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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

In my country the pirate party demolished itself when it spread into other political fields. A lot of idpol imported from the US took over net policy issues, freedoms and rights were completely secondary.

The whole understanding about digital freedoms and rights changed. It was like they changed their values over night and appealed towards completely different issues. Some even demanded more surveillance because "hate speech" was all the rage in this changed party. This new outlook was not only not attractive, it suddenly became quite repulsive.

While a party like the pirate party probably has difficulties to consolidate opinions in other fields than net policy, it wouldn't have been impossible. But it was done with a strange fervor around sometimes completely arbitrary and artificial issues not related to net policies.

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Quite a few parties suffered from either takeovers and the "crazy people magnet". Everyone with fringe views on ... anything ... decided that the Pirates were the place to be.

Which, fine happens, the problem we had was, that the core ideology was very anti-censorship, so much so, that in the end those fringe groups dominated the discussion.

In my country it might have been the same. Although the anti-censorship positions quickly evaporated and were replaced by something completely different. Freedom of speech became a far right dog whistle to some and hate speech was all the new rage and state surveillance a must to combat unsanctioned opinions.

On the other side, you had ideologues promoting strict libertarian positions, which were also quite repellent because they were inflexible about their own belief system and their policy suggestions crude at best, completely anti-social at worst.

Overall there was no discussion on which positions the party should take on specific issues and instead it was mostly prescribed top down. I believe people just noticed that they don't share the same values as the party anymore and so they left.

I was never a member, but followed their developments for a time.

The alternative is being a single-issue party which people will only vote for when there is nothing more important on their minds. IMO it is good for a party to have a clear profile on most important issues, and digital rights fit into the overall progressive ideology. Another possible direction would probably be libertarian profile for techbros, but that would be a different party.

Except there are already other much bigger progressive parties here. Really most major parties tend to err on the progressive side these days. So they both alienated people that don't agree on their new focus whiile failing to convince the progressives to vote for them instead of the larger parties.

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