European parliament election

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Hm, I am honestly to lazy to check up on the relevent laws right now but there are propositions up and I think even some laws passed that basically let for example Warner bros to demand who ISP X is, send the person a demand letter and if that is not met send him to the IRS or its ecquivalent.

 

Well, the common market works both ways. Still, I have not heard many British politicians speak against it in particular, so it is either not that bad or still fairly popular. As for the fishing waters statute, I am not really competent on the issue. If Spanish trawlers were suspected for overfishing, has anyone in the UK complained either on the local or European level? It's not like there aren't enough Greens there who'd love to make an issue out of it

 

Well, even though this is slightly off topic you have always the choice of not taking money from your own pocket. It would suck but such is the world. If people are not willing to pay for a product they are not willing to pay for it that goes for everything.

However, I am not discussing piracy per se in this thread. The reason why I and many others are planning to vote for the piracy party and why many other parties here and hopefully abroad soon as well are moderating their opinion is that the current copyright system does not work with the current technology and that the hamfisted attempts of forcing it to work by labelling 60% of the population as thieves and trying to fence in the entire internet in an attempt to stop them will either lead to a much diminished internet or the complete victory of anarchy. Technology has gone so far that trying to control intellectual property through ancient laws is completely futile and there will always be ways to get around them. Having a bunch of grey haired old men (and a few women) decide about the use of a technology they have only heard about from their grandchildren is not a recipie for success as I see it.

 

I took the poll assuming I lived in England. I came out on the bottom right sector of the graph -- mostly conservative, but leaning a little to the UK Independence Party.

Quick poll for all you Europeans: Does being in the EU improve your life? Yes or no? I'm curious about this as it seems to me to be the underlying question in this thread.

 

LKD I think European integration is a necessary and desirable direction to go. My core reason is that Europe has been the root cause of all major conflicts in the last few hundred years peaking with the horrendous devastation of WW2. The EU began as an attempt to make sure that never happens again and it is the still the underlying and main reason why it is kept going. I also think that we now have a chance to move away from the tribalistic thinking that is the reason for and the enable of pretty much all conflict. To have a conflict you need a "we" and you need a "them" the EU is a step to enlarging that "we" and I am all for it. The concept of the national state is a blight on humanity that I think we need to move away from. Everything else about the EU whether it is good or bad is secondary to this in my eyes.

As for bottom right, then you would be pretty alone in Europe my friend. I am not sure but I think the Independence Party (might have mixed them up with another British party) would be what we here classify as "extreme right" and are generally viewed as little more than disguised racists (except by the quite large amount of people who vote for them). Extremely un-PC.

 

Yeah, they were quite a ways down toward "anti-integration" and a bit to the right toward "socioeconomic right" from where I was. The oval that surrounded my position only encompassed the Conservative party. To be honest, I don't know the position or reputation of the other parties in the lower right quadrant that I saw -- The UK independance party or the British National Party (though that last one's position right at the bottom with no variance makes me suspect they are a one-note party.)

 

EU entry is probably the biggest thing to happen to the Irish State since its foundation (ok that wasn't that long ago relatively speaking). The fact that they've given us tons of money over the years is obviously a big thing but there's so much more. It's finally broken our complete dependence on Britain. Obviously the UK is still our main trading partner by a mile but it's no longer the case that we're completely reliant upon it. EU lawmaking can seem meddling but there's a lot of important ones that came from Brussels. Equal pay for women for instance and in recent times a lot of environmental stuff. We'd have got round to them eventually I'd say but the EU tends to force us to do the right thing sooner than we otherwise would. The only major drawback is the opening up of our fishing waters, which of course resulted in massive Spanish overfishing. More an intellectual point though, we probably wouldn't have had the resources to develop our fishing fleet to take proper advantage of our territorial waters anyway.

The answer would vary from country to country a bit (though I do believe it has benefitted all). The EU matters an awful lot more to small, poorer countries than to big rich ones (we're not really poor any longer but we were for most of our membership). Ireland is one of the success stories, a lot of the newer Eastern countries would tend to look to us as a model of what can be achieved.

On the election, does anybody have any Libertas candidates running? They're a new pan-European party originating from Ireland. I'm curious as to what others think of them.

 

Well, results for the Netherlands are in. My party, the Socialist Party, doubled in influence since the last election.
The main 2 parties in power lost a lot of seats. CDA is still the biggest party, but PvdA is practically halved. Most of the small parties have gotten slightly larger.
Geert Wilders' PVV has emerged out of nothing to become Holland's second biggest party, really embarassing.
The SP and PVV both oppose the expansion of EU influence, although for wildly different reasons. So the two parties are gonna collaborate to block legislation, cute.
In an interview, Wilders said that there was no longer talk of a cordon sanitaire against his PVV party, and that everyone was open to negotiations. Don't know how I should feel about that, really.

 

Ok, quick check - SP are socialists, CDA are Christian Democrats, who are the PvdA?

As for the nationalists, yes, they seem to be a growing phenomenon - unfortunately. It may be because most other parties (at least on the right) are fairly pro-EU and they can get their vote, but at least here they have been performing well on the national level as well. During the last presidential election in Bulgaria, their guy came second. Talk about embarassing.

However, his party seems a lot tamer since they got into parliament. Don't get me wrong, they still act like a cross between hateful bigots and absurd clowns, but for all their protestations they are willing to work with nearly anyone if they share interests. I think the whole nationalist thing is just a ploy to get some niche votes.

 

No Libertas yet, heard about them but dont think they will achieve much now. The first pan-European party and their entire focus is EU criticism. Feels a bit silly to me.

We have our election on Sunday, still voting for the Pirate Party. It seems like they have already started doing good, they have completely stolen the populist vote. The extreme right is standing there quite confused and wondering where everyone who hates dark skinned people went. It seems your average populist voter cares more about Internet freedom than blaming everything on people who are different in a certain way but not others.

The Piracy Party has already had massive influence in Sweden, I think all parties except one or two now believe that filesharing for personal use should be legal. Hope they can spread that influence in the parliment and into the US.

 

PvdA = Partij van de Arbeid. The Labour party, centre left, with the emphasis on centre. Too much compromising to be part of the government, too little emphasis on tackling system abuse.

Oh, the rest of europe SO needs a pirate party! Me jealous...

 

british national party are up, not a surprise.

People are sick of the EU and sick of the lack of immigration restrictions.

 

Man, the Danish TV coverage is way better than the Swedish. They have cool US style exit polls and stuff. The Swedish coverage don't even really start until the polls close.

 

I do not agree on the PvdA place. Not centre left, more left centre. They are the ones the PVV voters blame for creating the mess etc etc. I am not going to debate in this but the PvdA lost a lot to SP the party of Coineineagh's in the previous election for national parliament.

Holland also has a green left party an a liberal left party. A lot of small parties now all bickering and blaming each other for Wilders.
It is going to be nice in Europe.

 

The exit poll gives PP 7.4% which I think will give them two seats.

 

A Finnish "expert" claimed about an hour ago that two seats would be a suprise while one seat is pretty much certain.

In Finland the results are now in. National coalition and Center party both got three seats, Social Democrats got two seats, the greens two seats, Truefinns(the populist rightwingers) got one seat, Christian democrats one seat and the Swedish People's Party got one seat. 13 seats in total. Rather surprisingly the left alliance were left with no seats. A rather unsurprising if not downright boring result. No major shocks or changes in the balance of power.

 

Like that's a surprise. The last (few) times the nationalists did well none of the other parties expected it, and they predictably bickered who was responsible. Reminds me of one saying - "Success has many mothers, but failure is always an orphan".

Anyway, we finished voting here too. According to the polls, it looks like the right wing got 9 (5 populist right, 2 "Christian" democrats, 2 nationalists), the liberals 4 (3 Turkish party, 1 the NDSV), and the socialists got 4. There may be some changes, though, as a liberal/business party might get enough votes for 1 seat, in which case it would probably come from the CDs.