The Swiss Pirate Party Has Its First Mayor 110
bs0d3 writes "Alex Arnold from the Pirate Party Switzerland has been elected mayor of Eichberg. This is the first mayoral win for the pirates in Switzerland, and hopefully just the begining of things to come. Thomas Bruderer, president of the Pirate Party Switzerland, is delighted: 'This result is for our young party is an important milestone. To win a majority vote shows that our members are not just a marginal phenomenon; but are in the midst of society.'"
Things to come... (Score:2)
"This is the first mayoral win for the pirates in Switzerland, and hopefully just the begining of things to come."
Could Slashdot at least *pretend* to be non-bias when reporting this kind of stuff?
Re:Things to come... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Things to come... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not. Well it is to people who hate ordered society, or dislike people being involved. A lot of people simply hate politics because they don't understand how it works, personally I blame that on the fact that they don't actually teach people about it. Rather, they simply "tell people" what they think they should know.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Re:Things to come... (Score:0)
Logic fail: In writing what you wrote, you were engaging in political discourse. Are you saying that the act of decrying the repulsive nature of government is, in itself, repulsive? Quite the infinite loop you have got yourself into, no?
Also, quit this childish crap. We can organise ourselves into a society based on the idea that (to oversimplify considerably) we are all happy with majority rule, even though that may mean being adult enough to accept decisions that we disagree with. It would be absolutely impossible to have any sort of functioning society at all if we all accepted your extremist crap.
Just fucking quit it.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Churches and tithing?
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
On the one hand, churches do not force their members to tithe at gunpoint
Indeed they don't, tithing is entirely voluntary. As to the IRS, most people love their God but don't feel too kindly toward the government. It would take a massive ad campaign to get people to voluntarily fund government. And church only asks for ten percent, the feds get way more than that and my state, Illinois, gets at least that much (6% income tax, 7% sales tax plus road taxes on gasoline, beer taxes, cigarettes taxes, etc).
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
On the one hand, churches do not force their members to tithe at gunpoint (at least, none in America of which I know). On the other hand, many seem to be doing just fine with their funding being completely from voluntary sources, even when some people make use of their resources without paying tithes. Makes you wonder whether the IRS is needed at all.
If you only had church tithes instead of government taxes (assuming such a hellish conception could even remotely be workable in a population that was not composed entirely of braindead slaves), then do you really think they would be voluntary? At the very least there would have to be very strong social pressure to contribute, and presumably if you didn't you would be ostracized.
Re:Things to come... (Score:1)
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Re:Things to come... (Score:3)
Feel free to start your own country where there is no taxation. And good luck with that.
Here in the real world, we recognize that there are essential services that must be paid for, that people are not always rational and ethical and that we must agree on a system to deal with these sad facts.
The pirate party getting a mayor elected might be interesting, but it's not like they can simply impose their entire agenda.
Additionally, if you admit that intellectual property issues are real owing to the fact that real people must do real work producing them, the entire "pirate" thing falls apart. Sure, it's good to have an opposing viewpoint to the draconian IP laws being pushed by big media, but don't expect IP ownership issues to go away. If they did, nobody could ever make a living creating, well, anything.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Additionally, if you admit that intellectual property issues are real owing to the fact that real people must do real work producing them, the entire "pirate" thing falls apart. Sure, it's good to have an opposing viewpoint to the draconian IP laws being pushed by big media, but don't expect IP ownership issues to go away.
"My" intellectual property does NOT belong to me; I merely have a "limited" time monopoly on its use. I no more own The Paxil Diaries than I own the house I'm renting.
Studies show that pirates spend more on media than non-pirates. If your "piracy is killing authors" were true, the public libraries would have killed authorship a long time ago, but on the contrary, I would not have those dozen Asimov titles on my shelf if I hadn't read hundreds of other Asimov books I'd checked out from the library -- and the internet is the 21st century library.
Nobody's going to buy your record if they've never heard your songs. Only an idiot buys a pig in a poke.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY! Today, that's the internet.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Beh. Government is the objective standard of society working as the whole. When one person can't do it, it's the group doing it for everyone else with the express consent of what they're agreeing to(by election/vote/consent/etc). A person can give up on government if they want, there's nothing stopping any person in a western country from going off the grid and going to live off in a hermitage, or the wilds or anything else. This is the whole basis of the social contract [wikipedia.org], and there's a far better works written on that then what I could even cram into /. text box.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
The root problem with politics is that government, at its very core, is based on actions, based on aggression that when committed by anyone else other than "the government" would be rightfully condemned by everyone. If someone outside of government would implement taxation people would rightfully view it as theft. If someone outside of government introduced conscription people would rightfully view it as slavery. Those who have understood this naturally view politics as repulsive, just as we view working for the mafia as repulsive.
I think this is the point at which someone says "fuck off and live in Somalia then" isn't it?
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
I fail to see how someone promoting a new player in politics is a bad thing...
How about if they were promoting a new neo-Nazi party?
You believe that the Pirate party are a good thing and so are using false logic.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
You are criticizing GP based on an unsupported assumption that he would find that bad. Personally, I don't: more parties are good, even if they are neo-Nazi, since they force the discussion around "unpleasant" topics like racism. That said, I wouldn't see neo-Nazis getting elected as a good thing, but any stretch of the imagination.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
How about them being yet another one issue party? Other than free schooling and healthcare (at least the Swedish one) their only issue is: free media, no copyright, no patents. How about national defense, financial regulations, taxation, public services etc? Just like the cannabis party or the green party who essentially believe all problems can be solved by a bong or an organic compost heap respectively.;
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Crap I must code too much I terminated my statement with a semi-colon :)
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
Pretty sure they also fight for more government transparency and more citizen privacy.
That said, the value of a one issue party is that they influence other parties for capturing their vote.
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
True but it can be unbalanced. Having a party that really pushes IP reform for example to the extreme that the pirate party does ignores the fact that patents and copyrights exist for a reason: it is expensive and likely some of the most important things that a person or a company will do during its existence. Without protections for the exceptional everyone ends up being just another grunt in the cogs of an assembly line, or no better off than them even though they can't do your job but you can do theirs, ie market value of skills can't be respected since there is no security for the investor to get their money back..
Re:Things to come... (Score:2)
It doesn't really ignore that, since the Pirate Parties don't propose the elimination of copyright (source [piratpartiet.se]).
That said, and as someone who is employed to write Free Software, I'm skeptical of the existence of a real need for copyright; the system was created a long time ago when the conditions were massively different, and it exists because it already existed, regardless of the existence or not of a valid reason for it nowadays.
I'm sure copyright has many benefits for most copyright holders, but that's not really its supposed purpose, which is to encourage the creation of new works and inventions, and I believe that these would appear any way. We might even get a reduction in quantity but improvement in average quality.
That said, "copyright and patents" as a whole is impossible to speak about, since the differences between markets (e.g. B2B software and Pop music) are so great that what applies to one may be completely wrong for the other.
Re:Things to come... (Score:1)
Re:Things to come... (Score:0)
Could Slashdot at least *pretend* to be non-bias when reporting this kind of stuff.
I'm sure it could but I don't see why that would be an improvement.
Re:Things to come... (Score:1)
No. The claim to journalistic objectivity was never something I bought. More and more people are dispensing with it, and IMHO that's a good thing. If you go back in time, there were newspapers like, "The Press Democrat". No bones about it. If you want honesty in reporting, it's probably not a bad idea to start off being honest about your bias. I don't believe there's any such thing as a non-biased journalist. If you claim objectivity, you start off on the wrong foot--that of deceiving yourself and others. I'd rather get news from "The Press Pirate" than from a source that claims to be "fair and balanced" when we all know it isn't.
Arrr! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Arrr! (Score:3)
Re:Arrr! (Score:5, Funny)
How pirates ended up in a country with no sea? How did they commute?
They airlift them in with a swarm of talking parrots, you can often see the foreman sitting on the captain's shoulder negotiating for more crackers or threatening to blabber about the treasure. The colors are actually for navigation, red parrots on the left, green parrots on the right and white parrots on the tail. One crazy captain called the Flying Dutchman even airlifted his whole ship this way, but he got lost in the Swiss alps somewhere and the parrots froze to death in the winter. Who knows, maybe the descendants of the crew still live up there continuing their pirating ways...
Rhein River and Lake Constance / Bodensee! (Score:2)
Yarrr! Obviously a town named Eichberg is in the mountains, but they've got a creek, and they're about 5km from the Rhein River, where there's all sorts of opportunity for river piracy, Lorelei sirens, and the border with Austria. And about 30km away is Lake Constance (or Bodensee, in German), which is certainly big enough for piracy.
FPV FTW :) (Score:4, Interesting)
Switzerland: the country where doing this [youtube.com] is legal, now gets a pirate party major. When kids go to college, I'm moving there ;)
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:0)
Is flying an RC aircraft over the mountains illegal somewhere?
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:0)
I was a bit confused as well about that, but it looks like it's an RC aircraft with mounted cameras with a range of 10km from the person controlling it. I don't know where, but some strict countries maybe would classify that as spying?
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:3)
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:0)
This is not a reply to the parent, just me adding information to the parents post, and telling anyone they may actually have a problem with this activity my 2 cents.
If you look at the channel, they have plenty of videos of them doing this in here in America as well.
As for spying, not my problem. My country does shitloads of spying on its own people and the entire planet, I could careless about some guy flying a small plane anywhere.
If I owned a ranch out in the middle of no where and was sunbathing nude for some odd reason, and then I saw one of these above head, I would probably just put clothes back on. If it stayed around, and was clearly in my space above my property, I would shoot it down.
Because who owns a ranch and doesn't own a gun?
And if I couldn't shoot it down, I would then call the authorities and claim harassment, not spying. And then go back to my daily life without being stressed at all throughout the whole process.
Stuff like this is stuff only pussys complain about. Go back to nodding to your wife and letting her make the decisions.
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
It's not legal in many places even in Europe. You can't legally fly that way in Czech Republic IIRC.
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:0)
Or maybe SHOULD do it and watch lasers shoot it down.
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
If I was rich I'd park in a supercar somewhere near Area 51 and launch an FPV RC at it and fly around the buildings until it gets shot down. If the spooks show up then I'd tell the driver to gun it :D
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
RC aircraft are illegal to fly outside of certain designated airspaces in most places. Flying RCs out of visual range, which is basically part of FPV flying, is categorically illegal almost everywhere. That what a lot of the new laws about UAVs are addressing.
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
Before anyone yells about it I should mention that in many countries that "designated airspace" includes all airspace below a low ceiling.
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
Switzerland: the country where doing this [youtube.com] is legal, now gets a pirate party major. When kids go to college, I'm moving there ;)
Why are you so impressed with a radio controlled plane taking video footage? Wouldn't that be legal in most places in the world, except near military installations? What am I missing?
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
You're missing that it's not legal in most places in the world, unfortunately.
Re:FPV FTW :) (Score:2)
Say what you want, their apparent xenophobia served them well thus far. YMMV.
overheard: Better "Piggy" than "Fatty" (Score:0)
as the town's street signs were quickly claimed by collectors.
Time for a navy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Time for a navy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Time for a navy (Score:1)
I don't think the Sea Scouts count..
Re:Time for a navy (Score:2)
Just having armed watercraft [www.mcso.us] doesn't make you a Navy. You need a separate military command structure. The Swiss have that for their Air Force and Army, but not for their patrol boats, which are a small unit within the Army.
One can only hope these pirates don't get too uppity!
Re:Time for a navy (Score:0)
Well well America has the world biggest navy, with no admiral in control at the helm, it's people are dismayed disenchanted disbelieve their dishonest two party politicians
Re:Time for a navy (Score:2)
The copilot of a Titanic Airlines flight: (Score:1)
Eichberg! Dead ahead!
iCanfixit (Score:0)
A bit premature. (Score:5, Interesting)
"To win a majority vote shows that our members are not just a marginal phenomenon; but are in the midst of society.'"
Without knowing the politics of the town, that's a bit of a premature boast. Dark horse and odd ball candidates routinely win against major candidates in local elections when the major candidates have pissed off the electorate or run a seriously lackluster campaigns. The real test of entering the mainstream is either the candidate or party getting re-elected or gaining additional offices or municipalities.
After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Another key question, what is the demographics of the town? If they skew young and lower income (not poor, but cube monkeys) or have a major geek influence (like say, Silicon Valley), that's another potential indicator that the boast is hollow and premature.
Re:A bit premature. (Score:0)
you are right. It's a tiny village.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichberg,_Switzerland [wikipedia.org]
he was elected because he was backed up by different parties, having grown up in that village and working for the administration his whole career.
Re:A bit premature. (Score:0)
you are right. It's a tiny village.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichberg,_Switzerland [wikipedia.org]
1,481 inhabitants. That's a pretty major city, by Swiss standards.
Re:A bit premature. (Score:0)
It aint. Not even by swiss standards.
Re:A bit premature. (Score:2)
Nope. It's a village. I've never heard of it before, and I'm member of the Swiss Pirate Party (different municipality tough). There are indeed towns this size in Switzerland, since "town" being defined as either a) has more than 10'000 inhabitants or b) has an inherited medieval town privilege.
So this is a village: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langnau_im_Emmental [wikipedia.org] -- 9'000 inhabitants
But this is a town: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werdenberg_(Ort) [wikipedia.org] -- about 60 inhabitants
Re:A bit premature. (Score:2)
After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
They are Swiss, I am sure their watches are both ever running and ever correct :p
Re:A bit premature. (Score:1)
Back in 2002 the mayoral election for Hartlepool ( population 92000) was won by the local football club's mascot, H'angus the monkey. H'angus, who was previously best known for bein ejected from rival team Scunthorpe United's ground for simulating sex with a female steward, stood on a platform of ' a banana for every child' and narrowly beat the Labour Party candidate into second place.
There were some who believed that electing an man in a monkey suit to a £50000 a year public office position was asking for trouble. These people were unfortunately disappointed in 2005 when H'angus was re- elected with an increased majority. He duely won a third term in 2009 and is still the borougj's mayor.
Oh Great (Score:2)
What's the big significance here? If you get all your friends to vote in a local election that most people ignore, then yeah, you can get elected. Doesn't establish your political clout.
The citizens of Eichberg now have a mayor whose agenda has nothing to do roads, sewers, public safety, or any of the other unsexy issues that municipal officials deal with. He does care about copyright reform — an issue in which a mayor has no say at all.
Now the local Pirate Party people will pat each other on the back for this "win" and go back to ignoring local politics. Hey, real impressive.
Re:Oh Great (Score:3)
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
Transparency is good. But that's a standard plank on everybody's platform these days.
Re:Oh Great (Score:3)
Well, let's wait and watch? Considering how most other politicians seem to be primarily concerned with lining their own pockets at the expense of the country, a politician that gets actually nothing accomplished would be an improvement...
Re:Oh Great (Score:3)
So, if the city stops repairing potholes, that's actually an improvement?
The lame thing about libertarians and other government haters is that they take for granted all the things government actually does that needs doing. The city infrastructure seems to be OK, so what's the big deal about actually maintaining it?
Sure, government is corrupt. Most big institutions are corrupt. Not sure of a good way to fix it, but electing a single-issue bozo who no actual interest in running his city is not high on my list.
Re:Oh Great (Score:1)
He did his apprenticeship at the local government and the former major. Afterwards he went studding and gathered some years of experience as an informatics project manager. I am pretty sure he is capable of doing this job right.
btw: Also two major parties and the finding committee recommended him.
Re:Oh Great (Score:1)
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
Let me dig into my memory bank. Oh yeah, the green party is about ecology and sustainability, right? These are things that municipal officials deal with every day. I live in a city [portlandoregon.gov] that isn't actually run by the Green Party, but might as well be, given all the effort the city puts into mass transit, bike-friendly streets, mandatory composting and recycling, and other green initiatives.
Re:Oh Great (Score:1)
The citizens of Eichberg now have a mayor whose agenda has nothing to do roads, sewers, public safety, or any of the other unsexy issues that municipal officials deal with. He does care about copyright reform — an issue in which a mayor has no say at all.
Genuine question because I don't know anything about his politics - is what you've said here based on first hand knowledge of the mayor's opinions and policies, on local news reports, on something you read on some blog on the internet, or is it something you just made up based on your imagination of how a pirate party mayor should be?
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
He's a member of a party that exists solely because people are pissed off about antiquated copyright laws (as am I). Maybe the dude has more going than his interest in this one issue, but the fact that he's affiliated with a single-issue party doesn't encourage me to think so.
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
He's a member of a party that exists solely because people are pissed off about antiquated copyright laws (as am I).
I'm pissed off because they got rid of the antiquated copyright laws that said a work must be in a fixed AND TANGIBLE medium and only lasted 30 years. If we rolled copyright back to what it was in 1900, file sharing would be legal and Led Zeppelin songs would now be in the public domain.
The DMCA and Bono act are less than 20 years old. It's not the antiquated parts that need to go, it's the new parts.
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
Preaching to choir, dude. I'm totally on the same page with you as to retroactive copyrights. My point here is that touting the outcome of a city election as a major blow for copyright reform is just plain lame.
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
"The citizens of Eichberg now have a mayor whose agenda has nothing to do roads, sewers, public safety, or any of the other unsexy issues that municipal officials deal with. He does care about copyright reform â" an issue in which a mayor has no say at all."
This is Switzerland, not some Third World country where a road is more pothole than concrete. So maybe the local voters don't care that much about roads and sewers because they're in a good enough condition?
Remember that a government isn't all elected "politicians". In most well-run democratic countries, the government consists mostly of bureaucrats that can run the state or local unit even if there's a political deadlock where there's no legally elected leader but only a caretaker who may or may not have been elected. So basically you'll have a local "Pirate" politician setting "policies" for local bureacrats to put into practice.
Re:Oh Great (Score:2)
Hey, I don't live in a third world country either. My mayor [twitter.com] spends a lot of time talking roads and sewers.
If the public bureaucrats have everything in hand (ha!), why even bother holding an election?
Wait for it! Wait for it! (Score:3)
Hee hee hee... Oh damn... I kill me...
Old news. (Score:2)
"Talk Like a Pirate Day" was last week.
sectoral party (Score:2)
The pirate parties from various countries tend to be sectoral parties: they propose a lot of interesting stuff on some subject, but lack a global platform covering everything. Social or economic subjects may not be clearly included in their platform, for instance. It will be interesting how this pirate major will cope with matters that do not make consensus among pirates
Note that the term sectoral is not negative in my point of view. The goal of a sectoral party is to influence other parties so that their ideas get adopted in global platforms. Good example are greed parties: some of them could not decide for some time if they were left wing or right wing, but that did not prevent their green ideas spread far beyond their own ranks
Re:sectoral party (Score:2)
The goal of a sectoral party is to influence other parties so that their ideas get adopted in global platforms. Good example are greed parties:
The Republicans are a sectoral party??
Re:sectoral party (Score:2)
Re:sectoral party (Score:2)
I could tell it was a typo, I just thought it was humorous.
Ads all over the city for 777 Poker, etc...? (Score:2)
Mayoral regalia (Score:1)
Anybody know the rates for (Score:2)
webhosting in Eichberg?
Re:HOSTS file could have prevented this (Score:2, Insightful)
Seek help.
Or in other words || my big question (Score:2)
Also can be said PUT THE BONG DOWN AND WALK AWAY.
So i guess one of the first orders of business is to ensure the Rum Supply for the city.
Re:HOSTS file could have prevented this (Score:2)
(Now the sick bastard will follow me again)
Re:HOSTS file could have prevented this (Score:2)
I miss Dr Bob.
Re:HOSTS file could have prevented this (Score:2)
Re:HOSTS file could have prevented this (Score:2)
Oh hey, it's Gene Ray, the Time Cube guy.
Re:Where? (Score:0)
In Switzerland, this is an average town, not "an inconsequential rural area" or "rednecksville". But I'm sure your fellow countrymen are grateful for your propagation of the stereotype of the wilfully ignorant American.
Re:Where? (Score:2)
I am swiss, and no: ~1400 is a village not a town here.
Re:Where? (Score:0)
We get it, everything is bigger and better in the US, the only country that matters. Snore.
As for how much 1481 votes (probably less discounting children), please get a clue about direct democracy. Yeah, that's right motherfucker. None of that two-party representative bullshit that some baby countries have settled for.
Re:Where? (Score:1)
"Eichberg has a population (as of 31 December 2011) of 1,481." You know what we call these in America? Hick towns. Flyover territory. Rednecksville"
Errm.. we're talking about Switzerland here. The whole country is - literally - "Flyover territory". The place is tiny. Even Zuerich is only something like 3-400000 populationwise..
Re:Where? (Score:1)
Re:Where? (Score:0)
The flaw in your logic is that the USA has 312M inhabitants, while Switzerland has a mere 8M divided over 2740 communes. The majority of which, have fewer than 1000 inhabitants. Only 30 have a population of over 20k inhabitants. This may not be a huge milestone, but an important one nonetheless.
Re:remind me never to buy any music from the swiss (Score:2, Interesting)
> remind me never to buy any music from the swiss... or respect any other intellectual property from Switzerland.
All of a sudden, all Swiss products became a lot more interesting to me.
Re:remind me never to buy any music from the swiss (Score:2)
> remind me never to buy any music from the swiss... or respect any other intellectual property from Switzerland.
All of a sudden, all Swiss products became a lot more interesting to me.
Try pirating a Rolex watch and see how amusing they find it.
Re:remind me never to buy any music from the swiss (Score:3)