Whitehouse.gov petition to veto SOPA • Hacker News Board

Re: Whitehouse.gov petition to veto SOPA

#81

Post by rhizome » Mon, Dec 19, 2011, 6:46 PM UTC

lkx wrote: post #38

wdewind wrote: post #6

I was on a conference call w/ Zoe Lofgren (CA congress woman who is on the Judiciary fighting the hell out of this bill) and a bunch of NYC tech companies last weekend and she said petitions are essentially ignored, and instead to make phone calls to your reps and directly into the capital. This isn't to say don't sign this, but if you are really concerned, the absolute bottom line is phone calls. Anything you can do…

If Congress can be bought, why not expose the people doing the buying, and their lobbyists, and exert pressure on them instead of writing or calling Congressmen who don't care?

Since bribes, as in payment for specific acts, has been illegal in the US for some time now, each donor can hide behind the excuse that they only donated to the candidate, but they don't support them for this particular issue.

Re: Whitehouse.gov petition to veto SOPA

#82

Post by rhizome » Mon, Dec 19, 2011, 6:50 PM UTC

rst wrote: post #44

orthecreedence wrote: post #10

Every time I've voted on a whitehouse.gov petition, I've gotten an email 6 months later saying why the petition will be completely ignored, answering none of the points the petition brought up. The petition system is an ineffectual smokescreen.

You could imagine that one of these petitions might bring an issue that they weren't aware of to some staffer's attention. But this administration clearly already has a very strong view in favor of intellectual property protection by any means available, regardless of the consequences. It's one they've made manifest by pushing ACTA (among other things), and it's really hard to imagine a petition like this changing it…

Yes, think of the future! "If all the time and effort I spent results in just one petition-scanning staffer becoming aware of my pet issue, it will have been worth it." You might as well pin your hopes of affecting the political process on sowing copies of your journal pages around Congress, hoping that just one profound sentence reaches one of their eyes. It doesn't sound like a lot, but man, if they read one of those sentences, right? It could change everything.

Re: Whitehouse.gov petition to veto SOPA

#83

Post by orbenn » Mon, Dec 19, 2011, 7:01 PM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #28

rgbrgb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Safari every time I try to sign in, it just redirects me to the page I was already on without signing me in.

This happens to me in every browser I've tried (Opera, Chrome, FF, and ELinks). Maybe we can start a petition to... oh wait...

Didn't work for me in Chrome, but it worked in IE. Figures eh?

Re: Whitehouse.gov petition to veto SOPA

#84

Post by mkramlich » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:27 AM UTC

AgentConundrum wrote: post #64

mkramlich wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the present day practical reason why she thinks that phone calls matter more, I really do, however phone calls are a time inefficient way of accomplishing that result. There are just so many things people could be doing with their lives, including communicating opinion about other political issues, that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible. An online petition is more efficien…

> that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible Efficiency is the enemy for things like this, because it only shows a minimum amount of involvement with the issue. You show you care at all by participating in petitions, but you prove you care more by participating in more time-intensive activities. This is something that you'll see people close to politicians say quite a lot, that the method…

I understood that. It's that there are 1000 other things we need to be doing as humans. plus, I think there are more substantive and focused ways of showing somebody understands a given topic area, spent time on it, and has a meritocratic opinion worth paying attention to it. People who write letters to an editor may show they're passionate about an issue. But is also shows their time has little value, and/or they are an ignorant quack. We need to be able to make a distinction between these cases. And at the same time make it as easy and fast and cheap and painless as possible to vote.

And on November 8th, going into a voting booth, that is all that anyone can do already. Just push a button or fill in a circle which indicates "yeah, me too!". For those cases, let's speed it up and scale it up.