Rabbits, Blinkity

On the 1 in 1,000,000 change that someone reads this and hasn't managed to hear about SOPA, or isn't sure about it, or something, let me just urge you to look it up and consider it carefully. This is pretty bad stuff, even by post-9/11 standards. The really amazing thing, is how little our congresspeople seem to know about how the internet even works. Will this stop piracy? No. It won't even bother it a little bit. Will it seriously annoy legitimate content producers? You bet.

Could it potentially be used to censor anti-government, anti-corporate, or other forms of free speech? Absolutely. Will it? Probably not immediately to a great extent, and hopefully it would be stopped in court if it became too extreme, but in the future, well, who knows.

It's clearly wrong, clearly pointless, and possibly dangerous, which is why it needs to be stopped. Contact your congresscritters and senatecritters now.

This is an important thing to note:

I also am concerned about the 99 percent slogan, which lumps together people in households that take in $593,000 a year or less. Perhaps the guy earning $500,000 a year isn't doing as well as before, but I question how much he has in common with a woman who has spent her adult life among the working poor. A college graduate who can't find a job is in a different position than a convicted felon battling a drug addiction who can't find steady employment. Someone losing his $300,000 home is not the same as someone losing her $50,000 home.
-- Suzie @ Echide of the Snakes

I (sort of) fall into the 'college graduate' group - I have no idea if I would have much trouble finding a job (probably not, my field is pretty safe), but even if I did, I'd still have the option of doing what I'm doing now. Thanks to the obscene amount of knowledge, experience and education (much of it centered around working the upper-class system) that goes in to graduating from college, you just can't compare groups that easily. Sorry.

So here's something to think about for potential supporters (Via autostraddle). If Occupy Wall Street accomplishes absolute nothing besides shaking up the worldviews of a bunch of privileged-to-various-degrees people, it will still accomplish something very, very worthwhile.
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The protesters on wall street have a problem. The rest of us don't know what they want, which means they don't know either. And this means they won't get anything done. The curse of true democracy, if you will.

That this is the case was made quite clear by this NPR story, but there were signs of it before. For instance, look at this list of "one demands". There are two real demands in there:

• Ending capital punishment
• Ending American imperialism (By this, I assume they mean a large scale troop withdrawal)

But I don't think that these are really the focus of the protest. The rest are either too vague ("Ending the modern gilded age"), impossible ("Ending war"), or such that nobody can actually agree on how to accomplish ("Ending joblessness", most of the rest). The official declaration is equally problematic. It's patterned after the Declaration of Independence, including a list of grievances, most of which are clearly true. But one thing is missing. The Declaration of Independence contained this:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, .... solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States...

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