Petitions are encouraged precisely because they're completely ineffective: a safety valve to allow people to believe they're effecting change when in fact nothing is changing.
If petitions actually worked, they'd be banned.
If petitions actually worked, they'd be banned.
So many people take the fact the government doesn't work the way they want it to as evidence that democracy doesn't work. It's a fallacy. What they have trouble understanding is that while we may largely agree that certain problems exist (very few people are in favor of corruption in government) we are incredibly divided on how to solve those problems. My (imperfect) solution would be publicly financed elections and a complete end to campaign contributions. There are many people who feel passionately that campaign contributions == free speech. There isn't enough public support for one solution or another to override the institutional inertia that was built into the constitution by design.
It isn't evidence that democracy doesn't work, it's evidence that your position doesn't have enough support.
But when positions do gain support, things really do change. We've passed constitutional amendments outlawing slavery, giving women the vote, and instituting civil rights. Jesus Christ, do you understand just how hard getting each of those things passed was? Do you understand how many entrenched and powerful interests had to be overcome? Do you understand just how little shouting that democracy doesn't work would have accomplished when faced with moral injustices like that?
If your solution isn't getting passed, work on convincing people that it's the right solution. But don't scream democracy doesn't work when it doesn't get passed because not enough people care about it or agree with it. That actually is democracy working exactly how its supposed to.
Change opinions. Don't rant about how they don't matter. </rant>
Now, in that sense, let's review exactly how "our"[] government measures up: Individual citizens or groups of citizens have minimal means of influencing their own government through the means of the system - i.e. their representatives. Petitions change nothing, letters to representations to MPs / Congresspeople will receive a form reply and will usually be ignored. Occasionally, when public sentiment doesn't conflict too badly with economic interests, minor tweaks can be made, but that's about it.
Where real change has occurred, it has been done so outside* the institutional parameters of the system. The abolition of slavery took a civil war, and the vote for women and civil rights took massive public protests, illegal acts and (in the case of the suffragettes in the UK) hunger strikes.
So yes, change is possible. But it was never achieved within the confines of a system largely designed and evolved (I contend) to limit public participation, and certainly not by online petitions.
[*] Not everyone is from the US, y'know.
Big ships turn slowly, some patience is required to see the effect of steering. Many changes in society look quick and immediate only when clouded by the shortened perspective of looking tens or hundreds of years back in the history.
Incredibly valid point. The angry rant above was hastily written (typos and all) in response to a thread about a change to US public policy. That's my excuse as to why I got it wrong, not an attempt to say that I actually got it right.
> The abolition of slavery took a civil war
The actual passage of the amendment took an act of democracy, however, that still had to overcome mountains of entrenched interests even with the South temporarily out of the picture.
> and the vote for women and civil rights took massive public protests, illegal acts and (in the case of the suffragettes in the UK) hunger strikes.
All of which worked to change public opinion, and pass those bills through the democratic process.
My angry rant was probably less towards your statement than similar ones that I've heard too many times. So I apologize for directing it all at you.
I do strictly disagree that if petitions worked, they'd be banned, however. Petitions are nothing new; the only thing about Obama's site is the ease with which they can be made and the promise of a response. And petitions have worked in the past to effect change either directly, by making those in power aware of people's strongly held petitions, or indirectly, by helping to raise awareness and eventually changing policy by swaying opinion. They do work, if they have enough support.
I know you weren't explicitly making this argument, but many were complaining about how terrible it was that 25,000 signature petitions weren't effecting real change. The US is a nation of over 314,000,000 people. It would be madness if any 25,000 member subset of them could meaningfully coerce the government to action. I'm happy that the bar is being raised to 100,000. I kind of hope it gets raised to something higher. Once you start being able to describe the number in terms of millions it starts carrying real weight. And if people know that that's what they have to shoot for, they'll be more likely to achieve to it.
Well, not in the Greek sense; the US system was designed to lead to good governance, and to protect personal freedom, neither of which are preserved in a true Democracy.
True freedom is wealth. You believe it's important for people to have this and that? Create value, make money and then spend them buying yourself and others (if you really care) some freedom in the form of education, healthcare or whatever it is you believe in. In a democracy, it works very differently: you ask government to force others to pay for something they may not believe in.
This might not be bad, but because of this, even in anarchy the majority wins. Like, if somebody is gay, what would you have them pay to a big mob of people with torches and pitchforks coming for him, a mob who thinks that gays are an abomination? They might not be using the same currency, his created value may not be worth anything to this mob. And since there is no police, who is going to protect him? Remember that he's in a minority after all.
We take many things for granted, but IMHO democracy makes tolerance possible.
(There are different types of anarchy theories, btw, anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-capitalism being on the two opposite sides of the spectrum).
People often forget that the fact that the US moves slowly (glacially, I often feel) is frustrating but a GOOD THING. As much as things may be unfortunate right now, they are unfortunate situations we can live with. Far more worrying (to me, anyway) are radical motions that change our country drastically without much debate. Want some examples? Look at post 9/11/01 us government. We passed the patriot act exactly a month and a half later and started two wars.
Yea, I really wish that we could have tax reform, gay marriage, regulated cannabis, etc etc, but not without extensive debate: generally, a conservative (in the rate-of-change sense) country is far more stable than one that is purely held sway to public opinion.
Anyway, petitions really have nothing to do with democracy. It's just a way of people getting their voice heard at the White House, and if you think it's anything more, you're delusional.
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Or, even, (tangent incoming): "try a new law on some [randomly-selected] subset of the nation at a time, record metrics, see whether the experimental population or the control population are doing better" -- A/B test the nation?
That's theoretically what the whole system of state law was for--let each state experiment with its own law--but this has been less and less tenable for generating scientifically-valid data as it has gone on, as the policies states have enacted have caused them to diverge (where instead "good" policies were supposed to be converged to as other states copied them, and "bad" policies eliminated from the "gene pool"), and has caused people who agreed with each policy to move there and people who disagreed to leave. Now doing an "experiment" with a new law in one state will tell you next-to-nothing about how another state would react to it.
Now (or soon), we can efficiently enforce [some forms of] law at the individual level--just mark people in a database saying "this person is legally allowed to smoke marijuana" where a cop can look it up from the console in their car, or "this person will be charged a VAT instead of an income tax" where the credit and EFTPOS networks can look it up and handle it. Law doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. But this is, of course, a silly pipe-dream to apply to a current, entrenched nation. It'll probably be one of those things some charter city could run with, though.
The fear is that it might NOT be repealed in a few days--again, see the patriot act.
But, for a more obvious example, consider a bill that enables martial law.... much more difficult to revert and something that our country might have passed in some of its more heated moments.
But, this is all just speculation. I have no idea if our slow government is actually the reason why it's been so stable as a "democracy"; it could be for myriad other reasons, but it's always made sense to me.
Take for instance, the top one -- "classify the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group" or the various succession petitions. Is there a federal agency that regulates hate groups? Or classifies who is a hate group and who is not? No. "Hate Group" is a label used by the private NGO sector -- in this case the ADL and SPLC (two non-governmental organizations) maintain lists of hate groups.
Nor does one "incorporate" via the federal government. You incorporate in a state. Stripping Westboro of their tax exempt status should be the lead ask there, and yet those petitions are far less popular than the original? Why? Because it's a more severe ask.
Same with "recount the election" -- the federal government doesn't count votes!
Restrict pay for senators? Seriously, c'mon. We all learned about separation of powers, right?
Petitions do work. What a lobbyist does is petition the government. They're just professional at it, and why we presume that a developer or a plumber or a chicken farmer should be as good of a lobbyist as a professional lobbyist is, is beyond me.
Petitions work. But there's a lot more to getting petitions to affect change than writing some nonsense on a web page and getting a bunch of people to agree with you. Is the expectation that if .01% of the US Population clicks a +1 button on a website then the federal government will change a law? That's a scary proposition.
As much as I think lobbying is a great harm to the system, I can't help but wonder. Would it be effective if there were some sort of "Kickstarter" for lobbying that would allow the mass public participate in a particular lobbying effort with their own $.
Think "We the people" but backed by people who wish to affect change in a particular way with a small "donation". The difference would be that each project would need to be curated by a professional lobbyist to ensure that the details are correct. There could be a threshold set and a particular lobbying effort would only move forward if the threshold is met... Etc, etc, just like Kickstarter. I can't help but think that I'm being too simplistic and overly optimistic. Is there any particular reason this wouldn't work?
It wouldn't be as simple as Kickstarter, however:
US public policy already favors the wealthy. (Oligarchy) If the ability to participate in the government was predicated on spending some cash, the system would eventually turn into a Feudal state. This is why poll taxes are outlawed: the government cannot require you to pay to vote.
The petitions that generate notable interest are increasingly those who are written or championed by people who do have a better-than-baseline grasp on how the government works and what to ask for. The petition to dismiss Swartz's prosecutors is a good example. That's something aimed at the right place, asking for the right thing (to indicate the severity of the citizenry's reaction to the (mis)conduct) and really only getting traction because people who grok the system are promoting that petition in the general interest stories/blogs that initially revealed that misconduct and stoked the citizen response.
Particularly as they raise the threshold for response to reflect the total crowd using the site, I think we'll see the 'qualifying' petitions largely become those that are written/championed by -- for lack of a better term -- special interest groups of citizens.
Our group includes people with experience getting real bills past the House. It's a chance to stop debating which strategies make a difference and make a difference.
Pretend you're a government official. Every day you have several dozen, if not hundreds or more "requests" made of your office. Fix this. Change that. Ban it too!
It all just blurs together. Eventually you need to filter the noise, "these quacks are all just in it for themselves. I represent the people, I need to know what the people want!" you may say to yourself. How can you tell what the people want. Well, get them to rally together, show that there is support for the clause to "Ban it!"
How could we do that? Perhaps by getting everyone interested to express said interest. What's the threshold of people you're willing to listen to though? 25,000? That seems right. But suddenly, every cause can rally 25,000 people without issue, we're back to the initial issue: too much signal:noise. So we increase the threshold; only the issues that people really care about will make it through.
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I never actually believed the petitions were doing much good. The 80% "legalize pot", 5% "admit you have aliens", 5% "no really, legalize pot", and another 4% of equal garbage petitions seemed to ruin the system for everyone.
The goal of these petitions is to create visibility of some sort of interaction with citizens, to create an illusion of participation, an illusion of a democracy.
Hey, it does fool most people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_ballot_propo...
> If petitions actually worked, they'd be banned.
Replace "petitions" with voting, protesting, posting comments on Hacker News, or talking with your fellow citizens about political issues. All those are other pieces to the puzzle. Why aren't they banned?
The system won't be "fixed" using tools that exist within the system. It must be hacked, but I don't really see how.
figure out a way to efficiently get energy (nuclear? solar? vacuum energy?), so you don't need to rely on any incumbent authority.
Using that energy, design drones to mine resources from the earths' crust, or extract minerals/resources from the sea. THis process must be automated. These drones, using the extracted resources, would reproduce themselves, so that the whole process can be exponential in speed. When a critical number of drones is reached, arm the drones (or create new drones that are armed). Use those drones to take over the world - send an ultimatum. Then, once the whole world has bowed down to you, you become the most benevolent dictator, giving all equality and a good life.
That statement is so scary, but most likely true.
Activism comes from expending effort to direct the course of the system (aka, society). Some people, like the rich and powerful, are also "activists" - in the sense that they use their wealth and power to direct the system in such ways as to benefit themselves, while the more altruistic activists direct towards a more ethical/equal world as deemed by their moral systems. In my eyes, they are of the same sort. Problem is that the altruistic activists tend to lack in resources, and thus, they often "lose" to the powerful wealthy ones that act more out of self interest.
Because government should serve the people and a petition is meant to show government issues the people find important?
Okey, I guess saying that government should serve the people is hard to do with a straight face, but thats how it was suppose to be. Its like saying that the law should be fair and non-discriminating, no matter skin color, sex, or money in the bank. People still expect those two things to be true, even if in truth they are rarely so.
A tiny percentage of the population finds important.
I suspect that often enough we underestimate opposition to (or mere disinterest in) our ideas and tend to overestimate the importance of our opinions :(
I am apparently one of the rare ones who researches any petition, and its impact if made into law, before I sign it.
If everyone did such, I feel that petition systems would be a lot more worthwhile.
Reference: http://www.kcentv.com/story/16070848/killeen-city-council-re...
By this logic, if your comment was correct, your comment wouldn't exist.