Pirate Parties Continue To Grow In Europe As People Get Sick Of Politics As Usual
from the good-for-them dept
I've expressed my skepticism in the past about the ability of The Pirate Party to make a real dent long-term in politics, but I'm beginning to wonder if I've underestimated the effort. While we've seen some successes in Germany, it appears that the party has now become the third most popular party in the country, surpassing the Greens. That's fairly surprising. Equally interesting is that in nearby Austria, a Pirate Party member won a seat in a local city election... which actually made front page news:
These are still small steps, of course, and I still doubt that the party will become a "major" political party -- but its success in Europe is already driving other parties to pay much more attention to the issues that have attracted so much attention for The Pirate Party: internet freedom, free speech, civil liberties, copyright law, patent law, privacy and much more. If the Party's one major accomplishment is to bring those issues into the mainstream of politics, I'd consider it a pretty big success.
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Filed Under: austria, europe, germany, internet freedom, pirate party
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Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
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Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
I would also Love to get a Maine Pirate Party going.
A lot of Americans are hating both of the main Parties and unless we break their Monopolies we will never get the change we want to see.
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Re: Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
A pirate party could bring the issue to one of the big parties and get absorbed. That is the best you can hope for.
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Re: Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
not impossible, just unlikely.
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Re: Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
How about a candidate with the fiscal discipline of the democrats and the social progressiveness of the republicans. :-)
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Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
All I can say is....
Seeds grow and some grow to massive things.
Today's major political parties started in the same way.( small with narrow short term goals )
YOU DON'T KNOW the future , nor do I.
BUT we are both witnessing something growing.
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Breakthrough indeed! Soon they will rule the world.
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By the way, it's lion cub reading the book, not a tiger :-)
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Anyway, the message is clear and positive - people sick off novadays politics (hopefully "old time politics" soon) are looking for parties bringing the real solution for issues like excesive beraucracy, corruption, human and civil right abuses etc.
And Pirate party is one of them, I think.
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Re: Re: Stylin!
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At least tabloids are up front with what they are.
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I like your brand of misdirection. How much to license it, good sir?
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Did I miss something? Are we back onto the subject of German Porn??
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It's typical Mike action, trying to make something look bigger than it is. Why not just celebrate the success without the extra "look, the media got it" twist that doesn't really pan out?
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Your wife called Mike and asked him to give you some pointers on making things look bigger than they are.
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(With apologies to everyone else who isn't a stick insect.)
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The tabloid is distributed throughout the country.
"Now all you need to do is point out this "national media attention" portrayal. Please be so kind, good sir."
It's a typical Masnick deal - the inference is all there, he just avoids specific wording to avoid being caught out. Why even mention the newspaper?
Yeah, once again, Mike uses weasel wording to avoid saying what he is saying. Classic!
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They went on to form coalition governments.
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The tools are there, ask people what they want to debate and let them debate it and pick the most pressing issues those people want addressed and take a position over it using freedom as a compass for the decisions I am sure this will make it a lot more acceptable to others.
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It doesn't work in other countries, where actually the concerns of privacy aren't being widely acknowledged.
It's quite easy for someone to parrot the view and claim the follow it, it's another to be able to demonstrate they understand it (which no party which "adopts the platform" will be able to demonstrate).
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Much the same could happen here, in the long run.
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i strongly recomend reading 'the economy of cities' and 'cities and the wealth of nations' by Jane Jacobs when it comes to planing economic stuff. (hint: you can have free trade OR a national currency without eventually gutting most of your economy. not both. and things like the Euro are pretty much economic suicide for all but the city-region with the highest contribution to exports to areas which use other currencies.)
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looking forward
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You only want people to hear about it if it's spun with your silly pro-piracy point-of-view. You want people to hear your version of the truth, which is, of course, extremely biased and prejudiced (and frankly deceitful at times). I'm sure you're pumped about this, Pirate Mike. Your pirate buddies are on the cover of some rag magazine. That's about as exciting as the interviews you do on that commie network. Go Pirates! Yeah!!
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They need to change the name
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Re: They need to change the name
Another example of how that already happened before with a political party is the Green party in Germany. When they started out, being "green" was considered totally out of the mainstream. The name conjured up images of idealistic yet utterly unrealistic one-issue hippies and it was very much a protest party at the time. People said the same thing you're saying now, that their name would lock them in and prevent them from ever becoming mainstream. Now that they've been in the mainstream for 30 years people no longer associate "green" with purely environmental issues and the name is no hindrance.
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Re: They need to change the name
Thing is, even if we changed the name we would not be known by the new name, but everybody would still call us Pirate Party. We would essentially be giving the interpretation about what 'Pirate' means in a political context up to our enemies, however.
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and the lion cub is cute, the sports score is 0 - 0 which does not compute in the US, and the ??scha babe is ... a babe!
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Can't see the image
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Bad name? Rebranding works! Proof:
Of course, compared to the average Canadian, the average cow is Einstein.
Heil Harper!
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Pirate Parties Goals
My idea is not so much to "win" as a party, but to have our ideas win. The same which happend to the Greens (which are probably the 4th most powerful party in switzerland): Their ideas got taken up by the other parties. The CVP (christian peoples party), probably our most conservative party (not comparable to the US "conservatives", which would actually compare to the right wing SVP) is actually pushing so many "green" ideas, they would have been labeled a "green" party 30 years ago. Most of our parties have become "green" to some extent. The values of the Greens got internalized, and spread over the whole political spectrum.
And that's what we want to achieve: Our values (liberty, abolition of monopolies, privacy) spread over the whole spectrum, so that in 30 years time, nobody can even mention any ideas as those expressed in SOPA or CISPA (or the patent law) without being booed out of office by the whole population as a "dangerous radical" (which he is ;)). And of course, in the meantime have the patent system abolished, copyright shortend to 14 years, DRM outlawed, and any surveillance-acts repelled.
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German Situation
In fact, even in situations where they pulled a bad fail (one pirate comparing the rise of the Pirate Party with that of the Nazis before WWII), it is impressive to see how all political magazines suddenly feature long discussions on use and abuse of bashing people on Nazi comparisons.
More importantly, however, by their sheer presence the other parties are now forced to acknowledge that there are fields of politics which they have neglected in the past, and adjust their policies accordingly.
Because of this, many political issues that seemed so clear and easy to our politicians are now suddenly hotly disputed. Namely, ACTA is now dead, and Data Retention looks like it will be delayed forever...
And this alone was worth it, methinks.
ag.
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