I am always depressed when I read virtually any proposed law dealing with the internet. My only hope is that eventually the generations that grew up with computers will age into politics as previous generations age out, and we'll stop seeing these types of proposals.
"My only hope is that eventually the generations that grew up with computers will age into politics as previous generations age out, and we'll stop seeing these types of proposals."
I thought that might happen with regards to drugs, but yesterday's stoners have become today's busybodies and know-betters.
I have no expectation that next-gen grown-ups will be any more enlightened.
I'll give some credit to the stoners for that. But they wouldn't have gotten anywhere if pot didn't actually have significant legitimate medical benefits. And those benefits have mobilized many people suffering from debilitating diseases (and their friends/families), who would otherwise probably never have dreamed of getting involved in a legalization/decriminalization struggle.
"the generations that grew up with computers will age into politics as previous generations age out"
With respect, I keep hearing things like this, usually framed as "things won't get better until the Baby Boomers die out." It's wrong. Greed and stupidity are not correlated with age. There are young greedy and stupid people out there as well as the old ones.
> I keep hearing things like this, usually framed as "things won't get better until the Baby Boomers die out."
I don't think that means the same thing. Baby boomers are people over 50 or so; digital natives are people under 25.
Just about everyone turning 18 today is a digital native -- someone who's grown up with the internet and takes it for granted. Very many of these people have no time for crap like ACTA.
Incidently, over half of male voters under 25 in Sweden voted for the Pirate party in the European parliamentary election. If this is a glimpse of the future, I welcome it.
I'm a digital native and I'm 43. Not a boomer, but still. And I'm becoming probably more radical in my viewpoints as I get older, not more conservative. Seriously, age has got nothing to do with it and the future won't automatically get better just because some people get older and some people die off.
I see the problems with current politics; I personally think I could do a lot to fix it. I've even been close to stepping up and trying to actually do something the last few months.
Problem is I can see that fire slipping away already. I can see how much effort it would take just to give it a shot where on the other hand I know I can live comfortably, start and provide for a family within my current career.
Why step up when no one else will.
This is the problem: Im sure there are thousands of individuals of my generation with the drive, passion and (crucially) common sense to fix the mess in the future generation of politics. But they all lose interest or faith in the system.
So we end up with the second raters in charge (while the smart ones go off and do cool stuff)
> So we end up with the second raters in charge (while the smart ones go off and do cool stuff)
Sir John Harvey-Jones was the one-time chairman of ICI who said he went into business because he saw it as a more effective way to make a difference in the world. I don't think doing cool stuff is incompatible with influencing political decision-making. I dare-say, if you can afford to purchase a few politicians (which is what is really wrong with the system) you could make plenty of changes.
Actually the whole reason that this particular pile of excrement is being negotiated behind closed doors is that treaties are an end run around the legislature. For the US, treaties are binding law of the land once ratified by a two-thirds vote of the senate (not the house of representatives) and signed by the president.
So long as the interests driving a piece of legislation can keep it out of the news until it's a _fait accompli_ , it's not going to cost any Senator votes he hadn't already lost.
We can still control this. We can refuse to elect anyone that allocates money to the enforcement. We can lobby to amend the Constitution. We can elect a President that will put someone opposed to this on the Supreme Court. We can sit on juries and find anyone charged with these crimes "not guilty". With enough organization, anything is possible.
The real issue here is two-fold; nobody cares about this particularly ("laws only apply to other people, not me!"), and that voters tend to act against their own self-interest (remember "joe the plumber"? too poor to have health insurance, but didn't want the government to give it to him for free? what!?)
Personally, I'm working on technical solutions to ensure that people "infringing on copyright" can't be prosecuted. (Or rather, so that their network providers and their own machines can't provide evidence against them.)
Things like IPredator are a good start. I can almost guarantee that if you use that service for Bittorrent, you won't be going to jail for your file sharing. Tor is even better (but very very slow). I hate technical solutions to legal problems, but right now, they work very well. That's why nobody really cares about this; people will pay their $10/month for an untraceable account in some country that hates the US (there are plenty), and they will continue to "steal" TV shows and movies. (Until the movie industry starts pricing movies correctly, of course. Make non-DRM'd new-releases a 99 cent download, and piracy will be gone overnight.)
> We can still control this. We can refuse to elect anyone that allocates money to the enforcement. We can lobby to amend the Constitution. We can elect a President that will put someone opposed to this on the Supreme Court. We can sit on juries and find anyone charged with these crimes "not guilty".
In the USA, one effective method would be to organise people to vote on digital rights issues in the primary elections that both main parties hold.
In most of Europe, organising into Pirate Parties and seeking election directly is probably the best line of attack, since European countries tend to have (vaguely) proportional voting systems.
> nobody cares about this particularly
In the UK there are an estimated 7 million illegal filesharers, which is roughly a quarter of the people who voted in the last general election; I suspect the proportion in the USA is similar. All these people have a personal interest in this matter. If all (or a signifcant minority) of these people voted for whichever candidate was best on digital rights issues, it would decide the election, simply because there are few voters who would be swayed by an anti digital rights stance and therefore it would be in the interests of all candidates to take a pro digital rights position.
In the UK there are an estimated 7 million illegal filesharers
Sure, but these people think that only "other people" get in trouble. Or, they are ashamed of their activities and try to overcompensate by being in favor of these laws.
I hate when people say that "voters vote against their own interest" they is a blatant lie. If it was then 51% would enslave 49% so that they'd never have to work again, anything else would be voting against your own interests. Often times, what looks like a negative in the short term will actually be a positive in the longterm and often people have values or understand that slavery is immoral and thus don't vote to enslave others.
As for someone being against national healthcare there are a myriad of objects, the must fundamental being that the federal government is not allowed to be involved unless the constitution is amended.
Well, in the case of the US the voter has consistently and demonstrably voted against their own interests for a while now. How else would you explain e.g. the flood of money from the middle classes to the rich since at least Reagan, the corporatism (as opposed to just "capitalism") we now toil under, etc.
I often hear lower middle class people suggesting it is more important for the mega corporate monopoly they work for to get big tax breaks, etc., than for they themselves! I think these people always want breaks for the rich because they envision being rich some day themselves. Ironically the very policies they are in favor of appear to actually be preventing them from prosperity.
They are not voting against their interests. If you can even say that voting in a 2 party system allows one to vote for their "interests", in general it's voting for the lesser of 2 evils.
Income disparity is not in and of itself a bad thing. Corporatism and Statism is philosophy both major parties, so unless you vote 3rd party (libertarian for me) then you're voting for corporatism.
"I often hear lower middle class people suggesting it is more important for the mega corporate monopoly they work for to get big tax breaks, etc., than for they themselves!" Perhaps they're taking a principled stand that:
1. Corporations and small business pay too much in taxes.
2. Rich people pay more than their fair share in taxes.
3. They recognize that having a low tax environment encourages long term prosperity and are thinking the long term instead of the short term to see how much they can get.
The philosophy you are espousing is that middle class voters (the majority) should vote for themselves to not pay taxes and for the rich to pay all taxes since that would be their best interests.
An astonishing 43.4 percent of Americans now pay zero or negative federal income taxes. The number of single or jointly-filing "taxpayers" - the word must be applied sparingly - who pay no taxes or receive government handouts has reached 65.6 million, out of a total of 151 million.
> If it was then 51% would enslave 49% so that they'd never have to work again, anything else would be voting against your own interests.
I don't want to live in a society where people are enslaved, so it is against my overall interests for that to happen, even if such a policy helps me materially.
Agreed, you're not "voting against your interests"; you're voting based on principle -- just as people think that the government should provide a welfare state, even if it lowers their standard of living they think it's wrong to steal from others to help themselves.
But the rate of technological progress is accelerating, and sadly we can only expect the gap between policy and technology to get bigger with time. By the time the new generation gets into politics, maybe Internet regulation won't be the hot-button issue; but I'd bet it's going to be something even worse — for a random example, how about the ability to tinker with the genome to make new life-forms. I can't imagine that's going to be unregulated for too long.
For some reason, though, they seem to mainly do the same thing under both parties' administrations, which makes me suspect that trade policies are really crafted by a set of career bureaucrats who stay there under all kinds of administrations, aiding a revolving door of people with largely the same political viewpoints. As far as I can tell, ACTA negotiations have been exactly the same under Bush and Obama, such that if you were looking at U.S. politics through them you would barely know there was more than one political party in the US.
True, but I don't believe that Congress is allowed to negotiate foreign treaties. So I would assume that the onus for anything that the US government proposes at these discussions falls on his administration, making it all his responsibility.
I wish he was, actually. Every four years, vote in a new king, with near-unlimited power to do practically anything they want, excepting the extension of their own power. Then he might actually get something done.
Which history? There are many examples of multi-hundred years of stable government by kings. And there are plenty of failed democracies.
Remember that democracy is still a fairly young experiment, which has only recently encountered its mortal enemies - the middle classes and the permanent bureaucracy. I do not claim to know the future but I can tell you which direction things look like they're going to me, and it's not up.
In many ways it's looking like we have created the worst of both worlds - a royal court of privileged elite governing only for themselves, with a neutered king serving only to take the blame. That must end in tears, too.
> In many ways it's looking like we have created the worst of both worlds - a royal court of privileged elite governing only for themselves, with a neutered king serving only to take the blame.
So, you're claiming that giving all power to a single individual is a 'stable' form of government? If the executive branch wielded the full power of the government to enact laws at a whim and to be judge-jury-executioner to anyone it so desired, we would be in governmental nirvana? I think that you might want to check that your prescription glasses weren't filled by your local stained-glass craftsman, because you seem to have a pretty 'rosy' view of the history of 'all powerful' leaders.
It's incredible sailormoon is getting upvoted for basically proposing the arguments used by the fascists (strong central man, remove checks and balances to help him clean up) and making the incredibly stupid move of assuming that people (from both sides, now and into the unforeseeable future) won't extend their term of office when they are a "king, with near-unlimited power to do practically anything they want". This argument wasn't believed by the actual fascists that took power, they were far more cynical, but it was made to and believed by the people who were duped into voting for them. I just keep rubbing my eyes and looking at his upvotes.
I think I didn't explain myself well. I actually proposed that the "king" be democratically elected, so instead of hundreds of bickering congressmen, he would have largely unfettered power to then make decisions as he saw fit. The one thing he could not influence, at all, would be the process by which the cycle continued fairly after four years.
I don't see how that's all that different than today in terms of risk of executive takeover. I mean in theory the president could stage a military coup and declare himself dictator for life tomorrow. And the legislative branch could vote in measures by which it could be exceedingly difficult to remove the currently sitting members.
It was just a thought experiment, vary at your pleasure. How about dramatically reducing the number of legislators to, say, 12? Would that really be much worse? It's still democracy, just a different spin on it.
Seems like most of the arguments for our current implementation of democracy are a variation on the notion that government is so inefficient and bloated it can't act decisively on anything, thus reducing the likelihood of bad decisions (while of course throwing out the baby with the bathwater - no good ones, either). Well, that's a pretty lame defense.
All this talk about defending fascism etc is just wild extrapolation from what I said.
> I actually proposed that the "king" be democratically elected, so instead of hundreds of bickering congressmen, he would have largely unfettered power to then make decisions as he saw fit. The one thing he could not influence, at all, would be the process by which the cycle continued fairly after four years.
Do you really think that once someone is in power that they couldn't just ignore that limitation?
> I don't see how that's all that different than today in terms of risk of executive takeover. I mean in theory the president could stage a military coup and declare himself dictator for life tomorrow. And the legislative branch could vote in measures by which it could be exceedingly difficult to remove the currently sitting members.
The reason that the president can't stage a military coup is because there is more to the government than just the executive branch. If the 'president' by and large is the government, then the military just does whatever he says. Sure the president is currently the command-in-chief of the armed forces, but do you really think that they would obey an order to take over Congress? But you are proposing that there is no Congress. It's much easier to obey an order to suppress the population (i.e. 'keep them at bay') in order to keep the 'president' in power than it is to obey an order to completely restructure the government (i.e. remove power from Congress by force). Even military coups in banana republics are pretty 'small' when compared to taking power from every Senator and Congressperson (i.e. you only have to take out the current 'leader' and some of his associates).
> It was just a thought experiment, vary at your pleasure. How about dramatically reducing the number of legislators to, say, 12? Would that really be much worse? It's still democracy, just a different spin on it.
I was under the impression that we have such a system of Congress so as to make sure that everyone gets a fair hearing. The real issue isn't that Congress no longer listens to the people, it's that the people feel helpless to do anything about Congress. Most people don't deal with political matters anymore, they just ignore them. Maybe it's just a sign of our country/population being too large to be governed by a single body. Maybe we should take the more Libertarian route and give power back to the state governments with a severely neutered federal government.
And your example of a 'democracy' isn't really a democracy, it's a republic (which is what the US really is).
Do you really think that once someone is in power that they couldn't just ignore that limitation?
As I said, they have that power now.
I think you're being unfair. You presume - rightly, I believe - that the military would likely not obey an order to take over congress today. But why would they suddenly break all the rules once my proposed system was put in place? There would be very clear rules in place as to how long this super-presidency would be allowed to last. The military then would presumably be just as inclined to follow them then as now.
Congress doesn't have any power other than that ascribed it in the law, otherwise they're just a bunch of old men. The president has no power in law to take away that power now and would have no power to expand his own tenancy in my proposed system. The military, courts, etc, would presumably obey the law in either respect.
Anyway, I admit what I said was a bit extreme. How about a compromise - today's system, but with the congress relegated to "advisor" status? In other words, today's system, but with the president able to force through any bill he really wanted? Wouldn't that be interesting?
Maybe we should take the more Libertarian route and give power back to the state governments with a severely neutered federal government
I have a lot of sympathy for this idea too. I would like to see meaningful competition between the states with the federal govt just providing a kind of basic national infrastructure. I feel this benefit of the state system has been lost with creeping purview of the fed.
And your example of a 'democracy' isn't really a democracy, it's a republic
Actually, that's a US-only use of the word. The rest of the world would call the USA a representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy.
Which history are you reading? Democracy is not a "fairly young experiment". The ancient Athenians had an impressive democratic government from 508BC until it was destroyed, from the outside, in 322BC.
You cite "multi-hundred years of stable government by kings" like there are no power struggles when a given king dies, and like "stable" is even remotely near what we'd call stable or desirable (freedom?). Which history are you reading in which these wonderful benevolent king-systems (not just singular kings if you want "multi-hundred years") exist? Cite one.
There is no counter-corruption in a system with a powerful executive and no democracy for long. Without checks on corruption and a powerful state there is no freedom for very long. I can't believe the suggestion that the west moves to the model of voting in leaders with "near-unlimited power to do practically anything they want" is being taken seriously in a time when questionable wars have been started and torture policies implemented by the already too strong executives.
Your biases are showing pretty strong here. There's no reason we can't ponder alternative forms of government that have and have not been tried and consider their benefits and drawbacks.
For what it's worth, I do think democracy is too irrational to run itself very well, and it may cause its own demise. In my estimation it depends on whether or not technology saves us by producing wealth faster than our leaders can squander it on interest group politics. 250 years is a pretty good run for a country, even if it falls short of the monarchies of Europe.
You mean my bias towards wanting actual evidence of the benefits of this benevolent kingship? I hope you don't think the European monarchies of the past are good examples of anything (although constitutional monarchies fall on my side of the argument as they defer to parliaments and the leaders are not near-dictators in the sense being proposed here). I am not certain about your history if you think interest group politics now is worse than pre-democratic periods.
Liberal representative democracies are self-modifying. That is why the United States will persevere well past the records of the petty genetically-based monarchies, quite asides from the fact that even if were it to end tomorrow its achievements politically, technologically and economically outrank anything in human history (I am not a US citizen by the way).
I can understand the allure of a powerful leader who understands what needs to be done for some of the entrepreneurs on this forum. But you are peddling is basically the argument used by the supporters of fascism; strong leader, central control (as opposed to letting the market sort things out) and a total naivety toward the nature of corruption (do away with checks and balances because they are just hindering the visionary leader who has our best interests at heart). And as with most naive political reforms it totally fails the "but what happens when the other side has 51%" test.
Popular kings? There are plenty. King Abdullah is very popular. The Ming dynasty oversaw an extraordinary explosion in trade and art. The Medici family planted the seeds of the Renaissance. The Meiji Emperor dragged Japan, kicking and screaming, into the modern world.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "king", since that has quite a specific meaning. I really meant a leader, or group of leaders, who have a great personal stake in the country and its progress. Supreme leaders care about posterity, whereas parliamentarians always have someone else to blame.
Who do you think makes the best long-term decisions? A leader who knows they will still be there in 20 years to accept the consequences, or the politician scrambling to get out a press release so he can be seen to be "doing something" about the latest opinion poll?
I do not have anything like the faith in the long-term viability of democracy, at least as we know it, that you have. I do not see how a disinterested, ignorant population has any capability to govern, or even vaguely direct, a country's path better than, say, the Standing Committee in China.
> Who do you think makes the best long-term decisions? A leader who knows they will still be there in 20 years to accept the consequences
So are you willing to argue that Kim Jong-Il is a positive force in the development of North Korea? What about the USSR under Stalin? Are these all better forms of government what what the US has now?
Nope. Those are both terrible examples of what can go wrong. I provided some examples of it not going wrong.
So the question is, do we throw out the entire notion of concentrating power in one person or small group of people, because they might abuse it? Or is it possible to devise a system that retains the advantages and minimises disadvantages? Because we know the consequences of giving that power to several hundreds of people - deadlock.
Of course there are power struggles when a king dies. There are power struggles for preselection in democracy, there are power struggles to head up unelected but supremely powerful institutions. I don't see your point.
Stability and freedom would seem to be more a function of wealth than mode of government. There are plenty of people with freedom to do pretty much nothing but die under democratic rule in Africa.
Where's the counter-corruption in democracy? Plenty of democratic countries are corrupt to the core. India. Italy. Thailand (I personally bribed a police officer there once). The powerful control the media, and the people vote for who they're told whether the puppetmaster was elected or not.
How can you try and distance democracy from the wars and torture? Is this a "no true Scotsman" argument? Those acts are the acts of a democracy in decay. You're acting like if only we did democracy better, it wouldn't happen. I'm saying - what if that's the end result of all democracy?
Anyway, don't take it too seriously, I'm just throwing ideas out there, as usual.
I get it that you're just throwing ideas out there, but you can't throw around claims of a "no true Scotsman" argument when you yourself are dismissing some of your former claims.
First you claimed, "multi-hundred years of stable government by kings," but now you claim, "stability and freedom would seem to be more a function of wealth than mode of government." Don't spend time dissecting other people's words when your own words aren't necessarily in order. Are you claiming that an all-powerful ruler brings stability or are you claiming that stability is completely disjoint from government?
Well, I was kind of drawn into defending monarchies in general ..
I'm not making sweeping generalisations for either! I get the impression it's others doing that. I merely say that there are examples of stability and (relative to the times) prosperity under either form.
Stability is not completely disjoint from government but I would say it is completely disjoint from the form of government. But as you point out, yes, I do believe it has more to do with the prosperity of the population than the way their leaders are elected.
Stability and prosperity are a function of quality of government, not form of government. I am trying to point out that the form of government, ie elected or not, does not necessarily decide the quality. I gave examples of rulers who, in my opinion, did not discharge their roles badly, considering the times.
Summary: having a King is a multiplier, rather than a valuer. You might multiply corruption and despotism. Or you might multiply progress and decisiveness.
Yes, it would have helped Republicans quite a bit in the last decade. It should be hard for government to institute sweeping changes that only 51% of the voters want.
In other words, it should be hard for the government to govern? Well, that's one way of looking at it.
You know, if they instituted these "sweeping changes" and the public didn't like it, they could always be voted out next time and the changes reversed (with ease!). At least that way the policy would actually get tested. And it seems that the ability to actually enact the majority's wishes is more democratic than not.
And the same Obama that picked Biden (well known as one of the main DMCA promoters and great friend of the RIAA AND MPAA) for VP.
So this is not a surprise to me, I was just trying to sarcastically point out how the claims of some Obama supporters have been shown to be quite incorrect to say the least.
And I don't agree with the grandparent that the issue is lack of understanding of technology, I'm sure Obama understands technology, just as he probably understand that the War on Drugs doesn't work, but he prefers to not rock the boat and keep pushing the policies that have become political sacred cows, because doing so would imply that the political class as a whole has been completely wrong for decades.
This whole speculation thing is a mess: the pirates [sic] are probably bigging up the horror as much as the pro-DMCA crowd big up spposed benefits - everyone in the middle is throwing extreme bad/good scenarios too.(I sit in the middle, as it happens, and I reckon it will just be generally bad all round).
But what really depresses me is that this is done in secret.
That is the thing that concerns me most. I cant see any situation, even if this were a harmless treaty, where such a situation is healthy.
It is not done in secret from big content, the RIAA, the MPAA and any lobbyist that wants has full access to the discussions, it is the public that is kept in the dark.
