Slashdot Mirror
SOPA Creator In TV/Film/Music Industry's Pocket
First time accepted submitter en4bz writes "Representative Lamar Smith, the creator of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), has been consistently receiving donations averaging $50 000 from the TV/Film/Music industry for each of his re-election campaigns for the past ten years. Smith has received roughly half a million dollars from the TV/Film/Music lobby over the past ten years according to opensecrets.org. Check out the source link for a full breakdown of donors to Smith's campaigns."
Speaking of SOPA, new submitter DarkStar1O9 submits this "explanation in simple terms of why this dangerous new bill in congress could result in the extinction of sites that are based on user-generated content like YouTube, Reddit, and StumbleUpon." Update: 12/18 20:42 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "Eric S. Raymond weighs in on SOPA and the question of why so many people hate this bill and not the dozens of others just like it that get passed on a regular basis."
Well, not quite. US manufacturing has recently been on the decline, yes, but we're still top in the world for now. It's more that Chinese output has skyrocketed in recent years. (data)
With recent increases in Chinese labor costs, the balance is also slowly starting to shift back in our favor. But it remains to be seen what will happen in coming years.
Does someone want to reply to this post with a list of Senators/Representatives who are for SOPA? If Slashdot had a list of these people, we could just vote them out next election. Intent to violate our first amendment rights should be a good reason to vote them out.
God spoke to me
I participated in the Free Bradley Manning march by Occupy San Diego yesterday for a few reasons - (1) I believe in the cause (2) I wanted to size up the Occupy movement for myself for an unbiased opinion, and (3) I was hoping to see some action and maybe even capture a little police brutality.
If you were there, I was the guy with the water jug who had the idea to use zip-ties to support the banner poles over the overpass, and was the asshole who said, "Thank you, officer!(stirring a few laughs from the crowd)" after he blocked traffic for us.
The following is a brutally frank assessment of occupy San Diego: They are freaks. They are every bad stereotype the media makes the movement out to be. The only participants with any semblance of normalcy were a few affluent ex-hippies with legitimacy in society, but who had obviously done more than their share of drugs in the '60's.
The message itself and calls to rally were pretty good, and a couple of the speakers were passionate and charismatic. However, when I first arrived, a person giving the speech was a transvestite("trap"). It has seemed that the movement was co-opting itself by inadvertently shoehorning a LGBT agenda into the protests. I sympathize with homosexuals and I agree that they have a right to be pissed off, but it does nothing but hurt the cause of the protest when the impression is that of a gaggle of pissed off people looking for something to shout about.
Many of them are like you - dressed like bad LARPers, who were allowed to escape from their entire childhood and now are out of touch with reality. They are pissed because they failed to adapt to society, they failed to see what was coming. That is not to say that their message is wrong, because America is fucked up for all the reasons that they state. The problem is that they appear to be blaming the system because of their own weaknesses and failures, and that is not what "normal" people like you and I want to be associated with. If we join them, their stench of failure will hover over us as well, and it will make more people the laughing stock of the protest movement rather than gain legitimacy.
You want legitimacy? Stop dressing like steampunk cowboys and renaissance-fair rejects, take a fucking shower with shampoo, and put on some decent clothes. Correct the mistakes you made not conforming earlier in life and gain an air of legitimacy. Your spoken message is excellent, but you're making jokes out of yourself with your costumes, reenacting silly childhood fantasies. Grow the fuck up and I might just offer you more support. I know how to do this. But I need your help. You want to give all this tough-guy talk about being co-opted? Take the fucking offensive and co-opt them. The first step to gaining public sympathy is to take a fucking shower and grab a shave.
I want to offer some final criticism - in the official video of the march, the person operating the camera asks a bystander what they know about Bradley Manning, and the woman says, "Um, he, like, sent that thing to Wikileaks." Come on, you can do better than that!
The moron vote is herded like cattle by demagogues who are paid to do so by the Faux News corporate propaganda machine. The demagogues appeal to their prejudices, to ignore the policies that might hurt the plutocracy. So you have the insane situation where the lower middle class hates health care reform, where they are the actual benefactors of health care reform. We have a dynamic where their health and the education of their children is damaged by policies they fully support, because they believe fairy tales like welfare queens with 20 kids and lazy illegal immigrants, that that is the real threat. And they don't want to reward these stereotypes. When of course it is themselves who are having their benefits removed, and the real threat is the corporation who doesn't want their bottom line impacted and the health care insurance corporation who wants the money to keep flowing in the wasteful healthcare system we have.
So what do you do? Forget the morons for a moment, you can't do anything about them. Aim like a laser beam on one issue that even the morons understand: corporate influence in our politics. Keep up a constant drumbeat of how our elected representatives represent the influence of those who pay for the reelection campaigns, rather than the actual people they are supposed to serve. Even a moron can get behind that. It will take time, but enough inertial movement will eventually be established that the point will be too loud and obvious, and even the demagogues can't distract the morons anymore from the real tragedy going on.
It is "We the people", not "we the rich people and the corporations." Hammer on that point every day. This is the weak point in the propaganda machine that the lower middle class morons are currently under full influence of. Their standard of living gets worse every day. And it is exactly because of the agenda of those who pay for the propaganda machine that keeps them spellbound. Break the spell. Show the little plutocrat behind the curtain creating the illusion of the fake frightening Oz.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Frankly, I view abortion, separation of church and state and gay (and shemale) rights as more important than copyright stuff. So no, even if I were US citizen, I would not vote for him.
It's not just about copyright, but about free speech as well. And privacy. And getting rid of these idiotic anti-terrorism organizations that thrive on paranoia (and feast on taxpayer money).
As I said, those issues likely won't get any worse than they already are. Otherwise, with our previous presidents, they would have already done so. I seriously don't see the difference.
Wrong on 3 out of 4. I know it's snark but why not - I'll give a guy who delivered 4000 babies a pass for abortion, then again from a moral point of view contraceptives are everywhere and adoptions work (Have 2 adopted in my family). Of course he believes it should be a state issue not a fed issue. Gay - and straight - marriage should not involve the gov at all. The idea that the gov gives us the right to marry is asinine. RP supports gays in the military. He voted for repealing Don't ask don't tell. He thinks everyone should have the liberty to do as they want.
Separation of Church and state isn't spelled out in the constitution. Personally I find it silly that even at a township level when a new board is sworn in they do the 'so help you god'. Then again with hundreds of recognized religions, being able to sign up to be a legal minister over the 'net (Universal Life Church even accepts atheists) I'm fine with that. There are far more interesting things than the 10 commandments to put on buildings.
Let's be honest here: which 1st world country even wants U.S. citizens moving there? All of the people I know that routinely travel to Europe and Asia on vacation tell people they're Canadian now, because when they were honest and told them they were from the U.S. they were treated like absolute shit, made fun of, kicked out of pubs and restaurants, and generally just fucked with; not all the time, but often enough that it made them feel totally unwelcome even as tourists. Even people that they were engaged in pleasant conversation with would sometimes simply walk away once they found out they were from the states. Now that they tell them they're Canadian none of that happens anymore.
The "ignorant, brutish American" stereotype has spread across the entire globe, and I can't necessarily even argue against it; the only things many people around the world know about us are totally negative. For every thoughtful, reasonable American citizen there are 10 mouth-breathing retards comparing Islam to Nazism, cheering the deaths of the uninsured and booing one of our own soldiers because he is gay.
Are you seriously suggesting that a system in which corporations funnel money to campaigns based on politicians' votes, and politicians know this and cast their votes accordingly, is in any material way distinguishable from "trading money for votes"?
I was a Republican until 2008. Voted for Bush twice. I greatly regret it, and take some solace in the fact that my vote wouldn't have changed the outcome. I went into the 2008 election planning to vote for McCain, and only changed my mind after he brought in Palin and sold his soul to the same Rovian politics used against him 8 years earier (did you know McCain fathered an illegitimate black baby?).
I am in no way "listening to the reward centers of my brain". Anyone who puts aside their preconceptions and takes a critical view of American politics of the past few years will see that the Democrats are ineffective, but mostly well intentioned. Sometimes their good intentions have harmful effects, but the point is they're trying to help. The same cannot be said of the Republicans.
The Republicans are trying to destroy the United States government. They openly admit it, saying their plan is to "starve the beast". They want a country with no central government, because that will allow absolute rule by the 1%. They (the 1%) have all the power, in the form of near limitless wealth. Our only tools against them are being slowly taken away. Unions are dying, public programs are being underfunded or privatized, our ability to sue has been replaced by "arbiters" who find for the corporation 97% of the time, and the government itself is being strangled to death. It's class warfare, declared by the rich, and the rich are winning. They will leave this country an empty husk, and retire to some nice Carribbean isles, while we're left behind -- destitute, and looking for someone to blame.