on top of the fact that waterboarding can cause extreme mental and physical pain as well as permanent damage,  it has the precedent of being considered torture up until the point that the US decided it wasnt torture any longer and they could use it freely.  the US has even executed people for them using it to torture US soldiers.

Holy shit has this topic gotten derailed.

What do you guys think of my worries:

1) You have stagnant job growth, which will lead to MORE unemployment, as more young people enter the workforce.
2) You have a large wealth gap, which is only going to increase with the above mentioned (college graduates who do get jobs, and who don't).
3) You have an absolutely toxic and radical political landscape (as the 22 pages in this thread show).

Young, unemployed college graduates, who are going to be pretty moderate in their views, are not going to buy into the radical left and right. In fact, they'll despise it. They also don't care about abstract things. They will be afraid, afraid of their own personal future, as well as their country's as they see an increasingly partisan government and media seem to fuck things up more and more.

What I meant by a "movement similar to fascism" is an reactionary movement against the polarized political landscape, led mostly by people from the middle class. A movement driven by fear, that speaks in extremely broad terms and rejects the left and right. A movement that is skeptical of democracy. A movement that seeks national unity, that isn't divided by extremism.

I initially thought of the tea party as being that fascist movement, but in retrospect, I don't think it is. The main supporters aren't from the middle class, and it really is just the Republican party rebranded, and more extreme.

The fascist movement I envision is one that starts in New England. One that will be composed mainly of the unemployed members of the middle class.

I think the movement you see in New England will probably be the origins of the poor people's army that will rise up to oppose the Fundamentalist Christian Religion / Conservative Movement as its power increases (of course a lot of that will also come from the South and Midwest as it did during The Depression with the likes of Dillinger et al) and it becomes ever more fascistic as a result and cuts most of the social programs that most people need in order to keep more and more power concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, the religious leaders, and those that make up the leaders of the white, patriarchical power structure.

The Right Wing is always the path to fascism as is the Fundamentalist Christian religion which always seeks to place everyone under the fascistic will of its God as you say Fundamentalist Christianity seeks national unity and since it aspires to be the norm (and it takes steps to ensure that it is see the witchburnings from the 11th Century in Europe right up to the ones in Salem, Massachusetts just prior to the founding of the US as a country; also most of its followers aren't educated enough to know not to believe in it, and it has a ready made army if it sees its ambitions coming within its grasp) it isn't divided by extremism.

Of course the scenario isn't guaranteed it's only guaranteed if the Right gains more and more power in the upcoming elections and continues their current practices.  They wanted to declare war on the Education System which would have led to a faster rise in Christian Fundamentalism (as Christian Fundamentalists are really the ones that want all of their kids raised in home school based religious curriculums far from the intrusions of the real world; and, due to the fact that for 4,000 years Egyptian / Judeao / Christian Fundamentalism has seen itself as a great system for raising up docile workers and very much supports a white patriarchal ruling elite, it's what the Right would want to replace the Education System with ) as the public education system would be done away with;  however,  they really didn't quite gain enough seats during the last election to really make much headway in the war on Education, and they're hoping to renew their efforts there after the 2012 elections.

Also, the workers army that will begin to oppose this fascistic Right Wing Regime won't begin to assert itself until or unless the Right cuts something that the poorer people really care about and that forces a number of them to become criminals to survive.  As seen in Minnesota, that's really not education.

1)  If Bush hadn't shifted focus from dealing with the 9/11 terrorists (Afghan / Pakistan) who actually attacked our country to Iraq, you would have a point.  When Obama came in, we shifted focus again.  We have also had many wars in the past that had little to do with our national security. Look into the Phillipines.

Are you saying Gitmo and Guantanamo bay (things we wouldn't have allowed other nations to do) did not happen?  I suppose FOX news doesn't like to portray any actions that the military does in a negative light ever.

2)  The Tea Party as a basic platform isn't so bad.  IT's too bad that most of the members aren't questioning things like the PATRIOT Act.  Many of the members are not consistent with their basic ideas. 

3)  Ever heard of Blue Laws?  When I lived in Colorado, we couldn't buy alcohol on Sunday due to being a Church day (that was the intent of the law). 

4)  Many people are in prison for victimless crimes - such as marijuana posession.  If we put racial statistics in there (likelihood of blacks to be given time for the same crime while whites would be let off on probation), that's a whole another area to not get into. 

I agree that times have changed, and the fact that rich people of colour benefit from affirmative action is quite stupid. Then again in the academic would scholarships are often given by merit, actual needs never being taken into account (so you can have a rich kid recieving a scholarship because he got good results, even though he's perfectly capable of paying it, and the money could've gone to help needier students). Sadly laws don't change as fast as scoiety does.

Also, it's not people on the left who divide people into groups and treat them as nothing more than a representative of said group rather than as an individual, but people who are racist/sexist/homophobic, and who view being part of that group being in itsef anegative trait (while people who are part of their own group are "superior" by default). When trying to prevent discrimination you have to take this int consideration.

Irrational speech (like racist rhetoric) has a more powerfuil psychological impact on people (especially when presenting arguments meant to incite fear). I've witnessed first hand how in a debate when one of the people is spweing irrational arguments that prey on people's emotions (especially fear) and the other is presenting rational arguments that actually make sense, the averege person (uneducated, or not educated enough), won't even take notice of the rational person's arguments.

Democracy is fine, Capitalism isn't

"Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy." is a book worth reading. I just find it funny it's so taboo to say anything bad about democracy as if it's good vs evil. If you were born in China or Latin America I would think Democracy would be seen negatively

I've lived in America all my life and am half Iraqi. The shift in peoples attitudes right after showed how easily things could get out of hand. I was 12 years old and asked my teacher why America is going to war with Iraq and she told me because my people attacked America. I was more confused then appaled and actually had to research if Iraq infact attacked US.

You make it sound as if the left can't be racist, sexist, or homophobic. At least in my country, leftists routinely call any black, gay, Asian, woman, and anyone else they feel belongs to them by rights, every name in the book if they disagree with them politically. Women become sluts and cunts, Asians become gooks, Hispanics become coconuts, blacks become monkeys... all for simply finding left-wing social and economic policies infeasible. And talk about stereotyping... I can't think of anything more racist than to say that all blacks have to be economic illiterates.

So because you don't trust people to hear an irrational argument and not act violently, the government has to act not just against violence, but against speech in the first place? If it's already illegal to incite violence, why isn't that enough? Because political correctness trumps actual correctness every time, hate speech laws invariably end up criminalizing the truth. If someone points out an inconvenient fact, like that every instance of rape in Oslo last year was committed by a Muslim, you might think that's fearmongering and defaming an entire group of people. You may even be correct that those are the intentions of the speaker. But it's also the truth, and truth should be an absolute defense.

Strange because here in the US it's mainly the Right Wing that labels women that enjoy indulging in what should be their sexual freedoms as sluts and wants to outlaw abortion and to even go beyond that by in many cases seeking to deny women access to birth control devices simply because women enjoying their sexual freedoms goes against the teachings of some drastically out of date book.

And, it's Right Wingers that call Asians "gooks" because they're still upset about Pearl Harbor (many of them a few months back we're insisting that the Japanese deserved what they got from the earthquake  because of Pearl Harbor:  http://www.disinfo.com/2011/03/a-lesson-in-social-media-ignorance-earthquake-in-japan-2011/ .  Even though America itself tried to destroy Japan at the end of WWII ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpCCo4GfU04 )  and should be remorseful about that.

And that tries to deny gay people what should be a basic human right in any truely free society by denying them the right to marry and to have the same rights as afforded to single couples that marry, and that also creates entire grass roots political parties that seek to swell their numbers by taking advantage of the prejudices of the poor white working class simply because an African American President is elected that wants to bring beneficial changes to the lives of the largest number of Americans.

For a group that supposedly wants a smaller government these Right Wing types sure want to interfere in or curtail the personal freedoms of others in what is supposed to be a truely free society.

As you can see from the examples I've posted, while the left definitely prides itself on being more tolerant, once a woman or minority rejects the left's politics, that tolerance goes right out the window and that person gets hit with every slur in the book. So it seems to me that a lot of "tolerant" leftists are actually very intolerant and backward at their core but are able to supress it for political expediency.

Even in your own example, Obama has continued many of Bush's unpopular and failed policies. The economy over which he is presiding is a fucking disaster. The health care law that is his signature achievement is an unreadable bunch of nonsense about which we hear some new problem or glitch seemingly every day, and for which his administration is handing out waivers left and right (many of them conveniently going to his union allies who so vociferously supported the bill). So there are many reasons to oppose Obama as just another in a long line of shitty presidents, and a particularly shitty one at that, yet you imply - as leftists constantly do - that people simply must be objecting to his skin tone. So it is not unreasonable to conclude that you see him as merely a representative of his racial group and not as an individual with particular merits and demerits.

Well, if you look at the types of women that reject the leftist types of political policies, they do seem to be women that either have some interest in wealthy men being able to succeed with  little regard for the welfare of the poorer types or women like Palin and Bachmann that essentially want everybody to have to kowtow to the worthless book known as the Bible and its teachings which actually seek to subjugate women and others.  So, it's not as if they don't have some problems.

Of course the failed economy stems directly from Bush's polciies which anyone was going to have a hard time correcting and which the Republican Tea Party types will only exacerbate for everyone other than the rich when they get in office most likely leading this country down the road to a civil war in the not too distant future or at the very least into a time of rampant lawlessness like the 1930s as many of the common people have to turn to crime and an entire generation of new Dillingers and Bonnie and Clydes rises up to express the disaffected resentments of the poor especially after The Republicans if they get back in full control following the 2012 elections manage to cut out food stamps and welfare.

The mass of poor and  greatly uneducated white folks  that swell the Tea Parties' numbers and make it look like anything more than just a club of rich people upset that they're going to have to pay more in taxes to help out lower class Americans certainly are against Obama due to his skin color.  Of course the more affluent members of the Conservative party (though they may also share racist tendancies) are primarilly against Obama because they definitely don't want to pay any more money to help ease the lot of the lower classes in this nation and to help them in that cause they enlisted the masses of the poor whites that don't know any better due to the fact that they're blinded by their religion's teachings.

Their racism is even apparent in their treatment of Herman Caine whom they're running as a Presidential candidate to deflate the charges of racism, however, you certanly don't see Caine coming anywhere near being the frontrunner of the Conservatives.  No, that's Romney whom is very much emblematic of the old white religious boy's club that the Conservative party happens to be (even with Bachmann and Palin in the mix whose main role is to subjugate women as the book they follow calls for and to stroke the prejudices of the religious folks as I've mentioned before).