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Internet Blacklist Back In Congress
Adrian Lopez writes "A bill giving the government the power to shut down Web sites that host materials that infringe copyright is making its way quietly through the lame-duck session of Congress, raising the ire of free-speech groups and prompting a group of academics to lobby against the effort. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced in Congress this fall by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). It would grant the federal government the power to block access to any Web domain that is found to host copyrighted material without permission."
With the huge backlog of important legislation requiring immediate attention in an already gridlocked congress, it's sad this is even being considered. I guess the financial incentives to its backers are just too large. Set the controls for the heart of the sun, we are doomed.
Disclaimer: I am Canadian, so I didn't vote for Obama (although I would have).
The Obama administration has turned out far worse than GWB's eight years with respect to the digital age. For all the command they had of social media and running under the 'change' they were bringing with them, they sure seem to want to bow to their old masters.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
In a typical election, 40% of the vote goes one way, 40% goes the other. It's almost always unthinking party loyalty. There is no hope for most of those people. I know Democrats, for example, who vote Democrat despite the fact that Barack Obama, Reid and Pelosi have literally almost nothing in common with their views. It's all because "they're a Democrat/Republican family."
The points you raise are hardly insightful. Those problems have existed in literally every system of government from feudal monarchies, to Communism, to whatever-it-is-we-have-today. The establishment always plays hardball, no matter what form the establishment takes.
One of the interesting things our founders realized, like the Romans and others before them, is that a limited government with minorly democratic features is the closest thing to an ideal. If you look past the issue of slavery in the South, the US was the freest it ever was when it was the least democratic. The reason for that is simple: people in democratic states tolerate 5x more shit than those in nominally or outright undemocratic states in most cases because they don't have the pretense of "choosing their tyranny." Therefore, the government has to actually be judged on what it does, not the process by which it gets there (after which it gets a free pass because a temporary majority agreed with it).