United States Pirate Party
uspirates.org
uspirates.org
And yes, your name is silly. You should change it; messaging matters and you start with your left foot forward.
Switch to range voting, STAR voting, approval voting, and it goes away.
The incumbent parties don't have a lot of incentive to do that because tautologically the people currently in office are the people the existing system puts in office, so why would they want a different one? But even a lot of politicians are pretty jaded about the existing system. Get a couple third parties in there who are willing to turn a 51 vote majority into a 49 vote minority over this and you might get it through.
Fair enough! You are, of course, exactly right. But, the reasons for still having first past the post voting are arguably less clear. Many nations have reformed their first past the post voting systems while the US (along with some other countries) remains stuck.
A better strategy is to trade your vote away on anything that isn't your core issue. You trade with political opponents for their support when the issue you do care about comes up.
Using that technique, even a single representative can have quite some impact, as long as the issue they care about is narrow enough.
So, the pirate party protects people.
We need ranked choice voting and campaign finance reform.
We have an _enormous_ industry enforcing copyright laws which barely make sense, and imo that industry is parasitic
Yes, that's what piracy enables, if the legislation isn't successful.
What's your opportunity cost as a result of trivial replication and propagation being locked behind mechanisms that facilitate the creation of artificial scarcity?
Also, I agree with not being left/right wing but inability or unwillingness to commit to some belief or guiding principles that tells people how your policies might affect issues important to them is very bad. If I have an illegal immigrant family member, will you be hunting them down for deportation, after all they broke the law. Will you allow sharia law as an extension of people's right to practice their faith? will you reform immigration? If so, how? Will you end the visa lottery or amp it up? How about H1B and other skilled worker visas? I have colleagues that will have their entire lives impacted by that. Will you reform police and the military and if so how? Just funding? Will you, as a pirate actually restrict gun ownership, enact balanced reforms or leave things as is?
I am not saying take a position on every issue now but I can't tell it apart from satire when you are not even hinting at what your principles are. Change for the sake if change is something juvenile people whose only goal is to self-aggrandize and give their own lives meaning at any cost. To me, you are actually a bit dangerous because you want to scoop up support fully knowing screaming change like Obama will help a lot. Do you have a sinister motive? No idea, all I know is people like this, college/young kids start small and actually revolt in many other countries, but in the end, either the military or some other power takes control.
I like "piracy" and identify with what you are saying but idealism without principles and leadership is at best folly and at worst dangerous.
The original pirates were and are murderers, rapist and thiefs. Despite some romantication going on - this is what they are doing. So I always thought it is not a smart idea, to adopt the name, that was meant as criticism.
Americans often pride themselves on revolutionary ideals which spread chaos, pain and suffering throughout the world, to the point of looking down on countries stable enough not to have constant gun violence. We hold soldiers and police in far greater esteem than doctors and scholars. We write love letters to serial killers. We root for underdogs, villains and rebels by default.
Let's be honest - it is a silly name, mostly because it seems childish and tone-deaf given more pressing modern political issues, but not because of any implied association with rape, pillage and plunder. If anything, that probably sells better in the US than elsewhere.
Then the winning platform in that district would be the one where you're mostly aligned with the party currently occupying that seat but differ on the pirate issues.
So you'd end up with a blue pirate party and a red pirate party based on which district they're running in. They would work with each other on pirate issues, but they'd generally caucus with different major parties on a per-district basis.
It might also help to prioritize getting range voting or STAR voting so this would stop being necessary.
Also even if this party does not have success, just by running they can change the other candidates policies
Only implemented recently iirc.
I quite like the German model:
> Every elector has two votes: a constituency vote (first vote) and a party list vote (second vote). Based solely on the first votes, 299 members are elected in single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post voting. The second votes are used to produce a proportional number of seats for parties, first in the states, and then on the federal level.
(from wikipedia)
In CZ, we can prefer individual candidates from the party list. Plenty of VIPs lost their putatively safe seats because they were disliked enough.
This is only a result of first past the post voting. If a third party had any significant support, they would split the vote with the major party most like them and hand the election to the major party least like them. Then the third party merges with the major party most like them and we're back to two parties.
Switch to STAR/range/approval voting and that doesn't happen. You can run a hundred candidates and no one splits the vote. There is no point in even having primaries anymore, just run all your candidates in the general. Party becomes little more than an endorsement.
Libertarians don't have to run as Republicans to avoid splitting the vote with them, and then don't have to vote with Republicans on stupid wars or oil subsidies or whatever to avoid having a Republican run against them and hand the next election to a Democrat. Likewise with Greens vs. Democrats and anything else you like.
Proportional representation brings a bunch of different problems and is much harder to achieve in the US because it would require federal constitutional changes, whereas you can change the voting system in a state with a simple majority of the state legislature.
And different voting systems fix this. Suppose you have single representative per constituency with STAR voting. Then there is no "you didn't vote for this person" because you vote for everyone in degrees and the candidate who best represents the district wins.
Now suppose you're a minority constituency. You're 5% of the population, dispersed all across the country. With the existing system, a candidate willing to murder you in order to lower gas prices by 1% for everyone else can win the election with 95% of the vote. This is also the result you get with PR, because the "don't murder me" party gets 5% of the representatives, a coalition government forms in which they are not a part, and you get murdered.
But with STAR, the candidates who commit to not murdering you get the highest possible score form your demographic and the ones who want to lower gas prices get the lowest possible score. Since there can be a hundred candidates running, this will plausibly be the main difference between two of them, and a 1% difference in gas prices isn't enough to significantly change the scores people outside your demographic give to the other candidates. So the "don't murder me" candidates win everywhere and constitute the entire government no matter how the coalitions shake out.
In Czechia (where a pirate party is currently a part of the government) it was IMHO quite the reverse - the Czech Pirate Party mostly gained popularity by accenting ordinary center-liberal political themes.
The Pirate Party of Canada used to be quite active on r/CanadaPolitics. Once they fleshed out their platform they ended up overlapping heavily with the NDP and Greens (particularly the Greens).
I think many Pirate Parties have fallen into similar traps when they fleshed out their platform.
Yes, pretty much. There are Greens in Czechia but they are more left-progressive (compared to center-liberal pirates) and they are unacceptable for many because of their anti-nuclear position.
How about the radical position of letting each state decide for itself? They could even have the party in each state decide its own position, rather than enforcing a one-size-fits-all policy centrally.
Of course it's nice to think that there is one "right" answer to all those questions, and that the world would be better if we could just use the law to force other people to go along with what we want, but I think recent history has shown that just makes politics more dysfunctional and leaves everyone unhappy.
I admit, it's not an easy question, and my suggestion isn't guaranteed to work, but if there is complete deadlock and extreme polarization (potentially leading to violent conflict) at the national level, it's at least plausible that delegating some of those policies to smaller, more politically homogeneous, units might reduce the tensions, and make it easier for people to vote with their feet if they are unhappy with the rules they live under.
There's a lot of common sense power to the idea that smaller political units can reach an acceptable compromise more easily, and that having multiple governments offers some choice to those who can move. But there are big factors the other way too:
- The issues that most divide our definitions of liberty are aligned with differences in urban vs rural, majority vs minority, and rich vs poor. These are clustered such that they exist at state levels as much as federal.
- Smaller political units are more vulnerable to outside forces ... National parties can airdrop money into local campaigns to get strategic outcomes that have little to do with the constituents.
- The citizens of smaller units tend to have more direct power relations with each other, pulling them towards policies that explicitly maintain or redistribute power. This creates big problems for the less powerful, who see their position become more engrained and who often don't have the resources to vote with their feet.
None of this is an answer to "what's the best unit". I think that whichever personal liberties you value, you have to be pragmatic about who is protecting them where.
Sure, but liberty to do what? Liberty to not do what?
It is difficult to reconcile one person's liberty to marry the person they love without experiencing discrimination with another's liberty to discriminate against anyone who loves the 'wrong' people.
Or the right to own other people vs. the right to be free from ownership.
Does the freedom to innovate protect the generation, modification, dissemination, and implementation of ideas, or protect an inventor from having to compete with copycats?
Is the right to repair the equipment you own more or less important than the right of manufacturers to devise means of preventing unauthorized modifications?
Other than that, no.
Let's try approaching this from a different angle. Let's have X be the number of Americans who have the resources, knowledge, and paperwork required to move to a different state. And lets have Y be the number of Americans who have the same requirements, but to move to a different country. Surely you can agree that X is a much larger number than Y, right?
May be a global secular government with uniform civil laws for all is the answer?
As for the point of having a federal government, I could turn the question around and ask what is the point of having state governments when you could just decide everything centrally. You say "some kind of union", but I think you mean "exactly the sort of union that imposes the particular restrictions on states that I think is important". It's very much an open question what the "correct" set of restrictions should be, and that list has changed over the course of US history, and has different choices in different countries.
…which is the point of Federalism. The point isn’t what I think is important, the point is what we decide collectively as a country. And when such decisions are made, everyone must go along with them, because that’s how we accomplish goals. You can’t row a boat across a river if half the people on it are rowing in the wrong direction. However, if you decide you want to go back to shore, and everyone agrees, then the system should support that too (ie repealing prohibition).
For other stuff that the fed govt doesn’t care about, leave it to the states, and for the stuff the states don’t care about, leave it to the people. 10th amendment.
If we’d left things to states, Jim Crow would’ve stayed on the books for decades longer, and some states would still not have gay marriage.
Why stop there, though? Should the US invade countries that have worse rights for gay people, in order to "liberate" them? Both states and countries are (in some sense) just lines on a map, and ultimately you are using the threat of force if you are imposing a set of rules on people, whether you use an army to do so or not.
That said, supporting the fight for gay rights in other countries? Sure. There's a lot of daylight between "do nothing" and "invade with army."
The current state of affairs is that the constitution does not allow the federal government, or the states, to prohibit abortion, guns, or gay marriage. So the status quo is that this is up to the individual. Leaving it up to the states would be a regression.
I do agree that patents/copyright need reform and a reduced patent period could be beneficial, but I think complete abolition would backfire.
If what you really want is e.g. abolition of software patents, what you want to do is to start off demanding abolition of all patents and then compromise at abolition of software patents. That's what the other side does.
Another good example is penicillin. Imagine where we would be with bacterial infections today without it entering the public domain from day 1.
I understand the desire to own your work, and immediately arriving at the conclusion that patents are morally or ethically right, but fundamentally when you release some piece of information into the world, it is for all practical purposes no longer yours. Patents are an artificial protection for something that simply isn't true in practice, and it doesn't appear that it increases innovation at all, if your focus is the practical side of things.
Some things sure, but I don't see how this would work for drugs that cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and run through trials.
Secondly, plenty of research is publicly funded.
The major philosophical error people make when asking why would people create anything in the absence of IP laws is believing that just because they created/invented something, they are owed something in return. Plenty of times, IP gets created, but there is no one to sell licensees to because no one wants it.
The major historical error is believing forgetting that people created and invented stuff just fine before IP laws existed.
Then take a look at companies like Oracle that did not invent anything for the last 20 years, but are still sueing the whole software industry for things that are common practices even taught in University classes. An API shall be patentable? Seriously?
While I am still pro patents I also have to say that patent offices are the wrong judges (speaking of them as part of the judicative branch) on what is patentable and what is not.
Why did Microsoft got most of their financial income from Google's Android over the last decades? (before Azure took off) ...it was the licensing income stream for the mp3 codec that wasn't actually invented by them; it was invented by the Fraunhofer Institute in the 80s.
It's ridiculous that the patent system is so messed up that they always favor not the actual inventors.
A better question for the FAQ would be: Are you pro-democracy, or pro-autocracy?
How do you plan to promote your choice of democracy, or autocracy, in practice?
Or technocracy?
Just look at how politicians went about things in the olden times. Even when they disagreed on things, they were far far better than just raging against each other like they are doing now!
Right and Left which are just two sides is way too narrow view of the world.
But I do understand why though. The people weren't even ready for Bernie Sanders this election. I found him as the better candidate among the lot, with a better plan. So adding the "centre" or "centre-left" party maybe way too much.
But I think the file-sharing/pirate party movement is a lil way too late. At the peak of Pirate Bay, they really were revolutionaries giving chances to new artists and new ideas through their front page campaigns and what not. But we have bigger problems like climate-change right now. File sharing would be not in my priority list in the current political environment.
If there is no democracy then autocrats decide who can copy what songs, if any, from the internet. What you can read on the internet. If there is an internet. But if there is democracy then people can decide all that by voting.
If there is no democracy there will be no Pirate Parties, unless for some reason that benefits the unelected people in power. Hey I'm glad that there is US Pirate Party now. But is there one also in China and Russia? Why not?
I'm not trying to deny that intellectual property issues can be important, even extremely so. It's argued that Germany's rise was related to a lack of copyright[1], and we can think of patents on medicine and many other areas where copyright is crucial, even foundational. But please...
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
Thanks, that was a perfect example of whataboutism. Why do you assume that IPR law is not an "important issue"? It's certainly important wrt. economic development, as you point out that Germany has benefited in the past from having looser IP restrictions. And a stronger economy helps us deal with all kinds of other issues, including climate change.
Btw that doesn't mean that because you might disagree with your society's approach to property that it's morally defensible to steal, etc.
It's related cus pirates are subject to unfair penalties and if jail, our jails are pure evil
Here is one: https://web.archive.org/web/20140906172617/https://www.wired... (that one is mine)
[Citation needed]
I'd like to see a budget breakdown of what these companies spend on research, manufacturing, marketing, etc.
At a glance, from looking at CBO pages, it looks like average R&D spend is actually more like in the 18-20% range, and that this isn't unusual for industries, which makes sense since they have other costs beyond R&D.
Every party makes similar promises. Instead, lead with what makes you different - your focus on IP law and digital rights. Perhaps even emphasize your flexibility or neutrality on other issues, so that your voting base isn't decimated by your positions on wedge issues.
"What is your goal? Our primary goal is to get elected into office. We believe in political change from the inside."
The goal of these "pirates" is stated very clearly: To get power. Not to chance the society in a particular way or direction, but to get power to themselves (who else?). To get elected. Then what? Oh we'll think about that later but our current goal is to get elected.
After being a life long liberal Democrat who has donated a lot to people like Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard, last year I decided I that for my personal reasons I had to be in a political party that was clearly anti-war unless our country was directly attacked. I decided that the Green Party was too small so I ended up joining the Libertarian Party, some things I like and some I don’t, but clearly anti-war.
For this reason, the strategy of pirate parties in other world states - gaining a few parliamentary seats on a limited-focus platform (or centrism/third-way'ism + "pirate" principles) - is essentially invalid in the US.
It is my opinion that this is "copycat politics"; and while I certainly support legalized file sharing, better privacy rights, limitation of intellectual property etc. - I believe this initiative would be better served either by forming a "third party coalition" with other movements/parties (e.g. Greens, Libertarians, People's Party if they actually start running people), or, and it pains me to say this, form caucuses within the one or both of the large parties. And I say this with the utmost respect for your efforts.
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PS - "No safe harbor for the enemies of liberty" <- bad choice of slogan, it reminds people of how the US drone-bombs people to death all over the world.
If not, yikes. The site seems broken or disorganized. Nothing on who supposedly runs the party.
One of there last posts is about the Patriot Act which isn't really a thing anymore.
Basically imagine libertarians with a strong drive to consider practical matters over ideology. Individual liberties, but drop the ideology and do what works for people, and what the people want as a whole.
I don't think that great way of describing political positions, but they are at least _a_ way of describing political positions. If they are going to reject the terms, I'd prefer they at least answer the question in a better way instead of rejecting it.
But...
I do not think left and right trick people into falsely believing that they disagree with each other. Instead I see them as an acknowledgement that political positions tend to cluster. Add in an election system that tends towards two party rule, and left and right wing sorta makes sense.
Everyone is driven by ideology. I think those that say they are above ideology don't really get why different ideologies are different. People's political positions are an expression of their core values. There have been a few books I've read that make the case for this. I think The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt does it best.
One thing he discusses in that book is an ideology can represent a mix of values or be an expression of a single value. One bit of research he showed had people doing a test where they were told to answer as a person from a different ideology. He found those who belonged to single-value ideologies did worse. In particular it could be seen that these participants assumed people of other ideologies believed in the same one value but where just worse at achieving it. I bring this up, because I think it is going on here. For left and right to falsely believe they disagree with each other, they would have to be trying to achieve the same goal. The same values.
I think the Party says this because they want this to be inclusive of people from other ideologies, and I think they earnestly want to achieve that. But I think that thinking about it this way will prevent them from being successful. With this mindset, I think they are most likely to end up with whichever ideology is biggest becoming absolutely dominate. Similar to what happened with Occupy Wall Street. I think they'd get better success on this goal if they learned why different ideologies are different, what the different values they are aiming for are, why the core Pirate Party positions align with those different sets of values, and for other issues try to pick positions that best serve multiple sets of values.
> Are you left-wing or right-wing? > We think “left-wing” and “right-wing” aren’t very useful ways of seeing the world
Although I generally agree, but man this gonna be wild...
A list of 50 states and some US territories should just be statically included.