Absolutely read this: If This Goes On....A Scenario. And read the comments (ignore the trolls, focus on people with insight and information).
Funny, when I wrote this, people said that I was "paranoid" while the point of the post that too many people are not paranoid enough.
I particularly like this comment by someone on digg:
I'd move to another country if I wasn't so terrified of our foreign policy.
On one hand, I do not see the utility of moving from one country to another to another until finally dying on the last Pacific island to feel the influence.
On the other hand, I feel the obligation and the responsibility to stay here and fight, to slay this beast before it grows too big to overcome. Are you registered to vote next month?
We need to get every one of them out of office, at all levels from President to dogcatcher. Then, we need to put tremendous pressure on our new elected representatives to do what is right, to do it aggressively and to do it fast in order to bring the Enlightement back and roll back the effects of this last resurgence of pre-Enlightment religious and authoritarian ideology.
This is what I wrote back in July 10, 2004 - my very first post on my very first blog:
Thus, conservative movement is a creed of rich white Christian guys who are still peeved that Medieval power-structure that had them on top is no longer around. They long for the non-existent Golden Age in the past, for the times of fairy tales in which all of them are princes and all of them can get to sleep with Cinderella. They know they are cornered and fatally wounded and are fighting ferociously for their very existence. Through lies and Orwellian language, they have duped millions to help them fight. They will do absolutely anything and everything to retain power, as they demonstrated in Florida recount in 2000. Their only hope for the future is election of George W. Bush. If Bush gets elected, they will be in a position to finish the job they started during his first term, that is, to dismantle democracy and any means through which progressives and liberals can challenge their absolute power, turning America into de facto one-party state. Reforms of the judiciary system, starving the social programs, rigging the voting machines, changing the rules how Congress and Senate operate, waging endless wars and flaming fear through the population - all those are components of the strategy for their survival. If successful, their program will turn America into a totalitarian society without any middle class whatsoever. Middle class is a rare and recent phenomenon in history. A state that wants to foster a free-market economy needs to first form and, through laws and regulations, protect the existence of middle class. The conservatives have a different economic model in mind, one comprised of a few rich guys at the top and a quarter billion enslaved workers, too poor, tired and scared to speak out, with no protection by the courts.
Will they go with a bang or with a wimper?
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We need more than voters.
We need people who work in the local party committees.
We need people who talk, not argue, with their neighbours.
We need people who talk with people who vote for the other parties.
We need free speech and peaceable assembly around our kitchen tables.
Voters got us into this mess. It will take citizens to get out of it.
Bang.
The Eisenhower and entourage are steaming for the straights of Hormuz just as scandal [and not lying, military and fiscal incompetance!] are about to boot the neocons off the stage.
Greg: it was a few, not too many, voters staying away from poles that got us in this mess. Bush lost the popular vote. The way things are going just now, a big turn out on election day is bad news for the Republicans and for the crypto-fascists that have gathered around to advise him and fund his favorite legislators. Yes there are tons of ignorant yokels who vote but the rest of us are a lot more mad or scared about the republican agenda now than we were about Bin Laden's agenda in '04. Just get the[re and] vote and you will make a difference...your other actions would help greatly and by all means I would encourage anyone with the gumption to do those things to get busy.
Yeah, right.
North Korea, a country run by an insane dictator, is trying to build nuclear bombs and ICBMs.
Iran, a country run by a cabal of religious nuts, is trying to build nuclear bombs and ICBMs and has already said it will use them against its enemies.
Russia has reverted to a KGB-run thugocracy.
Somalia is now what Afghanistan was six years ago: a country run by terrorists for the purpose of recruiting and training terrorists.
But in your mind, the greatest threat to the world is Christian Fundamentalist George W Bushitler and his evil neocon cronies, and if you can just vote the Rethuglicans out of power next month, peace and freedom will reign forevermore.
Do you people have any idea, any at all, just how incredibly stupid you sound?
Why are you such a coward? Why do you think you are so important that foreign countries and/or terrorists will try to find you in your little village in the middle of nowehere? And why do you assume that those countries would be any different no matter who is the President of the USA> After all, USA is just one of 200 hundred countries in the world and much of the stuff happening in the other 199 countries is domestic or local and has no reference to the USA and is certainly not in response to anything the President says or does - except that in this case there is enough evidence to show that some of the worst excesses of other countries are directly caused by the idiocy of Bush Presidency.
Coward?
The nuts who run Iran are conservative rather than radical. The eliminationist rhetoric they use is fairly mild by even mainstream conservative American standards; in particular, the "wiped off the map" quote was a mistranslation. Ahmadinejad isn't that different from Bush - he's an unpopular conservative who's using militant rhetoric to paint his liberal opponents as soft and unpatriotic. To wit, whenever the US and Israel rattle their sabers at him, he gets an excuse to shut down another opposition paper.
The thugs who run Russia are similarly conservative rather than radical. The communists who used to run Russia were conservative too, but they were conservatives who grew up on the idea of a Cold War in which the Soviet Union had to win. The current crop of mafia thugs are more concerned with the stability of their own regime, and in particular are a lot more dependent on the US than the USSR ever was.
North Korea is run by a person who, while nutty, isn't as irrational as people think. Kim Jong Il isn't suicidal enough to launch a first strike against anyone. He knows that there's a sleeping giant to his north and west and another giant with nuclear weapons aimed at him. He's not a terrorist on 24.
The greatest threat to the world isn't just the neocons (in fact, it's not the neocons at all - they don't have the lasting influence of grassroots totalitarianism). It's the combination of totalitarian ideologies: Dominionism in the US, Islamism in the Islamic world, Hindutva in India, and so on.
Sorry, greensmile, without all those other things, voting is just an empty ritual, performed periodically to reassure each other. Without information to disrupt its comfortable meandering, the election is no more than a grunting sumo honbasho among imagemeisters.
Your neighbours aren't worried about "The Republican Agenda". If they are aware of it at all, they think, or hope, it will protect them from little brown men swimming across the Rio Grande and binLadin sneaking through the boreal forest.
Unless you are there, known, trusted, and heard, they will never believe that it wasn't little brown men who shipped the factories to Malaysia or that it wasn't binLadin who filled our air and water with poisons.
We don't need tons of ignorant yokels voting. We need tons of informed citizens working to uproot the government and grow us some democracy.