Lamar Smith trying to quietly revive SOPA
I'll all for punishing politicians that do stupid things. I believe the best punishment is booting them out during their primaries, but let's not split hairs.<p>And I'm hell on wheels about personal freedoms and liberty. We live in a terrible security state. We need to stand up and take action.<p>But at times I start feeling like I'm having my chain yanked -- that in my obedience to and love of freedom, other people use my passion as a way to manipulate me. BoingBoing is stepping over the line between simply trying to inform me and actively trying to manipulate me. Perhaps they're doing that for good reasons instead of ratings. I don't mean to smear them in any way. I just think you can tell me Congressman X is working on Bill Y without making it sound like Nazis building death camps in downtown Washington, DC. Sounds like a modern witch hunt. Jiminy Cricket, folks, politicians come up with ideas for bills all of the time. It's a healthy thing to have a Congress with all kinds of diverse personalities and opinions proposing all kinds of things. We don't need to start chasing them down the street with torches and pitchforks.<p>If he starts getting co-signers? If the bill looks likely to move out of committee? Much different story.<p>It's starting to feel more like "Lamar Smith is the devil! Let's all attack!" and less like "A bill was introduced that could dramatically change internet freedoms...."<p>I don't like that. People do things I disagree with all of the time. That does not make them my enemy. We are not all 15-year-olds and having to determine which person is part of the cool group or not. We do not have to make people into our enemies who just have a different opinion than we do, even if that opinion is heinous.<p>Not only is most of this material lifted, it doesn't cross my personal threshold as being important. Certainly not as important as the cell phone carriers saying they're getting over a million requests from law enforcement for tracking/surveillance data (A follow-up on that story would have been great). There's a great deal of hand-waving and vitriol here and very little reporting or providing unique value. Simply, it's lazy and manipulative.<p>This is the second time this week a BoingBoing story has hit the front of HN and it's been, well, sub-optimal. Here's hoping their luck changes.<p>ADD: And, if other commenters here are to believed, the freaking story isn't even accurate. Geesh.