Iceland’s Prime Minister Resigns, After Pirate Party Makes Strong Gains
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"The left-leaning parties — the Left-Greens, the Pirates and two allies — won 27 seats, just short of the 32 required to command a majority in Iceland’s Parliament, the world’s oldest."
and
"About 40 percent of Pirate supporters are under the age of 30. They had pinned their hopes on a party that has promised to install a more inclusive and transparent government."
and
"The Pirates have pledged to enhance direct democracy by passing the world’s first “crowd-sourced constitution,” drafted by Icelandic civilians rather than politicians. Parliament blocked the document in 2013."
What was the process for this to be? Having folks who are untrained in law draft a constitution and then passing it sounds... well about as dumb as having folks who've just learned to program write an operating system and put it in production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution#178...
Are these the "rich landowners" you are referring to?
That's why they didn't adopt it.
http://thefederalistpapers.org/federalist-papers/federalist-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_constitutional_refor...
Like every customer would do (potentially with multiple stake holders/persons trying to prioritize different things). In the end the trained people handle these wishes and either decline them ("Not feasible, because.."), discuss them ("You might think you want that, but that would cause X, Y and Z. I'd suggest doing..") or turn them into reality.
Which sounds super crazy but only because there is a perception that good medical treatment is difficult and not something you can do with out a lot of training. Government on the other hand is often perceived as "easy" because, hey anyone can throw their hat in the ring and be elected to President right? No previous training or education required.
You spend your life studying the heart muscle, its ailments, and ways that it can be treated when it is old or damaged. And your a revered, board certified cardiologist.
You spend your life studying people, their governance, and ways to manage conflict and justice through the law. And your a despised lifelong politician.
In any case, as was pointed out, the proposal wasn't to have a shared Google Doc that anyone could write, it was just a process with more democratic input.
It would be nice to see a country (or EU) that forbade politicians to share or get input on law drafts from lobbyists. Just imagine how the many current trade agreements would look like if only politicians had seen and written them. Or just extensions of copyright law.
Its like having a operating system be written by an advertisement company and then be surprised when it is designed in favor of the advertisement company rather than the user who bought the device.
In such cases it is actually helpful for the lobbyists to decide, so long as different sizes of companies and different industries are represented.
It is a huge mistake to think that individual companies want things to be better for their field or industry as a whole. They don’t; whatever ups or downs the industry suffers will be borne equally by all, and is therefore irrelevant to the real goal of companies: to get an edge over the competition. Companies will gladly make things worse for everyone in their field if it means they will get a larger share of it. Politicians, apparently, do not know this, or do not have enough incentive to realize this, so politicians choose to listen to the lobbyists and choose to believe that they are thereby listening to the industry.
You surely don't expect companies to not advocate for themselves and be wholly altruistic? A lobbyist is paid to advocate for their client's interests. Sometimes that aligns with the public interest, most of the time it's a grey area.
There are plenty of opportunities for corruption in the interaction and those need to be addressed; rebranding 'lobbyists' isn't one of them.
Just offering specialized input would be consulting.
And the way I see it: company and industry group lobbying works just fine, but there is a significant lack of public interest lobbying.
A lobbyist is a lobbyist. It's not the label assigned to people who give input in general.
Agree. But unless there's a mechanism for learning about the industry affected by the laws being written, and a feedback mechanism, the danger is that the law is simply going to be ignorant and force out non-state organizations.
While out of hand, lobbying has an actual practical function that is important.
Does it? Laws, or more general, contracts are made between people. If the wording of those laws/contracts requires a special education to be understood, people don't understand the contracts they make anymore. But then, what's a contract worth if none of the parties involved understands it but they all have implicit expectations?
Shouldn't a constitution be understood by every citizen? Let lawyers point out potential ambiguities, but let regular people do the wording so that regular people can understand it.
Coalition Parliament majority is not exactly an authoritarian takeover, in order to be able to push anything through, I would imagine.
Is your point that because the US hasn't toppled any governments in Western Europe we shouldn't worry about them doing it there? I see no reason to assume that Western Europe somehow is out of bounds.
The US always relied on finding some extremists or sympathetic party which they could manipulate to their ends.
You can't topple people in a vacuum. In Iran they could rely on existing support for the Shah of Iran. In Chile they could rely on right wing military people like Pinochet.
There has to be some sort of chaos to exploit.
Or perhaps there are way in which the US could manufacture a crisis, but I think US governments today as simply nicer than in the past.
Yeah, I used to think like you. Until that one time when the USA landed the plane of the president of Bolivia because they thought Snowden was aboard. That's not the USA doing its shit in a far away place, to "bad guys" in south america or iran. I know hijacking a plane isn't toppling a government, but do you see what I mean? They certainly have the power, it's just a question of are they brazen enough? And to me this shows that they are.
> I think US governments today as simply nicer than in the past.
I see no evidence of that. Look at what's happening in Syria.
The PM's party lost much support in this election, in particular the coalition they're in doesn't have majority. This was expected.
I find no Icelandic news about him resigning. On the contrary he says he's not going anywhere as the party leader for the Progressive party.
NYT might have misunderstood the entirely customary "request for release from duty" that the PM makes to the president on behalf of his cabinet. This is a normal formality after a majority coalition loses parliament majority. The president (which in Iceland is just a figurehead) then usually asks the cabinet to remain until a new coalition has been formed, at which time he gives a new coalition agency to form a new cabinet. This is just normal procedure, and nothing newsworthy.
Pirates tripled the number of seats since last election, but they have been polling much higher, towards 30% support on par with the Independence party.
But, inaccurate foreign news of Icelandic politics seems more normal than accurate ones.
(source: am Icelandic)
But the part that leaves me really uneasy is this idea they have of bringing: direct democracy to people and let them vote for a lot of issues.
After Brexit, do we really want to give the people the power to vote in issues that are way above the knowledge of most of the voters and to have media skewing and manipulating their views of the problem according to the interests of the few ones commanding the media?