This will be my (hopefully) only politics-related post, because quite frankly I am about as anti-politics as anyone with half a brain can be. I am normally very apathetic to the whole process because you never choosing the best candidate for an office, you are choosing the least worst candidate or the "lesser of two evils." Republicans protect the interests of the super wealthy, while Democrats protects the interest of the slightly less wealthy. I fall into the "poor" category that neither serves. I am now 35 years old and it wasn't THAT long ago that I was so excited to start voting, then I realized how little I mattered in the grand scheme of things. But for now I will digress.
The point of this rant is that while I have not read the SOPA bill in full (probably like many of our representatives), I get the general gist of it. I think it's horrible, but I also think people's responses to it are just as non-productive. This is why I have decided to NOT black out my site today. Wikipedia going "black" for one day will just prove that we can get by without Wikipedia. I am not a fan of the site except for purely entertaining reading, but I hate the fact that many people see it as a worthy research site. Nevertheless, shutting down your site for even a day ONLY hurts your regular viewers. It won't make an impact on Congress, it will only punish those that already like your site.
Should the time ever come when my site is taken down because of some idiotic politicians bending over for the entertainment industry, then there will be plenty of time for a "black out day." For now, I suggest you take a look at the archives of some of your favorite blogs (including mine hopefully). All of us blog writers have put a lot of ourselves into the creation of our sites and I think a day of reflection will serve a better purpose. I have been and will be checking out some of my peers' work from the past few years today to improve myself as a writer, blog owner, and maybe even a person and ultimately this will serve a purpose unlike shutting my site down. I really hate talking politics and I hope this is the last time I will ever have to on this fun-loving, diversionary blog.
3 comments:
First, your post is in no way offensively political--at least not to me, just to give credit where it's due.
Second, just to make sure you understand the point of site blackouts, people are trying to raise awareness of the possibility of their site(s) being arbitrarily blocked or sued into oblivion thanks to unjust censorship on the pretense of supposed copyright infringement, completely ignoring such hilarious concepts as "free speech," "fair use" and "due process."
I'm not saying blacking out your site for a day will be helpful, and I'm personally not participating in that because it won't make a difference anyway, but I understand why anybody else is, because this is such a monumentally unconstitutional law destined to be abused and censor the Internet, everyone who values the web as it is at all should be doing what they can to prevent this clusterfuck.
An excellent example from one of my favorite non-card collecting blogs is here, http://mgoblog.com/content/stop-sopa, in which the author described how similar laws screwed over his blog and therefore his readers without any grounds for doing so and with little or no recourse. There is exactly zero to like about SOPA and PIPA and its authors and supports should be ashamed for being involved and forced to have THEIR freedoms arbitrarily removed.
/rant over
I'll have to agree with Dennis. It's more of a "let's draw attention to this" than thinking that blacking out my personal site would actually do anything. My readership numbers are fairly low, and 12 hours isn't going to kill me (I hope). I just found it more important to get people talking about it, if only for a day.
I hate politics, probably as much as you do, and I classify myself as lower income as well. There's not a single politician that is doing anything for me, or people in our income level. Who they ARE doing things for, which really burns my butt, are the lobbyists. They give them hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with insane bills like these, to serve their own interests. There's NOTHING in these bills for anyone other than huge media corporations.
They can come up with this garbage but they can't balance a budget? Talk about useless!
They also love to sneak this stuff in, just when people are focused on other things. The election cycle, the economy, wars, jobs, all of those are more important than some little internet bill, so they're hoping no one notices.
Sorry to ramble on. It's just that this will fundamentally ruin the internet, as a whole. I'm a nerd, so it's kind of an important issue for me. Where else will I get my funny cat pictures?
PS: Pictures of baseball cards would be copyrighted and owned by the company that made them. So, this would affect bloggers like us as well. Posting a card would violate Topps/UD/etc's copyright and/or the copyright of the team that owns the name and logo of their franchise. The MLB or a card company could get our sites blacklisted for simply showing their cards. Scary huh!
I think we should just get it over with and elect Jon Stewart as President of the World.
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