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Konrad Werner: Stop pretending you like the Pirates

Happy Friday the 13th everyone! Konrad is here to rain on your Pirate Parade. You see, the Pirate Party is like spaghetti with Nutella. It seemed like such a great idea when you were six.

Image for Konrad Werner: Stop pretending you like the Pirates
Photo by Piratenpartei Deutschland (Flickr CC)

I can’t have been the only six-year-old who put Nutella on hot spaghetti. It just seemed so right at the time. The two best foods ever created on one plate, combined to transport a small boy to culinary heaven. And then look what happened? Tears. Rebukes. Chocolate all over the tablecloth.

Well, it turns out you’re never too old to learn a lesson about being stupid. It happened to all of us last September, when the Pirate Party triumphantly entered the Berlin parliament wearing funny clothes. We all shrieked and jumped on the sofas and put on eye-patches and drew on the walls with orange crayon and cried for no reason. And it became clear that all the Pirate ideas were designed to appeal to that innocent child in all of us: Give everyone, erm, €3,000? Yeah, €3,000 a month. And make everything free! Trains, buses, films, the internet.

But then, like all children, it turns out the Pirates are filled with weird, irrational prejudices. And, again in a very child-like manner, they say whatever idiotic words happen to be floating at the front of their brains in public. “I think the CDU are a bigger threat to our democracy than the neo-Nazis,” said one Pirate. Another described a woman as being “too pretty” to be taken seriously. Another said that, like former president’s wife Barbara Scheel, if she were in a nursing home, she wouldn’t let herself be “cared for by foreigners”.

Having come out with this and other foolish points, the Pirates further demonstrated their similarity to an average five-year-old by making convoluted, tortured-logic arguments to justify them. The Bavarian Pirate website included an article on the difficulty of controlling internet-debate that said, “No one can see into the head of the author. But still we allow ourselves to make a judgment of this person… Is that not a form of racism? Not one against ‘races,’ but against opinions and feelings?”

What the hell are you talking about? Oh, I remember. This is exactly the same as when I pointed out to my mum that Nutella is made mainly from vegetables.

But the most annoying thing is that people won’t let go of the Pirates. More and more Germans say they’re going to vote for them, even though all they seem to do is say stupid stuff. It’s like the more thicko pronouncements they come out with the more people want to vote for them. It can’t just be because they still think the eye-patches are funny. I am honestly baffled.