SOPA hearing yesterday: There are not enough /facepalms in the world

[kebab4you]

That's a good move, another year's worth of heavy net users and people who actually inform themselves and read about current affairs....will be of legal voting age, and looking at the kind of people voting on the bills, about half of the current lot will have died of old age, maybe even making room for some under 80s on the panel.

Yeah, postpone it another year!

Oh, no. By "another year", they mean "next year". As in, right after Christmas break.

/DebbyDowner

Nope. They are voting on it this Wednesday

/EvenMoreOfADebbyDowner

 

[Megumi0505]

That's a good move, another year's worth of heavy net users and people who actually inform themselves and read about current affairs....will be of legal voting age, and looking at the kind of people voting on the bills, about half of the current lot will have died of old age, maybe even making room for some under 80s on the panel.

Yeah, postpone it another year!

Oh, no. By "another year", they mean "next year". As in, right after Christmas break.

/DebbyDowner

Nope. They are voting on it this Wednesday

/EvenMoreOfADebbyDowner

No they're continuing the hearings on Wednesday, not voting.

 

[MistahFixIt]

Nope. They are voting on it this Wednesday

/EvenMoreOfADebbyDowner

Four days before Christmas. No doubt a pressure tactic to squeak this thing in quickly and quietly.

 

[kebab4you]

That's a good move, another year's worth of heavy net users and people who actually inform themselves and read about current affairs....will be of legal voting age, and looking at the kind of people voting on the bills, about half of the current lot will have died of old age, maybe even making room for some under 80s on the panel.

Yeah, postpone it another year!

Oh, no. By "another year", they mean "next year". As in, right after Christmas break.

/DebbyDowner

Nope. They are voting on it this Wednesday

/EvenMoreOfADebbyDowner

No they're continuing the hearings on Wednesday, not voting.

Ah, what I get for only reading half the article, but still, that is no reason to breath out!

 

[Megumi0505]

That's a good move, another year's worth of heavy net users and people who actually inform themselves and read about current affairs....will be of legal voting age, and looking at the kind of people voting on the bills, about half of the current lot will have died of old age, maybe even making room for some under 80s on the panel.

Yeah, postpone it another year!

Oh, no. By "another year", they mean "next year". As in, right after Christmas break.

/DebbyDowner

Nope. They are voting on it this Wednesday

/EvenMoreOfADebbyDowner

No they're continuing the hearings on Wednesday, not voting.

Ah, what I get for only reading half the article, but still, that is no reason to breath out!

There's still hope that the filibusters will kill the bill, we do have at least one dedicated senator in that regard.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Congress needs to be replaced with people who know things. Not old dudes so enraptured in politics that they can't fathom life without it.

Do you know how much America hates people who know things?

Only when they aren't in the Private Sector, making money for the suits.

I'm fairly certain that all of our genuinely smart people have already calculated how futile it is to even bother, and are just trying to find a way to leverage their talents before the inevitable collapse of American society.

Behold the collapse of Rome! Now pass the SOPA sapa!

 

[Flizzick]

The battle is won, the war (unfortunately) rages on...

 

[kebab4you]

The battle is won, the war (unfortunately) rages on...

It is not, as mentioned above the hearing continues this wednesday.

 

[KeyMaster45]

But it's only being censored in America, right? So I have nohing to worry about?

Actually you have plenty to worry about. If bullshit flies here in the states then other countries get the idea that it's okay, or worse the US uses political pressure to make other countries adopt similar laws. In this case that pressure would be spurred on by the media conglomerates that are pushing this bill in the first place.

 

[Something Amyss]

Only when they aren't in the Private Sector, making money for the suits.

Yeah, but when we're talking about replacing Congress, that's kind of what we're talking about.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Only when they aren't in the Private Sector, making money for the suits.

Yeah, but when we're talking about replacing Congress, that's kind of what we're talking about.

Well, I'm assuming the monkeys in Congress are at least directed by said suits, and that the suits are taking the "Out of (public) sight, out of mind" approach.

 

[jyork89]

Say goodbye to thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of income in America. These websites will simply outsource to Europe, the UK, Asia, etc. America loses. Everyone else wins after time. Of course we may temporarily have nowhere to watch videos etc etc. But after awhile we would end up with a UK or something based youtube equivalent.

Great job American Congress. It's nice to know that the country that the American government seems to hate the most is America itself :s

 

[boyvirgo666]

We have no one to blame but ourselves. "Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither." And we are about to get exactly that. "but truth be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"
We have allowed them to strip us of our rights piece by piece, and now we are finally paying the price for it.

You really think thats where this came from? Popular vote means nothing in America regardless of what your high school told you. Our votes are a polite suggestion. What needs to be done is riots and destruction. Anarchy would be the only way to force action.

The American people didnt condone this, they coudnt do anything about it without thousands of others backing them up. The whole "Americans are to blame" and quoting V for Vendetta isnt going to help. What will help is making sure that the American ideal of solving the problem by the people and for the people is upheld. What needs to be done is a massive force of the people finally getting back up and forcing change, like the civil rights movement and suffrage. People need to be willing to no longer be peaceful since the idea of violence solving nothing is full of crap. Violence made America not voting.

 

[spartan231490]

We have no one to blame but ourselves. "Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither." And we are about to get exactly that. "but truth be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"
We have allowed them to strip us of our rights piece by piece, and now we are finally paying the price for it.

You really think thats where this came from? Popular vote means nothing in America regardless of what your high school told you. Our votes are a polite suggestion. What needs to be done is riots and destruction. Anarchy would be the only way to force action.

The American people didnt condone this, they coudnt do anything about it without thousands of others backing them up. The whole "Americans are to blame" and quoting V for Vendetta isnt going to help. What will help is making sure that the American ideal of solving the problem by the people and for the people is upheld. What needs to be done is a massive force of the people finally getting back up and forcing change, like the civil rights movement and suffrage. People need to be willing to no longer be peaceful since the idea of violence solving nothing is full of crap. Violence made America not voting.

That's ignorant, and it is exactly that kind of thinking that led to what happened. We could have done something, if we had acted together, but instead everyone thought: "It'll never work, one vote isn't enough" and just kept on baa-ing with the rest of the sheep.

A government can only act with the consent of the people. If people really didn't want this to happen, they would have threatened to vote out the constituents, or had a truly sizable protest like in the civil rights movement, or rose up as you are suggesting. They didn't. "silent, obedient consent" doesn't need to be voiced, you don't have to approve of what's done, you just have to not act against it. The american people ARE to blame. Shoving your fingers in your ears and singing that it's not your fault won't change anything, the crimes that we as a nation have committed against the ideals this nation was founded upon, and against ourselves, are so heinous that we do deserve exactly what is about to happen.

 

[jonnosferatu]

We have no one to blame but ourselves. "Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither." And we are about to get exactly that. "but truth be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror"
We have allowed them to strip us of our rights piece by piece, and now we are finally paying the price for it.

You really think thats where this came from? Popular vote means nothing in America regardless of what your high school told you. Our votes are a polite suggestion. What needs to be done is riots and destruction. Anarchy would be the only way to force action.

The American people didnt condone this, they coudnt do anything about it without thousands of others backing them up. The whole "Americans are to blame" and quoting V for Vendetta isnt going to help. What will help is making sure that the American ideal of solving the problem by the people and for the people is upheld. What needs to be done is a massive force of the people finally getting back up and forcing change, like the civil rights movement and suffrage. People need to be willing to no longer be peaceful since the idea of violence solving nothing is full of crap. Violence made America not voting.

That's ignorant, and it is exactly that kind of thinking that led to what happened. We could have done something, if we had acted together, but instead everyone thought: "It'll never work, one vote isn't enough" and just kept on baa-ing with the rest of the sheep.

A government can only act with the consent of the people. If people really didn't want this to happen, they would have threatened to vote out the constituents, or had a truly sizable protest like in the civil rights movement, or rose up as you are suggesting. They didn't. "silent, obedient consent" doesn't need to be voiced, you don't have to approve of what's done, you just have to not act against it. The american people ARE to blame. Shoving your fingers in your ears and singing that it's not your fault won't change anything, the crimes that we as a nation have committed against the ideals this nation was founded upon, and against ourselves, are so heinous that we do deserve exactly what is about to happen.

The majority of the American people either don't know or don't understand what's going on here due to the lack of any mass media attention paid to events in Congress. We also don't have a significant say in the people who realistically CAN be elected - bipartisan systems are virtually immune to competition from third-party groups. Thanks to judicial rulings like Citizens United, candidates can very easily be bought out by special interests at any stage after declaring their intention to run for office, and in general the candidate who wins is the candidate who spent (and by extension the candidate who received) the most money to further his or her campaign. On top of that, once elected, most congressmen have control over the electoral district lines in their respective states, which makes it very easy for them to dilute the effects of people disliking them by splitting up unfriendly areas and merging the pieces into friendly ones.

FURTHERMORE, the fact that the majority of Americans have not been able to overcome the flaws inherent to our brains' attempts at rational action does not mean that the American people as a whole are culpable for the implied overall consent on what our government is doing. I don't smoke, but my father did until I was 15; does my failure to personally rid of him of his nicotine addiction before I inhaled my first breath of second-hand smoke mean that I deserve any lung cancer I may develop as a result of his habit?

The American people who have this coming are the ones who voted for (and continue to idolize, in any combination) Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, along with those who rely on Fox News for their information. Blaming the public in general for the actions of people who bought into Reagan's doctrine of irresponsibility and allowed all three of the above to bamboozle them into making neoconservative corporatism the driving force in U.S. politics is flagrantly denying the presence of a problem and inherently impeding the efforts of those of us who want to fix the damage that our parents did to our futures.

 

[jonnosferatu]

I would further like to call your attention to the fact that the progressive portion of the population DID turn out in record numbers and attempted to fix this problem by electing someone who promised a solution to the issue and had a political history strongly suggesting that he would hold to these ideals, and a charisma that similarly suggested that he would be able to put these ideas into action. Upon entering office, this man made backroom deals to castrate most of the causes to which he had dedicated his campaign, and was (perhaps knowingly) unable to push the remainder of those causes through a Congress that unexpectedly mobilized very specifically against him.

I find it very odd that you call attention to a failure of the U.S. public in general to act together when the one recent instance of a progressive majority overruling the remainder of the population resulted in the situation becoming steadily worse, culminating the very situation that the recent flood of SOPA and NDAA threads were made to discuss.

 

[alik44]

...nothin left to say

 

[Irridium]

Here's a list [https://boycottcensors.wordpress.com/] of the supporters of this bill. You know, so you can shop appropriately.

For game companies, I see Nintendo, EA, and Sony on there.

If I recall correctly EA and Nintendo is up there because they are in a group(forgot it´s name) that support the bill, I think both of them have backed out of that group as it stands right now and isn't supportive of the bill.

I thought that was Microsoft. I remember reading about how they were originally in favor of it, then quietly stopped being in favor of it.

 

[Thaius]

I hadn't realized those things were said. From what I heard, the whole thing got nowhere because one representative was too immature to stay off Twitter during the proceedings and another was butthurt by what he tweeted.

But yeah, the whole freaking bill is one gigantic example of staggering ignorance and disregard for freedom on the part of our country's leaders.