Swedish Voters Keelhaul Pirate Party 299
Billosaur writes "Apparently the 'scurvy dawgs' are still in control. Results from Sunday's Swedish national election were not favorable for the Pirate Party, according to Wired News. According to the article, 'The Pirate Party not only failed to score the 4 percent required for a seat in Sweden's Parliament, but appears to have missed the 1 percent that would have afforded the party state assistance with printing ballots and funding staff in the next election.' However, the party sees this as a learning experience and morale is still good."
This was not good to start with (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:4, Insightful)
This wasnt all that suprising, they had a lot of interest, but they failed at getting it together into votes. This was their first attempt and a lot of the probs were related to learning how to do political party things.
Serious (Score:2, Insightful)
It Is Necessary (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, intellectual property is free for anyone to copy but these are just ideas. Capitalism can function just fine if everyone can use anyone's idea for free -- you just suffer less incentive to come up with innovative ideas since copying someone else's is easier.
Freeloading, maybe
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:1, Insightful)
oh well, (Score:5, Insightful)
That is fantastic!
Don't forget that this is people's vote in a general election. Any are a big deal and most people won't make a choice lightly. They might see votes as a waste because they might not even get anyone in parliament which puts people off voting for them as they want their vote "to count". Also a lot of people in the country will already have aligences to parties and even though they might really agree with the message they might be reluctant to turn against the party which represents what they want overall better. Its hard to have a successful "single issue" party, I'm not sure what their other policies are but they will be important and you need to tell people what these are to let them know that your not just a one trick horse.
Overall though, it's a good effort, don't get too down on them.
The problem is not their cause (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, i support a lot of what they lobby for, but I'd much rather vote for a party which also supports my ideas on a whole range of other issues.
This goes in particular in an election that's been running so close as the swedish one did this time.
Single issue parties, should really stop being parties, and start doing some serious lobbying instead. I do understand that they're doing it, since i realize it can be very hard for young people to be heard by politicians on new and controversial ideas on an old subject.
I hope noone ever gets voted into parliament anywhere based on such a narrow issue, I really feel it would be a double loss for democracy, the first because it should never be the only way to be taken serious, and the second, because once they get in, you'll have no clue on how they vote for issues that are very important to all of us.
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, part of the point of a capitalist system would be that we'd get affordable items - it isn't difficult to understand why the entertainment industry would rather maintain the status quo.
It's time to accept it. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's got to be a better way to enact the changes we want.
Calm Down (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, learn to use the <br> tags. They are your friends and do wonders for your readability.
Third, they ran and lost. That's how Democracy works. Maybe they'll do better next year, maybe they won't even be around, who knows? But one thing is for sure, when you outright say they shouldn't even exist, you're starting to hinder the goal of Democracy. Sounds like you have a pretty closed mind, my friend.
Also, thanks for writing me off as a hippie. I'm glad you took 2.5 seconds and one post to know me and I highly value your (fairly incorrect) stereotype. I was only trying to point out where they're coming from, not advocating it. You either need to do more reading or stop talking because you really don't understand the goals of this party.
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with advocating for change. (Score:5, Insightful)
And to put it quite bluntly, this is perfectly fine. The point of a democracy is that it responds to the will and wishes of its citizens; if they want a law changed, then they have the right (and, I would argue, the responsibility) to attempt to change it within the structure of the system, if possible.
The only difference between the Pirate Party and NAMBLA (I think that's the 'sex with children' thing you're talking about) is how personally offensive you find the behavior they want to legalize. As long as they're not doing the behavior in question while it's still illegal, they're perfectly within their rights to campaign for a change in the laws. This is why political speech is protected by the First Amendment in the United States, and why we tolerate things like the Nazi Party and the Stalinists and any number of other kooks.
For a less extreme example, consider the people who advocated for the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s; history has shown that they were probably doing the right thing, but at the time they could have easily been accused of "advocating illegal behavior."
If you didn't allow people this freedom, then democracy would be nothing but an irreversible march into an oblivion of illegality.
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:2, Insightful)
Repeal the prohibition of marijuana (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I regard it as a test of integrity, when I find someone claims to support free speech except when it's racist/sexist/whatever/else/they/don't/like I know they're a hypocrite and I needn't give much weight to their opinions.
Revolting as the idea of a polical party campaigning to legalise child abuse may be, I'd campaign to support it's right to exist.
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:4, Insightful)
If they call for the government to arrest someone for speech that is racist/sexist/whatever/else/they/don't/like, then they are a hypocrite, and they don't support free speech. If they merely call the 'offending' speaker a dickwad, then not only are they not hypocrites, they are demonstrating the power of free speech.
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:2, Insightful)
Not a failure (Score:3, Insightful)
TPP said "this is going to be a close election, there are about a million people in Sweden sharing files, we can become a tiebreaker by gaining 4%". Making file sharing legal is the best-understood point of their political tenets (as few "intellectual property" institutions as possible, better privacy, reforming the copyright system). I don't fault them for picking exactly what they did to run on, or by the issue they made themselves known by (legalize file sharing). Which isn't the same as saying there weren't problems.
The other day I visited a page listing some Swedish political parties. The one line that described TPP was "They want to make downloading music and movies legal". Depending on how you look on it, it may be technically correct, however it's vastly oversimplified: The TPP reform of copyright includes perpetual and unlimited rights to *private* copies of anything, and shortens the exclusivity of selling the work to a five year duration instead of the author's-life + 70 + whatever-Disney-can-coax-international-law-into years of the current system, which effectively legalizes a lot of file sharing, which by necessity includes both uploading *and* downloading. These issues are hard and complicated. The Man on The Street won't be able to detail copyright law beyond perhaps author's-life + 70, and I don't think a tenth of the population have even heard of the continuous lengthening of the copyright period.
The "regular" parties run using a platter of promises - hundreds of them - where at least two are presented in a reasonable way. The Green Party (once a similar tiebreaker running using a similar philosophy) runs using more advanced stuff like TPP, but the few-words summary here, as expressed by The Man on The Street - "be nice to the environment and give us more family time" - is infinitely more agreeable to, well, most people, than "make downloading music and movies legal", which reeks of "omg plz make everything free kthx!1" rather than the well-thought out proposals behind TPP. This is one factor why TPP didn't make it all the way.
The other factor, then, is that more people found it more rewarding to vote for one of the two blocs (who mostly carry full political agendas on *all* issues, even the aforementioned Green Party) or on other small parties.
You could argue that the pie-in-the-sky chance that they would ever reach 4% was abysmal, but if they hadn't been so optimistic about it, I am positive that a lot of supporters would just have given up, saying "we're not going to make it anyway, why bother?". TPP didn't get its way, but I find it hard to deem them a failure. From 0 to sub-1% of above five million votes in less than 10 months is astounding work.
Re:This was not good to start with (Score:1, Insightful)