Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Party Gaining Strength In Germany
bs0d3 writes "For the third consecutive regional election, The German Pirate Party has breached the five-percent mark needed to enter the state parliament, winning 8.2 percent of the vote in state of Schleswig-Holstein. From the article: 'The big winners on the night were the Pirates, an upstart party that has shaken up the staid world of German politics with a campaign based on more transparency in the political process and internet freedom.'"
Too easy. Mod me down.
Aside from the obvious position of the party concerning copyright and p2p technologies, what exactly are the Pirate Party political positions.
Tomorrow is another day...
I'd mod you flamebait but instead....
All this shit that's happened is because a handful of uber rich fucks are in bed with a handful of uber powerful fucks. The pirate party is for exposing that and being more open. Why do we have dinosaur-lifespan copyright? Because Disney is in bed with the US congress. And every other country is in bed with US Congress, at least when it comes to copyright.
So let's shine a light on what's going on between the sheets.
While the assorted techie shenanigans of the previous thread are all good fun, this sort of (much more difficult, and much less entertaining) work is arguably a much better strategy to keep your intertubes open.
Dodging the man is fun and all, and certainly can beat the alternatives; but playing cat-and-mouse with state power can be a poor long term strategy. You have to get away with it every time. They only have to catch you once...
Global warming will be reduced a bit.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
They also host Wikileaks. They have a broader view of internet freedom than merely downloading in violation of copyright.
And so was I. Look at the big winners in the housing market bubble. Who came out on top, and who lost? This was possibly the biggest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the uber wealthy in modern history. How many of the uber rich have lost everything? How many middle class people have?
I'm pretty sure that the parent's point is that the problems of transparency, regulatory capture, questionably-representative democracy, and such are also at play in the context of many issues aside from copyright. Given the involvement of those issues in such minor matters as the EU's ugly 'austerity vs. popular opinion' and 'web censorship and surveillance: awesome or mega awesome?' controversies, this isn't a hard point to argue for...
(Also, in the context of a parliamentary system, it is much more usual to have assorted issue-focused parties that don't need to have an opinion on all matters because their expected outcome is to end up as part of a coalition government with one or more other parties that bring other positions to the table. Given voter inertia, it is as illogical as it is unproductive to form a new party with too significant an overlap with an existing one, so you expect upstart parties to be mainly focused on some issue they feel to have been previously unaddressed or mis-handled, with the assumption that whatever coalition they end up in will take care of issues on which they don't differ significantly from the mainstream.)
maplight.org matches how politicians get paid by donors with how they vote and displays the correlations as nice graphics.
Cool ... Lessig thinks so too.
How to deal with this corruption?
Lawrence Lessig has a good idea about this:
search for his talk titled "How money corrupts Congress and a plan to stop it" on fora.tv and other sites.
Specific links:
Media lives on copyright and money infusions from its owners.
Corrupt politicians live on media support.
Extremely rich own the media.
Politicians extent copyright granting media unprecedented ability to control information through legal means. Media pays back by not reporting on major issues that are harmful to political system that births such politicians (aka voluntary self-sensorship such as lack of coverage of occupy protests in USA causing a historic collapse on the reporters without borders media freedom chart).
And with extremely rich controlling both politicians and media they can ensure that laws that transfer wealth from poor and middle class to them are written and enacted while media keeps telling you that it's fair to have such laws.
The people who caused the copyright issues caused many (most?) of the other issues. Fix the people supporting copyright, and you'll fix many of the other issues.
Learn to love Alaska
No, he said a lot of problems are caused by rich and powerful corrupting the political process, and then gave an example using copyright law.
The Pirate Parties are the only parties that support unlimited non-commercial file sharing, which is the only sane position on the matter.
Personally, I think it's the most important IP issue we have, since, if we're shutting down websites for copyright infringement, we are shutting down websites. And thence, we cannot discuss anything freely.
expandfairuse.org
You raise a good point, but it seems equally apparent that representative democracies pretty much universally fall prey to corruption. I don't know the details of how Germany's government works, but in a US context where our congressional branch is split into a Senate that represents each state equally and a House of Representatives that represents each state based on population, I've often thought that the latter might be profitably replaced with a direct democracy. Or perhaps a third "House of Commons" branch could be added with any two branches being able to override the third. Or maybe just give the Commons the ability to veto and repeal laws unilaterally to keep the career folks in line.
There's lots of different ways it could be implemented, and I think now that the technology has made it possible it would be good for governments to start exploring ways in which direct democracy could be integrated into the system. Probably not replacing the existing structure, as you point out you'll have trouble getting the populace interested in a lot of the menial details of governing, but it seems like some measure of direct voice would help to counteract the creeping spread of corruption and cronyism. Even if it's largely advisorial to start with - if politicians had a central source where they could get direct information as to the leanings of their constituents who care enough to take part, perhaps even draw upon them for suggestions - I imagine something like an "Ask Slashdot" about how a bill under consideration could be improved. And I do think veto power would be a good thing, even if the bar is set pretty high to start with - say you need 60-70% of participants to vote against it, with some minimum quorum of citizens participating. Basically a leash to keep the representatives in check on specific issues rather than being limited to replacing them entirely.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Your critique of naive direct democracy - that leaders arise, but are informal and therefore not subject to safeguards - is an excellent one. But it's not enough.
Consider that the United States today suffers under exactly this scenario. Informal unelected elites have captured the levers of power to the point where the U.S. is not looking much like a democracy any more. This was accomplished despite the excellence of the design of the American system the strength of democratic principles among the American people - a citizenry still fairly engaged, and which was formerly also relatively well educated and informed.
Democracy is often present as the mechanism through which individuals, born citizens with their own preferences and interests, express and negotiate those preferences and interests, ideally with an eye to the common good. According to many advocates of direct democracy, this is wrong. We are not born citizens. It is not citizens who create democracy: rather it is the practice of democracy that creates citizens. We do not come to politics as individuals with already developed preferences and interests. It is by engaging with others in public discourse and debate that we learn to be citizens, to reason, to participate in public discourse, and through this process we discover and develop our preferences and interests. Democracy is thus a process of education. One of the great failings of representative democracy is that instead of treating us as active and evolving partners, it relegates us to the role of disengaged consumers who occasionally choose one option over another.
Yet realistically, even if we were to provide the perfect mechanism for people to participate, most of us, lacking interest and starved of time, wouldn't: with results like those you describe. One intriguing alternative draws on the jury system and the elections of ancient Athens. Decisions would be made not by professional politicians, but by randomly-selected groups of citizens with their range of private expertise. Such groups would be charged with investigating a particular issue for a period of time, after which they would disband.
I realize juries (chosen by counsel more for ignorance than independent thought) are typically reported as dysfunctional, and I don't doubt that this is so. Yet it only confirms that we do not know how to be citizens: and when it is demanded of us, we fail. Through failure, though, we can learn, and teach others. Forming a jury today, when virtually no one has substantial experience, amounts to throwing together a bunch of greenhorns and expecting them to spontaneously become experts.
For an idealized view of how a jury can teach its participants to be jurors, I suggest the film 12 Angry Men. I admit am not convinced of the wisdom of such a system. But if I was forced to choose, I would place my fate in the hands of a court rather than a politician. I would trust a random selection of my fellow citizens over a self-selected professional of politics. For with the crises we face today, our common fate is indeed the question.
It doesn't make sense to own your own home. Period.
It (usually) doesn't make sense to own your own home as an investment. Otherwise, the above sentence is completely moronic, as most absolute blanket statements tend to be.
What I find sad is that if you try explaining this concept to people, they think you are an idiot. Many times, friends have told me that they will be living a life of borderline affordability when they finally buy their new house. I suggest they carry on renting. Their usual line is "but if you rent you're throwing money away!". Oh really? And how is this different to your mortgage interest payments? "But at least you're on the ladder!". Right, so you are going to pay substantially more than you would to rent, just so you can be a "home owner". I know people who are paying 40% more per year in mortage interest compared to their previous rent, with flat house prices predicted for the next decade, and they are convinced they're doing the right thing, because society has convinced them that it is so. And then they complain that they have no money, despite having a combined income that is double the median for their area. If you're taking home double the median pay, and the numbers still don't add up, then you're doing something wrong.
It should be noted that the German Pirate Party has strayed a little from its root of copyright criticism. It's pretty much a left-wing liberal party now that has some ideas concerning copyright and privacy, but also advocates other concepts such as free education, a citizen's income, deregulation in certain areas, voting rights for foreign citizens, sustainable energy sources, and so on.
Even in traditionally tech-savvy Germany, a party that only focuses on copyright and patents can't get 8% in parliamentary elections. An important factor in the Pirate Party's success in Germany is that it's very easy for anyone to participate in the political discourse within the party, but after 6 years and with 30k members now, that was bound to produce something more than just "copyright law is broken".
Copyright issues is what made the pirates realize where _many_ problems, including copyright, originate: rich and powerful people (aka money) circumventing democracy.
The copyright issue crystalized that even though the majority of people opposes today's copyright, there is no way to change it, because political parties are so much in bed with IP stakeholders (which in the US for example, openly make threats "touch this protection law with a pole, motherfucker, and I wont finance your next campaign."), that they make laws _against_ the population, for the benefit of the influential stakeholders. It is a sick, dangerous symbiosis, which shouldnt be allowed to exist. They effectively shield off copyright policy from _ever_ being voted on, because they know what the result of a popular vote would be.
The pirates started out with copyright, then realized "oh fuck, this is just the tip of the iceberg" and are now mainly advocating total transparency, separation of money and state, and basic, direct democracy. If we the people have the means to vote on single issue, then we _should_ be able to directly vote on it, and not be forced delegate the vote to a "representative", whom we cant force to vote to our benefit.
The representative system has a fatal bug: a representative can make promises, get votes first, win seats, then get money, and then vote for the money wants, not for what the voters wanted when they voted for him. The only thing we supposedly can "do" about this is to not vote for the same representative again, but we cant change his once made decision. But the representative we vote in next is still subject to the same exploitability that corrupted the first one, and there is no way for the electorate to do anything to stop this bug in the system to get constantly exploited by money. The only way, and this is what the pirates are actually attempting, is to fix this fundamental bug in the system by letting voters override policitician's decisions, switzerland style. Direct democracy.
The copyright law nightmare is just a symptom of the fact that we cant directly vote on copyright law, while money can. Money gets what it wants and we dont. We can only vote on _who_ makes decisions, but money can vote on _what_ decisions he will make. So money already has a kind of direct democracy, and we dont. The goal is for us to get direct democracy, and to decrease the influence money has.