Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.
US voters are impotent. Millions are about to be kicked off Medicare and Medicaid because of the signature of a man who repeatedly pledged over and over again that he would not ever cut them. Politics has become a metagame of tribal signaling with only a tenuous connection to actual policy.
Voters are ignorant, not impotent.
They just don't care enough to stay informed with their other life responsibilities and/or pleasures. The dangers of slow strangulation in the form of bills like Republicare is something they simply don't care enough to track. It'll be fully felt around 2021-2022 and by the time people realize its a problem the Republicans will have control of the government for 6-8 years.
If people genuinely cared the prescription is still rather simple:
A) Organize voting blocs to end careers on the issue of gerrymandering to prevent statehouse control == Congress control.
B) Organize voting blocs to end the careers of anyone who lowers services below Obama-era levels.
C) Organize voting blocs to end the careers of anyone who violates Constitutional liberties.
I don't think reasonable people really want people in power who are willing to do those things, they just don't care enough to do anything about it.
Americans are the test bed for modern media and political manipulation strategies. What you guys invented are being exported around the world.
Stop putting your political compatriots down, and please read your political history with some empathy.
Post the cold war, the triumph of rationalism seemed to be entirely in reach. "religion is the opiate of the masses" was a common enough refrain, and we seemed to be on the verge of beating out all sorts of old superstitions and ideologies.
And then came the combination of mass media, evangelicism, and politics.
Over time people saw that the media allowed religious folk to reach out to target markets which were hitherto blocked from their reach, by the structural systems, checks and balances imposed by the strictures inherited from the Enlightenment.
With the revelations pouring in from psychology, and the significant improvements in advertising and marketing techniques, it became possible to target, poll, and build markets.
Startups use these tools today, and all the time. Theres no reason that the psychology for marketing an app should somehow prevent the marketing of a regressive, progressive, or authoritarian idea.
Details aside - the creation of that system worked as a proof of concept.
Now people around the world realized that with a tv station, and the right kind of messaging, you too could beat back science and facts. You just needed to work on the right message.
Of course there were road blocks, but eventually America was able to create a strong conservative movement, and finally Fox news. "a place for the persecuted majority".
You can trace all your problems to this arrow, this realization that you could mass produce emotional agreement, curtail information, using TV and now social media.
Look at who's on the ticket. Look at their record. Look at their campaign funding. If you can convince yourself that voters have any real choice, then I admire your optimism.
At the end of the day, grass roots change is possible if people are willing. The problem is, they just aren't right now because things seem to be "OK" and so they care more about tribal signaling.
If I genuinely thought it was hopeless, I'd seriously consider abandoning the US and living out my life elsewhere.
Still the sci hub proxy is indeed a single point of failure, but people could mirror the already stored part. I'd do it if I had a team.
I think the single point of failure issue can be easily remedied if people could easily back specific parts of libgen/scihub.
http://libgen.io/repository_torrent/ http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/
Libgen offers torrent and usenet downloads.
The best way to help is by joining https://genofond.org/viewtopic.php?p=9000/ and working on mirrors, software and all kinds of related projects. Donations are great, but decentralization can't happen if no new members are joining the librarian community.
See "14. How do I upload papers to the Scientific Article section? Is it possible at all?" on how to upload articles you downloaded via scihub to libgen.
See https://security.googleblog.com/2016/10/distrusting-wosign-a...
This ruling actually makes me realize that SciHub is a single point of failure, and if it gets closed, there won't be anything else to replace it. Unlike the thousands of torrents and streaming sites for movies and TV shows, research paper sites aren't something that the average Internet users care about.