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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.
If I'm going to support a candidate for the job of POTUS I expect them to get elected and then do the f***ing job for at least four years.
If he says he will be a one term president up front I then applaud him for that. But getting elected so he can resign makes no sense.
Go back to academia where you can play what if. We need a real POTUS committed to the job of running the country.
... "crowd funding" in politics is ancient. And I'd point out that most crowdfunding systems have no problem with rich donors. Go to kickstarter... scroll down... they've got prizes for people that give 10k. Generally involves people going to some stupid party with the developer or them inserting you into their work or something.
There's nothing new about Larry's campaign. Guy that founded Wikipedia likes him? Okay... that's interesting sort of... but the crowdfunding argument? I'm not such a low information voter that that doesn't pass the smell test.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If he has only one bill he wants to pass, and then resign, that doesn't seem like much of a vision to me. The country can't be "fixed" by changing one law. I'd rather elect somebody who has a vision with a bit more scope.
Yeah Democracy ie Proportional Representation, is a pretty far left idea.
work in progress
The unbalanced part doesn't bother me as much of the deletionists. I've created about five dozen pages, and almost a dozen of them that I can remember have been deleted for "not being notable." I included the required minimum number of citations, but the deletionists still deleted them. One was my uncle who is a musician that has two platinum and five gold records. One song even hit #5 on RPM's charts which was the main Canadian music chart at the time. It was the Canadian equivalent of Billboard Magazine. I think most of the high level editors on Wikipedia are more concerned with deleting information than with making Wikipedia a source of information.
As somebody who grew up in a country with proportional representation I find the notion that this is somehow "left" rather bizarre.