Why It's Time to Party Like It's 2011
The Pirate Party has hovered on the edge of politics for a while now, acting as a kind of gadfly to traditional parties - annoying but not able to inflict much damage. Its seats in the European Parliament have proved important in terms of raising issues and obtaining access to hitherto restricted information. But last week's events in Germany are perhaps even more significant:On Open Enterprise blog.
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2 comments:
It's a pity that the AV vote went the way it did, but people in the UK seem to be unhappy unless they get the slap of firm government. Even a semi-dictatorship is preferrable to wooliness and compromise. Coalition is a dirty word.
The fundamental argument against AV seemed to be that it would be possible for a party that 'came second' to 'win' because the 'loosing' votes got recounted. That's 'not fair', and the British are very sensitive about that sort of thing.
But this reduces politics in the UK to just a form of sport whose main event comes around once every five years like the olympics or world cup (and let's not dwell on their internal politics). It seems more important to figure out who won and, almost more importantly, who lost on that one day than to think about what the 'winners' will then do to *all* the people in the country on the day after and for every day until the next general election. We can't even bear the thought of having to wait for the result --- it has to be known on the night or, well, tomorrow there'll be no government! Anarchy and chaos, dogs and cats living together --- mass hysteria.
And so we have ever-more divisive governments in an ever-more divided country, exploited by business lobby groups.
@guy: yup...
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