It's great that Islanders express their dissatisfaction by reporting their votes on "the pirate party" instead of extreme right parties as we see it happening in some European countries.
Patriotism is seen as some kind of wrong thing as it could be taken offensive by immigrants. Unless you are in Asia - then its OK because it is accepted there that when you are a guest, you live by host rules. But for some reason both Europe and America is afraid to say that.
ANY kind of extreme left or right is wrong, but recently I see right parties going to the left slowly.
Saying "I don't like when people do XXX" or "I am unhappy that government pays for XXX" makes you extremist.
Saying this as an immigrant.
#Edit. It's just a question, people. I'm trying to figure out what default means in this whole Greece context.
Right now Grease gets more new loans / year than they pay out in interest payments. So their debt keeps growing until their next default / restructuring. It’s a vicious cycle.
On the other hand if they defaulted and did not need to make interest payments, but could not make new loans their cash flow would be worse off. But, they would have a reasonable path to long term prosperity by simply keeping their books balanced.
Of course there is always the 3rd option of defaulting and then trying to make new loans and default again. But their already getting free money from the EU so there is little point in doing this now.
Alternately, you use the threat of that default to renegotiate the debt on more favorable terms. This also happens with personal bankruptcy, though the situations aren't quite analogous (some creditors will negotiate a more favorable repayment plan with debtors who seem like they might otherwise declare bankruptcy).
Unfortunately for Greece, afaict they have less leverage now than they did in 2010. At the time, much of their debt was held by German and French banks, so there was a mutually assured destruction angle. France/Germany would probably not sit by and let their large banks go down with the ship in the case of a Greek bankruptcy. So they would be forced to bail out the situation one way or the other, either bailing out Greece and thereby indirectly bailing out their banks by giving Greece money to pay them, or letting Greece default and then bailing out their banks directly. Now most of the debt has been moved to institutional holdings (the European Central Bank, IMF, etc.) as part of the bailout, which is less directly threatening. Probably Greece should've bargained harder at the time, but the previous government was a bit spineless.
The actual left of Syriza has become very critical internally over that line, which they see as incoherent and not in tune with reality: in their view, the line Tsipras/Varoufakis are attempting to take just won't work, because it wants to promise staying in the Euro and then also a bunch of things that are incompatible with staying in the Euro, but won't admit that you need to pick one. Here is one interview with a left-wing Syriza MP, criticizing them along those lines: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/lapavitsas-varoufakis-gre.... You can differ over whether this line would be better, but I think it's more grounded in reality; Lapavitsas (the interview subject) imo much more clearly understands the concrete situation and what can and can't be done, and doesn't promise glibly that everything is simultaneously possible.
As distinct from the dominant political parties in the US ... how, again?