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Comment by throwit1979 | Hacker News Reader

throwit1979

Thank god for this. If there's one thing that really gets despotic police states to change their ways, it's online letters.

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The White House petition, along with this letter to Congress, exist to make the people signing them feel like they've done something about the situation. People are filled with outrage and clicking 'submit' allows them to vent some of it in a pretty futile way, but one that gives them some self satisfaction for standing up for themselves but without actually risking anything.

In some ways I think online petitions have done some societal harm because people will always take the path of least resistance. If it's between clicking a button or actually going out and banging on doors to rally support, the button wins every time.

Pressing online buttons would do more good if it were a submit on a EFF donation button. Probably more then banging on doors too.

Exactly.

This is why my activism site experiments with combining the two: seeking positive change by making symbolic donations to charity. The dollar amount of the donations made in a task's favor might actually help convey the weight of support. For example: http://btf.io/382 ("Pardon Edward Snowden")

Criticism is easy. Rather than heckling from the peanut gallery, suggest something more useful.

Heh-or DO something more useful. People are so quick to talk.

Bitcoin is more useful, because by using it you're not actually sponsoring NSA and you're doing it not in some hypothetical utopian future where politicians actually serve their people, but right here right now.

> you're doing it not in some hypothetical utopian future

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I really hope it is.

So are you saying that the US is an example of how government serves its people and that there's every chance in the world it's heading towards a bright future not far away from today?

From a viewpoint outside the US, I think most people would agree with the parent. Clearly, if the rights of Americans are being abused, sod knows what that means they're doing to rest of us.

Your elected official are simply not going to help us, please understand this is a very 2-sided issue. Those in the US can try the political route, those outside, the routing route, i.e. we need to avoid our Internet traffic going through the US.

If nothing else, it provides a sense to Congress of how many people are angry about this. And at least some in Congress are angry, too. So it may or may not do much, but it's something at least. It is, I believe, a more valuable action than commenting online about how it won't do anything.

And how much collective campaign financing will these angry people provide next election? Zero? Then fuck them.

Campaign financing only exists to buy propaganda to influence people to vote one way or another (excluding some dirty tricks at the margins). Issue voters are largely outside the reach of this propaganda, which is why they often have so much influence (think NRA and Christian conservatives, who are willing to go against party interests to pursue their issues).

If a large enough block of organized, committed issue voters were to emerge from this event (especially a bipartisan block), that would do much to change the political landscape, and could significantly undermine the influence of money in certain elections.

That's a lot of ifs. All I know is, when I was a kid calling your congressmen works. Now hundreds of people spamming phone calls and emails has no effect at all. Advertising works and the politicians know it. They don't care about fringe voters because it's usually not a big enough group to matter.

I actually only count one "if" in my comment.

Also, you kind of beg the question, don't you, when you say "They don't care about fringe voters because it's usually not a big enough group to matter"? The whole point of my comment was to point out that the people who care about this issue may now be numerous enough to matter.

> especially a bipartisan block

Yup, that's a biggie. Let's do a little simple arithmetic: Suppose Senator/Representative A is really popular and won by 55-45 at the last election.

Now along comes "a bipartisan block" of 10% of the voters all uniformly well up on their hind legs and totally torqued over issue X. So, now at the next election politician A and their opponent politician B get to split the 90%. Assume that this 90% again splits 55-45 for politician A (here we are using the assumption that the block was bipartisan). So now we have

     0.55 * 90 = 49.5

     0.45 * 90 = 40.5

for politician A versus B.

Then, if politician A neglects the block, politician B gets the 10% and the election is a win 50.5-49.5 for politician B.

This is simple arithmetic for a simple scenario but illustrates the main point: A politician who fails to take seriously a 10% bipartisan block is well on the way to a new career.

There is a way to finance the watching of the watchers. Replacing journalists with hackers and coders:

http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/52547186796/radical-surve...

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