Saturday, May 13, 2006
Carcinogenic Ideas
"...But the modern bureaucracy (and I would include the modern megacorporation in that category) functions more like a machine, or perhaps a colony of one-celled organisms like a coral or a sponge. It’s essentially mindless, driven by a set of basic imperatives, of which the most relentless is the urge to grow, to expand both in size and power. To paraphrase Edward Abbey: It has the ideology of a cancer cell. ...
However, it definitely doesn’t take much imagination to see how handy a database like that could be to a bunch of would-be police state captains – for everything from political dirty tricks to tracing the phone calls of suspected whistleblowers and reporters. In fact, it doesn’t take any imagination at all, not when the RNC, the Justice Department and the CIA are already doing just those things. ...
The lesson learned is submission to authority, or at least the passive acceptance of hierarchical relationships. It teaches people to be good bureaucrats, and good bureaucrats understand that if the organization is tapping phones – or infecting test subjects with syphilis or dumping toxic waste in rivers or shipping undesirable people off to concentration camps – it must have a good reason. ...
The creature doesn’t know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn’t tried to do them yet. But it’s starting to figure this out, and it’s going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down."
http://billmon.org/archives/002440.html
However, it definitely doesn’t take much imagination to see how handy a database like that could be to a bunch of would-be police state captains – for everything from political dirty tricks to tracing the phone calls of suspected whistleblowers and reporters. In fact, it doesn’t take any imagination at all, not when the RNC, the Justice Department and the CIA are already doing just those things. ...
The lesson learned is submission to authority, or at least the passive acceptance of hierarchical relationships. It teaches people to be good bureaucrats, and good bureaucrats understand that if the organization is tapping phones – or infecting test subjects with syphilis or dumping toxic waste in rivers or shipping undesirable people off to concentration camps – it must have a good reason. ...
The creature doesn’t know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn’t tried to do them yet. But it’s starting to figure this out, and it’s going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down."
http://billmon.org/archives/002440.html
