What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying Today About SOPA/PIPA
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
I am no patio11, but they should be stressing SOPA/PIPA as an anti-jobs bills that will destroy Silicon Valley and won't even protect Hollywood jobs. Perhaps employ the fear of China or terrorism to make it seem important too. And most of all, Silicon Valley should be sending highly paid lobbyists too to make laws in their interests.
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but relying on public engagement in the long-term is folly.
Mainstream news channel didn't cover SOPA/PIPA until very late; the press didn't know what they were about, and when they did they just kept mum out of self-interest. Nevertheless, a very large mass of people noticed, enough to make extremely powerful congressmen like Smith sweat cold -- that's a very significant number of people who clearly rely on "alternative" online sources for their news and entertainment right now. Are they majority? The next few months (and votes) will tell us.
15 years ago, the DMCA passed with no real opposition. Now, this bill could actually be defeated. The shift might have already happened, and if not, it's really, really close. One day we'll look back trying to find a turning point (the rise of Google? Wikipedia? Facebook?), but I bet historians will set it before 2012.
I agree and we need to all become more vigilant. I also implore you, as a member of the news media who is paying attention - please help us stay informed. Government is big and complex and we laymen have work to accomplish day-to-day. Help us find information, point us to new sources, new ideas. Challenge us. Its not that we can't think, but simply that we are busy producing and I personally feel their are few news sorces that give me the facts, respect my intelligence, and dig in deep.
We can get Congress to vote down SOPA/PIPA, or alternatively get the next Congress to repeal it, but there's a fundamental flaw in the way that we, the consumers, do business. Yes, our Congress is taking severe steps in the wrong direction, but we contributed significantly to that direction as well.
The permanent solution is not to stop one law or even a multitude of laws in perpetuity. The permanent solution is to change the methods by which we create (and allow to be created) copyrighted material. That means encouraging the use of Creative Commons and Free Software licenses like the GPL, Apache, BSD, and WTFPL (to name a few). We, as consumers, need to make shifts that not only deny these laws to affect us to our detriment, but also deny the companies supporting these laws the money to push them through.
In short, America and the rest of the world contributed heavily to these actions by Congress. Even as these laws get voted down, we must start to take steps that prevent them from happening again.
I will be likely voting Republican (for the first time in my life) for at least some of the 2012 elections, out of my commitment to vote against any incumbent who supports or votes for SOPA. Vote the bastards out. #FireSOPA #FirePIPA
You've got to try to understand the kind of message seeing more Republican votes sends the Democrats.
When they see the Republicans get more votes, their strategy over the last 20 years is to move more to the "center" (ie. more to the right). By voting for Republicans, you are helping no one but the Republicans/conservatives. If that's what you want, then go for it. But if you want a more liberal/progressive government, voting for the Republicans is counterproductive, even if you do help to vote a bunch of spineless Democrats out.
The real way to combat the Democrats' shift to the right is to vote for a more liberal/progressive party, like the Greens. This strategy has worked wonders for conservatives, when they started to vote en-masse for Tea Party candidates. Now the Tea Party, an extreme right wing group, is an influential member of the right wing landscape, even if there's no Tea Party president yet and the vast majority of right wing congressmen are not Tea Party members yet either. The Tea Party still has a significant influence on policy, and on shifting the Republican party to the right. A similar strategy can work for progressives who want to push the Democrats more to the left.
I tend to vote Green or leftist in not-close elections just because I figure the marginal effect of 1 vote is higher. The difference between 5 and 6 percent is a lot bigger than that between 30 and 31 percent, or 69 and 70 percent.
When they see the Republicans get more votes, their strategy over the last 20 years is to move more to the "center" (ie. more to the right).
That's because they're bought and paid-for by the same people as the Republicans. Almost all politicians are vector sums of corporations; you're just voting for one portfolio over another.
Democrat or Republican, as soon as they get invited to assholes' parties in Aspen and Easthampton, they fall in love with the asshole world and do whatever they can to stay connected to it. This social phenomenon has a technical name: goatsefication.
That being said, I understand people's frustrations with the system and wish there was a legitimate way to support third parties in a way that felt effective.
That makes no sense. What better way is there to support third parties than voting for them?
Your vote isn't going to be the deciding factor in the election, so why not vote for the third party candidate who most closely matches your views?
If there's ever to be hope of voting reform in this country, it has to be done by getting a major party to adopt it, presumably by convincing them that they'll gain a lot of supporters by doing so.
Perhaps one could convince the major parties to support electoral reform by constantly hitting them with spoiling candidates. Run left-wing independents in districts which are typically safe for Democrats but still reasonably close. Run right-wing independents in districts which are close but Republican. If you can get both major parties to get fed up with losing seemingly safe seats due to the first-past-the-post system, that might get them to change it.
I'm not holding my breath, though.
I count nine Republican initial supporters and four Democrat initial supporters. Where are you getting the "...illusion that the Democratic Party is at all useful or decent" part at all?
from Wikipedia(you know how to get there still):
The Stop Online Piracy Act was introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and was initially co-sponsored by Howard Berman (D-CA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Steve Chabot (R-OH), John Conyers (D-MI), Ted Deutch (D-FL), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Timothy Griffin (R-AR), Dennis A. Ross (R-FL), Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Lee Terry (R-NE). As of January 16, 2012, there were 31 sponsors.[82]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Supporte...
I think both sides are terrible but to lambaste one side for something that they didn't do is bad reporting.
The OP's whole point is that the Democratic party is arguably less bad than the Republicans, but that they are still very bad and deserve no loyalty. Your pointing out that more Republicans initially supported the bill does not conflict with this.
Here is a list by propublica.org which lists likely supporters and opponents for SOPA/PIPA.
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
I count 37 Republicans and 43 Democrats on the list of supporters. I count 14 Republicans and 17 Democrats on the list of opponents.
I am not going to argue here which one is less bad because that's pointless and off topic. I am merely pointing out the logical disconnect that I saw.
> I will be likely voting Republican (for the first time in my life) for at least some of the 2012 elections, out of my commitment to vote against any incumbent who supports or votes for SOPA
Outside of the presidential election, voters in the US don't vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, they vote for their electoral reprentative. The party of the representatives on offer might be a decent heuristic for their policies and values, but the informed voter has a lot more information at their fingertips than just that.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/pipa-support...
A consequence of the two-party system (and the lack of will of the political parties to challenge their own incumbents) is that shitty Democrats are more damaging than equally shitty Republicans, because they take up that "slot" (usually; credible primary challenges are really rare) can only be replaced by Republicans.
Getting into office is really, really hard. But once these people are in, they have a sub-5% per year chance of getting fired. That's ludicrous given that (a) positions of power should be harder to keep, and (b) their performance has been awful for the past few decades.
If I was the dictator of the U.S., I'd change the constitution so that Congress gets drafted. People would get selected to be Congressmen by random lottery.
I'd imagine that a good fraction of Americans chosen randomly would be corruptible, but a good fraction of them would be incorruptible, and it would be too dangerous to recruit corrupt legislators: you'd have too high of a chance of having somebody (i) call the cops, (ii) pull a gun, or (iii) punch you in the face.
The current selection process selects for :Respectable people for whom being :Respectable is accepting that other people are :Respectable. Many ordinary Americans, be they "good ol boys" or inner-city blacks, won't play that game.
Net Neutrality, and perhaps less tendancy to go to war, are about the only things keeping there though.
For the people by the people.
Murdoch (and ilk) are terrified of the Internet, as it dilutes their influence. Once their influence dilutes past a certain point, people and politicians will stop listening to them. Is SOPA the beginning of the end, a final effort at shoring up their power base before reaching the point of no return to influence?
Many of these really egregious bills are unpopular with the majority of americans, but their opinions are not represented by the actions of government. There's little they can do to get real reformers elected because the "two party" system focuses on immaterial differences between the parties and on these issues the parties are pretty close. Most democrats and republicans voted for the PATRIOT ACT (and its renewal and extension under Obama) as well as NDAA, etc.
I'd love for someone to find a way to make democracy work. If there were a way to keep the US government constrained to the powers enumerated for it by the constitution, then we wouldn't have these problems.
But the only "checks and balances" on the government are all part of the government, and thus have long ago been compromised, there's no real oversight.
That's the fundamental problem.
If SOPA is "defeated" it will just rise up under another name in a few months.
SOPA itself is only the latest attempt to do this- they've been attempting to gain this level of control over the internet using the excuse of fighting terrorism for several years now.
In a winner take all system, if there are more than two candidates, the dominant effect is the spoiler effect, where having more similar candidates makes it less likely that any will win. This means that anything more than two parties is degenerate, which implies that only the dominant eigenvector of political opinion will ever be reflected in an election. (Which in the US is typically the culture wars/identity politics, unless the economy is falling apart.)
I believe in the approval voting that you mention, there's a situation where candidate C would be able to win, which is also interesting.
That sounds like an excellent outcome. They might actually have to talk to each other, work out solutions that work for everyone, and refrain from doing things they can't all agree on.
There are certain due process, etc, arguments you can make at the edges, but the fundamental idea of SOPA/PIPA are squarely Constitutional.
Only in part. Only downloaded goods use the internet as a medium for commerce. The rest of the time, it's for communication (speech).
The regulations in question allow the government to censor websites, something that they are not given the power to do in the establishment clause, and are also strictly forbidden from doing in the first amendment.
If the bills simply entailed the power to require websites to take down IP violating content, then what you say would be true.
The fundamental ideas are not constitutional. I suggest you read the constitution. (Seriously, it was meant to be read. It doesn't take lawyers or judges to interpret it, it is written in pretty plain language.)
What does a prohibition on establishing a national religion have to do with DNS blocking? Perhaps metaphorically, unlimited-copyright is the religion of many politicians, but legally that seems like a stretch...
Compared to other government who actually do have complete unlimited power, your statement looks like a gross exaduration.
Do we have any other large decision-making systems that are proven to work? Because scale really seems to be the problem.