Iceland Votes "Já" To Proposed News Haven

eldavojohn writes "The proposed rules shielding journalists harbored in Iceland are now official. It appears that sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome could have a friendlier home base. For those familiar with the Icelandic tongue, the voting results and legalese. Some of the details can be found at www.immi.is."

Comments

is it just me?

[tomkost]

Seems like the "socialist" Scandinavian countries are the most honest and "free". I've visited many of them and always been received with kindness. Yes, the women are as attractive and "fun" as stereotyped. Time to investigate moving there.

Re:is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the most important ingredient of their success is their small size.

I urge everyone to read works by Leopold Kohr...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr

Re:is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would these be M or FP voters? Because those guys will sometimes make up some very "interesting" statistics that show how us Swedes supposedly pay close to 100% of our incomes in taxes. (In case you're wondering, the trick is to only count income tax for some other country and then compare that to income tax + sales tax + import tax for anything the "average" Swede buys and so on).

Another common complaint from the same crowd is about the so-called "Jante law" which supposedly rears its ugly head in the form of Swedes being dismissive and unfriendly to anyone successful, not to mention apparently sabotaging anyone destined to be successful (I know this is not something unique for Sweden but those who blame the "Jante law" will often claim it is). In reality most people who whine about how the "Jante law" is keeping them down seem to be either reality TV "stars" who aren't in the spotlight anymore (and no-one's buying their autobiography *insert surprised look here*) or failed "entrepreneurs" who had a useless business model, failed and then blame "everyone else" to ensure that they can still get investors for their next crackpot idea...

Re:is it just me?

[CallMyCards]

Well, there's places in US where beer might cost as much, it's not that expensive in everywhere in Finland for example. A sizable portion of that is taxes of course to cover the medical costs caused by alcoholism, since healthcare is essentially free. Same with taxing of gasoline (naturally not towards alcoholism), I think that 75% of the price is tax, currently at roughly 6.75 $ for a US gallon.

Off topic: A funny detail is, that Nordic countries have this unofficial (maybe even official) agreement that in acute medical cases, citizens of other Nordic countries are taken care of for free, basically with no questions asked. No need to show travel insurance or anything, applies to operations, x-rays etc.

Re:is it just me?

[Per Wigren]

When you have paid your tax and all of your obligatory (those that you must be either stupid or too poor to not have) insurances I bet that the Swedes have a larger % of their salary left after their taxes and insurances are paid. As a Swede I pay around 29% in tax and I'm OK with that as long as I can rely on reasonable public services like health care and yearly limits on how much I have to pay for medicine, should I need it.

I'd really like to see a lower VAT though. 25% (except for food and books) is ridiculous and makes everything so much more expensive to buy. I order almost everything on the Internet from the UK, Germany or the north-eastern European countries.

Re:is it just me?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I'm just curious, what exactly did you mean by this comment?

I'm not trying to be snarky, I am just not sure what you're trying to state by saying reality has a bias.

Re:is it just me?

[MoriT]

But only until you were in competition for resources. Then, it might well have been useful to stab them in the back and take their stuff. Also, back then you had to keep seeing the same people every day. Game theory suggests games played repeatedly will play out differently than games played only once. So our behavioral evolution is less relevant to our modern behavior than one might think.

Re:is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Scandinavia is quite harsh on drugs compared to western Europe in general. OTOH they don't have US-style craziness where bizarre legal contortions turn someone caught with weed into a co-conspirator to every crime ever committed by the international drug cartels.

EU membership will undo this

[jdesbonnet]

That will probably be all undone as a condition to EU membership (which I think is inevitable at this point).

Re:EU membership will undo this

[jbssm]

What are you talking about? Check the world stats for freedom of the press. EU countries are ALL, either less restrictive than USA or at most, some are equally restrictive.

I know things are not perfect around here when you go on a country by country basis in southern European countries and Eastern European, but most of the laws and directives of the EU commission are quite good ones for the normal citizen, you can see they are not there just to defend the rich ones.

But mostly and what shows me that you don't know what are you talking about, is that Iceland is already quite into the EU, they belong to Schengen Space and to EU free trade zone. And the talks to enter the EU are already practically finished, the only real step left for them to join us, is they own internal referendum about the subject, that should happen in 2 years.

A good idea for Iceland

[Favonius Cornelius]

For those small island states, especially broke ones, you need to invent a reason for people to care. This kind of freedom of speech could bring in money in one form or another and help remake Iceland. Good for them!

Re:Bandwagon anyone?

[conspirator57]

yeah, i wonder if fallout from people shifting to Iceland servers will result in countries shutting down their transoceanic fibre links in retaliation.

Re:Bandwagon anyone?

[hitmark]

NYT or WaPo could probably pull a nice one by leaking finds to wikileaks or similar, and then writing a article about some leak from a unknown source to wikileaks. Basically, as long as it cant be proven that they did the leak, they both get to blow the whistle, and wash their hands by pointing the finger at a third party.