As a wise man pointed out on HN the last time around, we haven't won when this law fails to pass. We've only won a law explicitly stating the opposite passes.
It works in our countries too. Try to pass a terrible bill. Get rejected. Try again. Rejected. Again. Again. Again. They only have to get it through once, since laws are very rarely removed, only added.
Defeatism adds to the problem and it doesn't bring solutions. If we're already accepting that idiotic laws will pass, obviously they will. Let's call this what it is: a myopic and totalitarian law created by misinformed and clueless politicians. Let's fight it tooth and nail until we bury it.
Exactly. And given the relative difficulty of undoing bad legislation versus stopping it from passing (and even stopping it often takes a huge effort), whoever can afford the most persistence wins, by just waiting for the other side to slip up once.
If a law can be so easily circumvented, does not provide an alternate solution and fails to effect any change at all, then it's a failed law and a bad law, regardless of good intentions.
that's exactly the plan. Try many times, and as long as it passes once, it can't be removed forever because no politicians will ever touch it. That's why the current system of law-making is completely gamed against citizens.
I like your optimism, but I've failed to witness a law that has never been twisted into some gross contorted display of what it was normally used for at least once.
It's lamentably common to pass laws that force the enforcement of previous more general laws, so please don't take the passing of a law as an admission or attestation that what the new law forbids was previously legal. In the U.S. this is going to be even more common, since post-Bork judicial idiocy has ex-facto sidelined much previous law; but the law is still there, and could still be enforced. It just isn't being enforced. Since judges can't easily be replaced, passing "repeater" laws that rule out bizarre interpretations of previous law is going to happen.
Alas, enough of them pass with serious enough consequences that we do have to watch for and actively oppose them. Prime example is NY's recent passage of the "SAFE Act".
I am very pessimistic, because it seems governments just won't stop trying to pass such laws
And by definition, they have deeper pockets than us -- they can afford to push it farther than we can, because in the end, they control the guys with the guns who can come and take everything away from us.
A few years back I was involved in a local controversy. The local authorities made three tries to pass a referendum, being rejected each time. Finally, on the fourth try, they were victorious. There was no difference between what was proposed in #3 and #4, except:
1. They changed voting hours, so that polls were only open in the afternoon; and
2. They sent postcards to the entire town (paid for by us, of course) containing information that was objectively false. [1]
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[1] Not relevant to this discussion, but the referendum was for school construction. The proposal contained a bunch of frills such as expanding the cafeteria. The false mailing I mentioned explicitly stated that the proposal was for classroom space only, which was patently false. But the mailing was timed to arrive the afternoon before the vote, when it was too late to do anything about it. And they knew we couldn't afford a lawyer, and the amount that could be done ex post facto was limited anyway. No one ever held them to account.
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