Poor analogy. Passing a law is a 3 step process. Voting in the house was scheduled for Jan 24th. If it passed then, it would have meant voting in the Sentate. Not a law, or a burning house in your example. If the house (or senate) is controlled by the opposite party of the president they will sometimes pass bills just to make the president veto them for use in campaigns later.
You're right, a group of websites just did something impressive. But do you think all 124 million people really understood that law? How do you know your personal motives align with those websites? Laws are terribly complicated... look at the new healthcare bill. We have no idea how that will play out, and it's making companies all over the country hoard their cash while they wait and see. Now we have Occupy protests.
You're right again. It makes our country great.... but it also assumes we know what we want. This was an easy one. SOPA sucked. What about something tough, like education or healthcare? Do you want teachers to be paid more for performing well? Sounds obvious, right? That comes with a performance eval, which can lead to firing bad teachers. The unions will not stand for that, and they have deep pockets at campaign time.
Nothing is cut and dry.
<I>Au contraire.</I> Poor observation.
My analogy would have been erroneous if its intent was to demonstrate how the process of one is parallel to the other. But it wasn't.
The purpose of the analogy was to showcase how imminent danger to something has been (directly or indirectly) made known to someone, and to suggest that the matter is of great importance, and therefore action is something which must be taken with haste. Clearly, in my analogy, the "man" was not asking for votes to burn the house down.
We also don't know <i>why</i> the man wants to burn the house down, something that shows distinct disparity with the analogous reality--but still doesn't diminish its urgency--, as unlike the very reality, due to our political structure, we <i>do</i> know why this piece of legislation wants to be passed. Which leads me to the heart of the reason for the blackouts/protests:
We know what it entails for our future, as we've seen/read
worse.
It's not that the Internet is suddenly up in arms just because... its because we know that the legislation could potentially blur the line between "law" and "corporate interest." You know, more than it already has. The legislation threatens the freedom of an open medium; it is clearly a (purposely written) broad legislation, one which its supposed reason of being is clear, but its applications and consequent effects are inconspicuous to say the very, very least.
We are not talking politics, or how the political framework works (or how much do regular joes know about it), but rather me challenging you, on why do you feel there's supposedly a "right" time to exercise democratic debate? Why should we wait until it reaches the president's desk? We shouldn't, because there's no "right" time to act when there's imminent danger. (In this context, of course.)
People have seen the MPAA and RIAA unjustly suing, and demanding ridiculous amount of money from whoever is in their way for years. From 12-year old girls, to families even without computers. SOPA/PIPA was simply a more "formal", broad way to do it. People didn't just react to it because it had a chance of passing, but because it all <i>had</i> to be stopped.
Alternatively, because the Internet was originally developed in the United States with federal money, the US government enjoys disproportionate influence over Internet governance. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is based in the United States, as are the majority of the DNS root servers and the registries for popular top-level domains like “.com” and “.org.” The US government passing such legislation could have greatly compromised the open medium that the Internet is, and all negative effects would have undoubtedly fell upon those countries that follow us. In other words, it would have spread like a virus.
If you look close, the conversation is not so much asking that SOPA/PIPA be vetoed, but more that nothing like it should ever come up again. And they are listening.
