Στην Ε.Ε.
Today, on January 23, it is 500 days to June 8, 2014, when the next European Elections are held. Pirates entered Parliament on June 7, 2009, and have since saved Europe from “three-strikes”, ACTA, and many other examples of encroachment on civil liberties. But things are still overall going very much the wrong way – we need to fire more politicians over reckless disregard for civil liberties to drive the message home.
Things are going to hell in a handbasket, and fast. I’ve written before how I consider the Pirate Party movement to be the last line of defense against a very ugly society – just yesterday, there was another example, that I choose to illustrate the overall trend: European politicians want the right to fire uncomfortable reporters.
A society where such a report can be published by the political powers, and even taken seriously, is a society where civil liberties are endangered and verging on extinct – even if the report doesn’t become law. Even if it doesn’t become law this time around.
There are more things in the pipeline, which we must prepare for – preferably by boosting the pirate forces in Brussels. You have the various spinoffs on ACTA, everything from CETA to TPP (even if Europe is not an initial party to the latter) where the monopolistic powers will just go with “more and harder violence, but less vaseline” until things snap. Politicians mostly don’t even try to defend copyright and patent monopolies by claiming they fulfill their stated purpose of encouraging creativity/innovation – having the monopolies and enforcing them is about jobs. Pure protectionism by means of monopolization, at the expense of civil liberties and freedoms of speech and expression.
Speaking of freedoms of speech, the report mentioned above spoke of “removal of journalistic status” as a punishment for people who printed bad stories about the politicians. You will note that there is no such thing as journalistic status today; anybody can publish anything, and this is a good thing. To be able to remove freedom of speech, the European Union must first create a mechanism that grants freedom of speech – and one that does so conditionally.
That language tells us a lot about what is happening right now.
That is not tolerable, not any bit of it.
But we can send them a message. We can do this, we can do this together. We know that it works. We have done the proofs of concept. We know that we can get elected and change the world for the better.
For it is direly needed, it has never been more needed, and it keeps getting more needed by the day.
The polling stations open at oh-eight hundred on June 8, 2014. That’s exactly 500 days from now, and the clock is ticking.
