[avar]

Many have some sort of same-sex unions, what Iceland did recently is eliminate all occurrences of "man and a woman" and replace them with "two persons" in their laws.

Most countries that have same sex unions have a different set of laws for them, usually for religious and political reasons. The Church of Iceland opposed the recent change, but it lost that battle.

Regarding Jóhanna, it's sad that the first openly gay head of state is also so openly incompetent :)

[sh1mmer]

Regarding Jóhanna, it's sad that the first openly gay head of state is also so openly incompetent :)

Care to elaborate?

[avar]

First of all, under normal circumstances she never would have been anywhere close to being prime minister. The only reason (seemingly) that she got the job was that after the collapse of the previous government the new leftist coalition needed someone to pass the buck to, and she was pretty much the only uncontroversial figure they had.

Her coalition government's only redeeming quality has been to suck less than their predecessors which facilitated the giant ponzi scheme which took down the economy. They're wasting a lot of effort on the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

One shining moment of incompetence was the press conference right after the president announced that the Icesave debt repayment bill would go to a public referendum.

She announced (well, mumbled actually) that the government was "disappointed" in the President's decision to bring the matter to a vote in a rushed international press conference hours after the announcement.

What they should have done is explain calmly that this was part of the democratic process in Iceland, and how the result might affect any future debt repayment.

Examples like these and countless others have shown that her and her government can't think two steps ahead, manage PR and foreign diplomacy horribly, and generally seem more interested in their pet leftist issues (which they can finally shove through, now that they're in power) rather than solving the problems facing the nation.

But what do I care, I moved abroad shortly after this all went down.

[mbotta]

right, so previous icelandic governments brought down the country by dancing to the tunes of the banks, but it's the current government that is incompetent and only shoves through its pet leftist issues.

how unbiased. leaves me wondering if those previous governments had any pet rightist issues of their own. something to do with banks, do you think? bringing down the entire economic system, perhaps?

pet leftist issues don't sound so bad after all. i should look up which they are. i might even like them.

[avar]

Perhaps you missed the part where I indicated that they were better than the previous government. They're just still a disappointment.

It's not like I'm some bitter right winger either, my views align more closely with theirs in theory. But in practice they're about the worst thing that could have happened after the crisis, sans the incumbents.

They've failed to enact any meaningful change to financial regulation or government oversight since they took power. They've failed to implement the government transparency that was widely demanded of them (e.g. doing secretive dealings with the IMF). The issue of changing the constitution is now dead in some committee.

As an example of something that's (still) being done right check out the election of the Best Party in Reykjavík. Their agenda (here in Icelandic: http://www.bestiflokkurinn.is/ur-starfi-flokksins/samstarfsy...) includes things that are actually relevant to improving short- and long term life for the population. They've set up an instance of a "shadow government" at http://betrireykjavik.is (running http://github.com/rbjarnason/open-direct-democracy), a fair amount of their policies are being drawn from there. So they're actually listening to their constituency.

[mbotta]

missed that part indeed - i apologise.

google translate helped me make sense of the pages you link to. do i understand correctly that they run the Reykjavik council? sounds like a down-to-earth party representing the interests of the people more than those of the corporations. unusual, that.

also, i like how they use open direct democracy. i wish there were more reporting about this.

all in all, this sounds a little like reverse disaster capitalism: seize the crisis to install laws that benefit the people. disaster socialism? ;)