Originally shared by Miguel Afonso Caetano
"The Pirate Party is a strange beast that has no political analog in the United States, but there are other parties with the same name and same platform in Europe, where the "Pirate movement" advocates for copyright reform and an open Internet. (The first Pirate Party grew out of a Swedish think tank that also developed the infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.)
These parties are generally progressive-leaning, but they intentionally eschew the traditional left-right political labels. Instead, they focus on civil liberty issues such as free speech, direct democracy, individual privacy, government transparency, and the open exchange of information and digital data.
However, their policies in other areas lean more toward egalitarian social democracy than neo-liberalism. They support market economics, but with a strong social safety net, universal health care, and high taxes to pay for services—the sort of governance you typically find in Nordic nations. Most provocatively, the Icelandic branch advocates granting NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden citizenship so that he may seek asylum in Iceland."
"The Pirate Party is a strange beast that has no political analog in the United States, but there are other parties with the same name and same platform in Europe, where the "Pirate movement" advocates for copyright reform and an open Internet. (The first Pirate Party grew out of a Swedish think tank that also developed the infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.)
These parties are generally progressive-leaning, but they intentionally eschew the traditional left-right political labels. Instead, they focus on civil liberty issues such as free speech, direct democracy, individual privacy, government transparency, and the open exchange of information and digital data.
However, their policies in other areas lean more toward egalitarian social democracy than neo-liberalism. They support market economics, but with a strong social safety net, universal health care, and high taxes to pay for services—the sort of governance you typically find in Nordic nations. Most provocatively, the Icelandic branch advocates granting NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden citizenship so that he may seek asylum in Iceland."
No joke: Iceland's Pirate Party surges into first place in the polls