(no subject)

[edg]

I've been up since 3 AM. (It's now just a bit after 7, although it will probably end up being just a bit before 8 by the time I'm finished this.) I'm suddenly glad that I went to bed at 9; at least I got six hours in. The problem was that typically when I go to bed, I put on some kind of audio - mostly music, but lately it's been DVDs. Since I've been watching Farscape over the last few days, I figured I'd stick the next disc in and let it play while I was going to sleep.

Bad idea. Very bad idea. Why? Because the theme music is so gratingly aharmonic that it woke me up every time it played. I didn't twig to this until the third time through the disc, though (I woke up, saw that the playback had stopped, and restarted it). So at 3 AM - when the DVD ended for the third time, and the title menu came back in, where the music is inexplicably louder than during playback itself, I woke up, and couldn't go back to sleep. Thus, I've been up for four hours and loose change.

I really do hope that an inauspicious start like this only means that the day will get better as it progresses.

And now, a digression.

I've been seeing a lot of protest widgets lately. "Ban Gay Marriage, Take This Poll!" "Support Gay Marriage, Take This Poll!" "Save Angel, e-Sign This e-Petition!" And here's where I get to be flat-out honest: I'm really fucking sick of it.

Taking a poll isn't going to ban or save gay marriage.

Signing an e-petition isn't going to save Angel. (Hell, putting an ad in the Hollywood Reporter isn't going to save Angel. All that demonstrates is that someone, somewhere, has the wherewithal to spend $3250 on an ad, which is going to mean almost nothing to the producers who literally have to come up with one hundred times that much - if that little - every time a new episode airs. David Boreanaz alone makes $30,000 an episode.)

If you're going to support a movement, understand that it takes work. Signing an e-petition, filling out a poll, tossing a few bucks at the problem - these don't do anything. Anybody can rig any of these. (As I said before, it only takes one guy with $3250 to put an ad in the Hollywood Reporter, just as an example.) It's too easy.

There are two questions to be asked:

• What methods of supporting this cause are available to me?
  
• How far am I willing to go to support this cause?

If you want to support gay marriage, write a letter (hand-written if possible, hand-signed if not, and absolutely not a form letter that somebody else wrote) to the various members of Congress who support you. If you want to stop Angel from being cancelled, call the studio that produces it. If you live in the area, show up in person. All of these addresses and phone numbers are available to the public; it just takes a little looking. By all means, sign the petitions and take the polls - but that should be the least of your effort.

If you're not willing to take the time to do that, then ask yourself how much you really support your chosen cause, because you're not doing any favors taking it easy on yourself.

Comments

[unlovablehands.livejournal.com]

*applauds*

[colley.livejournal.com]

E-pititions don't do anything. Theres no way to verify that the people actually are different people and just not one guy doing it all. To my knowledge, there ISN'T an e-pitition for Angel, just the ad campaign and the letter/postcard writing campaigns.
Having been part of the movement to get Road Rovers back on there years ago, I can say that flooding the mail offices of a network does tend to get their attention more often than not. (Especially when said mail contains tennis balls with something about Road Rovers scribbled on it.)
Will it be successful? Probably not. Like you said, Angel is an expensive show. Doesn't mean people can't try though. And with Joss & Co. alrighty working up proposals to give to UPN (The first target of the letter campaign coincidently), you never know what'll happen.
*Shrug*

Re:

[unlovablehands.livejournal.com]

http://www.petitiononline.com/ai5d0162/petition.html

Re:

[colley.livejournal.com]

....
Well played.. Clerks. ¬_¬

Hmm.. looking it over, its not affiliated with the people organizing the letter and ad campaigns..
Meh.. Stupid E-petitions

[jackwalker.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know. It's not impossible for voting in an e-poll to have some effect, at least if some advocacy group is silly enough to set up an e-poll in the first place.

Look at what happened with the American Family Association's e-poll on gay marriage. The AFA apparently planned to run the poll and get results of 95% or higher opposing gay marriage - at which point they planned to take the results to Congress. Instead, they got less than 50% opposing, not least because word of the poll got out and a lot of people not in the AFA's core constituency voted. They abandoned their plan.

A small victory, perhaps, but a victory nonetheless.

Your point is well-taken, of course. Real results usually require real effort.

[angelofwinter.livejournal.com]

The latest season really does suck. I'm *trying* my best to ignore the stuff that irritates me, and accept that not all their episodes are going to be good-- but god, it's just crappy ep after crappy ep. I even have really low standards what with Buffy being off-air. It's official that this is the last season, and I already see evidence of how suddenly in mid-season, plot hooks started getting hyper-accelerated to account for the fact that they won't have another season to let these things slowly develop.

I've never, ever seen petitions accomplish anything. I've seen long long petitions for people who want this or that, and it never gets accomplished. It's like, they bring the petition to the person in power responsible for their unhappiness, and the person just knocks it off their desk and into the wastebasket without a second thought. I think petitions are only there so people have an outlet for their frustration and can delude themselves into thinking that changing something someone did to piss them off is as easy as just signing some list.

[vaultedthewall.livejournal.com]

Actually, the e-petition to save Angel was mentioned on a news report and WB said that there was a shadow of a chance they would be swayed by it if people really wanted it that bad, or somethin.

[edg.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'm not sure whether to respond with:

- "Well, good for them. If WB's going to take that into account, more power to 'em. My point still stands generally, though."

or

- "Okay, someone at WB doesn't know how easy it is to rig e-petitions."

In either event, thanks for pointing this out.