everydayjonhill:

Last night I went to the Community Town Meeting with Congressman Howard Berman. Congressman Berman is the co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act. These are my observations of the night.

1. Old white people love community meetings. If you ever wonder why minorities’ and the youth’s issues get…

Click through and read Jon’s thing. He sums up the meeting extremely well.

Part of me enjoyed the town hall experience, and was pretty excited to see actual real life rabble-rousing. The larger part of me is just more hopeless about politics, and how much pull that people with actual knowledge on these issues really have.

Just like on cable news, everything in the meeting dissolved into easy talking points like “Artists shouldn’t have their content stolen!!!! (cheer)”, “keep your damn pirate hands off my pension!! (cheer)” and “You can’t just go to the store and steal DVDs!!! (cheer)”. These people don’t understand that the SOPA bill is attacking a fly with a sledgehammer, and they don’t care. All they know think is that the bill will stop evil pirates, spyware vendors, counterfeit prescription drugs, and kiddie porn pushers.

Watching political conversations happen in a venue outside of our own little twitter/tumblr/reddit echo-chambers is really eye opening, and makes the success of crazy shit like NDAA, SOPA and anti-LGBT policies make perfect sense. Informed people are a huge minority, and circlejerking each other with reblogs, upvotes and online petitions is getting us zero traction where it actually counts. There are a lof of voters out there with trains of thought that stop with “gays are the devil”, “we need to stop all the terrorism”, and “this will end piracy for good”. Those are the people that representatives like Berman are working for. They don’t give two shits about well-informed.

If everybody tweeting about #SOPASUCKS, spreading demandprogress petitions or refreshing /r/politics took the time to go outside visit events like this town hall, we might actually get somewhere.