4 ms·

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

by 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.
yk 13y ago
Unfortunately it is not just media smear. In Germany we have at the moment roughly ten percent of the electorate who are deeply future shocked and are just random walking around the political landscape. ( They did push the FDP to 14% in the last parliament election, pushed the Greens to win the Baden Wuerttemberg election and voted the Berlin Pirates to 13% two years ago. ) And some of these guys did overrun the original pirate party. For example, they did recreate a lot of the problems voting machines have with their 'liquid feedback' system, and when called out on that answered that they do not know, but since 1337 pirate party instead of evil(TM) Diebold suggested it, there is surely a way. ( And to rant a bit, at their last party convention they did petition that the parliament publishes their schedule on the INTERNET, which the parliament of course does. But there is no one left in the pirates who is able to google.) So by now I tend to think of the German pirate party as the party of cargo cult modern, in the sense that modern does not mean a opinion informed by deep technical understanding, but modern in the sense of the latest Techcrunsh fad, independent if that is Instagram, Stasibook or Anonymous.

by 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.

yk 13y ago

Unfortunately it is not just media smear. In Germany we have at the moment roughly ten percent of the electorate who are deeply future shocked and are just random walking around the political landscape. ( They did push the FDP to 14% in the last parliament election, pushed the Greens to win the Baden Wuerttemberg election and voted the Berlin Pirates to 13% two years ago. ) And some of these guys did overrun the original pirate party. For example, they did recreate a lot of the problems voting machines have with their 'liquid feedback' system, and when called out on that answered that they do not know, but since 1337 pirate party instead of evil(TM) Diebold suggested it, there is surely a way. ( And to rant a bit, at their last party convention they did petition that the parliament publishes their schedule on the INTERNET, which the parliament of course does. But there is no one left in the pirates who is able to google.) So by now I tend to think of the German pirate party as the party of cargo cult modern, in the sense that modern does not mean a opinion informed by deep technical understanding, but modern in the sense of the latest Techcrunsh fad, independent if that is Instagram, Stasibook or Anonymous.