14 ms·

Initially I'm enraged against the publishers, the judge and the system in general as many of you, but they are not the issue, while I can't talk on behalf of IA

by uda 4y ago

Initially I'm enraged against the publishers, the judge and the system in general as many of you, but they are not the issue, while I can't talk on behalf of IA, I don't see this as a fight against the publishers, but a fight against broken business models flourishing because and protected by broken laws meant to protect earlier broken business models The current law is broken, we know that, but most of us don't grasp broken laws as a threat until it is challenged (and we as a society usually lose), and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable This circuit should be shortened, we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society like with DMCA and PATRIOT act If anything has proven this lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws, be more involved in the legislation process and actively propose and push for fixes

komali2 4y ago
What actions can Americans possibly take given the captured two party system and drawing back of voting rights? Not to mention the wildly unrepresentative government, wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless, or, republicans can fail for over two decades to win a popular vote and still elect three presidents in that time. Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, and the House is similarly unrepresentative. It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?
- ajdegol 4y ago
  Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…
- prox 4y ago
  Getting involved, grass roots style. The feeling of powerlessness is exactly the way you become inert to do anything. “What can I do.” Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.
  - jzb 4y ago
    Getting involved locally is a very non-specific guidance. Part of the problem with “local involvement” is that a lot of folks are in very very gerrymandered areas. Either you’re hopelessly outvoted or preaching to the choir when trying to affect local politics. But also, I think we are well past affecting change through voting and so forth. Not that you shouldn’t vote. But if we want to see actual change in the United States, we need to start taking some cues from the French and other countries where they go on strike aggressively until they get what they want. As long as we keep getting fucked and showing up for work anyway the powers that be are just going to keep fucking us.
  - vinyl7 4y ago
    Even if you do get involved, you're going to get tackled by the quarterback trying to enact the changes that you see are needed. What has been happening in politics over the last several years? Bickering about non-issues that don't really effect people. What did the senate do this week? Interview the TikTok CEO. Meanwhile our economy is in shambles, inflation is out of control, housing and rent is unaffordable, the middle class is dying. Why are they over there arguing about wokeness, screaming about communists and facists being on the precipice of taking over the country, and interviewing the tiktok CEO? Because that doesn't require any action. It distracts the public from real problems. The partisan inflammatory and meaningless screeching is enough to get them re-elected, so why do any hard work fixing problems? And so people who do try to get involved in order to fix real issues like the economy or housing, end up getting blocked by pointless debates. It's system-wide filibustering.
    - dogcomplex 4y ago
      Economic/systemic change has been off the table for quite a while. These poor politicians are just playing the only cards they have available - social tribal chanting - while filling their personal coffers as much as possible while the getting's good.
- dogcomplex 4y ago
  Entirely open (at best) question, which no smug hacker news commenter is going to answer. What does one do? (My current longshot hope? Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. If we just start making online group decisions and scale it up, that's a power bloc that can run its own parties and strongarm existing gov processes - assuming the network even wants to interact with them... )
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. Politics is the set of activities associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals. Throwing technology at these human affairs isn’t an answer.
    - shigawire 4y ago
      Not the sole answer but it does enable different ideas that weren't possible at scale without technology. Something like liquid democracy.
    - dogcomplex 4y ago
      It also gives a fresh space to develop democratic systems that aren't dominated by previous parties to the extent that there is barely a functioning democracy. Existing systems are ridiculously compromised.
  - komali2 4y ago
    I agree with many that the most effective method will be some combination of empowering communities and destruction of property.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Way too much focus on the HOW and not the WHAT
- criddell 4y ago
  A decade ago, activists made a difference protesting SOPA and PIPA.
  - Matl 4y ago
    Or Google did.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless Not sure what a "functionally meaningless vote" is; is that simply a vote cast for the losing side? If something is to be decided by a vote, then one side of the argument is going to lose, otherwise you don't need a vote.
  - Matl 4y ago
    I'd guess you took what OP meant a bit too literally, I'd say that there's so many things to change, campaign for, convince that even if you say convince enough people to vote to change this law, there's already another rolling your 'win' back being prepared, backed by interest groups with much deeper pockets. So in the end your individual vote does little, because real power is at the hands of much better resourced interests.
- meany 4y ago
  The slowness and lethargy of the system is by design. For instance, The constitution is really hard to change to prevent tyranny. Checks and balances against power protect all our rights. There is no garauntee that the people in power will choose your path forward. There is also no garauntee that the majority view is yours. Hitler for example was elected. The system was setup to ensure for hundreds of years at the price of short term inefficiency. Read the history of an imploding republic - France, Rome, Weimar - and you will see similar pushes to speed reform for the masses that ended in tyranny. Reading the federalist papers will give good perspective on the rationale for these things. One may disagree with the conclusions, but the concerns and rationales are reasonable
  - unholythree 4y ago
    It’s hard for people to appreciate just how much better our lives are, and how much more just life is in western society now than all of the millions of years of human life before. 200 years ago some people were literal property, 150 years ago women couldn’t vote almost anywhere, less than 75 years ago Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Huge, meaningful strides have been made for equally and fairness very recently. It may seem terrible and unjust that there are some now that are as rich as a Roman emperor and can buy a great deal of influence, but the world was once thousands of unaccountable tyrants, free to brutalize their peasants and slaves.
    - komali2 4y ago
      Millions of years? If I recall, our societies are quiet a bit younger than that, several hundred thousand sure, but millions? Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless. Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.
- maxwell 4y ago
  Odd to open asking what actions Americans can take, and then closing with a bizarre appeal to a noble wealth hoarder. What can we do? Uncap the House. Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929. The billionaires easily bribe 435 reps, several thousand would be harder. And in line with historical representation. https://www.reddit.com/r/uncapthehouse https://www.reddit.com/r/uncapthehouse
  - ncphil 4y ago
    Something many have advocated for decades. But keep in mind that there are tens of thousands of elected offices in the US, most of them nonpartisan, local positions that cost little to contest: yet it's incredibly hard to find people willing to run. Voter apathy is a huge problem here, in part due to historic voter suppression efforts baked into the system, but the dearth of candidates willing to participate in elections is even more serious. There again, legal discouragements, especially in the most significant races (state and federal legislature, executive), are endemic. Still, too many offices at the local level (town and city council, special district boards) go uncontested: leaving one or the other major party -- or venal representatives of the FIRE sector -- in control to mismanage and misappropriate power in areas directly impacting public life.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Many of those local or state offices also pay little to nothing. A state rep in NH gets paid $200 for a two-year term based on an 1899 law. That's something of an outlier but $25-50K is common.
  - komali2 4y ago
    The bizarre appeal was poorly communicated sarcasm.
- hyperman1 4y ago
  As an non-USA inhabitant, one thing I see is that you have a lot more voting chances than most countries. I heard e.g. you can vote for officials like sheriffs and stuff. So don't only vote for a president, vote for everything you can. Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides. I think after that, you shouldn't be afraid to 'throw your vote away'. Gerrymandering and other stuff made most voters in the presidentials irrelevant. So the only voice left there is the signal function of 3rd part vote. Make it clear yo don't like the hobson's choice you've left. You did what you could in the previous round. Don't succumb to nihilisms. The powers that be seem to have dividers in a dumber and smarter half. The dumber half gets very simplistic reasons to vote for some extremist side. The smarter half gets tamed by nihilistic passiveness. Both get all kinds of divisive news as a side dish. Don't fall into this trap. A big enough group of people aligned around a common cause is the biggest danger to any powerfull entity, and they fear them and do anything to break them up.
  - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
    > Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides. That's not permitted in any state which I know. I am a registered voter in "NO PARTY", which gives me the option to request a ballot from any party in a primary and vote within that party. Any registered voter can vote any candidate or issue in general elections. I think what would improve our abysmal two-party system would be runner-up benefits, and coalitions, rather than winner-takes-all.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      The likely best solution to the 2-party system is a change to balloting from single-choice to something like approval voting (check any number of candidates you could live with) or ranked-choice/instant run-off (number candidates by preference). If I were king, I’d do away with party primaries completely. Run a jungle primary with all candidates on a single ballot. Ranked choice to pick the top 4-5 for the general. Then ranked choice in the general to select the winner. Something like that. I’d also ditch the EC for direct election of the president. And legislate the size of a House district be derived from the smallest state population. This adds hundreds of members to the House, and brings voting parity back to CA and TX (who currently have districts substantially larger than Wyoming’s single seat.
- patrick451 4y ago
  Aside from the two party system, this is all working exactly as designed.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I bet in your county it would take the dedicated organization of maybe 10-25 people to tilt who is out on the ballot in your local government. (If your county is much larger, you may need 50 or so.) register for a minor party and then only nominate members of that minor party that fit your views. A friend of mine in his smaller town was able to, with his local family, put on only democratic candidates under Republican nominations because his family had minor party share.
- salawat 4y ago
  >wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless. Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem. > or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still elect three presidents in that time ...The Chief Executive is determined in a two-fold election pipeline. A popular vote to elect State electors to cast votes for the President The number of electoral votes is set by a Constitutionally defined function that strikes a balance to ensure the most populous states can't steamroll the less populous. The means of choosing who the electors are are up to the States. Original intrnt was that Electors were unaccountable to anyone, as the Founders wanted a specific check on demagoguery, as they greatly feared the charismatic charlatan who could work a crowd, and believed a second smaller unaccountable party of voters would either eventually reconfirm the majority if it was a genuinely uncontroversial decision, or conscientiously object if they could not in good conscience believe it was in the best interests of the nation to cast that vote. The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker. The popular vote literally was antithetical to what the Founders set put to do. It was specifically not the system they wanted to get anywhere near. >Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, This is by design. The Senate represents the States. Not the People directly. Each state gets two Senators, no matter how big, no matter how populace. Only the House Scales as a function of Population. The Senate is specifically a check on the House. It was recognized that the House would be the Heart/Vehicle of the People's passions. The Senate was intended to be a smaller, more rational filter to keep the House checked as Reason is the check on Passion. Again. Working as designed/Civics 101.
  - komali2 4y ago
    This kind of comment confuses me. There's always one rigid constitutionalist that shows up and just kind of... Pretends the usa was a determinist system kicked off the second the constitution was signed? Despite the immediate amendment when they needed to add some human rights to the thing? Actually, America was designed to be a slave state, with laws explicitly laying out why African people are less entitled to rights than European descendants, and laws working around different states' positions on slavery. Working as designed, right? > The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker. And yet, the people voted for the less charismatic candidate, and the electoral college elected the swindler. Working as designed, right? Now we have executives directly trying to influence the electoral college, and it seems to be working (supreme court stepping in during bush's election to force stop a recount that would have led to him losing the election, which we know as fact now). Not only is it absurd to suggest the USA is a deterministic system like constitutionalists claim, there's a very easy retort: ok, it's a bad system then. Americans need a better design. If America is working by design, then it's designed to be easily exploited by haliburton to send its soldiers to die in foreign countries so as to feed the military industrial complex. It's designed to have one of the largest prison populations on earth and a systemically racist police system. It's designed to have an outsized homeless problem, massive painkiller addiction crisis, and a population of people with no savings, no hope for retirement, and one paycheck from homelessness.
politelemon 4y ago
> and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable Why can't it be both? All this does is keep us busy looking where the 'root cause' is and never actually solve anything because the mechanisms to fix those things don't exist... all the while others reap its benefits.
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  Judges are there to enforce the law, not to make it. You can't hope that the judge takes your side because then the judge could just as easily take the other side. There is of course an element of interpretation which the judges can use to decide in different directions over the same thing, but that again is an example of a broken law.
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    > Judges are there to enforce the law, not to make it. That's not the right characterization of the argument. Judges are there to tell legislators that they can't make certain laws. The abortion dispute is not about judges making abortion legal, it's about judges telling politicians that they cannot make abortion illegal. Without that, politicians would literally have the ability to do anything they want.
    - frankfrankfrank 4y ago
      I find it both shocking and terrifying that people lack the most fundamental understanding of how a properly separated government system would work, let alone why it should function that way. It should concern everyone that these types of top down authoritarian mentalities are more prevalent as people without a tradition or culture based in western philosophy that has led to what used to be a clear separation of powers, become more prominent even all over the western/European based world. It will not end well for most of humanity, even in this community, regardless if how much we believe ourselves to be doing good here, or at least not even considering the destabilizing consequences of what we do here.
frankfrankfrank 4y ago
I agree with you until you parroted the propaganda trope about Roe v Wade. Roe has always been known as “bad law” even though it was never law, only illegitimate judicial dictate. It’s always been known as one of the worst rulings in American history. It’s unfortunate that you would demonstrate such logically compromise in such a blatant manner, ironically, in a post about “bad law”. Ironically, overturning Roe specifically was good law, in that it followed the law the ruling was a blatant violation of.
- saint_fiasco 4y ago
  I'm confused. You act hostile yet you seem to agree with the original comment. The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that. You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I have no idea what Roe v Wade is about (I'm not American or in the US), but I like GP read the parent comment to theirs as meaning 'these jokers overturned it, that is bad, we cannot rely on them'. Re-reading after seeing your own comment, it is ambiguous really, you could read it either way, but you're probably right (having the context of what it's about) and GP just mistook the meaning as I did. > If anything has proven this [that 'we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society'] lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws [...]
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      It all boils down to people fighting for the right to do whatever they want to an unborn soul including shutting down its life processes at will. They all have different justifications and excuses. It boils down to the local morality hence why judges kicked it back to the local governments.
eggburger 4y ago
Who gave them the right to say it was legal or illegal in the first place? People in here pretending one party is better than the other because they give you back fundamental human rights they have no business controlling the legality of to begin with.
- Eumenes 4y ago
  That's the Supreme Courts job?
- retrocryptid 4y ago
  The constitution.
  - account42 4y ago
    This is the correct answer but it is worth pointing out copyright being spelled out specifically in the first amendment recognizes that this is something that he government would normally not have authority to enact because it goes against more fundamental rights. The first amendment also restricts the authority of the government when it comes to copyright by requiring it to be done "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and for the aritificial monoboly to be "for limited Times". It isn't clear that the current implementation of copyright still falls within either of these limitations.
Qahlel 4y ago
every monopoly is created by the government (read: state and laws).
cbozeman 4y ago
[flagged]
- LilyFrenchPants 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - Xeoncross 4y ago
    You can do whatever you would like with your uterus (or any other body part), just please don't kill anyone in the process.
    - dctoedt 4y ago
      > just please don't kill anyone in the process. Ah, there's the rub: How to define "anyone." (In my 1960s Catholic family, my parents encouraged us four kids to discuss issues of the day at the dinner table. One night the discussion was about abortion, and specifically, when does a fetus become human. My dad joked that he often wondered whether fetuses didn't become human until they could cut their own meat ....)
  - starkd 4y ago
    Well, thanks for the strawman. When you debate in strawman arguments, you block constructive debate from moving forward. The issue is one of judicial discernment. It is the ability for a supreme court to make up rights not written into the constitution. This is not difficult to recognize, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life. The correct place for this is in legislation. It is an emotional topic that is constantly evolving. What is going to happen when a fetus can survive in an artificial womb? We are a long way from that, but that is something a council of unelected justices should not have to rule on.
    - cbozeman 4y ago
      > What is going to happen when a fetus can survive in an artificial womb? We're going to see a wave of hilariously (in the worst possible way) maladapted babies, because I'm almost certain we'll find that the constant "noise" of the mother's body, plus hormonal changes, are critically important for proper development. Sure, maybe researchers and scientists will factor all of this into the development of such a technology, but so far Humanity doesn't have a good track record with getting everything right on the first go-round.
GuB-42 4y ago
Judges here to apply the law made by the legislators. That's the basis of the separation of powers. If it wasn't the case we wouldn't have a legislation in the first place turning judges into oligarchs. The way people are supposed to support better laws is by electing better legislators. Easier said than done I admit, but I think that's better than giving judges power beyond their role.
dahart 4y ago
> The current law is broken I think many agree that copyright needs to be shortened, but what does “broken” mean, exactly? I have good feelings for the Internet Archive, but in this case it’s about a handful of books that are being copied and distributed a mere 5 years after initial publication, which I think a lot of people who want copyright shortened would still agree is quite a bit too short. Books frequently get popular long after initial publication, they’re not anything like blockbuster movies that make most of their income in a few weeks (which used to be true before streaming but might not even be true anymore). Keep in mind that this isn’t about the Internet Archive specifically. If the court ruled it’s okay for them to copy and rent books, then anyone can copy and rent books, it undermines the entire market for books (and also web sites and images and other media, because this is the Internet Archive). Think about what it means for the company you work for, or the creative works you or your artist friends create, if people can copy their things legally and take away their revenue streams after only 5 years. I wonder why the Internet Archive doesn’t keep things unpublished on their site until it’s not generally available online, this would keep them clear of the most obvious copyright violations.
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  Yes. This would really hurt the ability for authors to make a living if everyone could do what the IA claims the right to do. It just won't work for sales to be cut off after a few physical copies by digital copies everywhere.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Really the main (even only?) thing "broken" about copyright is the terms. (ADDED: I generally favor orphan works legislation but I also get the argument that this is also more likely to favor corporations than individuals.) And basically all the schemes to make copyright more expensive, difficult, requiring jumping through hoops and paying increasing amounts of money to renew? That just basically screws individual creators (who already don't make much money for the most part) to the benefit of the major content rights holders who are not going to forget or be unable to pay for copyright renewal. Which is probably not the objective of most of the people dreaming these up. The US actually took a pretty big step towards benefitting more small-time creatives when it aligned with the Berne Convention and did away with explicit notices being required.
lagadu 4y ago
Switching from common law to civil law systems should fix a lot of that up. This wouldn't be possible, considering the amount of law that would need to be written to replace an existing common law system but it's an interesting thought experiment.
- redtexture 4y ago
  Louisiana has a civil law system, subject to the Federal Constitution.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by uda 4y ago

komali2 4y ago

What actions can Americans possibly take given the captured two party system and drawing back of voting rights? Not to mention the wildly unrepresentative government, wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless, or, republicans can fail for over two decades to win a popular vote and still elect three presidents in that time. Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, and the House is similarly unrepresentative. It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?

ajdegol 4y ago
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…
prox 4y ago
Getting involved, grass roots style. The feeling of powerlessness is exactly the way you become inert to do anything. “What can I do.” Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.
- jzb 4y ago
  Getting involved locally is a very non-specific guidance. Part of the problem with “local involvement” is that a lot of folks are in very very gerrymandered areas. Either you’re hopelessly outvoted or preaching to the choir when trying to affect local politics. But also, I think we are well past affecting change through voting and so forth. Not that you shouldn’t vote. But if we want to see actual change in the United States, we need to start taking some cues from the French and other countries where they go on strike aggressively until they get what they want. As long as we keep getting fucked and showing up for work anyway the powers that be are just going to keep fucking us.
- vinyl7 4y ago
  Even if you do get involved, you're going to get tackled by the quarterback trying to enact the changes that you see are needed. What has been happening in politics over the last several years? Bickering about non-issues that don't really effect people. What did the senate do this week? Interview the TikTok CEO. Meanwhile our economy is in shambles, inflation is out of control, housing and rent is unaffordable, the middle class is dying. Why are they over there arguing about wokeness, screaming about communists and facists being on the precipice of taking over the country, and interviewing the tiktok CEO? Because that doesn't require any action. It distracts the public from real problems. The partisan inflammatory and meaningless screeching is enough to get them re-elected, so why do any hard work fixing problems? And so people who do try to get involved in order to fix real issues like the economy or housing, end up getting blocked by pointless debates. It's system-wide filibustering.
  - dogcomplex 4y ago
    Economic/systemic change has been off the table for quite a while. These poor politicians are just playing the only cards they have available - social tribal chanting - while filling their personal coffers as much as possible while the getting's good.
dogcomplex 4y ago
Entirely open (at best) question, which no smug hacker news commenter is going to answer. What does one do? (My current longshot hope? Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. If we just start making online group decisions and scale it up, that's a power bloc that can run its own parties and strongarm existing gov processes - assuming the network even wants to interact with them... )
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. Politics is the set of activities associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals. Throwing technology at these human affairs isn’t an answer.
  - shigawire 4y ago
    Not the sole answer but it does enable different ideas that weren't possible at scale without technology. Something like liquid democracy.
  - dogcomplex 4y ago
    It also gives a fresh space to develop democratic systems that aren't dominated by previous parties to the extent that there is barely a functioning democracy. Existing systems are ridiculously compromised.
- komali2 4y ago
  I agree with many that the most effective method will be some combination of empowering communities and destruction of property.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Way too much focus on the HOW and not the WHAT
criddell 4y ago
A decade ago, activists made a difference protesting SOPA and PIPA.
- Matl 4y ago
  Or Google did.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless Not sure what a "functionally meaningless vote" is; is that simply a vote cast for the losing side? If something is to be decided by a vote, then one side of the argument is going to lose, otherwise you don't need a vote.
- Matl 4y ago
  I'd guess you took what OP meant a bit too literally, I'd say that there's so many things to change, campaign for, convince that even if you say convince enough people to vote to change this law, there's already another rolling your 'win' back being prepared, backed by interest groups with much deeper pockets. So in the end your individual vote does little, because real power is at the hands of much better resourced interests.
meany 4y ago
The slowness and lethargy of the system is by design. For instance, The constitution is really hard to change to prevent tyranny. Checks and balances against power protect all our rights. There is no garauntee that the people in power will choose your path forward. There is also no garauntee that the majority view is yours. Hitler for example was elected. The system was setup to ensure for hundreds of years at the price of short term inefficiency. Read the history of an imploding republic - France, Rome, Weimar - and you will see similar pushes to speed reform for the masses that ended in tyranny. Reading the federalist papers will give good perspective on the rationale for these things. One may disagree with the conclusions, but the concerns and rationales are reasonable
- unholythree 4y ago
  It’s hard for people to appreciate just how much better our lives are, and how much more just life is in western society now than all of the millions of years of human life before. 200 years ago some people were literal property, 150 years ago women couldn’t vote almost anywhere, less than 75 years ago Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Huge, meaningful strides have been made for equally and fairness very recently. It may seem terrible and unjust that there are some now that are as rich as a Roman emperor and can buy a great deal of influence, but the world was once thousands of unaccountable tyrants, free to brutalize their peasants and slaves.
  - komali2 4y ago
    Millions of years? If I recall, our societies are quiet a bit younger than that, several hundred thousand sure, but millions? Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless. Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.
maxwell 4y ago
Odd to open asking what actions Americans can take, and then closing with a bizarre appeal to a noble wealth hoarder. What can we do? Uncap the House. Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929. The billionaires easily bribe 435 reps, several thousand would be harder. And in line with historical representation. https://www.reddit.com/r/uncapthehouse https://www.reddit.com/r/uncapthehouse
- ncphil 4y ago
  Something many have advocated for decades. But keep in mind that there are tens of thousands of elected offices in the US, most of them nonpartisan, local positions that cost little to contest: yet it's incredibly hard to find people willing to run. Voter apathy is a huge problem here, in part due to historic voter suppression efforts baked into the system, but the dearth of candidates willing to participate in elections is even more serious. There again, legal discouragements, especially in the most significant races (state and federal legislature, executive), are endemic. Still, too many offices at the local level (town and city council, special district boards) go uncontested: leaving one or the other major party -- or venal representatives of the FIRE sector -- in control to mismanage and misappropriate power in areas directly impacting public life.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Many of those local or state offices also pay little to nothing. A state rep in NH gets paid $200 for a two-year term based on an 1899 law. That's something of an outlier but $25-50K is common.
- komali2 4y ago
  The bizarre appeal was poorly communicated sarcasm.
hyperman1 4y ago
As an non-USA inhabitant, one thing I see is that you have a lot more voting chances than most countries. I heard e.g. you can vote for officials like sheriffs and stuff. So don't only vote for a president, vote for everything you can. Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides. I think after that, you shouldn't be afraid to 'throw your vote away'. Gerrymandering and other stuff made most voters in the presidentials irrelevant. So the only voice left there is the signal function of 3rd part vote. Make it clear yo don't like the hobson's choice you've left. You did what you could in the previous round. Don't succumb to nihilisms. The powers that be seem to have dividers in a dumber and smarter half. The dumber half gets very simplistic reasons to vote for some extremist side. The smarter half gets tamed by nihilistic passiveness. Both get all kinds of divisive news as a side dish. Don't fall into this trap. A big enough group of people aligned around a common cause is the biggest danger to any powerfull entity, and they fear them and do anything to break them up.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  > Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides. That's not permitted in any state which I know. I am a registered voter in "NO PARTY", which gives me the option to request a ballot from any party in a primary and vote within that party. Any registered voter can vote any candidate or issue in general elections. I think what would improve our abysmal two-party system would be runner-up benefits, and coalitions, rather than winner-takes-all.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    The likely best solution to the 2-party system is a change to balloting from single-choice to something like approval voting (check any number of candidates you could live with) or ranked-choice/instant run-off (number candidates by preference). If I were king, I’d do away with party primaries completely. Run a jungle primary with all candidates on a single ballot. Ranked choice to pick the top 4-5 for the general. Then ranked choice in the general to select the winner. Something like that. I’d also ditch the EC for direct election of the president. And legislate the size of a House district be derived from the smallest state population. This adds hundreds of members to the House, and brings voting parity back to CA and TX (who currently have districts substantially larger than Wyoming’s single seat.
patrick451 4y ago
Aside from the two party system, this is all working exactly as designed.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I bet in your county it would take the dedicated organization of maybe 10-25 people to tilt who is out on the ballot in your local government. (If your county is much larger, you may need 50 or so.) register for a minor party and then only nominate members of that minor party that fit your views. A friend of mine in his smaller town was able to, with his local family, put on only democratic candidates under Republican nominations because his family had minor party share.
salawat 4y ago
>wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless. Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem. > or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still elect three presidents in that time ...The Chief Executive is determined in a two-fold election pipeline. A popular vote to elect State electors to cast votes for the President The number of electoral votes is set by a Constitutionally defined function that strikes a balance to ensure the most populous states can't steamroll the less populous. The means of choosing who the electors are are up to the States. Original intrnt was that Electors were unaccountable to anyone, as the Founders wanted a specific check on demagoguery, as they greatly feared the charismatic charlatan who could work a crowd, and believed a second smaller unaccountable party of voters would either eventually reconfirm the majority if it was a genuinely uncontroversial decision, or conscientiously object if they could not in good conscience believe it was in the best interests of the nation to cast that vote. The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker. The popular vote literally was antithetical to what the Founders set put to do. It was specifically not the system they wanted to get anywhere near. >Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, This is by design. The Senate represents the States. Not the People directly. Each state gets two Senators, no matter how big, no matter how populace. Only the House Scales as a function of Population. The Senate is specifically a check on the House. It was recognized that the House would be the Heart/Vehicle of the People's passions. The Senate was intended to be a smaller, more rational filter to keep the House checked as Reason is the check on Passion. Again. Working as designed/Civics 101.
- komali2 4y ago
  This kind of comment confuses me. There's always one rigid constitutionalist that shows up and just kind of... Pretends the usa was a determinist system kicked off the second the constitution was signed? Despite the immediate amendment when they needed to add some human rights to the thing? Actually, America was designed to be a slave state, with laws explicitly laying out why African people are less entitled to rights than European descendants, and laws working around different states' positions on slavery. Working as designed, right? > The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker. And yet, the people voted for the less charismatic candidate, and the electoral college elected the swindler. Working as designed, right? Now we have executives directly trying to influence the electoral college, and it seems to be working (supreme court stepping in during bush's election to force stop a recount that would have led to him losing the election, which we know as fact now). Not only is it absurd to suggest the USA is a deterministic system like constitutionalists claim, there's a very easy retort: ok, it's a bad system then. Americans need a better design. If America is working by design, then it's designed to be easily exploited by haliburton to send its soldiers to die in foreign countries so as to feed the military industrial complex. It's designed to have one of the largest prison populations on earth and a systemically racist police system. It's designed to have an outsized homeless problem, massive painkiller addiction crisis, and a population of people with no savings, no hope for retirement, and one paycheck from homelessness.

politelemon 4y ago

> and then we expect the judge to "save" us from the broken law instead of holding the legislators accountable Why can't it be both? All this does is keep us busy looking where the 'root cause' is and never actually solve anything because the mechanisms to fix those things don't exist... all the while others reap its benefits.

forgotusername6 4y ago
Judges are there to enforce the law, not to make it. You can't hope that the judge takes your side because then the judge could just as easily take the other side. There is of course an element of interpretation which the judges can use to decide in different directions over the same thing, but that again is an example of a broken law.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > Judges are there to enforce the law, not to make it. That's not the right characterization of the argument. Judges are there to tell legislators that they can't make certain laws. The abortion dispute is not about judges making abortion legal, it's about judges telling politicians that they cannot make abortion illegal. Without that, politicians would literally have the ability to do anything they want.
  - frankfrankfrank 4y ago
    I find it both shocking and terrifying that people lack the most fundamental understanding of how a properly separated government system would work, let alone why it should function that way. It should concern everyone that these types of top down authoritarian mentalities are more prevalent as people without a tradition or culture based in western philosophy that has led to what used to be a clear separation of powers, become more prominent even all over the western/European based world. It will not end well for most of humanity, even in this community, regardless if how much we believe ourselves to be doing good here, or at least not even considering the destabilizing consequences of what we do here.

frankfrankfrank 4y ago

I agree with you until you parroted the propaganda trope about Roe v Wade. Roe has always been known as “bad law” even though it was never law, only illegitimate judicial dictate. It’s always been known as one of the worst rulings in American history. It’s unfortunate that you would demonstrate such logically compromise in such a blatant manner, ironically, in a post about “bad law”. Ironically, overturning Roe specifically was good law, in that it followed the law the ruling was a blatant violation of.

saint_fiasco 4y ago
I'm confused. You act hostile yet you seem to agree with the original comment. The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that. You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I have no idea what Roe v Wade is about (I'm not American or in the US), but I like GP read the parent comment to theirs as meaning 'these jokers overturned it, that is bad, we cannot rely on them'. Re-reading after seeing your own comment, it is ambiguous really, you could read it either way, but you're probably right (having the context of what it's about) and GP just mistook the meaning as I did. > If anything has proven this [that 'we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society'] lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws [...]
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    It all boils down to people fighting for the right to do whatever they want to an unborn soul including shutting down its life processes at will. They all have different justifications and excuses. It boils down to the local morality hence why judges kicked it back to the local governments.

eggburger 4y ago

Who gave them the right to say it was legal or illegal in the first place? People in here pretending one party is better than the other because they give you back fundamental human rights they have no business controlling the legality of to begin with.

Eumenes 4y ago
That's the Supreme Courts job?
retrocryptid 4y ago
The constitution.
- account42 4y ago
  This is the correct answer but it is worth pointing out copyright being spelled out specifically in the first amendment recognizes that this is something that he government would normally not have authority to enact because it goes against more fundamental rights. The first amendment also restricts the authority of the government when it comes to copyright by requiring it to be done "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and for the aritificial monoboly to be "for limited Times". It isn't clear that the current implementation of copyright still falls within either of these limitations.

Qahlel 4y ago

every monopoly is created by the government (read: state and laws).

cbozeman 4y ago

[flagged]

LilyFrenchPants 4y ago
[flagged]
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  You can do whatever you would like with your uterus (or any other body part), just please don't kill anyone in the process.
  - dctoedt 4y ago
    > just please don't kill anyone in the process. Ah, there's the rub: How to define "anyone." (In my 1960s Catholic family, my parents encouraged us four kids to discuss issues of the day at the dinner table. One night the discussion was about abortion, and specifically, when does a fetus become human. My dad joked that he often wondered whether fetuses didn't become human until they could cut their own meat ....)
- starkd 4y ago
  Well, thanks for the strawman. When you debate in strawman arguments, you block constructive debate from moving forward. The issue is one of judicial discernment. It is the ability for a supreme court to make up rights not written into the constitution. This is not difficult to recognize, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life. The correct place for this is in legislation. It is an emotional topic that is constantly evolving. What is going to happen when a fetus can survive in an artificial womb? We are a long way from that, but that is something a council of unelected justices should not have to rule on.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    > What is going to happen when a fetus can survive in an artificial womb? We're going to see a wave of hilariously (in the worst possible way) maladapted babies, because I'm almost certain we'll find that the constant "noise" of the mother's body, plus hormonal changes, are critically important for proper development. Sure, maybe researchers and scientists will factor all of this into the development of such a technology, but so far Humanity doesn't have a good track record with getting everything right on the first go-round.

GuB-42 4y ago

Judges here to apply the law made by the legislators. That's the basis of the separation of powers. If it wasn't the case we wouldn't have a legislation in the first place turning judges into oligarchs. The way people are supposed to support better laws is by electing better legislators. Easier said than done I admit, but I think that's better than giving judges power beyond their role.

dahart 4y ago

> The current law is broken I think many agree that copyright needs to be shortened, but what does “broken” mean, exactly? I have good feelings for the Internet Archive, but in this case it’s about a handful of books that are being copied and distributed a mere 5 years after initial publication, which I think a lot of people who want copyright shortened would still agree is quite a bit too short. Books frequently get popular long after initial publication, they’re not anything like blockbuster movies that make most of their income in a few weeks (which used to be true before streaming but might not even be true anymore). Keep in mind that this isn’t about the Internet Archive specifically. If the court ruled it’s okay for them to copy and rent books, then anyone can copy and rent books, it undermines the entire market for books (and also web sites and images and other media, because this is the Internet Archive). Think about what it means for the company you work for, or the creative works you or your artist friends create, if people can copy their things legally and take away their revenue streams after only 5 years. I wonder why the Internet Archive doesn’t keep things unpublished on their site until it’s not generally available online, this would keep them clear of the most obvious copyright violations.

xhkkffbf 4y ago
Yes. This would really hurt the ability for authors to make a living if everyone could do what the IA claims the right to do. It just won't work for sales to be cut off after a few physical copies by digital copies everywhere.
ghaff 4y ago
Really the main (even only?) thing "broken" about copyright is the terms. (ADDED: I generally favor orphan works legislation but I also get the argument that this is also more likely to favor corporations than individuals.) And basically all the schemes to make copyright more expensive, difficult, requiring jumping through hoops and paying increasing amounts of money to renew? That just basically screws individual creators (who already don't make much money for the most part) to the benefit of the major content rights holders who are not going to forget or be unable to pay for copyright renewal. Which is probably not the objective of most of the people dreaming these up. The US actually took a pretty big step towards benefitting more small-time creatives when it aligned with the Berne Convention and did away with explicit notices being required.

lagadu 4y ago

Switching from common law to civil law systems should fix a lot of that up. This wouldn't be possible, considering the amount of law that would need to be written to replace an existing common law system but it's an interesting thought experiment.

redtexture 4y ago
Louisiana has a civil law system, subject to the Federal Constitution.

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