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SOPA Makes Strange Bedfellows
davide marney writes "What do 1-800-Contacts, Adidas, Americans for Tax Reform, Comcast, the Country Music Association, Estee Lauder, Ford, Nike and Xerox all have in common? According to OpenCongress.org, they all have specifically endorsed H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. A total of 158 corporations have signed up in favor of the bill, and only 87 against. $21 Million has been donated to Congressmen who favor the bill, but only $5 Million to those against. Thanks to OpenCongress for these insights. This goes a long way towards explaining why this bill has so much traction, despite all its negative publicity."
Write to your senators, your representatives! Tell them you oppose this bill!
http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/new?bill=112-h3261&position=oppose
Tell your family, friends, even the guy at the gas station to do the same!
This bill WILL get passed if we don't make our position clear to elected officials!
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Have you ever gone to Chinatown and seen all the "fake" handbags (it is hard to call them "fake" when they are probably produced by the same people who make "genuine" handbags)? Online, there are plenty of websites that will sell you a bag or a shoe that looks just like an expensive brand for a fraction of the cost. SOPA is meant to block access to such websites, which are often hosted offshore where US law enforcement agencies cannot touch them.
Palm trees and 8
You may be correct, but like most Fox News watchers, you're missing the point. Specifically:
1. Obama is a corporate friendly statist with the very occasional progressive idea or two. Portraying him as a liberal or a progressive is very much a "please don't throw me in he briar patch" trick conservatives like to use.
2. There's always this implication that somehow having a true believer whackjob conservative in there will make things better, despite extreme amounts of recent history that say otherwise.
So, if you want to say that liberals and progressives should be disappointed with Obama, go right ahead. His problem is that he's not what we want him to be, and he's not what you fear either.
A true liberal would never go for this crap. Post-Reagan conservatives with their unquestioning military and cop worshipping seem to want to give law enforcement anything and everything they want, so they're no help either. A true conservative would never go for this crap either, what few are left, so what does this say about our alleged "leadership" these days?
Indeed. The majority of citizens don't know about SOPA and won't know until it's too late, because there has been a sort of informal media blackout. Mainstream news coverage is nonexistant.
Wrong. Ron Paul is obviously not corrupt, and he's been a Representative for decades. He's not going to get bought off either; the guy is old. Yes, most politicians do get corrupt these days, but it's not an absolute rule.
Of course RP also has a lot of very controversial and extreme ideas. If you want someone that's really middle-of-the-road but incorruptible, you're probably out of luck.
>The Greeks also considered "demokratos" to be equivalent to anarchy.
That's a very ignorant statement. Mostly because there really wasn't such a society as "The greeks". The various greek cities were effectively independent city-states (known as Polis, plural Pollii) with very different cultures and political systems. Some were absolute monarchies, some were democracies (several variations on the theme though none had universal suffrage). About the only thing they had in common was language and religion - their political systems were as different as England and America - in fact, much more so in many cases. Oh and they regularly went to war on each other. Do not imagine for one second that the politics of Sparta and the politics of Athens had anything in common.
The monarchic Greeks indeed considered the democratic cities to be anarchies (and Plato wrote that monarchy is the ideal form of government while democracy is doomed to fall into chaos- but since he lived under one we must consider the possibility that he just wrote what the king would like to hear in a classic case of CYA - especially since his own mentor Socrates had gotten the death penalty for saying things that weren't popular).
So your statement is rather meaningless - much more interesting is how the people living in the democracies described their cities and how they ran them. Tellingly the democracies came with a set of basic behaviours deemed appropriate for a citizen in such a Polis - about how to respectfully getting along with your fellow citizens. The proper behavior for living in the Polis is "to be polite" - which is where the word came from. Those whose daily lives revolved around maintaining law and order in the democracies were the "men of the Polis" - from which we get the origins of modern "policemen" and those elected to govern a polis were Politicians.
Your history lesson is now concluded and you are slightly less ignorant.
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