The Butt Ugly Weblog

An interesting, while not ground-breaking or particularly deep book about is "Death of Common Sense" (Philip K. Howard).

The title pretty much sums it up.

I do agree that drawing up laws that give the powers that be more power to excercise their power without any outside control, is a very bad idea and against the idea of representational democracy. Unless you happen to be in power and prefer to stay there for a long time :)

This issue is an old and common one, dating back at least to the Roman empire:

"Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -Juvenal (Who guards these guardsmen?)

The problem is becoming ever so acute, as the free press is not fulfilling their position as the guardsmen of the powerful. They are only interested in protecting the IP rights of the corporation they belong to and making as much profit as possible (without angering those in power, which is esp. true for the USA - if you study the Fox network situation).

Who will then watch those with power?

Blog writers?

Single dissidents?

I think the only good thing about this is that stupid laws end up being ignored by 90% of the people, in which case they become pretty worthless anyway.

Unfortunately they can still be used against unfavorable persons when they are in the way of those with power.

But there are examples of civil courage, where stupid laws have been rendered utterly untenable by common people:

If a person is convicted of a silly offence (like copying an original cd he/she owns), only 10 000 others need to step up and "confess" the same crime.

After this, police will be up in their ears with work and the whole system suffocates.

-> things will be fixed.

But it takes interest in common affairs for this to happen.

I'm afraid people will only care, if they themselves end up being prosecuted or asked for compensation of imaginary damages.

--vasra, 12-Oct-2005

I guess the US law would work just fine, if there weren't opportunists that were ready to take advantage of it. Or people who think they know better than anyone else how things should be: what is proper, what is not. The law is stupid in many countries - but it is really just letters on a paper. It ceases to be stupid and becomes a danger when people try to exploit it - either for their own personal gain or for some higher ideal they believe should be imposed on everyone.

Someone mentioned that the biggest difference between China and USA is not communism or capitalism, but that China is run by engineers and USA by lawyers. Could be true.

--JanneJalkanen, 12-Oct-2005