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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.
Reference: http://www.kcentv.com/story/16070848/killeen-city-council-re...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If petitions actually worked, they'd be banned. That statement is so scary, but most likely true.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> the current institutional arrangements aren't really democracy 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.
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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…
>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 ha…
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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.
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…
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.
Better yet, a petition to actually act on petitions, would be nice.