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Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Is Now Chairing Lessig's Presidential Bid
Funksaw sends a followup to Tuesday's news that Lawrence Lessig is pondering a presidential campaign: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is now chairing the committee for Lessig's campaign. Wales said, "Larry's run for President is different. He's crowdfunding his campaign instead of seeking out rich donors. He's showing people that we can change the rigged political system. ... The Internet community came together to fight back against SOPA and we were successful. Now we’re behind Lessig to fight for citizen equality." Lessig's goal is to raise a million dollars by September 7, and they're already at roughly $300,000. Relatedly, Newsweek had a brief interview with Lessig over his potential campaign, and Eric Posner wrote an insightful piece about it at Slate.
See? You just did it again. Sarcastically assuming that democracy is totally on your side, your own far left ideas are the only possible ones, and that anyone who disagrees with you must be a bad person because they're against democracy. How about being pro-democracy and anti-leftist? If your conception of politics is so narrow as to exclude this viewpoint, then you're part of the problem I stated above.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In theory I like proportional representation. In practice every European country with PR seems to have at least one ridiculous/evil/nationalist party run by someone suspiciously similar to Donald Trump, which always seem to make the threshold. For awhile the Law of Jante seemed to protect the Scandinavian states and Germans from this, but the last Swedish elections resulted in a minority government that almost fell due to the Moderate's ignoring the Law of Jante and supporting some ridiculous brinksmanship from the Sweden Democrats.
So it's kinda a trade-off. In the first-past-the-post system minor, relatively unpopular movements, all have to co-opt themselves into a larger movement or be irrelevant. The advantage here is that they don't get office unless they have mainstream allies, which means they have to be somewhat reasonable. Unlike Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, or a half-dozen other European movements. The disadvantage is that sometimes the local definition of "reasonable" is wrong and somebody (ie: the US Greens) should have more power then they get.
In the US, of course, we have the added complication of Separation of Powers, whereby the larger movements can really fuck up the system without taking much responsibility; so they tend to court smaller movements by brinksmanship.