91–100 of 133 posts
If you're going to effect a significant change, you're going to need a critical mass of people coming together to do it. Lone wolves are picked off with ease.
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.
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 pr…
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.
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.
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 pr…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
It's not an argument that "democracy" doesn't work, it's an argument that the current institutional arrangements aren't really democracy - at least in the sense that the public are actually directly or indirectly governing themselves. 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 th…
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.
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.
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 t…
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
It's not an argument that "democracy" doesn't work, it's an argument that the current institutional arrangements aren't really democracy - at least in the sense that the public are actually directly or indirectly governing themselves. 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 th…
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.
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.
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 t…
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
"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." 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…