

Swedish Pirate Party Fails To Enter Parliament - ElbertF
http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-pirate-party-fails-to-enter-parliament-100919

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tjogin
The Pirate Party lost my vote because they focused more on antics than
politics; i.e. that they would host the piratebay and wikileaks from within
the parliament.

The Pirate Party has alienated those who supported them not because they want
to legalize filesharing, but because they had a strong stance on personal
integrity, privacy and so forth.

They've lost their focus, and with it their credibility, I'm sorry to say.

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ashleyw
While at first sight it would suggest less people support the party now
compared to last year, you've got to remember that fringe groups like the
Pirate Party often do better in EU elections than they do in national
elections, which has a substantially higher turnout of mainstream voters.

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davidedicillo
Sadly enough they didn't while the xenophobic party did...

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ique
The party has a very clear highly racist agenda and yet they received upwards
of 20% in some regions. It's quite depressing that people would give up their
privacy in favor of "not having that foreigner in the neighborhood".

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m_eiman
The interesting thing is that the places where they got a lot of votes hardly
have any immigrants at all - it's a splendid example of being afraid of the
unknown and how that fear is used by extremists.

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gmlk
The same was true in the Netherlands, the party of Geert Wilders (with an
unrealistic, but popular, national/socialist program, with elements from both
far-right and far-left) received the most votes in places with the most
homogeneous population, where there are almost no immigrants. In places with
the most immigrants the socialists and progressives won. Interesting fact: The
day _after_ the elections Wilders dropped most of the left side of his
election program.

This makes me wonder if "voting" is actually any good, is it really
"democratic"? Maybe if a vote was actually an informed choice, but most people
just go with whomever is the most popular or promises them the moon on a
stick. Realism, reason, legality, etc does not matter. Perhaps "voting" is not
democratic at all if the people are basically ignorant, shortsighted, easily
swayed by (the illusion of) popularity, fearful, during times of uncertainty
and with many doubts about the future; We already see a kind of political
aristocracy in most western democracies, the sons of presidents becoming
presidents. Maybe that a demarchy would have been a better idea?

[demarchy]: Democracy without voting, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarchy>

