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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.
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!
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.
...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/
Yeah Democracy ie Proportional Representation, is a pretty far left idea.
work in progress
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
As somebody who grew up in a country with proportional representation, I agree: proportional representation is not particularly left wing, it is something that political extremists in general like, whether on the left or on the right. It turns a parliament into a collection of many small parties with extremist viewpoints and unstable, unpredictable coalitions.
Proportional representation also gives those political parties enormous power over their party members (since "proportionality" is determined at the party level), making independent candidacy next to impossible. If you add government regulation and public financing of campaigns into the mix, you have essentially created a political aristocracy.
In the US, proportional representation is mostly associated with the left because there is a pretty large political minority of progressives and democratic socialists who are frustrated that the majority is rejecting their ideas. They are hoping to gain power through proportional representation.
Proportional representation allowed the Nazis to come to power in the Weimar Republic and has brought many socialists and communists to power in Europe and South America. It is a bad idea, and one of the strengths of the US system is that it doesn't have it.
It turns a parliament into a collection of many small parties with extremist viewpoints and unstable, unpredictable coalitions.
As opposed to what we have in the U.S. now, which is two giant monolithic parties who don't really represent anyone except their own politicians' desire to maintain the status quo.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.