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Original (this is on the front page of Spiegel today): http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/nsa-ueberwacht-500-millionen-verbindungen-in-deutschland-a-90

• NonEUCitizen 13y ago
  Has there been polling as to whether support for German Pirate Party has increased?
  • kybernetyk 13y ago
    Probably not because our Pirate Party is only known for drama and the media portrays them as an disorganized bunch of kids who fight over internal power. Not that the media would be particularly wrong with this. When the party was founded I had some hopes ... now I have given up on them.
    • alan_cx 13y ago
      That reads like you have simply bought in to the media smearing. Sound familiar? See here in the UK, our media represent the whole of the EU like that. Don't give up, get involved.
      • arrrg 13y ago
        No, the pirate party in Germany is a fucking mess. Unelectable. (This opinion is based on reading the parties’ own writing and discussions, not on anything the media wrote.)
        • zxcdw 13y ago
          A foreginer here. Would you like to elaborate why they seem unelectable?
          • JulienSchmidt 13y ago
            They are unable to settle on a real party manifesto. Also they have problems to organize themselves. Even worse, they regularly contradict each other in public. (My personal view)
            • vidarh 13y ago
              It's not so strange, because the core issues of the pirate parties are orthogonal to the classical left-right spectrum. They're trying to form a party out of a fraction of a full platform, with the result that they will either need to find a way to agree to disagree about large swathes of politics, or they will drive away large parts of their potential supporters.
      • kybernetyk 13y ago
        > That reads like you have simply bought in to the media smearing. Sound familiar? I wish it was just that. But you don't need the media to get the full drama experience. Their twitter flame wars are famous and the fall-out from certain actions (like devastating a congress centre and blowing up the bill to over 20k eur where initially 1700 eur were planned as expenses) can be read in their official wikis. I was a member in the SPD party (some of the bigger German parties) some years ago and quit shortly after becoming a member because it was all about internal power struggles - even with a local 'branch' in a 30k pop town. I decided politics wasn't for me. I had better things to do than wasting them on bullshit. Then after I got invited by a friend to come along to one of their meetings (for a 250k pop city) I decided to give politics a second chance. And I swear - it was the same like what I had experienced before with the SPD. Only there were significantly more mobile computing devices around. It was 90% about administration (who and how should do what and why that someone was a bad choice mixed in with some feminism/sexism debate) and the real issues (data retention, privacy, etc) weren't even discussed. In politics I think there are many people who do care about the core issues - but there are far too many egomaniac assholes around destroying every constructive discussion with their bullshit. And after what I've seen I don't believe that the pirate party is immune to that.
    • sentenza 13y ago
      Don't read the mailing lists, they're public and thus a trollfest. I was also somewhat disillusioned in the recent months, but that is over now. I went out setting up campaign advertisement signs in 2009 and I'm doing it again this year. This is our only chance. Remember, even though some of the Berlin scene wish to "reboot" the Pirate Party in a way that is more to their liking, it is far too late for that. The Pirate Party has seats in west German state parliaments, which is a lot more valuable as a gauge for the chance of success than what the blogosphere thinks. If we fail now, after having come so far, then the project is eternally burned. We are at 2-3 % and the party is well beyond 10000 members. This is the window of opportunity to make a difference.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  • aluhut 13y ago
    They don't get the media attention (if they are doing something at all). My biggest fear is that the Liberals (FDP) gain votes through this...
    • JulienSchmidt 13y ago
      Why would the FDP profit from this? AFAIK they never positioned themselves in favor of privacy. I think the green party (Bündnis 90 / Die Grüne) will profit considerably more from this. They are know promoters of privacy and personal rights. "Die Linke" could also profit from this.
      • bayesianhorse 13y ago
        The liberals are very vocal about privacy and interfering of the state in the people's affairs. They just don't do a very good job making people aware of these positions...
        • Semaphor 13y ago
          Or fighting for those positions.
          • cygx 13y ago
            Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has been pretty consistent, though. If it weren't for their neo-liberal/laissez-faire approach to economics, I'd consider voting for them...
            • Semaphor 13y ago
              SLS usually does. But to me it always seems like she is rather alone in her party. And even she had some slip ups. If the FDP were a liberal party they'd never ally with the CDU as they are probably the most anti-liberal party we have.
      • aluhut 13y ago
  • weinzierl 13y ago
    Here you go http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm. (Click on the headings for results of previous weeks for a specific pollster.) Piraten are fairly stable around 3%. I think these polling results are not very meaningful in regard to the Pirate party. At the last election only one pollster saw them at 1% all the others at NA [1]. In the end they won 2.0 %. Pollsters still rely primarily on land line telephone interviews, and Pirate voters are therefore heavily underrepresented. Of course pollster know that and try to compensate for this effect but as long as they don't change the sampling method the error for the Pirates will be large. Peter Norvig's FAQ about the U.S. Presidential Election [2] has some excellent explanations of these effects. [1] http://www.bundestagswahl-2009.de/wahlumfragen/ http://www.bundestagswahl-2009.de/wahlumfragen/ [2] http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html
• corin_ 13y ago
  Isn't Der Spiegel a weekly release? Or when you say "front page" do you mean "of their website"?
  • aluhut 13y ago
    He means both: http://www.spiegel.de/ http://www.spiegel.de/ and http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/titel/SP/2013/27/300/titel.jpg http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/titel/SP/2013/27/300/titel.j...
    • corin_ 13y ago
      That magazine cover is tomorrow's so that makes sense, but the way he worded it suggests that two days running it was on the "front page". And I think that using "on their front page" when talking about the website of a magazine is misleading, in part simply because it suggests magazine not website, and in part because being on the front page of their website really means absolutely nothing when it comes to importance - or at least, it means no more than saying "Spiegel wrote a story about it". The front page of their website is just the hub where they link off content as and when it gets published, both important and less important items.
      • Schlaefer 13y ago
        The Spiegel homepage is hugely popular in Germany. Look at the table on the bottom [1]. Note that the data is a little bit older and Bild is yellow press and recently introduced a pay wall. If a topic is prominent on the Spiegel homepage mainstream Germany will talk about it. [1] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dwdl.de%2Fzahlenzentrale%2F35136%2Ffocus_online_setzt_sich_im_verfolgerfeld_etwas_ab%2F http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=ht...
        • corin_ 13y ago
          I get that it's popular, but still.. maybe it's just a cultural difference, I don't think in the UK we would specify website (e.g. "it's on the front page of The Guardian's website"), and even then I don't think we'd refer to the front page of a newspaper/magazine's website as a big deal, we'd maybe specifically highlight how prominent on the front page it is. I mean, on Spiegel.de right now, sure the NSA story is at the top, but other items that could be described as being "on the front page" include BBC Nature: The man who lives with the grizzlies, F1: Hulkenberg Sauber team threatens to bankrupt and Jennifer Lopez in Turkmenistan, to pick out a few.
• cabalamat 13y ago
  > Germans are pissed (We take privacy serious [1]). They're expecting the EU and chancellor Merkel to do something or she's going to have a really tough time being re-elected in the fall. How is this affecting the Pirates' poll ratings? If they hold the balance of power in the Bundestag, it's likely the next German government would have to do something.
  • stesch 13y ago
    Piratenpartei now is at 3% instead of 2%. :-/ (You need 5% to enter the Bundestag.)
    • cabalamat 13y ago
      60% there then.
  • aw3c2 13y ago
    The Pirate party in Germany has become such a sad display of juvenile trolling, aggressive genderism and political incompetence that I doubt their numbers will increase.
    • mars 13y ago
      +1. unfortunately the german pirate party is badly organized, suffers from having no real leadership and thus they don't have a clear road (nor program). i'm gonna vote for them anyhow - just because it's better having them in the bundestag than not.
    • Zirro 13y ago
      I can't say I know very much about the German Pirate Party, but how did "aggressive genderism" end up becoming associated with them? Are they trying to focus on questions outside Internet-related ones and made a blunder?
      • dsl 13y ago
        The same problems as every other group of (essentially) anarchists that try to organize. It might as well be called the 4chan party.