Swedish Voters Keelhaul Pirate Party

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."

Comments

Re:This was not good to start with

[TheWoozle]

Something is "illegal" if there is a law against it, by definition. No law, no problem. Hence, I see it as an entirely practical way to tackle the issue.

Re:This was not good to start with

[CRCulver]

Obviously the point of the party is to use the power of democracy to ensure that such actions are no longer illegal. Do you think Marxist parties should be shut down just because the state ownership of industry they advocate is not permitted under current laws? I thought America was supposed to be better than other countries since it allows any ideas to participate in the democratic process.

Nothing wrong with advocating for change.

[Kadin2048]

there is a northern country (forgot which) who has a party, which wants to legalize sex with children. so there is the question: is the "pirate party" nearer to marxism than to a fellony?

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.