Slashdot Mirror
German Pirate Party Enters 2nd State Parliament
An anonymous reader writes "After its recent success in the Berlin elections, the German Pirate Party scores 7.4% of votes for the state parliament of Saarland, earning them 4 seats out of 51. While the campaign didn't center around copyright issues and/or ACTA (the party's stance is well-known), it centered around open government, access to education, and participative governing models, effectively ridding the party of its 'one issue' notion."
To me, this sort of win, the power that it gives them to promote and further the gains that they stand for is likely to have a MUCH bigger impact on the actual lives of their constituents than all the Occupy movements put together. Recently in Australian politics, the Green Senators have shown themselves to be a wonderful constant badgering voice calling Bullshit when needed and keeping the government here in check. I can't help but hope that the Pirate Party in Australia has similar success.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Frankly, I'd prefer to see some issue-specific "Green" party get in: Eg, the Subj ones.
There are, after all, some more critical (eg, to life on Earth) issues to be solved here.
What about the greens then?
But of course. I like how you don't complain about any of the bigger parties. The biggest difference between those?
A few tax percent. Completely irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.
If we just did something outrageous and said,"All copyrights expire after 7 years", we'd have a great wealth of free media for the uneducated. We could put K-12-College books on 100$ laptops. Then schools, instead of paying 10,000$ for books for k-12, kids could get a laptop and schools could save 10 grand on each student. Schools keep complaining they're strapped for cash. Well, here is a solution. Not to mention how great it'd be for third world kids with OLPC.
God spoke to me
We bound to have some German slashdoters here, so it would be good to have a first hand opinions on them:
- What is your opinion on the party?
- On what issues do you agree with them and which do you disagree?
- Do you think that they will be able to affect the policies or are they an ineffective tongue-in-cheek gesture?
- What do you see will be the biggest challenge for them in the future?
don't underestimate the destruction caused by patents, copyright, etc. The damage to our culture has barely begun to show - while it's not direct, our culture is being less and less documented as a result.
Patents around green products can affect the life on earth issue, and patents on medicine cost actual lives (and money).
My stepbrother was born in Kaiserslautern, so he technically has German citizenship. That's it. I'm convincing him that we need to move there, pronto, before my passport expires a month from now.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
I'm so jealous of proportional representation. Here 7% of the vote would get you 0% of the seats, barring some sort of miracle - like all of your votes being concentrated, instead of low level throughout the popular vote.
This makes it pretty difficult for new ideas to get out there... If large party A, B (or sometimes even C!) won't buy your idea, it's not getting represented.
Typo for "parliament", a term for an elected legislative body in which the executive branch is answerable to the legislature.
Frankly, I'd prefer to see some issue-specific "Green" party get in: Eg, the Subj ones.
They have a green party in Germany and they are also just got voted in and will be sitting "right beside" the "pirates" in the state parliament after this election there in Saarland.
There are, after all, some more critical (eg, to life on Earth) issues to be solved here.
A party who opposes censorship, data retention and supports more government transparency is also needed and these issues do matter there, because the "pirates" got 7,4 % of the votes in Saarland so their program is more supported then that of the green party who barely got over the 5 percent threshold with their 5,0 %. I think you just said something without knowing the political situation there, or am i wrong?
But besides all these things got me wondering... in Germany even new and small parties have a chance to get into parliaments and now there are six different bigger parties (cdu/csu, spd, the green party, the left party and now the pirate party) and many more small parties there to chose from, but in the us they just got stuck with two, why? I don't get it where is the democracy in that?
It seems to be a fairly common problem on Slashdot that posts are poorly hyperlinked. There are two key pieces of information here: (1) The party received 4 seats and (2) the party can no longer be considered a "single issue" party. The second two hyperlinks (7.4% and 4 out of 51 seats) are related to (1), but there is no hyperlink for (2). If a reader wants to know where (2) comes from, they have to randomly click the links to find that it comes from the pcworld.com link (7.4%). This is just annoying.
a discussion about german politics without germans... good luck
A survey found 40% of Pirate voters naming "Social Justice" as the most significant issue, even though the Pirates didn't exactly campaign on this in the state (though their platform on the federal level includes it).
Green and Pirate issues do have some overlap. Currently pure rent-seeking counts as economic activity, and so long as someone in your country is getting revenue from somewhere else, can perversely appear as growth. This is not a trivial problem; the UK has been a heavily IP-based economy for a long time (look at ARM: a UK company making one of the most ubiquitous architectures in the world that doesn't itself ever make a single chip. Pharmaceuticals are another good example.)
This can mask underlying problems in the physical economy - which should be of concern to Greens. Anything that allows you to maintain business-as-usual whilst oil prices rocket and we head towards a permanent energy crisis is obviously dangerous.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I can type more than that for my comment.
...also all of these parties have a lot of overlap.
Any combination of parties starting a coalition with another has already been tried. Amazingly most seemed to be functional.
This is why a new party like the PP doesn't NEED a party stance on everything. Besides, parliamentarians can and should have their own conscience and vote along those lines. The PP doesn't need a consensus on EU milk quotas, the recession(there is none in Germany at the moment) and other issues. The Green Party started like that and became a party with a complete programme within two decades.
There are safeguards against fragmentation. You need at least some percentage to actually get a seat in parliament. Most commonly that's 5%. That keeps the kooks out.
Also if a big enough portion of your population votes for a party that doesn't make it into government then government still has to take their needs into account. Otherwise you don't have a democracy but a dictatorship of the majority. Which never is a good thing.
20 minutes into the future
but in the us they just got stuck with two, why? I don't get it where is the democracy in that?
Americans are on the whole pretty stupid (like every country) and can only handle two choices. This keeps it quite clear for the morons as they only need to pick either black or white.
See:
* Abortion
* Left right politics
* You're either with us or against us (in war)
Personally I envy countries that have a real choice amoung political candidates and parties (I'm from UK which is just as bad as the U.S.A.). If that makes it difficult for them to do their job well tough titties.
One of the primary goals of a democracy should be to give every person his/her own voice. Only having a choice of two parties voilates this most basic of freedoms.
The interesting thing is they didn't prepare for this election as much as the other parties did. They didn't have the money for polls or a coherent programme weeks before the ballots were cast.
This whole thing was pretty improvised. They followed their gut and didn't stress the digital issues they have(since they are well known to those who actually care) and explored what else they can stand for.
There were a lot of pirates going ARRR, and ding-a-ling while they drove around on their bikes hanging up posters. Pieces of eight were not looted.
A train station that had been in planning for 30 years got protested and that's about it. The Occupy movement wasn't very strong in Germany. That's why. We tried sit-ins and teach-ins and bed-ins(well, our parents did) and being sprayed by cops is all hunky-dory but ineffective. The tendendcy to Get Things Done this country shows from time to time is actually quite impressive. Usually it involves football, peace, endangered bugs, availability of beer, freedom, slightly more vacation so to push us even further over the European mean(gotta lead at least one board, amirite?) and now social equality. It's very hard to argue against any of that.
20 minutes into the future
That's not even counting the fact that most "green" political parties (at least in France) are a bunch of opportunistic retards that are just there for politics, not at all about ecology.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The Green party is well established in Germany anyway. They actually took a beating in Saarland this time, but they are running the state of Baden-Württemberg with the SPD as their junior partners and they are participating in several other state governments.
I think the PP is an important addition - I agree that green issues are vital, but we also need to protect the foundation of our democratic system, otherwise we have no chance of addressing these issues. The main problem with stuff like ACTA etc is not even the content of the treaty (though it's bad enough) but that the route taken to implement it, basically subverts democratic control. That needs to be stopped urgently.
Funny thing is that due to the yoghurt eating, long-haired fleabags Germany was/is quite ahead on evironmental technologies/alternative energy/andsoforth.
I could very well be that the Green party has lined the German coffers with gold and Muesli.
Also that party grew up quite a bit over the last 20 years and I suspect that it isn't even in the slightest comparable to the counterpart in the US. Although the fundamentalist wing of Die Gruenen has a problem with being in power and the realist wing has a problem with not being in power. Fun times for all are guaranteed.
Don't read German newspapers in the next few weeks. You've been warned.
20 minutes into the future
Who owns and controls which information under which rules, *is* a major issue in the information-age.
It's not only, or even primarily, about copying of entertainment. Who owns and controls, and under which rules:
Computers. Personal information. Inventions. Knowledge. Art.
This ties in with education, with corruption, with medicine, with an awful lot of very important issues pretty much all over the map.
It doesn't cover the -entire- map, but as "single" issues go, this one is a biggie, I'm not at all convinced that the "green" issue is any bigger, or cover more of the map.
It's a mis-spelling of "Pariahment", the place where we put the Pariahs. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I don't know about the Greens in your country, but in mine they have changed from an ecology party to a "minority support" party. Whatever minority group there is, the Greens want to be their spokesperson. They have no time for ecology anymore, they're too busy saving the minorities from the oppression of the majority.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
5 minutes until someone comes and declares how the US are a Republic and not a Democracy. As if that made any difference in that matter...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Left/right politics?
Where?
From a European point of view, I can see the right, but the left? What you have is far right and moderate right politics to choose from.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Personally I envy countries that have a real choice amoung political candidates and parties (I'm from UK which is just as bad as the U.S.A.).
The trouble here in the UK is that we actually turned down the Alternvative Vote system in the referendum last year, so in a way we're even stupider than the USA.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
the UK has been a heavily IP-based economy for a long time (look at ARM: a UK company making one of the most ubiquitous architectures in the world that doesn't itself ever make a single chip. Pharmaceuticals are another good example.)
Yes, ARM should have declined to patent and license their designs, but should just have given them away for nothing.
I have no love for drug companies, but they have to finance their R&D somehow. It would be nice if the UN financed all worldwide medical research and funded it through world government taxation, but I can't see that happening any time soon.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A place for untouchables to feel important. Everyone's valuable today, always remember that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indeed, almost all of the proposed solutions to the big issues (in terms of the environment) are technological solutions. This almost demands a party who recognise that rampant abuse of IP law needs to be reined in so that it's no longer one of the major stumbling blocks to technical innovation.
I totally agree, it's a shame in some ways that their roots have given them the piracy tag and this will be used as a means of attack by their political opponents, because what we've really needed for a long time now is a technologically aware party. One who actually understands the basics of, and can see the pitfalls in, many of the poorly thought out, lobbyist-driven laws we're seeing enter the statute books.
Fucking hell that is a massive strawman.
My point was not that ARM is bad for producing IP, merely that it is a symptom of how the UK economy works that they shy away from manufacture.
In the world economy, the UK is like the guy in a team who says he is the 'ideas guy' they lounges around the office doing very little but taking credit for everything. We have to remember what it is like to get our hands dirty.
This disconnect from the physical economy makes us unresponsive to changes in it (when oil prices rocketed last time, in 2008, it wasn't British people who went hungry...) - and that is dangerous.
My personal political beliefs, as far as economics go, is that we need an economic system that is rooted in physical processes - but still allows room for innovation. Both Green and Pirate political economy figure influence me in this. I see them as inherently compatible.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
But besides all these things got me wondering... in Germany even new and small parties have a chance to get into parliaments and now there are six different bigger parties (cdu/csu, spd, the green party, the left party and now the pirate party) and many more small parties there to chose from, but in the us they just got stuck with two, why? I don't get it where is the democracy in that?
First of all, the US does have a lot of parties, but most are fairly small. Since you for individual candidates, you don't even need parties, but it sure helps having an organization behind you. Historically, the dominant parties have changed, so there is nothing in the system that prevents other parties from growing. But the most important mechanism in the US system is primaries where you let different candidates within a party battle it out. And those candidates can represent as large spread in ideologies as there are in any European parliament. The end result is not all the different to Europe: You need a conflict to get the voters off the couch, but the most extreme can not carry the election. Or perhaps, it is different: After all, the proportional system gave the world Hitler, with only 33% of the votes.
"We the people ... do ordain and establish this constitution" in the preamble establishes democracy (Greek for rule by people) as the source of power, and Article I makes this democracy representative. However, I don't see anything in the Constitution itself requiring states to use the Duverger-bait first past the post, one seat per district system common in the United States. As I see it, an individual state with a decent number of representatives could easily switch its representation in the House to a proportional system: "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof" (section 4).
look at ARM: a UK company making one of the most ubiquitous architectures in the world that doesn't itself ever make a single chip
I see a big difference between a fabless semiconductor company like AMD or ARM and a nonpracticing entity like Intellectual Ventures. AMD and ARM at least put forth the engineering effort to design implementations of their processors, whether the processors are marketed as standalone ICs (AMD) or as a core to be included in a system on chip (ARM).
It all sound good but I'd wish this movement changes its name to something else other that pirate party. Not only it sounds like single issue but also immature. I can't imagine a party with such a name got elected official here in NA.
From a European point of view, I can see the right, but the left? What you have is far right and moderate right politics to choose from.
I think a more accurate description of American politics is two corporate parties with minor differences on social issues. Neither party does a very good job of representing the interests of the general public. Trying to place the two parties along a single left/right axis is just a game played by the media to give the public the illusion that they have a choice, and that one of those choices matches their interests.
patents and copyrights serve a very useful purpose, but the laws are badly written. A copyright lasting only twenty years encourages new art, the excessive lengths today discourage it.
Without patent protection, no drug company would do any research at all because they couldn't recoup the cost of developing new drugs. However, the insane dollar costs of a patent are a detriment to innovation.
If patents were as cheap as copyrights ($30 to register) and copyrights were as short a time as patents, we would have a good system.
Kids, I know twenty years seems like a damned long time when you're 25, but believe me -- it isn't.
Free Martian Whores!
I've heard the Greens have a reputation for selling out a bit in Germany. I believe the Pirate party offers most everything the Greens offer, plus reform on key intellectual property, transparency, etc. issues and minus the bit of corruption that tarred the Greens.
There is another fact that Saarland is extremely conservative, which hurts the Greens, but not so much the Pirate party.
There are other European countries where the Pirates have basically joined the Greens, agreeing to support one another's candidates.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
.... he funded prohibitionist politicians.
Drug dealers know exactly who is more convenient to their interests.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Perhaps. I think the bigger risk is that they'll break apart when faced with a controversial issue where there's no obvious way to derive a solution from their primary platform.
In essence, the pirate party sticks together well when discussing copyright, patents, privacy, censorship, public-data and related fields that tie in well with one of these.
But what is their opinion on socialized healthcare ? On emission-standards ? On immigration ? On speed-limits ? On care for the elderly ?
I agree with nearly everything in their program, but the most glaring thing to me on reading it, was all the major issues they say -nothing- about. I strongly suspect that their members disagree violently on many of these issues.
I'm in favour of scandinavian-style democratic socialism, and agree with the pirate-party-program. Meanwhile I see other people that are of the american libertarian variety that *also* agree with the pirate-party-program. What are the odds we'll agree on those things that aren't in the program =