permanent members of the UN security council will always be willing to drop the axe, or the scimitar in this case. Republicans talk a good game when it comes to international security, but they suck at execution.
Every political system that ever existed or ever will exist is garbage. Democracy is manure, and it leads to popular assholes getting elected. But it’s fertile and it helps societies bloom and flourish. The fruits of democracy are free expression, the right to property, education, and many other wonderful things, but you need that manure of politics to make those good things happen.
The best you can hope for is an asshole devious enough to be able to get the things you want accomplished. That's why Al Gore got out of the damn mess. That's why Edwards has decided that he's going to work on the issue of poverty in the same way that Al Gore did.
That's why Edwards didn't endorse Clinton, though he might if she shows she can win some primaries.
So stop whining about things that will never change. This is politics. There is no honor here.
Quote:
Weren't you an idealist, Acheron? What happened?
I am an Idealist about things you can be idealistic about.
I believe that the American people are genuinely good people who will hang the assholes in power out to dry effectively.
If you want to do good, do good through The Red Cross, Amnesty International, The Red Crescent, UMCOR, or one of those other groups that do good work.
Yes, I believe that there is hope, that there is redemption, that the world can be made a better place, but it won't be made a better place by politicians.
I believe in a universalist utopia that can be achieved. I believe in building the kingdom of god where men and women of every nation and every faith see themselves as citizens of the human race primarily, and citizens of individual states second.
But it won't be achieved by governments who spend so much time squabbling for power. Governments are just a necessary evil.
When that utopia is built it will have been built by Humanitarians, Churches, Mosques, atheists in professorial robes, and good honest normal people who band together as part of movements to force the politics along.
If you want change, work with those people who are standing for a better tomorrow. Find an organization that is working hard to fix these problems. Vote for people who will do a good job of these things, and then retire them when the evil of power corrupts them.
Take that organization and help it band together with other organizations until a network of humanity is formed that ensures that people who are truly good are elected everywhere at once.
It will not be one man who talks a good game who changes things, it will be a movement. It will be all of us, together. It will be the people who Obama is attracting who work to make things better.
It won't be an act of congress or an executive order. So you see, I am an idealist, but I understand the reality of politics. There is no salvation in government. Go elsewhere, and you will find it. And I don't just mean churches because there are other groups who do great good, but in America it is churches.
Seek and you really will find. Just don't look for it in politics.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." -IF Stone
This reply was last edited on 04-30-08 05:18:42 PM by Acheron.
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