WEP '12, Day 18 - SOPA/PIPA Blues

It seems almost mandatory on this, the day that Wikipedia and Rock, Paper, Shotgun among many other sites have gone dark in protest about SOPA/PIPA, to discuss the matter.  I just don't know what else there is to say about it that hasn't been said by people much more in the know and passionate about it.  Certainly the odds are that less than a dozen people will even read this post, and in all likelihood you've already been bombarded with a ton of SOPA/PIPA data, so my throwing around numbers and figures isn't going to convince you of anything.

I guess the only left for me is to examine what would happen around here if the bills pass as is.  Granted, the Obama Administration has already said they oppose the bills as they are, but that doesn't mean that the President wouldn't sign a version that addressed the specific 'net security concerns that the White House objected to.  Or, for that matter, that there even will be an Obama Administration by this time next year*.  What are the chances that Big Money Mitt's going to be willing to veto a bill that has so much corporate cash behind it?  Not too good, in my estimation.

So let's say that SOPA passes.  What happens next?  Will Blogger even still exist?  If you can shut down an entire webpage because of a single copyright complaint, wouldn't that mean Blogger would get smacked down almost instantly?  I know I've seen plenty of blogs that use copyrighted pictures in them.  Heck, I've got pics of movie posters in my various movie reviews.  Would that be enough to get Blogger shut down?  I don't know.  Even if they ignored the relatively benign poster pics that I've got up, what about the character portraits I've taken for my Old Republic characters?  Would EA try to pull the plug because of those?

What's worse, I've seen blogs on Blogger that are much more egregious vis a vis copyright infringement than my own feeble efforts.  I've seen blogs, for instance, that are nothing but links to downloads of anime and manga and Japanese video games.  So even if nothing I do is at all site-killing worthy, those blogs probably are.  So then Blogger has a choice.  They can either try to police what is purported millions of blogs, or they can just shut their doors.  I'm guessing it'll be the latter.  Same for LiveJournal or Facebook or Google+, or anywhere a person can get free and easy access to post whatever they want.  It's hard to imagine how those sites could possibly hire enough people to go through their content page by page day by day to ensure that there isn't a copyright violation that could get them IP Blocked until they remove it.  Especially since the law as written doesn't even require a court order.  Any big old corporation can just say "Hey, they're stealing my stuff" and BAM, your site is down until after you prove that isn't so.  Guilty until proven innocent, with corporate lawyers being the ones with their twitchy fingers on the trigger.

Now maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe the scenario I describe is overly pessimistic.  Maybe it will be intelligently applied and narrowly focused.  But given Congress' track record of late, are you willing to risk everything the internet is on the hope that they won't fuck it up?

Me neither.


* = Yes, I know, the new President gets inaugurated on January 20th, so even if Obama loses there will still be an Obama Administration on January 18th, 2013.  But you know what I mean.  Stop being so pedantic.

WEP '12, Day 10 - Lesser Known Candidates Forum

This was going to be another Old Republic log, but I found something better.  This morning, I caught the tail end of the Lesser Known Democratic Presidential Candidates Forum.   Looking for it online, I found a link to the other side of the coin, the Lesser Known Republican Presidential Candidates Forum.  The latter is interesting too, considering that it has a guy whose solution to everything is to "contact orb soul spirit Jesus with Braingate."

But perhaps as one might expect, Republican fringers aren't as wacky as the Democratic ones.  In particular, the Democratic half includes an appearance by Vermin Supreme.  His solutions to the Zombie Apocalypse sounds pretty good to me, but the highlight of it was watching "Mr. Supreme," as the moderator called him, glitter-bomb Anti-Abortion crusader Randall Terry because Jesus told Vermin Supreme to turn Terry gay.  That's near the end of the Democratic video if you'd like to see that play out.

The thing about it is that by opening the forum to anyone who managed to get on the ballot but who hasn't been invited to any of the "real" debates, they pretty much neuter the ability of any of these guys to be taken seriously.  Republican John Davis, for example, who really doesn't say anything too different than, say, Michele Bachman or Rick Santorum, still gets tarred with the same wacky brush because he's sitting two seats away from "orb soul spirit Jesus" guy and next to "9/11 drone planes and tower rigged to blow" conspiracy guy.

It's interesting to me how many of these guys are single-issue.  Beside the aforementioned "orb soul spirit Jesus" and 9/11 Conspiracy guys, there was "attack Iran" guy and "hunt down the illegal immigrants" guy, and a 38 year old who's a Tea Party favorite on the Republican side.  The Democrats had a guy focused on Thorium nuclear reactors as a way to solve the oil crisis, a couple of highly religious guys, the anti-abortion guy, and of course, Vermin Supreme who isn't so much a single issue guy so much as an issue all to himself.

There are the occasional good points and even moments of near statesmanship, such as the guy in the Republican forum who said that he thought that the President had done has he'd thought was best but that his efforts simply hadn't worked.  But as reasonable as he sounds, it's hard to take the whole thing seriously when it's mixed in with a guy calling to "contact Jesus" for guidance.  And it's even worse on the Democratic side when you're sitting on the same podium with a guy in robes with a boot on his head, and, as it turns out, a handful of glitter in his pocket.

WEP '12, Day 7 - The Republican Primaries

And so, the inevitable politics post.

Has there ever been a less enthusiastic body politic than the current Republican electorate?  While united in their desire to replace President Obama, about the only thing else Republicans in the field seem to be able to agree on is how much they don't like the current crop of candidates.

Like kids on a Ferris Wheel, each of the prospective candidates has ridden to the top, then spun back down again.  First Bachman, then Perry, then Cain, then Gingrich, then Paul, and now Santorum.  The only exceptions seeming to be Romney who is the center of the wheel that the others rise and fall around, and Huntsman, who as a moderate in a party that no longer believes in moderation, never had a chance in the first place.

It seems like it will be Romney.  He "won" Iowa, though there's some debate about that.  He's going to run away with it in New Hampshire.  That will likely scrape off Huntsman.  He's ahead in South Carolina, where a significant Romney victory will probably do in Perry.  Paul always hangs in until the end, and Gingrich, who's been running with almost no money anyway since his campaigns' early defections in the beginning of the year, might stick around just to take shots at Mitt, whom he blames for his collapse in Iowa.  I'm guessing that unless Santorum does remarkably well in South Carolina, he'll kack it after a defeat in Florida, but there's room for error there yet.

And so, it'll be Romney.  Whom no one really likes.  The reason that no one's enthused about Romney is because no one knows who he really is or what he really believes in.  The Massachusetts Health Care bill Romney signed as Governor of Massachusetts is similar in most ways to the "ObamaCare" that Mitt swears is destroying the country.  Shockingly enough, when he was Governor of a left-leaning state he was willing to tolerate all those sticky social issues like Abortion and gay Marriage that he now, as he panders to a right leaning body politic, he says he abhors.  And so on, and so forth.

In short, one gets the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that Mitt will say whatever you want to hear just as long as he gets to be the guy to redecorate the Oval Office.  And indeed, maybe that very chameleon like ability of his to try to be all things to all people will let him beat President Obama in November.

But that doesn't mean that we'll have any idea what kind of a President we're going to get.