The new Blacklist.

Paul Tassi talks about the SOPA bill and the sweeping effects it will have.

Why is this? Am I a pirate, who feeds my users stolen content every day and deserves to be slain by a new law like this? Not at all, and this is the fundamental problem with SOPA and other prospective laws like it (Protect IP most recently). . . . The fine print of the law says sites that distribute copyrighted content could be subject to summary censorship, ie Torrent sites and the like. But it also encompasses any sites that LINK to copyrighted content, which is the bomb that blows up any semblance of sense this bill might have had. . . . Watching the House debate this bill yesterday was beyond pathetic. These representatives, if they deserve to be called that, have no idea the amount of power they’re giving the entertainment industry.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

Wow, politicians regulating something they have no idea about that will be intrusive and liberty destroying. How... familiar.

Also from Prof Reynolds, Eris S Raymond has similar thoughts on the familiarity.

It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.

But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…

Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?

It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.

Rice-bowls, cannibal pots, and cell phone bans. Well maybe some people will realize that using the power of the state to "make people better" is nothing more than a fantasy covering a bloody nightmare.

Maybe.

But I'm not being too hopeful. No matter what happens, it looks like we'll be stuck with this crap.

Here's Tam showing the few reversals and wins. Asside from the CCW revolution (which is big) the rest of the wins can be counted on one hand.