Yeah, I hate to be that guy, but the 'petition to end all petitions' comes to mind. Particularly the bits about 'politically safe non-answers' and 'channeling public activism into a cul-de-sac'.
It argues that the reason for petitions to exist is the possibility to open a dialog to the people who are concerned about certain topics (because the petition website gets your email adress), and that in the time of fractioning news consumption it is a useful way to keep communicating, whatever that means.
edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland?
Maybe I'm just cynical (okay, I'm probably just cynical), but that looks like a slightly more positive spin on essentially the same idea: a whole lot of 'communicating' and no action.
> edit: Ok, why the heck do they call their page Swampland?
Probably because it's about politics, and according to popular myth, DC was built on a swamp.
Its worth noting that Barack Obama, even before he was President, was very big on encouraging people to reject the "big hero to rescue us" model and take action to make change themselves.
If you recognize that people who want change have been writingindividually to the White House to get it for generations, redirecting some of that mostly-invisible-to-others mechanism of feedback (which, because of the volume, is pretty much guaranteed to generally produce generic responses and little action) to a mechanism where requests and the responses can be highly visible and serve as vehicle for groups to raise interest and propel a conversation that then extends beyond the WH petition forum, it has some value.
If you look at the response from the WH as the end of the process that the petition starts, sure, its not particularly useful. But that's, I think, misunderstanding the point rather badly.
First step to action is communication. Politicians aren't mind readers, they need to communicate with their constituents to understand their wants.
Whether or not a petition is an effective means of communication I'm not qualified to answer, but it seems like a better option than doing nothing at all.
In response to both you and dragonwriter, those are all totally fair points. My thought is this might be a case of poorly-managed expectations.
Specifically, people generally think of petitions as things where, given n signatures, some kind of action is going to be taken (as in 'the right to petition government for redress of grievances'). In that context, it's easy to forget that the most you can 'win' is a response. Hence, 'victory' feels hollow, which can take more energy away from a movement than not having had a petition to rally around in the first place.
Hope that makes sense. I'm not arguing against the system itself, but I think it's overplaying its hand by calling itself a petition system.
There seems to be quite a crowd of you saying the same thing every time the subject of a petition comes up. Perhaps you could club together and have a support group.
Do you have a problem with the comment or the people?
It's just a gentle way to deliver constructive comments that are sensitive. You bring them down softly. There's no need to be especially cruel in delivering negative opinions, and this is a forum. Negative opinions are warranted; so long as they are at least valid, they need not be particularly liked.
I'm not convinced that the negative opinions are valid in this case. The petitions are an imperfect and newly implemented system, but the denunciations of them are sweeping, final, and tend to substitute speculation for fact when it comes to discussing the intent of the system architects. Most of the time, comments like the grandparent are little more than a reiteration of the poster's personal outlook.
:-/