I've noticed a particularly idiotic post on the site of the man who is now going to represent me as a Pirate Evangelist in Europe and the world at large.

Well. Here. Rick Falkvinge becomes a lot easier to work with when you don’t work with him at all.

He is sometimes easy when he likes you and you want cash.

I admit to having abused this expression of bad leadership once when I thought representation of the party at WIPO was very important. I was given about €700 without any formal approval by the board. From a budget with €50000 in a year. That is slightly more than 1% of the budget.

Before Almedalen, three cameras that cost €150 euros each were bought. This is €450, again, around 1% of the total budget with no prior approval.

In the election €9000 were spent on candidate parties in a much criticized decision. I agree that it is fun to party, but quite frankly, as a non-candidate I would have liked if money that could have went into political campaigns before the elections (and 1/5 of it none-the-less!!) were not spent on people being encouraged to drink alcohol purchased by the party. They didn’t even get a DJ, and the parties were closed to the general public. This is not a good way of getting votes, which perhaps also shows in the end result.

I see a party board, and any board in an organisation, as a very important thing once the organisation starts having money. Money is a source of conflict. Money is a source of dissent. Money needs to be handled in a careful way which I perceive not to have happened ever. Rick has once incurred costs on my local constituency (Skåne) totalling 1/3 of our total annual budget, or, 1/5 of our total budget for the event (see, we got money from the youth organisation Ung pirat for holding the event). He did not remember signing up to the event. 1.5 years later our party secretary (hired half-time at the time) discovered a bill of €200 for this event that had not been paid. The party secretary is no longer hired now, because keeping track of bills and other things is not valuable to this organisation.

I am very, very annoyed by this. It is completely agonizing when you, one week before an event, get told that you have €200 extra costs in a budget of €1000 which was difficult to hold in the first place (actually, because we were given only €200 by our constituency for holding an event, it was 100% of money used by the party - we had already used it up for printing folders - and the rest of it could not have been used to pay for costs incurred by the party since they'd been given to us from a different organisation, even if, granted, I was on the national board of that organisation. We took a board decision after having motivated our costs and made a project plan). Otherwise we could have planned around this event and, say, given up our regular visitor’s information stand which was not terrible well visited but did expose our organisation and its existence to many people who didn’t know us (but were autonomous activists and therefore probably didn’t care).

I am pained by this. Like. Money is a source of conflict. If it takes you five years to not realize that, you really should start thinking about it and consider whether people may be annoyed by other people using what is essentially the money of an organisation they consider theirs and to be a part of. Gosh.

I remembered that he once hired a person to go with him on a national tour. This was a very attractive girl who’d joined the party about 2 weeks before going on the tour. Because this was a quite large cost for the organisation it caused a lot of people to be upset, but I agree that the situation, after emergency board meetings and several angry emails to Rick that apparently have destroyed his creativity, was resolved well with Anna Troberg following Rick on the tour as well. Troberg was not Rick’s choice, and to my knowledge her much desired presence on that tour was not his idea.

Uhm. About the child pornography thing: much more weird is that there is a board decision on Rick not hitting on girls because he is making girls uncomfortable to the point of them leaving the party (this happened to a friend of mine). For some reason, this has never happened to me, but I am told it might be because I’m a) scary or b) has never met him drunk.