Re:Iceland, a land of Vikings, braces for a Pirate Party tak...
by jacquesm on Monday October 24, 2016 @08:06AM
(#12778086)
It goes much further than marriage, there is the whole decriminalization thing, which goes back to the 1930's in the case of some countries here.
As for how NL is 'better' than the US: It's a ridiculously small country and very densely populated so what works here would likely not work as well in places like Canada or the US, but as mentioned above I think coalition politics (het poldermodel) is an important part of making sure that minorities do not easily become the football of dominating majorities. Both large US parties would be considered right-wing here (roughly VVD), the US has no functional left which is a residue of the McCarthy years and the cold war. Somehow the US associates 'left' in politics with 'communism' and that has kept a very large chunk of the US population without representation.
In NL it is very hard to find any substantial chunk of the population without representation. We also don't jail 1% of our populace.
That said there is plenty of room for improvement, we still have corruption, racism, crime and so on at levels higher than what I'm comfortable with, and our government is excellent at wasting money, an area they are slowly improving on but in my opinion too slowly.
Re:Iceland, a land of Vikings, braces for a Pirate Party tak...
by tptacek on Monday October 24, 2016 @07:51PM
(#12783959)
Sorry, of course there's a lot of things we could obviously be better at, things that NL is already far better about. I was asking specifically about LGBT rights.
As for how NL is 'better' than the US: It's a ridiculously small country and very densely populated so what works here would likely not work as well in places like Canada or the US, but as mentioned above I think coalition politics (het poldermodel) is an important part of making sure that minorities do not easily become the football of dominating majorities. Both large US parties would be considered right-wing here (roughly VVD), the US has no functional left which is a residue of the McCarthy years and the cold war. Somehow the US associates 'left' in politics with 'communism' and that has kept a very large chunk of the US population without representation.
In NL it is very hard to find any substantial chunk of the population without representation. We also don't jail 1% of our populace.
That said there is plenty of room for improvement, we still have corruption, racism, crime and so on at levels higher than what I'm comfortable with, and our government is excellent at wasting money, an area they are slowly improving on but in my opinion too slowly.