Already made a thread like this months ago, but wondering if people still are skeptical today, given how things are just getting worse politcally and economically these days.

Edit: Article by the Economist:

(Mostly economic, but key takeaway): http://www.economist.com/node/21541388

"Even so, prolonged economic weakness is contributing to a broad rethinking of the value of liberal capitalism. Countries scrapping for scarce demand are now intervening in currency markets—the Swiss are fed up with their franc appreciating against the euro. America’s Senate has sought to punish China for currency manipulation with tariffs. Within Europe the turmoil of the euro crisis is encouraging ugly nationalists, some of them racist. Their extremism is mild when compared with the continent-wrecking horrors of Nazism, but that hardly makes it welcome.

The situation is not yet beyond repair. But the task of repairing it grows harder the longer it is delayed. The lessons of the 1930s spared the world a lot of economic pain after the shock of the 2008 financial crisis. It is not too late to recall other critical lessons of the Depression. Ignore them, and history may well repeat itself."

From Paul Krugman's blog:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/central-european-shadows/

Some disturbing take aways.

1) People are not only losing faith in the government, but also liberalism as well.


To me, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are different sides of the same coin. Both are reactionary movements, and both are anti-establishment. They're also very extreme, and in my opinion either we're going to have a very partisan political landscape, or the great majority of moderates will look for a centrist/3'rd party as a solution to the confusing chaos they're seeing.

2)Jobbik party has 1/3 control over the Hungarian parliament.


Posted this before, but in Greece:

What do you guys think? Maybe not right now, since the shit hasn't completely hit the fan, but if Europe decides to enforce austerity measures on its members, there will be some serious anger and economic downturn.

Also, the political landscape in the US doesn't look good. Again, you have tons and tons of college kids graduating with lots of debt, unable to find a job, and subsequently have a lot of free time and anger on hand (As much as neo-cons like to characterize FDR as a "liberal", programs like the CCC were very conservative in spirit). Obama is a weak politician, and none of the Republican candidates look strong. I think Americans will be very disastisfied regardless of who gets voted.

So you have a depressed economy, a toxic political landscape, and people losing faith in the current system. We already have the Tea Party and OWS, and we've already seen what damage the Tea Party did during the debt ceiling "crisis". Imagine if more of those fucking idiots get into office.

Eh, I think in the end it's still a pretty vocal minority in Greece and europe.

I think most people are smart enough to know that lack of austerity is only going to lead to GREATER economic downturns and decades worth of recession.


As for the Debt ceiling.... US Bonds are as strong as ever despite the credit downgrade and now Democrats are finally willing to talk about the deficit and see it as a problem, even though all reports are they were actually the ones who prevented a deal coming out of the super committee.

So really i'd call that one a net positive. Whenever we finally fix our debt problem the credit rating will bounce back like that.

Really though, Liberalism and Fascism haven't looked that different since the Obama administration came in.  They kept all the facist policies they said they wanted to get rid of like FIZA, Guantanamo and the like, and if anything have greatly outdone Bush in a ton of areas... including killing a US citizen without trial, or even an attempt at capture.

actually its rise of democracy

as people's toleration is getting over as banks loot rich countries and destroy poor countries

yeah fascism is linked to it but when the euro collapses and dollar collapse,there will be no money for fascists either so they will unite against the banks

going towards fascism would be going towards liberalism (in the american sense of the word liberal, which is really just progressive)

Fascism entails a stronger nationalist, anti-capitalist and pro-corpratist movement in a country. In some cases, I think that may be happening, but in most, I don't think that is the issue.

And way to go with the Tea Party bashing, Akvod. You are really a balanced, learned poster.

I'm confused by the OP.

You say people will either head to the extremes, or to the centre.

What exactly do you mean by centre? Are you referring specifically to a position slightly more right wing than the democrats and slightly less right wing than the Americans, or are you using the (globally) more common definition of centrist being much more left wing than the democrats?

The scariest trend is the rise of organized Islamophobia among the right wing pundits that want to restore America. It is reminiscent of a certain event in history.

It's about time, love the outfits

I hate to tell you, but most European countries stopped being democracies a long time ago. No-one noticed, of course, except a few people who were labelled as paranoid Orwellians. Everyone else was perfectly happy to give up their essential liberties whilst the economy was strong.

What's happening now is that people are starting to wake up to the lack of democracy. And the lack of democracy is becoming more obvious now that the EU has basically taken control of several of its member states. Of course, the people have no-one to blame but themselves; the signs were all there to see. They have the governments they deserve.

And, as is always the case, whenever some retarded political trend starts on one side of the Atlantic, it crosses the Pond within a few years. Particularly interesting in the US is the rise of vocal, public antisemitism since the start of the banking crisis. It has always lurked beneath the surface of mainstream American culture, but now it's coming out into the open just as it has in Europe.

And don't get too optimistic about the Arab spring, either. What tends to happen in that region is that military leaders get replaced with religious ones or vice versa. The latter are worse, and we'll probably see a lot more of them now. Egyptians are already killing each other over religion, and I give it 12 months, tops, before we realise that we made the same mistake in Libya that we made in Iran. Thank Zeus that Libya is too small to be the same kind of threat.

We're very likely to see the nukes flying before the decade is out.

I'm pessimistic about the world's near future.

Massive generalizations are welcome here