1.) The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has been ousted in the most recent election. The LDP has been in power almost continuously since 1955 – and really, longer than that, since the Liberal Democratic party formed out of the Liberal and Democratic parties making their unofficial collusion/cooperation in running the country official, so basically it’s been one party in charge of Japan since World War II with a couple of hiccups. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens, because Japan honestly has about zero experience with electoral change of this sort; the bureaucracy in Japan has become almost totally divorced from the consequences of elections because, well, there have never really been any consequences of elections. I honestly have no idea if the DJP’s victory will bring change to the Japanese bureaucratic system or if it’s just your classic walking-against-the-tide scenario.
2.) In the wake of the Pirate Party having success in Sweden, apparently some Canadians have decided we need one too. Apparently nobody in the Pirate Party has bothered to examine the Marijuana Party’s success as a one-issue fringe party, or understands how first-past-the-post parliamentary systems differ from proportional-representation parliamentary systems. But I bet they will have bitching LAN parties!
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What, you mean that they’re not gonna get a ton of reps for getting a very small portion of the vote? Shit, next you’re gonna tell me that their reform of copyright is going to have all sorts of consequences they had no idea of.
1. Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?
Fuck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea
2. Betrayin’s all part of piratin’. If you don’t know that you’re not even close to being a pirate, “Prawn of my loins”, my foot!
My first thought when I saw that the LDP was finally out of power was “Holy shit! Hojo and Asami won!”
If you get that, you are as big a nerd as me.
But where’s Mr. Tokai?
Maybe they could join forces and become the Marijuana Pirate Party?
“Yar matey, ye best be handin’ over that spliff now!”
I’d be much, MUCH more impressed by a “Pirate Party” that advocated something a bit less legally ludicrous. Like re-instituting the tradition of issuing Letters of Writ to privateers to build public coffers by attacking foreign shipping.
Well, the last time the LDP was out, it made pretty much no change whatsoever, apart from having a very stylish PM for a while – remember Hosokawa? No? I was living in Japan at the time and remember his party being so consensus-based that they quickly started forming a consensus with the LDP wherever possible and then they quietly lost their majority.
Australia has preferential voting (lower house) and proportional representation (upper house) – not quite as exclusionary as first past the post, but it’s always fun to see all the little parties show up!
I’m in Japan right now for some strange reason and everyone’s excited as hell about this, mostly out of curiousness.
The important thing about the Japanese elections isn’t necessarily what will happen, but what might happen with someone other than the LDP in power. It’s a chance to do something different.
Speaking as a swede, a lot of the Pirate party’s success in the recent EU election wasn’t based just on copyright issues. It was a reaction to the ‘spy society’ that is slowly being set up here in sweden, where the government wants to be able to listen in to phonecalls and electronic communication, as well as some private companies wanting to do the same. A lot of people that voted for them said very clearly that they didn’t really support their views on filesharing, but they were one of the three parties being very outspoken about the privacy issues of your online life. In fact, the environmentalist party was the other big winner in the election, and between them and the piracy party they pretty much split the young (below 30) voters between them. And they were equally outspoken about online rights to privacy.
In generals the voters of the pirate party were more males and on the right of the political scale, while the voters of the environmental party were female and on the left.
It’s going to be REALLY interesting to see what happens when the elections in sweden happens autumn -10.