Comment Do they need a seat? (Score 1) 299
Really, I can assure you that the seat would in fact be wasted. It is important to understand that politics is about more than a single issue of interest. Personally, the Pirate Party agenda is sadly lacking, but that is not to say that it doesn't have a certain merit.
The Pirate Party (keep wanting to write bay), has made it to a public election. This is important to realize. In Sweden, you can form an "I like Cookies" party and bring it to election, however it would receive 0 votes unless all the remaining parties were so disgusting that the "I like Cookies" party seemed the most harmless. The Pirate Party on the other hand, whether they received the needed number of votes or not is irrelevant. What is important is that they did in fact receive votes.
This means that they in fact won votes away from (I use this term in the not to piss everyone here off terminology of it) legitimate parties with agendas that focus on improvement of roads, education, social welfare, health related and other key focal points. So it isn't important how many votes they won, it's important to notice that they did in fact win votes away from parties with issues that genuinely impact the survival of the Swedish people.
So why does that matter? Well, it means that other parties will have to look at the issue seriously enough and recognize that this single issue which has no impact on a persons ability to feed themselves or take care of their children was important enough to some people that they need to at the very least evaluate whether this is a stance their party should back.
Now, the alternate possibility is that the Pirate Party rebuilds itself as for example, "The Human Civil Liberties Party". They can build a proper agenda, adopting the focus points from other parties they agree with and win office to forward all these values they hold to ensure civil liberties that are regularly being revoked by corporations with strong political control. It could in fact be a party that focusses on issue like :
- Reform of the police departments, have the police focus on real crimes like drug trafficing, rapes, murders, thefts, and less on protecting corporated IP rights
- Reform schools to educate students instead of babysit them, require teachers to do a full year of schooling themselves for every 10 years they teach. This will make the students smarter and more capable of understanding their rights.
- Reform medicine so that licensed doctors are required to further their education formally every few years to maintain their licenses. This will hopefully make it so that doctors spend less time on the golf course and more time actually excersizing their brains. This is important since they are major campaign funders.
- Reform universities to require students to take general education as well as their specialized training. This in itself will make people more aware of civil liberties when they leave school..... we hope.
- Reform business schools to require a certain amount of general science education so that the business people will form a greater understanding, and hopefully appreciation for what is actually involved in producing intellectual property.
- Promote solutions from universities over solutions from corporations within government computers. For example, accounting schools should have software development classes where actual business systems are designed and developed for free use within the country. Make Linux a viable option for the government by funding research and development in the universities of genuine solutions that can be deployed for free.
I can go on for ages, but the fact is, in a country such as Sweden (I live next door in Norway and am American so I've seen a lot of both extremes), there is no room for a party like the Pirate Party because they don't address issues which directly impact a persons survival, they don't even address issues that impact a persons quality of living. But, they have an idea that could actually mean something, and if they are in fact serious about it, then they need to take the politics more seriously and find more to stand for that does in fact address real problems in the country they live in.
The Pirate Party (keep wanting to write bay), has made it to a public election. This is important to realize. In Sweden, you can form an "I like Cookies" party and bring it to election, however it would receive 0 votes unless all the remaining parties were so disgusting that the "I like Cookies" party seemed the most harmless. The Pirate Party on the other hand, whether they received the needed number of votes or not is irrelevant. What is important is that they did in fact receive votes.
This means that they in fact won votes away from (I use this term in the not to piss everyone here off terminology of it) legitimate parties with agendas that focus on improvement of roads, education, social welfare, health related and other key focal points. So it isn't important how many votes they won, it's important to notice that they did in fact win votes away from parties with issues that genuinely impact the survival of the Swedish people.
So why does that matter? Well, it means that other parties will have to look at the issue seriously enough and recognize that this single issue which has no impact on a persons ability to feed themselves or take care of their children was important enough to some people that they need to at the very least evaluate whether this is a stance their party should back.
Now, the alternate possibility is that the Pirate Party rebuilds itself as for example, "The Human Civil Liberties Party". They can build a proper agenda, adopting the focus points from other parties they agree with and win office to forward all these values they hold to ensure civil liberties that are regularly being revoked by corporations with strong political control. It could in fact be a party that focusses on issue like :
- Reform of the police departments, have the police focus on real crimes like drug trafficing, rapes, murders, thefts, and less on protecting corporated IP rights
- Reform schools to educate students instead of babysit them, require teachers to do a full year of schooling themselves for every 10 years they teach. This will make the students smarter and more capable of understanding their rights.
- Reform medicine so that licensed doctors are required to further their education formally every few years to maintain their licenses. This will hopefully make it so that doctors spend less time on the golf course and more time actually excersizing their brains. This is important since they are major campaign funders.
- Reform universities to require students to take general education as well as their specialized training. This in itself will make people more aware of civil liberties when they leave school..... we hope.
- Reform business schools to require a certain amount of general science education so that the business people will form a greater understanding, and hopefully appreciation for what is actually involved in producing intellectual property.
- Promote solutions from universities over solutions from corporations within government computers. For example, accounting schools should have software development classes where actual business systems are designed and developed for free use within the country. Make Linux a viable option for the government by funding research and development in the universities of genuine solutions that can be deployed for free.
I can go on for ages, but the fact is, in a country such as Sweden (I live next door in Norway and am American so I've seen a lot of both extremes), there is no room for a party like the Pirate Party because they don't address issues which directly impact a persons survival, they don't even address issues that impact a persons quality of living. But, they have an idea that could actually mean something, and if they are in fact serious about it, then they need to take the politics more seriously and find more to stand for that does in fact address real problems in the country they live in.
