Sorry to put a damper on the ideological trip but it's time for a moderate's reality check.
Why is everything you disagree with ideology?
Sorry but the U.S. NOT attacking it's own people
Definitely no problems with police brutality. Not against peaceful protesters, and not in impoverished neighborhoods or neighborhoods dominated by people of color.
and that whiole the rise of FEMA and police state nonsense was cooked up by ideological groups who don't undestand the reality to the kind of world we live in.
I don't have an opinion on whether or not the martial law in the FEMA camps was a symptom of a rising police state, but I find the bolded portion of your statement very boring. Security threats, real or imaginary, have historically been used by military and executive powers to accumulate power. It's sort of a given in modern historiography that war and security propaganda are used to squash dissent and reform. I, personally, am grateful to any political organization that is vigilant in regards to executive overreach. The only check on misuse of government power in a republic is an engaged citizenry. Exploring the possibility of abuse of power is the definition of civic virtue, whether you like what conclusions they're coming to or not.
I've heard how that whole Ben Franklin statem,ent about trading freedom for protection has been misused.
Everyone always argues that the Ben Franklin quote is being misused when the other side is using it. It's over-quoted to the point of irrelevance, and extremely easy to rationalize its application to almost any situation ever.
Let me ask this does anyonme out there REALLY understand what a police state is?
I feel like I have a fair idea. My definition of the police state would include constant surveillance without the requirement of a warrant and the ability to arrest and hold people without charges or due process or trial. Unfortunately, wiretapping and digital activity monitoring have been fairly commonplace for the last decade.
I still wouldn't consider the US a police state, because it lacks your usual climate of fear and suspicion of everyone around you. We could easily go that way, though. Plenty of democratic or republican states have turned authoritarian when the going got rough enough. Naomi Wolf actually wrote a fascinating analysis of the rise of fascist governments through history called
The End of America. You probably hate Naomi Wolf, but I think it would be willfully ignorant to say that her argument is unsound.
Folks I know what a police state is.
Could you provide your definition? I've given you mine.
And consider this. If we were living in a police state don't you think the thought police would've come for you a long time ago? But they haven't, because there is none.
The police state doesn't include literally arresting everyone. None of us are community organizers or local party leaders. People who kvetch quietly among themselves without taking action aren't a danger to the police state. Even at the height of Soviet terror, people still gossiped in their kitchens. It isn't until you try to do something (like protest corporate control of the political process in the US) that you get pepper sprayed in the face and piled onto by multiple police officers.
We still have our freedom of speech.
What's freedom of speech without freedom of assembly to request redress of grievances?
A police state is a government in which the Government actively oppreses other people's thoughta and beliefs. And the U.S. has most certainly NOT become that. Anyone, in my opinion anway, who thinks otherwise is selling something.
Then clearly, I am selling you an alternate definition. Lucky for me, my definition is grounded in tangible government structures and not an extremely vague term like "oppression."
Orrr no one is selling anything, and are instead exercising their civic virtue and completing their civic duty by remaining vigilant in the face of government action.
But if we ignore that I find your definition problematic due to ambiguity, we could also consider the fact that it's too broad. You can be a theocracy, which requires people to hold a certain set of religious and cultural beliefs, without being a police state.
And as for these so-called video I could take them tio any unbiased fact-checker out there and we could probably break down all the lies these videos are telling.
Your certainty ahead of time that these videos are lying doesn't say much for your objectivity as a consumer of information.
The left is throwing a temper tantrum because they're losing control. The right is throwing a temper tantrum because the want control back.
This seems like a very reductive way to look at the political climate. Despite having a Democrat for a president, the Republican party, and conservative politics in general, have been key to the American political scene for the entire last decade. The Blue Dogs, your beloved moderates, have done just as much partisan damage as any of the pro-gun or pro-human rights legislators could've dreamed. Stupak-Pitts was a Democratic amendment to the healthcare bill, after all.
Which is why I believe uit's time for us Moderates Democrat and Republican to stand up together...take botht the left and the right by the an ear, give them both a good Jethro Gibbs head slap, and set them in the corner to think about all the damage they've caused to the country while we moderates fix things.
You seem really convinced that you've got an army of moderate legislators waiting to come out of the wings and do what you think is best, but if that's true, where are they in politics? The increasing polarization of our legal representatives is partly party machinations, true, but the parties wouldn't be able to operate this way if not for a dearth of other, more cooperative leadership.
The real truth is neither left nor right but down the middle moderate.
I'm willing to consider any cogent opinion, and so far you haven't presented me anything even remotely convincing. Just a series of slogans, mostly.
And I for one call on the members of the silent majority to stand up and help end the petty political shinnanigans of both ideological extremes and help get this country back to the greatness for which we once stood.
So you... want to re-elect Ronald Reagan?
I don't see that this country was ever greater than it is now. I think that's the varnish of nostalgia speaking. In the past, we had different horrifying problems, and now we have new ones. For example, no one's getting beat into paralysis on the Senate floor anymore, and the bathrooms are unsegregated. Instead, we have hilariously partisan politicking and the steady roll back of reproductive rights.
Obviously that's an extremely simple comparison, but the point I'm trying to make is that there were never any halcyon days. Speaking as a woman-assigned atheist Jew, I would rather be living in the US now than any US that has come before.
Because where the U.S.A. is concerned...our best days are NOT behind us! Because we don't die...just multiply!
Naw, we're definitely on the declining track of the Roman Empire. History's a spiral, after all, and patterns have a tendency to repeat themselves.
I mean, you're right, population-wise we're probably going to keep growing, but that doesn't mean we won't experience any dissipation in our national structure. Maybe we'll be forced to reorganize along our watersheds or agricultural needs, something cool like that.
