I just read this article at http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Features/09_ShirleySocialFuture.html and found it interesting that an article about the future had so many political answers. I'll quote a few directly from the article. NOTE: I do not agree or disagree with any of these quotes. I just found the answers interesting... and some amusing.
“The biggest change, one which I didn't get at the time, was the rise to dominance of the American Christian fundamentalist far right. Where are we going? If Kerry should be elected, back to the Clintonian middle. But if Bush is re-elected, straight into the worst fascist shitter this country has ever experienced. We're on a cusp like that of the Roman Republic about to degenerate into the Empire. Though in many ways it has already.” -Norman Spinrad
“The Stasi — the East German version of the KGB — had detailed files on virtually every resident of East Germany, yet somehow managed to miss the fact that the Berlin Wall was about to come down until it was already in rubble. Tell me again how a centralized government makes us more secure? September 11th wasn't a failure to gather enough intelligence: it was a failure to correctly interpret the intelligence in hand. There was too much irrelevant data, too much noise. Gathering orders of magnitude MORE noise just puts that needle into a much bigger haystack, while imposing high social costs. Fingerprinting visitors to the US and jailing foreign journalists for not understanding the impossibly baroque new visa regs makes America less secure (by encouraging people to lie about the purposes of their visit and by chasing honest people out of the country), not more.” -Cory Doctorow
“The election of George W. Bush. Second, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, leading directly to an unopposable American hegemonism. Not that they aren't related.” -Norman Spinrad
“I think the Ashcroftian terrorist witchhunts, coupled with the fiscal irresponsibility of massive tax-cuts and out-of-control cronyist military adventurism will be regarded as the world mistake in this part of the American century by debtor generations to come who find themselves socially and economically isolated from the rest of the world. When the US dollar starts to drop against the laser-printed post-Saddam occupation Dinar, an unbacked currency, you know that your economy is in the deepest of shit.” -Cory Doctorow
“I'd say the Jihad; there is one, you know. There isn't any ‘war on terrorism’; terrorism is a tactic; the war is Islamic fundamentalism versus ‘the Crusaders,’ aka ‘the Great Satan,’ aka the United States, aka the ‘West,’ aka the 21st Century. The Jihad has been openly and loudly declared by the jihadis, and as far as Islam is concerned, Bush has openly declared the other side in Iraq. This will affect everything. It already has. It's a holy war that's been going on for 1400 years or so, and this is only the latest and most dangerous phase. Osama bin Laden, after 9/11, said that he would destroy civil liberties in the West, and in the US he's already succeeded. What he didn't understand was that he was feeding energy into the fundamentalist Christian right, Bush's allies, and in effect creating the Great Crusader Satan of his paranoid fantasies that hadn't existed before, or at least not on a mass level. Years ago, and I paraphrase loosely, William Burroughs said that if you want to start a murderous brawl, record the Black Panthers speaking, play it for the Ku Klux Klan, play their reaction back to the Panthers, etc.... Voila, Jihad! Destroying civil liberties, indeed civil society itself, on both sides. Wherever you go, there we are.” --Norman Spinrad
“Well, if you gather in armies and raise a flag, the USA will blow you to shreds, so the trend is to strap a bomb around your waist or pile artillery shells into a car and then blow yourself up. The idea that a 'war on terror' is going to resolve this kind of terror by using lots of warfare is just absurd.” -Bruce Sterling
“Osama will get to decide it.” -Bruce Sterling being asked who will win the presidential election
Now discuss. And yes, this was on slashdot the other day.