I do know a few right-wingers who discussed the subject even back in Bush days, long before Obama. For example, Matthew Bracken, who wrote "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" (it's basically a right-wing propaganda piece, with central theme being the govt cracking down on gun owners, but it also directly touches on surveillance and police militarization, and the use of terrorism as a pretext to curtail civil liberties; as I recall, it specifically mentions the PATRIOT Act). That book was written in 2003, back when Bush's reign was seen as uncontested, so effectively it targeted that administration.

You can also look at the Pauls. Say what you like about them, but they have been very consistent in arguing against all these things, and Rand at least counts himself as Tea Party affiliated (though many people in that movement would probably dislike him).

OTOH, yes, you also have large quantities of "I'm not racist, but why is he black?" guys there too, for whom it's just the convenient excuse of the day. But they're not all there is to it.

Tea Party is a minority among right-wingers, but it's also the one that is most strongly pro-gun, and also the one that's most consistently emphasizing the "right to armed uprising". Mainstream Republicans are rather averse to such rhetoric (the politicians are another matter when they're pandering to electorate - they know that being seen as "pro-gun" will win them some fringe votes, but won't spook the mainstream enough to cost them more, especially when the other option is a Democrat).

What makes you think that Saudi Arabia would permit the kinds of books from which people might learn such things?

Remember how it went? "If these books contradict the Holy Qu'ran, then they are blasphemy - burn them. If these books are in agreement with the Holy Qu'ran, then they are superfluous - burn them."

Yes. Thing is, if Israel really wanted to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties, they'd turn Gaza into rubble literally overnight, with casualties in hundreds of thousands. They certainly have the means - it being packed as dense as that, a few fuel-air bombs would cause immense casualties, without a single shot being fired in response.

Ironically, the fact that Palestinian casualties haven't even reached a thousand yet (and this includes the combatants) is ipso facto evidence that Israel is not deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of policy (though it doesn't mean that individual soldiers don't fire at civilians, by mistake or otherwise).

I'm not right wing, but I have to call you out on that. Most extreme right-wingers that I know - the kind that likes to talk about right to keep and bear arms as "means to fight back against a tyrannical government" - are actually pretty skeptical of PATRIOT Act, NSA surveillance, and all that stuff. Notice how a lot of recent attacks on the NSA came from Tea Party.

That was the point, wasn't it? You can be NIMBY all you want, but when that translates to "no [water] in my back yard", you can bet that a lot of people will suddenly reconsider.

The reason why Hamas rockets "didn't hit a single person" is because of a combination of interceptor systems, early launch detection, and well-developed civil defense in Israel. If rockets were fired in the same manner at Gaza, given the population density there, almost every single one would have found a target. Yet that would be exactly a tit-for-tat response.

You seem to be arguing that if a guy attacks me with a knife on the street, I can't use any force to defend myself until he actually manages to land a stab on me. If that's your notion of "proportional response", it's bullshit.

For which they need massive desalination facilities. For which they need nuclear.

I mean, it's a win-win as far as I'm concerned, but the local eco-hippies might not see it that way.

Er... are you implying that what Israel should do is fire its own Qassam-style rockets back at Gaza, using the same targeting principle (i.e. aim where the concentration of people is highest)?

The problem with this is that no-one seems to be able to coherently explain what a proportional response should look like. Every time I ask people, they immediately go into rant mode about "Israeli fascist" and "they've had that coming" etc. But no-one is willing to actually lay out the proper response to the rockets step-by-step.

They're still aimed, it's just that the target area is very wide. But in most cases, those target areas are city centers.

Not for the lack of trying. It's one of the reasons why I consider Hamas leadership basically insane - it's clear that what they're doing is just plainly not working, and is only making things worse for them, but they're doing it anyway.

What Congressional hearings? We've already had the whole NSA thing blow up, and half of Congress was frothing at the mouth at any suggestion of legislative action to restrict the surveillance, because "we need it for teh terrorists!".

Soviet doctrine (and the broader Marxist doctrine) distinguishes between "personal property" and "private property". Things like furniture or car would be considered personal property, and hence okay. Land, means of (large-scale) production like workshops and factories etc, would be considered private property if owned, and that was banned. Houses and other things that straddled the line could be treated differently depending on the country and the era.

After the first revolution in February, 1917 (the one that saw the tsar abdicate), Russia became a capitalist republic. That lasted for 8 months.

After the second revolution in October, 1917, the power was in the hands of the soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, most of which were under Bolshevik control already.

In 1918, the power was very briefly (and largely nominally) exercised by the Constituent Assembly. It lasted for 13 hours before the Bolsheviks dissolved it.

By the end of 1918, Bolsheviks have purged the only remaining minority party that shared the power with them in the soviets, the left esers.

So, where do the "few years after the Russian revolution" come from?

They didn't call themselves communist. They had communist parties, which were ostensibly dedicated to the goal of achieving communism - eventually, sometime in the future.

As Soviet joke went, a party lecturer holding a class on dialectic materialism in a remote village said to the audience: "Cheer up, comrades! Communism is on the horizon!"

One of the peasants in the audience raises his hand and asks a question, "Comrade, what is a horizon?"

The lecturer answered, "A horizon is an imaginary line where the sky and the earth seems to meet, which always remains the same distance from us as we walk towards it."

None of those countries actually called themselves "communist", they were all "socialist". Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example. Communism, just as you say, was a label for a hypothetical future society that was just around the corner, kinda like fusion.

The one place where you'd see actual communist countries mentioned was in Soviet sci-fi. E.g. in Strugatsky brothers' Noon Universe, its early stages see an economic and scientific competition before the remainder of the Western world, headed by the USA, and the USCR - Union of Soviet Communist Republics - a result of the merger of all socialist states, with USSR and China as two cores, once communism was achieved in them.