Well, the question you asked was about local vs. international, but sure, let’s talk about personality.
In many ways, I think the great name debate was a proxy for discussion about the party personality.
Ref: Formal proposal to rename the Pirate Party by 2018
and: Alternative names for the Party - #24 by MarkG
Many people questioned how the current name was perceived by the wider public, but I never heard anybody express concern about feeling as though their own beliefs didn’t sit well under the current banner.
Dozens of alternative names were considered and discarded.
There was never anything close to a consensus on a alternative name.
So, “Pirates” we are.
I’ve been hanging around with this motley crew for around 6 years now.
Keeping in mind that I’m half way through a nice bottle of red on a Friday evening, here’s my list of what it means to be a Pirate, in decreasing order of frivolity:
- Pirate song: “I’ll be a Pirate 'cos Pirates are free” - says it all really.
Listen to this while you read the rest of these points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiyEP02KNZw - Did you ever notice that we have pirate themed parties for our children, but we never have “murderous thief” party themes. There’s a reason for this. Pirates emerge wherever the powerful push the powerless too far, and we all kind of know this when we’re told it. It’s like an archetypal story.
- We’re part of a political movement born out of a notion amongst the youth of Sweden, then spread around the world, that corporate imperialism should never impinge upon the basic human NEED to share culture. People and their culture should come first, everything else flows from there.
- The notion of free culture expanded to cover a wide variety of other areas of our lives. We want to be liberated as individuals, but when Pirates mutiny, it’s not every man for themselves. We do it as a crew. Nobody gets left behind, and so we’re libertarian-left or left-libertarian, depending … “Peoples front of …”
- Democracy. Yep, that’s like the pirate code (“more of guideline really”). We’re all children of the internet … surely democracy can be “MOAR” democratic than that … looks deeply … Oh Shit, that’s really hard.
- Ermagurd, sooo many “feelpinions” - we need , “Science” - yep we believe in that because … it works - . look, the planes keep flying and the iPhones keep on iPhoning. Yep, objective, verifiable truth is useful stuff, but it only tells us which things are objectively true, and never which things we should value. So, we constrain the “feelpinions” to questions of value, then we go make a lot of policy. Lead with values, verify with evidence.
Woohoo, look at all the policy that emerges. Damn, that’s a lot of policy, and nobody seems to disagree with ANY of it. - Hmmmm. Yep. We’re all individuals and we value culture and humanity above crony capitalism, and we all pretty much kind of agree on this policy stuff, but we kinda have this problem that we’re almost universally wary of “joining”. We don’t follow leaders. We’re individuals god damn it.
Yes, we’re ALL individuals.
Sigh…