Comment by tptacek
2 months ago
Kurt posted this to troll me. Just know my audience here was, mostly, non-technical people involved in politics in my local Chicagoland municipality.
Permit me a PSA about local politics: engaging in national politics is bleak and dispiriting, like being a gnat bouncing off the glass plate window of a skyscraper. Local politics is, by contrast, extremely responsive. I've gotten things done --- including a law passed --- in my spare time and at practically no expense (drastically unlike national politics).
An amazing thing about local politics, at least in a lot of places, is that they revolve around message boards. The boards won't be in places you want to be (in particular: a lot of them are Facebook Groups) and you just have to suck it up. But if you enjoy participating in a community like HN, you can participate in politics, too, and message-board your way towards making things happen.
> Local politics is, by contrast, extremely responsive. I've gotten things done --- including a law passed
You live in a country where local governments have the power to make laws… in a lot of other countries they don’t - or, to be more precise, their lawmaking power is extremely limited.
Actually, even in the US, that’s often true too - only local governments with “home rule” can enact laws on any topic (provided it doesn’t contradict state or federal law), those without it can only enact laws on specific topics authorised by the state legislature. Some states grant home rule to all counties and municipalities, others none, others to some but not others (e.g. in Texas a municipality can give itself home rule powers, with approval of its voters, but only once it reaches a population of 5000).
Even state legislators are, by their nature, pretty much locally driven given the relatively small size of their constituencies and thus the margin of victory.
Voters significantly underestimate their power even up to the House level; AOC’s first campaign was very scrappy and resulted in a bartender unseating the chair of the Congressional Democrat Caucus and likely successor to Nancy Pelosi, and that was the first campaign in which anyone bothered to primary him.
Would you care to elaborate which law you helped to pass?
Also, can you link to some good resources for someone who wants to get off the sidelines and get more involved in Chicago politics, whether the resources are on FB or elsewhere? I've previously tried Googling for some but with very limited success.
Thanks.
We're the first municipality in Illinois to draft and adopt an instance of ACLU's CCOPS model legislation, which requires board approval at a recorded public board meeting before any agency (most especially our police force) can adopt any form of surveillance technology, given a broad (ACLU-supplied) definition of "surveillance". Previous to that, our police force could acquire arbitrary surveillance products so long as they kept under a discretionary budget threshold; they used that latitude to acquire a pilot deployment of Flock ALPR cameras, and CCOPS was a response to that.
My real goal is zoning.
In Chicago itself, I have less clarity, but am optimistic that somewhere on Facebook is a message board where the staff at your alderman's office reads posts, and the most politically engaged people in your neighborhood argue with each other. That's your starting point (and maybe your ending point). Just go, listen, and chime in with high-effort comments. If you're used to clearing the bar for HN comments, you're way past the threshold of coding like a super-thoughtful person in local politics.
God speed to you sir! What is your goal wrt zoning?
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead
Like a hedge fund? Or are we including those committed to violence?
Probably not the intent of the attributed author [0] but literally speaking the statement doesn't specific "ethical" or "peaceful", no.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/12/change-world/
It's about that it's a small-dedicated group that brings change and not government or private institution. If it's still hard to grasp, then think about how national movements started.
Would would you ever exclude ones committed to violence? Violence consistently works.
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Snipers, patient 0's, drunk drivers...
>The boards won't be in places you want to be (in particular: a lot of them are Facebook Groups) and you just have to suck it up. But if you enjoy participating in a community like HN, you can participate in politics, too, and message-board your way towards making things happen.
How do you figure out where to go?
The way you'd expect: I bumbled through a bunch of different Facebook Groups, starting with the one simply labeled for my neighborhood, and followed cross-posts. Eventually I found the two really important ones in my area (one is an organizing group for local progressives --- I live in a very blue muni, and the other is the main high-signal political group for the area, in which all the village electeds participate).
> (drastically unlike national politics)
Man, I remember your & Maciej's effort to get FIDO keys to the campaign staffers, and how depressing that was
Aaaaaaa! I need to finish my post! :(