Skeptic Project

Yes but if a democratic government is formed, there is no guarantee that those rights will remain with France, so as you said it is definitely risky.

However I don't see anything wrong with that, France isn't going to use their manpower and resources (and make themselves look bad for intervening) for nothing.

Why not? Nothing paranoid about this, just the way things work. It's a risk and usually those who get somewhere first get rewarded.

Heavily? They signed the agreement for natural resources exploitation and a day later bombed the carp out of the good colonel. What more do you want :-)

this thread sucks.

Iceland has one of the highest rates of belief in evolution and rejection of creationism.

So did the Soviet Union.

Haha. Good on them.

It's also completely powered on geothermal and hydroelectric.

Geothermal increases earthquakes, it's not perfection, and hydroelectric can hurt wild life and ruin low lying villages (see China).

Who said it was perfect? At least it doesn't contribute to climate change like oil does.

It also has a very low Gini coefficient (= equal wealth distribution).

Again so did the Soviet Union.

So does your mom. That's why I like her. She likes to spread the wealth.

I just went there last month. You can check out the pictures on my facebook

Braggart!

See, I can be a fancy-pants negative Nancy too.

That was more of a full disclosure than bragging haha.

Anyway, my point was that Iceland ain't a bad country. And the scenery is nice, even when it's covered in snow

The highly subjective, and perhaps even normative, aesthetic qualities aside, this thread really just lacks any sort of value despite the level of importance that seems to be ascribed to it in many of the posts made by certain authors. In evaluating the "merit" or "importance" of the country of Iceland we find a tremendously varying set of metrics upon which to base any judgements, and that is precisely why I think this thread sucks. Geopolitically, Iceland has remarkably little worth in and of itself and what happens in iceland really does little to change the power calculations made by verious state apparatuses. Perhaps such a statement rests on a neo-Realist evaluation, but it is not a trivial one to make. The point being, anyone claiming that what Iceland does, politically, matters in terms of broader political issues has a tremendous amount of proof to procure. This is tantamount to the arguments that Australia as a country carries signifcant weight, by prestige or material influence, which inevitably have to be qualified and requalified to the point of absurdity and uselessness. Moral of the story, arguments about political comparisons are worthless unless one is ready to rigorously demonstrate cultural-politico transferance in a meaningful way. As for this remarkably deficient fetish of saying icelandic people are "sovereign" there is a clear, perhaps blatant, disregard for the intracacies of social contract theory in "the West" as well as a demonstration of a normative Occidentalization of political life. Its just dumb. Its also a statement made without understanding that "sovereignty" is immediately undone in a variety of analyitical approaches and thus is really a stupid thing to say unless there is a rigorous disassembly of these critiques. Consider Foucault's biopolitics and questions of state technologies that actually create latent webs of power even when the "people" or "citizenry" appear to be "soveriegn." Its just a stupid thing to say and rests, again, on an normative occidentalization of the complexities of political philosophy and thought. This thread sucks.

Because earthquakes only impact the immediately surrounding areas, just like the recent one in Japan.

OSHI-

I don't want to go to a spa.

I've fought men on the Internet for less!

^ also this.

Kaiser. Your post above sucks. Don't you know that it's nauseating to read text that hasn't been formatted into paragraphs and the like?

*vomit*

...chances are people in Iceland want to live somewhere else themselves because its better there too.

That's likely. I had an English teacher in early high-school who escaped East Germany and she talked about this. She said that many people "dislike" their own country because they've seen it for such a long period of time and have an ideal about new places and new surroundings. I'm sure that's true for peoples of all countries.
But then again, at the same time, the country does have perfect infrastructure, among other things, so... there's one reason to be more happy than many other countries (compare with many areas of America's infrastructure which is in a state needing desperate help).
Most Icelanders I know right now are pretty darn happy with their country. Considering they were supposed to go into major financial problems for a long time, it's pretty monumental that they're almost out of them entirely within a few years and have their economy where it was in around 2002. Granted, it's arguably easier to fix a smaller economy than a far larger one such as America's.
And of course Icelanders' sovereignty rests on political philosophy. The entire status of each individual is derived from a document. A political document.

Paragraphs are for conformist cowards. The wall of text speaks no untruth. Let this stupid thread die

And of course Icelanders' sovereignty rests on political philosophy. The entire status of each individual is derived from a document. A political document.

You missed the point entirely. Please try again.

I don't understand what living in redneck Australia has to do with anything.

You're weird Brenton.

@(Pretty Please) Ed?