Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
Perhaps being excluded from the final debate helped Junilistan. They’ve captured 14.4% of the EP votes, and a new political party is born.
The EU-critical party Junilistan won’t be given a place in SVTs final debate before the EP elections on Sunday.
The reason: they don’t have a seat in the Parlaiment.
And pundits wonder why people won’t bother to vote in this election.
Even though I've picked a candidate for the upcoming elections to the European Parliament, it's increasingly unlikely that I will even cast a vote.
I haven't heard anything that the EP has decided that has affected me as a citizen of the EU. The only thing I can recollect is a number of stories about MEPs collecting travel expenses and pocketing them. This is the body I'm supposed to elect?
"Ah, but if you've read more about the EU, you'd know that..." -- well, guess what, I read the editorials of Sweden's biggest daily newspaper every day, listen to P1 often, and subscribe to The Economist. I'm as clued-up politically as a citizen who's also working full time and has a 2-year old at home can well be asked to be, and yet I still don't know more about the EP. How can I make an informed decision then?
"But you have to vote, otherwise the extremists will..." -- yeah right, a vote for a body that has no real influence will give extremists a voice. Get real. Political extremists are smarter than that.
"Democracy is a right and a privilege, your vote is precious..." -- no it isn't. I'd rather save my energy making decisions that will affect me and my family. The MEP doesn't do this, nor should it. It's a tacked on band-aid that the technocrats behind the Union have slapped on to give their tired, bureaucratic, mega-project some democratic gloss. The EU is not a democratic project. It's an artificial counterweight to the USA that doesn't have a deep popular support and probably never will.
Some parts of it are good: the free movement of trade, capital, and labour. Most parts are bad: the CAP, the intrusive bureaucracy, the Gallo-Teutonic haughtiness of its unelected leaders. If, by denying this patchwork of idealism and self-serving nationalism the legitimacy of my vote, I can help undermine its foundations and bring about a serious re-evaluations of the whole project, I'm glad. But my vote won't count, whether I cast it or not.
So Ronald Reagan has died. My first political memory is going to a US international school in Kuala Lumpur and seeing the big board with election results between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
This thought also occurred to me.
Ho hum. MEP elections are coming up. Booooring.
I feel strongly about one thing in the EU: that the CAP must be abolished. No-one I can elect to the parliament will make this happen. Probably only a combination of global warming and a massive die-back of French farmers will bring this about, in a century or two.
I feel less strongly about software patents. They affect lots of people and the future of free software, but compared to growing food they are unimportant. However, they maybe can be banned in the EU by the EP.
So I'm looking for a candidate who's opposed to software patents.
I'd like to vote for Christofer Fjellner (m), but his party supports software patents, and who knows what kind of hold they have over him.
So I'll probably vote for Olle Schmidt (fp) instead.
I first encountered the belief that Europe was heading for an inevitable Islamic takeover in a most unlikely place: this post by Philip Greenspun.
This entry shocked me, because from what I've read of and about him, Phil is a smart guy. If this is how well educated Americans living in Boston view Europe?
I couldn't really put my finger on what was wrong with his analysis. This article does just that. Recommended reading.