Iceland's Pirate Party tops polls ahead of national elections The Pirate Party looks set for a successful outing in the coming weekend's Icelandic elections. A poll by local newspaper Morgunblaðið and the Icelandic Social Science Research Institute of the University of Iceland reports support for the Pirate Party is running at about 22.6 per cent, a point-and-a-half ahead of the ruling …
Pirates in Iceland, a minority anti-emigration party topping the polls in Lithuania, one of the TrumpTon pair as US president, Brexit versus the EU, and the FN riding high in France. Looks like 2017 is going to be an "interesting" year. Seems that voters have finally realised that no-one should take the current crop of politicians as anything more than incompetent self-serving wankers. Pass the popcorn.
Granted, often the only similarity between pirate parties the world over is in the name. However, I once voted 1 for the Pirate Party in a local election. Their policies were more sensible than any of the other parties contesting that election.
When it came to the count, they were eliminated first. In particular, the candidate I voted for scored the fewest first preferences of any candidate standing in any electorate during that election. I can pick 'em...
The idea of privacy in Iceland is interesting when they have a national genealogical database, the Islendingabok, that allows people to check that they aren't about to marry their cousin.
How do you square the right to privacy, with wanting to know the genealogy of prospective partners?
(I'm not saying Icelanders are inbred, but they do have a gene pool shallow enough that they have to check these things).
It's a solved problem, really. Everyone gets a unique ID and you submit that as a request along with yours. It then gets authenticated with you and with your significant other using a pre-approved phone number. After a week, you get a reply to a pre-approved e-mail address simply stating the request number and your relationship level. Requests against a specific unique ID can only be made after the previous request expires.
The idea of privacy in Iceland is interesting when they have a national genealogical database, the Islendingabok, that allows people to check that they aren't about to marry their cousin.
But that's because of the way they do names in Iceland - there is no family name / surname which gets passed down through generations, like most European countries. Instead, the second name reflects the male parent's first name, so if Bjorn has a son called Ragnar, then his name will be Ragnar Bjornson, and if he subsequently has a daughter called Agnetha, she will be Agnetha Ragnarsdottir. If Agnetha meets and marries a nice bloke called Anders, then their son would be Peter Anderson, and their daughter would be Malia Andersdottir, and so on.
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