We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Bravo Norway!

In a direct response to the mass murder of people at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last January, Norway has abolished its blasphemy laws. This is a development of sheer magnificence!

31 comments to Bravo Norway!

  • Paul Marks

    Good.

    God is big enough to take care of Himself.

    He does not need the state to defend Him.

  • Slartibartfarst

    Hats off to the Norwegians. Didn’t think they had it in them.
    Maybe there is hope for them yet.
    Next stop, Sweden? …

  • Mr Ed

    Iirc, Slartibartfast, you designed Norway.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Mr Ed: indeed, that’s what he said, and he did not seem prone to bragging.

    Hats off to the Norwegians. Didn’t think they had it in them.

    Keep in mind that this is a country where the Progress Party got into government, a little over 2 years after the Breivik madness. I didn’t think they had THAT in them.

    BTW another area where Norway leads, is antibiotics use: it is strictly monitored, and as a consequence, antibiotics resistance seems to be in decline iirc.

  • Snorri Godhi

    PS: I seem to remember that a couple of Finns were arrested in Norway for dancing during Holy Week, but i read about it in the 1990s, and if it happened, it was even earlier than that.

  • bloke in spain

    Arresting Finns for dancing is an international thing. And not to be discouraged. One of the few actions the authorities can perform I’m in favour of.

  • Mr Ed

    BiS, you were lucky not to meet Simo Häyhä on a bad day (for you),

    http://www.simohayha.com

  • bloke in spain

    I suspect I may already have. There’s a large Finnish community, where I live. Possibly the entire population of Finland, taking it by turns. On a bad day it looks like casting for Lord Of The Rings. Stunted, squat fellows with beards. And that’s the women.
    Just because the article says he died in 2001 means nothing. Nothing. They’re not entirely human the Finns. They may never die at all. Not how we know it, anyway.

  • The First Mate is 1/2 Finnish. It all rings true.

    Thank the Maker for her Italian half.

  • They’re not entirely human the Finns. They may never die at all. Not how we know it, anyway.

    I believe the term for that is “sisu”. Many many moons ago I knew a rather beautiful luminous blonde Finn babe who trekked across Norway with me and some chums. It was so fucking cold we were joking about who would piss on who if anyone got some exposed flesh stuck to their rifles… but she would jump naked in the freezing river each morning whilst we were all still shivering in our sleeping bags. Saw her again years later and she had married a bloke who I think was an actual real life troll. Nice enough chap and he spoke good English (but rarely used more than three words per sentence). I had mental images of him biting the tops off beer bottles and head-butting trees and trees getting the worst of it. Fortunately the kiddies looked more like her.

  • Thailover

    “Norway has abolished its blasphemy laws”.

    I won’t pretend to have any hope for any nation that would implmement blasphemy laws to begin with, epecially to protect the fascist totalitarian religious cult known as Islam, and to protect those who lie to themselves and others about it.

  • Laird

    Thailover, these are very old laws (read the article), and weren’t at all unusual in prior centuries. They weren’t enacted to protect Islam, but rather Christianity. Have a little charity.

    Anyway, it’s a good start. Now we have to work on abolishing all “hate speech” laws, which are cut from entirely the same cloth.

  • bloke in spain

    “I knew a rather beautiful luminous blonde Finn babe ”
    Glamour. Bet she got out of that river as dry as she went in. And didn’t cast shadows, either.
    Damned lucky you didn’t look at her through amber.

  • Now that you mention it, that would explain a lot. And she did have a cat called Loviatar (really) when I saw her after she was married. She looked a lot like Hanna-Maria Seppala (the babe, not the cat).

  • bloke in spain

    My “Finnish babe” story relates to one 4’10” & about 12 stone. Recently shaved. But I do wear fairly heavily tinted sun glasses. She sat opposite me, in the bar, drinking raw alcohol & informed me “I*have*decided*you*are*untrustworthy*I*do*not*trust*you” They talk like that, don’t they? Each word distinctly separate from the next. Unless they’re talking Finnish. In which case, they aren’t words. Not anything a human could pronounce, anyway. And this from the woman I’d just lent 10€ cab fare. And only known half an hour.
    Not saying she wasn’t completely correct, of course. But how did she know? And why had I just given her 10€?

  • LOL, this thread is getting better by the moment 😀

  • Slartibartfarst

    Just for the record, I only designed the fiddly bits around the fjords.

  • Nicholas (Self-Sovereignty) Gray

    I read (somewhere) that blonde hair may be a gene from the Neanderthals. If so, you might have been lucky that she didn’t eat you! They were less fussy than us about what to eat.

  • Ian Bennett

    Apparently you can identify an extrovert Finn because when he’s talking to you he looks at your shoes instead of his own.

    Also apparently (according to Martin Brundle), although Kimi Raikkonnen is widely regarded as being the epitome of the monosyllabic Finn when being interviewed, in social situations (ie, when he’s a bit drunk) he’s impossible to shut up.

  • Mr Ed

    I once had a night out with a visiting Finnish VAT inspector, he was in the UK on some EU exchange, and as a civil serpent, I felt obliged to help out a colleague by making up the numbers. He made Kimi Raikkonen (as he is in interviews) seem like Robin Williams doing stand-up.

  • bloke in spain

    Ah. The notoriously taciturn Finn.
    It is not generally known that Finnish, unlike most tongues, is primarily a written rather than a spoken language. Thus a Finn is not actually speaking, as such, but reading the words displayed on the back of his eyelids. Have you ever tried to read Finnish?

  • Mr Ed

    There is one word of Finnish that sticks in my mind, the word for the bird ‘robin’ is ‘Punarintasatakieli’. Others are ‘pannki’ for ‘bank’ (they don’t have ‘b’ except in some loan words) ‘alko’ for the State Liquor Monopoly, and ‘Kippis’.

    Quite how outsiders started to learn the language is a mystery, but if the average Finn speaks one sentence once a month (Do they have Talk Radio in Finland?), perhaps you can learn enough to get by quite quickly.

  • bloke in spain

    “the word for the bird ‘robin’ is ‘Punarintasatakieli’ ”

    Not a word you’d wish to say often, is it? Maybe once or twice a year. A lot of Finnish is like that.

  • Emily

    I’ve read many many threads on Samizdata over the years, but this one contains the strangest and funniest directions ever.

  • Some how this seemed inappropriate.

    “A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.”

  • Maybe I spelled “finished” wrong.

  • Mr Ed

    That’s a touching rip-off from this picture of an Me109 “Made in Germany. Finished in Britain“.

  • bloke in spain

    Bf 109, please Mr Ed. The Finnish Airforce flew 109s in the Continuation War. With Swastika markings, of course. Later they used them to shoot down Germans. Must have been very confusing for them. You just can’t trust the buggers can you?

  • bloke in spain

    Shouldn’t think it would have been worthwhile intercepting their radio traffic, though. Not unless you had a lot of time on your hands.

  • Mr Ed

    Indeed, the Swiss had Bf 109s too, and shot down Luftwaffe intruders at the rate of 7:1 I read somewhere many years ago, (but presumably the Germans weren’t really intending to get into dogfights with the Swiss Luftwaffe).

    Oddly enough, Swiss hostility to German ‘intruders’ continues to this day, if reports are to be believed. You might think that in Switzerland, you are free to refuse to rent your flat to a German because he or she is German without facing a legal case for discrimination on the basis of nationality or national origin.

    It’s not as if you could get sued outside of Switzerland for not baking a cake or anything though, is it? That would be sinister and absurd.