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Reading about USA’s exit from Iraq and the chaos they are leaving behind made me think about the universality of democracy; is it for everbody? This thought has struck me before when I have been reading about the Civil Wars in Africa and now again reading about Iraq.

Many of these conflicts has its roots in the decolonization of former European Empires, where little attention was paid to the varsity of people and cultures living in these areas. In Iraq three major ethnical groups have come to conflict with each other; the Sunnis, the Shi’as and the Kurds (the latter two which suffered under the rule of Sadam Hussein). This leads me to a second question; what makes a state or nation?

It’s easy to draw borders on a map, a little easier to create institutions that formally make a state but harder to create citizens in a nation. Even though democracy should be seen as universal right, it has no meaning when it can only be conducted the formal way, meaning political freedom. What does democracy in this sense mean to a person living everyday in the midst of violence and death, without access to food or clean water? Without any prospects of the future?

Western Democracies seem to think that formally establishing democracy will automcatically bring forth a stable, free and democratic state. History has shown us that this is not the case. Too much emphasis is put on institutions, and too little on culture, customs and norms. A good functioning democracy requires some cultural prerequisites, and without them the project of spreading democracy is bound to fail. But why should democracy be the highest good in a society? Should the first priority not be the right to a decent life (to education, food, water, roof over your head) even though this life is being lived in an “undemocratic” country? I think so.

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Ibland är det jobbigt att vara jag eftersom jag tänker för mycket. Jag betraktar andra människors liv, analyserar, frågar mig vad de gjort för fel och är fast besluten att inte göra samma misstag. Kan man vara för förberedd för livet som väntar? Jag har väl aldrig gjort några misstag. Inget som jag ångrar i alla fall. Jag låter inte mig själv att göra någonting utan att tänka på konsekvenserna. Det kan vara jobbigt eftersom det innebär så mycket tänkande. Men jag kan inte vara som alla andra, bete mig irrationellt, göra det som jag känner för i ögonblicket. Nej, jag måste tänka först.

Men. Det är väl bra att någon tänker i alla fall. Så att inte hela världen faller i kaos.

There has long been a discussion in Sweden about file sharing and copyright. The Pirate Bay and IPRED are heavily discussed in the media. With the emerging of the Pirate Party it is obvious that the current legislation concerning copyright is not the right direction. We need more discussion about it.

That’s why it is so sick that the RIAA carry out blackmail against file sharers, the latest being a woman fined 1,9 million dollars for downloading 24 songs. The numbers are just absurd. 80 000 dollars per song. I guess the music industry is trying to scare people from downloading with these absurd numbers, but it’s not the way go. What we need is dialogue. Internet is a new media and we have entered a new period where information exchange is a people’s right, choking this freedom does not help. Governments can come up with laws to prevent illegal file sharing but there will always be ways to go around the laws and if the governments just go further and further in implementing new laws on top of the old ones we will soon be living in a totalitarian society.

We need dialogue between the file sharers and the industry to come up with new ways of distribute the media and make it legal. Hunting down music and movie lovers like they are heavy criminals is just wrong. I don’t see anything wrong with people sharing, illegal or not, movies, music and other media. It’s part of the wonder of internet: unlimited information exchange.

You can’t illegalize file sharing without coming up with more options on how to access media legally on the internet. The idea Radiohead had to let the fans decide the price of the album was brilliant. It can also be that the media industries would profit more from this strategy in that the bigger fans would pay much more for the music than what the market price for an album is right now. I don’t mind paying for downloading, but the price has to be reasonable. I don’t see this happening though, the film and music industry seem so incredibly greedy and are only focused in making profit that they are not concered to the advantages internet has to the society as a whole.

I do hope that governments stop seeing information exchange as a bad thing and let the internet be a free forum that promotes freedom of speech.