Including the term Libertarian would lead me to leave the party.
My impression of the party is that it focuses on equity. Equity Party or Equity Australia might get my vote.
Including the term Libertarian would lead me to leave the party.
My impression of the party is that it focuses on equity. Equity Party or Equity Australia might get my vote.
Thanks @Mozart and @AndrewDowning for the replies. I do see how the name âPirateâ doesnât have mass appeal, and can be a barrier to entry / barrier to growth. So the question there is: how much growth and direct influence do we want? As @piecritic and others have pointed out, the party has done a good job of getting issues noticed, and having other parties adopt our policies. Are we content to keep playing at that level, so to speak, and hopefully just keep growing slowly?
OK, here goes. Bear in mind that if the answer to the above question is âwe want mass appealâ, that probably trumps all these.
I also have a specific argument against any name with the word âlibertarianâ in it. Itâs become too toxic. I know exactly what itâs meant to mean, but itâs going to scare people off.
Personally, I think that spinning the party to the NGO and political party is a good idea on paper, but the logistics of the party alone are already a nightmare. Adding the NGO is only to make things more difficult in practice.
Also - LibLeft? Seriously? It doesnât exactly scream originality, does it?
A more appropriate name would be something like âThe Solutions Partyâ (Obvious) or âThe Oreo Partyâ (Because like an Oreo, the world is complex, multicolor and fragile)
âLiberâ is the root of the similarity. Voters will think that âLibertarianâ is somehow associated with âLiberalâ, and is what happened at the 2013 election. If we are voted under the âLibertarianâ base name, I donât want to feel that we duped people, even if inadvertently, into mistakingly voting for us if they did not intend to do so, but did so because of a similar name and not think twice about it. Although itâd be good times that we got the vote, but I donât want to feel like weâve misled people based on the issue of a similar name.
I donât see why our name is our problem, particularly in this instance. Perhaps we need to improve on brand promotion. If we want people to talk to us rationally, we need to attract them. We need to sell ourselves in a way to convince them that the âPirateâ name is for real. I donât feel a name change will work. A name change will give the impression that we faltered somehow with the Pirate name. I joined partly because the name stood out, and for its modern appeal. A re-label to where we stand on the political compass feels generic.
Using this opinion, if we were to adopt this as part of our name, this is how I feel people will see us:
Are we trying to rebrand ourselves to be more popular? The argument seems to be: âLibertarian left doesnât really mean anything but people will think itâs serious and therefore will vote for it.â
âLaborâ is also meaningless, possibly more so. Itâs tied to a movement, and that is why it has credibility. That credibility had to be built over time, but it happened, and thatâs why it is lasting. Enough people have fought that fight. There are a lot of people today who agree that copyright is bullshit, and âPirateâ is the best name to associate with that. The real question is: Is this the party of that movement?
If you see this party as a tax policy, privacy policy, and maybe some other things, âLibLeftâ sort of makes sense. If you see this as a party dealing with culture and copyright and freedom, âLibLeftâ seems like capitulating. Weâre essentially saying âLetâs just disband the pirate party, but we can start a new party with a bunch of the same policies.â
Personally, Iâm only aesthetically liberal left. Itâs the closest thing on the spectrum which fits me, but Iâm not an actual âliberal leftâ person. I donât âbelieveâ in the dogma. I donât think political parties should have dogma. I think thatâs how politics was ruined and huge amounts of money gets wasted. Being a party of dogma means being a party married to our policies. Being a pirate means âwe donât know, but weâll find a solution, and this is the kind of solution we like.â
I started a different thread explaining the motivation for this proposal to give everyone some perspective as to why this has been proposed. Posting a link because much of it is very relevant to this discussion.
As an affiliated but distinct entity, I think the NGO would be much easier to operate than the Pirate Party. More than half the bureaucracy would be removed. The digital rights arena is current dominated by the ineffective Electronic Frontiers Australia (which does not hold a candle to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation), and the equally ineffective Australian Digital Alliance which seems to spend most of its time being so damn moderate it achieves nothing.
I think âLibertarianâ is sufficiently different from âLiberalâ. Letâs not forget that the LDP literally uses âLiberalâ in its name.
I think more to the point is that we appear to have outgrown the name âPirate Partyâ. Unfortunately âPirateâ hasnât become synonymous with âLeft-Libertarianâ (despite the Pirate ideology being very clearly a left-libertarian ideology). Perhaps that could be improved upon, especially as most of our policies are now drifting away from what used to be called the âcoreâ issues, and many of those issues are now being resolved outside of the political arena.
So the question really, in my mind, comes down to whether the label âPirateâ is actually the best label for us considering our now-extensive policy set and the future directions of the Party.
So the name should be as reasonably:
as is possible to make it?
Not convinced that there actually is a general understanding of this word based on my interactions with people over the last several years. Responses vary from ânever heard of thatâ to âI like freedomâ to âthere once were crazy right-wingers, run away!â.
Itâs not so cut and dried, hence my proposal in the first place.
Thatâs what makes this proposal a fairly difficult name. Also, weâre not a bank trying to sell a mortgage.
Pretty sure Libertarian Left covers off our entire platform.
Itâs what it says beyond the platform thatâs the problem.
While weâre at it, Iâve been looking for a term to convey the freedom aspect. Havenât found anything that doesnât smell too much like âTea Partyâ.
Please enumerate what you believe the proposed name âsays beyond the platformâ so we can better understand your position.
In other news, an article about a new forming party called the âWellbeing Partyâ has a quip about us in it:
The electoral commissionâs register of political parties lists the Pirate Party Australia and while it appears to be a force for pirate shirts as worn by Jerry Seinfeld in the sitcom, it is a movement against âdraconian copyright and patent lawsâ and protecting civil and digital liberties against piracy.
First, you were warned:
Then, you showed that you already knew:
What impact on your case do you anticipate from your trolling?
Returning to honest discussion:
If the only option on offer is the one upon which you seem fixated, then I wonât vote for change. If the Party is renamed as you wish, then I believe we will lose members. Itâs highly probable that the name will attract members that you wonât particularly want.
Youâve rejected all reference to common usage, clinging instead to narrow dictionary definitions. Weâre the Pirate Party; how often do you rob ships at sea? Are the Liberals really liberal?
Tarnatiger Copter put it well:
If the Party really needs a new name, then it doesnât need to reflect our policies or position. In fact, weâd be more nimble and flexible if it doesnât.
Going to ignore the goading and get to the crux.
The only ârestrictionâ that left-libertarianism imposes is no authoritarianism and no right-wing nonsense. It canât get more nimble or flexible insofar as meeting the requirements of the partyâs current culture and ensuring it isnât restricted in the future without evolving into something it should never be.
I donât care ifâregardless of what the name changes toâwe lose members. If theyâre in it exclusively for the name, theyâre in it definitely for the wrong reasons. Iâve spent the best part of 8 years on this party, so Iâm not some nobody nom de plume trying to assert a point for no purpose than to gain attention. I want the party to grow going forward and it has largely stagnated in its current form. I will continue to argue for my proposal otherwise there would have been no reason to propose it in the first place.
Go read over @Frewâs post and see someone else who has spent just as many years on this organisation making the point about why the change is necessary.
Are Left Libertarians really right-wing?
Also because I just canât let this go: the Liberals are liberal in the sense they named themselves; see economic liberalism.
Itâs also worth mentioning, I think, that libertarian doesnât actually have an established connotation in Australian politics. All the more reason for a truly left-libertarian party to grab hold of it.
The negative connotations attached to it do not seem to apply outside those familiar with American politics. Every example of âbadâ libertarianism raised comes the United States.
I am confident that the negative connotations of âlibertarianâ would be tempered by the word âleftâ, and that anyone with a knowledge of libertarianism would know what left-libertarian means.
Of course they are not the same, but âsocial equalityâ is the constitutional principle to which âequityâ best relates.
It would seem quite a bad decision to cover less than half of what the party stands for. âLibertarianâ would be far better than âequityâ if we took that route: we are, after all, a civil liberties party. It is the completeness of âleft-libertarianâ (or other arrangement of those words) that makes it so attractive.
I think if we are to move away from Pirate Party, it should be towards a name with a similar completeness as what has been proposed.
OK, but we do actually get news of US politics over here Those bad examples are going to stick with people.
Incidentally, there appears to be a Libertarian Party of Australia, although AFAICT itâs never been registered with the AEC (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_of_Australia and http://libertarian.net.au/)
Neither the American or Australian libertarian parties have ever achieved enough momentum to get significant local attention.
And by âsignificantâ, I mean âmore than usâ.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant by getting news of US politics over here was that every time some gun nut, climate change denier, Ayn Rand disciple, selfish bastard or other crazy who happens to identify as libertarian pops up doing something nutty, we hear about it, and it taints the term.
I know qualifying it with âleftâ makes that go away if you take the time to think about it, but the base term is still overloaded with ugly cruft. Itâs a shame when that happens to an otherwise useful wordâŚ