Anyone else thinking of a petition against this threshold raise?
RS
White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
81–90 of 133 posts
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#82Petitions 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.
Petitions are completely ineffective because the citizenry doesn't have enough civic knowledge to ask for the right things.
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.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#83Calling whatever is going on with that website "petitions" is a pretty misleading move, and it has been from the start. The "petitions" carry even less weight than ones gathered manually by interest groups, and they certainly carry absolutely no weight if you compare them to legally necessary petitions (such as putting candidates on ballots). What (now) 100k votes gets you is a guaranteed response from a White House…
I also take issue with the name of the site.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#84Petitions 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.
Calling them completely ineffective is a stretch, at a minimum they create more opportunity for spreading news. Whether that has any effect is a function of the person who receives it.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Petitions for Ballot Propositions have radically reshaped California's government over the last several decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_ballot_propo...
Some (me!) would argue rather poorly. Design by committee taken to its unfortunate logical extreme.
Not rather poorly; disastrously. I don't live in California any longer, but when I did I voted no on every single proposition. Their cumulative negative impact on the possibility of effectively running the state far outweighs the benefit that any one of them might confer.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#86Petitions 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.
Apologies in advance.
I am so sick of these democracy doesn't work, the powers that be own us, utterly worthless statements. Worthless is the sense that all they do is justify your own inaction.
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.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Petitions for Ballot Propositions have radically reshaped California's government over the last several decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_ballot_propo...
Some (me!) would argue rather poorly. Design by committee taken to its unfortunate logical extreme.
I would argue otherwise. There is at least one political movement that is currently sweeping through the country that was first passed via a California ballot measure because no one in the legislature would risk the political capital for it.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#88They can require a billion signatures on the petition. We will STILL successfully petition for a Death Star.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Petitions for Ballot Propositions have radically reshaped California's government over the last several decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_ballot_propo...
Some (me!) would argue rather poorly. Design by committee taken to its unfortunate logical extreme.
One of the problems with democratic processes is that they're democratic.
Re: White House raises petition signature threshold to 100K
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
the amount of effort you expend to sign a petition is next to nil. Why would anyone expect, then, that signing a petition can affect any sort of change? 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 amount of effort you expend to sign a petition is next to nil. Why would anyone expect, then, that signing a petition can affect any sort of change? 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 say…
> show government issues the people find important
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 :(