Dark Christianity
dark_christian
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May 2008
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Project PunditTree - a call for help

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY [info]eiredrake) It should be noted first that I am posting this notice with the express permission of [info]sunfell  . Please do not post off topic adverts or 'calls to action' to the forum without asking first as they will be deleted.




A couple of months ago, I had a realization: The biggest and most pressing issue in America today is the fact that people are woefully under informed and misinformed as to what our government is doing at all levels. This leads us to a condition where the juggernaut of bureaucracy seems so insurmountable and intractable that the large majority of people have become apathetic as a coping mechanism. The only people that actually appear to be paying attention are the extremists on both sides of the political aisle the entities seeking to manipulate the system for profit and power. There are small groups of sensible people ( we in dark_christian, for example ) who want to fight this ongoing desertification of the once verdant plains of our democracy but lack the time and resources to pursue large scale changes.

Unfortunately for us, this condition has been prevalent for years and is slowly destroying our nation from within. Voter ignorance and apathy as well as Machiavellian maneuvers by our representatives have brought us to a crossroads. Not just on the issue of potential theocracy or even our many wars, but on many issues that affect all of us even to the point of the continued survival of our species. We have oil companies writing environmental policy. Religious extremists are using public tax dollars to fund their bids to undermine the establishment clause. Politicians are being appointed to lead government agencies because they tow the party line and not because they are qualified.

The net result of this is that the government that was created to protect and serve the interests of the people of this nation no longer does so. Worse, this corruption has become the norm in the halls of power and politicians routinely obfuscate their words and actions to prevent us from making intelligent, informed decisions about the direction our government has taken. Media outlets, some more obvious than others, are guilty of aiding this transition and have become propaganda wings for an increasingly dissociated government. This is true irrespective of party lines or political ideologies. While not everyone may be crooked, it has become increasingly difficult for the average citizen to have a hand in his own government as a consequence because tracking through this web of deceit, lies and distraction borders on a full time job.

Would you knowingly support a law that would allow the Federal government to enter your house without a warrant while you were out, rifle through your things and take anything they wanted without informing you? Or arrest you in the middle of the night for indefinite detention as an 'unlawful enemy combatant' based on some random person's word or some petty bureaucrat's decision? Would you support someone who voted AYE to this law without ever actually reading it? No, of course you wouldn't. But that is precisely what has been occurring.

During the 107th Congress, the PATRIOT Act was first introduced. The only person in the senate that voted NAY on the bill was Feingold (D-WI). There were 66 total NAYS in the House on the same Bill out of 432 potential votes. All of my representatives voted AYE on that bill even though it allows the Bush administration to flagrantly violate our rights. So the question is, did they vote on it without reading (incompetence) as many have claimed or did they read it and know what it could be used for and vote AYE anyway? We may never know the answer to this question, but wouldn't it be useful to be able to, at a moments notice, find out who (running in your district) supported that bill or was against it?

Navigating the online realms to find out what even a single law or bill contains, out of the hundreds produced every congressional session, is a frustrating and often futile effort. For every well written article or documented fact you may well find ten poorly written opinions and conspiracy theories. Then there are the bills themselves - even in well written legislation, the legalese the document is written in can conceal the extra unrelated pork tucked inside. Did you know, for example, that tucked into a 2005 revision of the Patriot Act is a ban preventing you from buying more than 9 grams of pseudoephedrine sulphate, a common antihistamine in a month? The amendment was added during a renewal of the act, in the effort to prevent people from using the drug to create crystal meth. While there is some debate on the utility of this provision, what precisely does this ban have to do with fighting terrorists?

How is the average person supposed to know if his rights are being violated when unrelated provisions such as the pseudoephedrine ban can be tucked into a bill that has absolutely nothing to do with it? How is he supposed to decide which politicians will best serve his interests? Surely their campaign promises and political advertisements aren't our only method for choosing who will run this country for us.

The only way to fight lies is with truth. The only way to fight deceit is with knowledge. The only way to fight obfuscation is with information. With the next election cycle rapidly approaching and our executive as well as legislative branches up for grabs yet again it is all that much more imperative that the American citizenry get the information they need without any sort of party or ideological spin. What our forefathers created so many years ago is not bad. It's just that for the last two hundred or so years a lot of mediocre, misguided, evil, and outright corrupt people have been perfecting ways to manipulate the system for their own benefit.

The idea then hit me. The large majority of this information is publicly available, it is just difficult to locate and translate into something useful. Does the average person have the time in their busy day of work and home life to research every Presidential candidate to pick the best one? Or to pick the best people to represent them in the House or Senate? What about at the state and local level. I would imagine that for most of us who are not full time activists, lobbyists or pundits the answer is no.

I envision a place to collect and link to every bit of data we can on the state of the nation: Bills, laws, resolutions, politicians, pundits, lobbyists and all of the issues they do not wish us to know about or act upon. Yes, we can Google a Law we hear about in an article. But Google isn't going to tell us what that law means to us. Google isn't going to let us know that a provision in a law could be used to confiscate your property or send you off for torture in the middle of the night. Search engines don't really sift through the dross either - how many conspiracy theories do you need to see before you can find something useful?

What I want to create is a place where people can go and get information from an uninvolved nonpartisan source they can (hopefully) come to trust and make intelligent decisions based on that information to positively effect America. It will be part blog, part encyclopedia, part web magazine, part bulletin board and part personal assistant. Above all, the format and interface must be easy to use. Thus far I've been using my own LJ as a platform to let people know what our representatives have been up to, but it's reach, effect and capabilities have thus far been limited. I think with a little drive and work what I propose could be a great resource not only to fight the theocratic takeover of our government but to help in correcting the poison that has taken up residence in the soul of our nation.

You could, for example, login in the morning and see what bills are coming up for a vote today and in the near future and what bills just became law. Read the text of the bill, get some insight into what it might mean for you, the nation and the world. You can see precisely who voted for and against the bill and their previous voting records. You can click on an icon and have an update sent to you via email, text message, IM or what have you any time someone changes the bill or it gets voted on. You can also click on another icon and instantly send an email to your elected representatives either for or against the bill either using a form letter or by writing one of your own. I have a lot of other ideas, but I lack the manpower to put them into place.

What I need is volunteers to help get the place going. Artists, writers, journalists, editors, researchers, PHP coders and anyone else who wants to help. I don't want this site to be biased so I need opinions from all parts of the spectrum, but I'm more interested in facts. Writing everything myself would be an impossible task given the amount of data to go through. Eventually I will open the site up to the public and allow anyone (with an editor and fact checking) to submit content but to start I will need a small pool of contributors. Once there is a base, we can start getting the word out and attract users. I have a plan for that as well.

What I have in mind would ultimately be a useful too for those of us who are sick to death of the way our nation has devolved over the last ten years and want to be able to make informed decisions and take swift actions. I can't count how many times I have found out about a bill and sent off a letter to my Congressperson only to have it arrive after a vote has already taken place. Our representatives need to know and understand that we will no longer tolerate their shenanigans and that we, the people who put them into office and who pay their salaries, are watching.


If you are interested in helping out with Project PunditTree you can reply here, or contact me directly at eiredi at hotmail dot com.


Thank you very much for your attention.

Eiredrake

Edit: It should be noted, I think, that I am not looking for a huge commitment in time or effort nor am I looking for full time journalists or coders. It would be unfair to expect people to suddenly give me that much time without some sort of compensation. But rather I am looking for concerned citizens to contribute articles on their own maybe once a month. If I get ten such people to contribute one article a month, by th time my September 'go live' date rolls around, that'd be 50 articles and more than enough to start up. This isn't even including the articles that I will be writing myself and those that RL friends of mine that I have recruited will write. So even if you can only contribute a little time here and there you can still make a difference. I like the idea of this being a grass roots project where everyone contributes a little to achieve something major. Every little bit helps!

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