America's Dystopian Future? You Have Been Warned.

Artwork by Masakatsu Sashie

by Nomad

It's getting increasingly more difficult to decide what is science fiction and what is the real world. I stumbled across a couple of stories that might give us an unpleasant foreshadowing of things to come if things keep going the way they are now. One note of caution, however: this kind of speculation is not for the paranoid.

Discover Magazine has a story ( Seeing Crime Before It Happens ) that could have been snatched from the Philip K. Dick novel, "Minority Report.

Things You Should Know about the Rise of the American Police State

By Nomad

From Fiction to Fact

Here is a clip from that brilliant, strange but frightening film "Brazil." The film was a surreal tragic comedy involving a Dystopian authoritarian world where the last refuge of the common man is in his heroic dreams. 

Because of the threat of terrorism, the state relies on an aggressive policy of No-Questions-asked policy which soon becomes mere intimidation. 

Even then, sometimes things go wrong. But this was all fiction, you say. Just a harmless bit of entertainment. I mean, it couldn't happen in the free nations of the West. We have protections for our civil rights built into the system, after all. These have to be respected by authorities.
In America and Europe, according to the conventional wisdom, there are safeguards making sure abuse of power cannot happen here. That is a proud notion based on a small degree of truth and a great deal of wishful thinking. In fact, beginning with the war on drugs and dramatically increasing with the war on terror, the local police have become more and more aggressive in their assault on the rights of citizens.