Another response by me to another essay that attempts to discredit SOPA opponents as being misinformed:
I think this essay does a good job illustrating the "inside the beltway" attitudes that are damaging democracy in America.
Millions of people stood up to oppose SOPA. These people have a historically unprecedented level of access to the full text of the legislation and reams of detailed analysis. In a democracy, the government is responsible to the people and has a responsibility to understand and respect their views and interests.
Instead, SOPA proponents have engaged this month in a campaign of editorial writing in numerous publications with the intent of discrediting SOPA opponents as "misinformed" through shallow, transparent "straw man" arguments. The intent is to convince policy makers to ignore what just happened and proceed with the creation of an infrastructure in the Internet for blacklisting foreign websites, a step the protestors understood very well and communicated very clearly that they do not approve of.
Consider this author's attitude about ACTA which he says "was successfully negotiated over several years." The primary objection to ACTA is that it was negotiated for years IN SECRET. The American people were NOT ALLOWED TO READ what our government was negotiating on our behalf. Once, the Whitehouse disingenuously cited "national security" as a reason for preventing the public from reading the text of this copyright treaty. And, now that the treaty has been negotiated, the Whitehouse seeks to implement it without the approval of Congress.
This is fundamentally anti-democratic. The influence of money and lobbying in Washington has reduced our country to a point where the people in Washington who make the rules no longer believe that they are accountable to the public at large. They don't believe that the people need to be able to read the laws that are being negotiated. When people do read those laws and express disagreement they are just dismissed as "misinformed" and the process moves forward.
If SOPA advocates wanted a reasonable dialog, they could start by demonstrating that they understand the legitimate reasons why millions of people oppose SOPA, rather than simply dismissing them all as being misinformed. Anything less is just a tactic, and one that underlines some fundamental cultural and institutional problems in Washington that go far beyond the scope of this particular debate.
