Reply #217: A rose by any other name...

[txaslftist]

You can quibble about fascism and whether your Webster's includes what we have going on today.

Certainly, whatever it is, it's comfortable. Unless you happen to black, in which case you've got the whole racial-profiling prison-industrial-complex to deal with; or muslim, in which case you've got the whole "my phone calls back home are all monitored and I might get shipped off to Egypt to be tortured" thing to cope with; or a pothead, in which case you've got to deal with the whole "hide my stash or the cops will steal everything I own" rap...

Than it's not so comfortable.

Tell you what. I'll let YOU define it.

Define what form of government we have when the president can, by executive order, take any person that comes under the power of his agents into custody and hold them to be tortured without trial or charges for as long as he so deems. What form of government limits the rule of law to it's citizens and not it's executive? What would you call it, sir, when a nation sports the largest prison population in the world, both as a raw number and as a percentage? What do you call a nation where selected citizens' phone calls can and are being monitored and their phone records turned over to an executive without a warrant or any court review? Where corporate control has seized and consolidated great chunks of formerly independent media that now broadcasts material that varies little from city to city?

What do YOU call it?

Because you've said it isn't fascism. Fine.

Sir, I submit to you, it is not freedom.