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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.
headline says it all
Jimbo needs to fix Wikipedia first by grtting rid of abusive admins and deletionists.
Any candidate that has a poll on their "plan" page that even entertains the notion of Jon Stewart and Neil Degrasse Tyson for VP has already convinced me to stop listening.
It's the Campaign Platform Anyone can Edit!
uh oh, reddit is leaking...
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...that contributors will have their contributions blocked or reversed at the behest of vindictive campaign insiders without explanation or appeal in order to stroke the insiders' petty egos?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Jeez, this is like reading Xinhua News. Just a collective ignoring of the fact that all these people are on the far left of politics, and instead pretending that "the internet community" is some sort of monolithic bloc that supports this. SOPA wasn't a divisive issue, it was something everyone could get behind. But come on, simply presenting statements like "Now we're behind Lessig to fight for citizen equality" with no context? Look at how it assumes the sale and doesn't give anyone the chance to raise objections. If you're not for these hard-leftists, you must be against citizen equality. Man, I feel really despicable being against citizen equality.
If you read a lot of Xinhua like I do, this is a common occurrence. They will simply ignore important context and call everyone to action. The obvious questions that everyone sitting at home is asking? Unanswered. In Xinhua's defense, they regularly receive instructions from the Communist Party instructing them to leave important information out of their stories. Western journalists are under no such oppressive restrictions and deliberately do such things of their own free will. Which system is worse?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
They want to elect a 'reform' president who will serve only long enough to turn it over to a "biz-as-usual" VP from their same party and who were pigs sucking at the public swill they now seek to reform, just like the other party. Delusional idiots. Usefull idiots to the demokrats perhaps.
I nominate Bennet Hasselton for president. He's the president we deserve, but not the one we need. Imagine the 400 page state of the union address he would write every year.
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.
...this guy with the beard and dedication will fix all ...
Karl Marx?
> the deletionists
Wikipedia seems to think deleting information is more important than providing information. That has been true for several years. One study:
http://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf
Found that only that only 13% of the edits allowed were by women. My name is Terry, and my account on Wikipedia contains my name. Despite being a male, since I have a name that is often female, every single one o the pages I've created since I started contributing to Wikipedia the past eight years have been deleted. There is a bias against information there, and an even bigger bias against women providing information.
Why is /. giving this guy so much news space? Isn't this place news for nerds? Something has to be going on in the STEM world.
I'm probably feeding the troll here ( in the classic sense). But Larry Lessig is an absolute giant in the STEM world.
Pretty much everything we do in the STEM world is shaped by "intellectual property" law. Not so long ago Larry Lessig threw his heart and soul into trying to get some sanity back into copyright law - ending perpetual extensions of copyright and returning copyright to it's original purpose of giving people the incentive to create things that would then enter the public domain within a reasonable time frame.
Unfortunately, Larry lost that fight - essentially the corporations like Disney won. Not so long ago, Kings owned all the land and were able to use that ownership to exploit pretty much everyone else (i.e. the ordinary people / peasants). But now it's not the land that's valuable, it's the ideas - the "intellectual property" that's valuable.
Back in the day there were plenty of peasants who believed in the divine right of kings - that the more powerful a king was and the more he used his power to enrich himself the better. These days there are plenty of people who believe that CEOs should have even more power (e.g. less government restrictions of their treatment of the ordinary people working in their corporations) and that CEOs should be paid even more.
So, you may agree with Larry Lessig or you may not, but if ever there was a presidential candidate who was focused on issues that are relevant to "nerds" - well, that would be Larry Lessig. There's a good chance you were trolling and I got all wound up and took the bait - but if you really don't know why a run by Larry Lessig would be news for nerds then you don't deserve to call yourself a nerd.
Lessig is a fanatic by Churchill's definition: he can't change his mind and won't change the subject. That alone makes him unfit to be President. That he's a raving left-wing kook is just icing on the cake.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Trump is selling low taxes, greatness deserved by lethargic individuals for simply having been squeezed from a vagina in such a manor as to qualify for US citizenship, and of course hate and fear.
Lets be honest, wasting time and money to beat Trump is futile. You simply can't prevail over stupid.
Oh... I feel with absolute certainty that Trump is the optimal representative of the vast majority of the American people. I will actually register to vote for the first time and vote for him. I hate his guts, I believe he's dangerous, I dread everything about him... but I believe he is very likely the huge kick in the ass America needs to finally understand that America needs an overhaul.
Oh... I also like GWB quite a bit and think he deserves either Jeb or Trump to win so he won't be considered the worst president since LBJ
Someone asked 'why modded down'?. Whoever that AC was, let me point out that I agree with that mod by answering your question:
Firstly, all sources have to be laid open. Affiliations included.
Secondly, your post is not quite on topic, because Lessig has never said anything close to 'censoring'. Watch his talk at TED. He wants the result of elections to be a result of the votes alone, like written by the founding fathers. When the idea is, any candidate, irrespective of funding by 132 (watch said talk) individuals can make it, this is no censorship. On the contrary, if 132 (or 144k, watch the talk) decide on the candidate to run, that would be censorship, since the US has rather 144M voters.
I doubt that you consider funding by some party expecting 'returns' after the elections as 'democratic'. Therefore, some system must be put in place to limit, yes, limit, funding in a way that only altruistic campaign donations are possible. If you consider a reduction of corruption as 'censoring', that's your perspective.
Okay, you love to use cliches until the cows come home.
Why AC?
I have created some pages, and found them deleted likewise. No, not about family members or stuff, but as a starting point to collectively collect sparse information about some almost forgotten actors in not almost forgotten movies. Actors that have impressed me one way or another, despite minor roles. Why is it so wrong to start a wiki page on person XYZ who pops up in the credits of a movie as cinematographer or actor, and put in a few lines, as many as I can do, a link to the IMDB entry of the movie, and over. Maybe in a year, or a decade, or a generation, some family member or another fan finds that entry and can make it grow.
With deletion, we have this unique opportunity of information collection removed.
The real problem is the USA's voting system is so broken that the only thing such a candidature can achieve is giving the GOP a chance. And I'm saying this as someone (not a US citizen) who has deep respect for Lessig's views.
There's nothing like $HOME
Some mods are trying hard to mod down not on objective reasons, but on political and subjective dis-/agreement. Sad.
Don't take the down-mod too seriously. Probably your last sentence infuriated a proud US citizen.
Ron could raise a million dollars in a weekend, and he did it 25.00 to 50.00 at a time. That's called real grass roots.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I spent the past two years pointing out that if you're trying to convince someone you're nonpartisan, you shouldn't name your PAC after a communist holiday. Or rail against how money from big corporations is distorting the political system because they give most of their money to one side. (In practice, big business needs to be friends with whoever's in power, so they give money to both sides roughly evenly.) Or rail against money from big corporations, while other big special interest money (i.e. from labor unions), which is actually donated one-sidedly.
Now that he's running for the Democratic Party's nomination... NOW can we agree that he's a leftist and his PAC was leftist?
You are assuming that money can compel a person to vote a certain way and that they don't have the choice to do otherwise, but they do. The AC got it right. Work on the desire. The corruption is in the taking of the money, not offering. We can all turn our backs. You have it completely backwards. If they are talking about limits, then it is censorship.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What a load of partisan bullshit. If that's how republicans are crying themselves to sleep at night; rationalizing their own losses on a manipulated brain rather than being remotely introspective about the candidates they put forth, they're more deluded than the general public. I'm confident republican spindoctor Frank 'Death Tax' Luntz sitting next to him on the panel corrected his assertion that it was the democrats alone were preying on the gullibility of the human mind.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
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.
Fighting against 'Disney' has little at all to do with the kind of intellectual property reform that is needed. Nerds don't care that much about mainstream Hollywood shit. I wish we could get over the idea that people making copies of commercial entertainment content, which for the most part has ONLY entertainment value, is a bold move for greater communication.
Greater communication was things like open USENET threads that people could communicate through (yes, before the majority of the people 'using' USENET were using it to shuttle around binary attachments- again, more Hollywood shit). Peer-based actual communication means not sending 10,000 different copies of a Brittany Spears song this way and that. That shit has clogged up the net and actually impedes relevant communication.
Lessig is a law-type. Yes there are law nerds just as there are astronomy nerds and vintage chainsaw nerds. The fact that he champions the flavor of intellectual property law reform that would free up the Disney vaults for more, freer shuffling around of those bits takes away from his relevance here on Slashdot. Really, it does.
I'm as intrigued as the next nerd with the intellectual challenge remove copy protection and mass-producing all the mainstream content as the rest of us nerds. But like the rest of nerddom, my interest in said content evaporates as soon as it's time to actually view or listen to said content.
The trouble with trying to keep money out of politics is that money is very powerful so has a strong motivation to find its way around whatever obstructions you put up. So the fix isn't to put up stronger gates, it's to reduce the incentive by making that money less powerful.
Donors dominate because individual legislators have a lot of autonomy and are easy to push around. But if you take away the legislator's autonomy by strictly enforcing party discipline then they're a much less tempting target and they have less liability for "you voted for X" style ads.
Make it into a Parliamentary systems where the house leaders aren't just wrangling cats, they're actually telling their members how to vote on important issues. Sure it sounds authoritarian but it's a lot more accountable because when a bill passes (or doesn't) everybody knows who to hold accountable.
You don't even need to change the constitution, it's just a change in the legislative traditions.
I stole this Sig
Donations to Wikimedia Foundation are tax deductible. Donations to a political action committee are not. So if Jimbo wants to use Wikimedia's donation drives for politics, it's going to have to make a separate entity to receive political dollars. It's the same reason that NORML is two different companies.
Mods, I gotta ask...
What did roman_mir ever do you YOU?? I always see his posts are modded down to hell and/or marked troll even though they basically just offer an anarchist perspective on TFA.
Anyone see the hypocrisy of a politician who wants to restore an elective democratic government, so that it can champion gun-control laws and climate remediation, hiring an avowed anti-government, pro-gun Libertarian to rattle the cup for the politician? There will certainly be thousands of nitwits duped into giving money to this campaign, but the majority of observers will see it for what it is -- a fundraising drive for the personal aggrandizement of Lessig and Wales, which is *disguised* as a political movement.