Birgitta Jonsdottir on why Iceland is not a good destination for Snowden

>What is this bigoted nonsense doing on HN?

I was about to ask something similar. What is your comment, a content-free mix of accusations and insults, doing in HN?

As for your accusations:

What exactly is "bigoted" about what I wrote? People from cultural backgrounds less developed with regards to women's issues (as one example), don't magically become tolerant and feminist when they immigrate to another country.

Honour killings are a real thing -- I can point you to tons of articles on the issue. Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyunVoRKL8k

And they are related to muslim communities [that's what the police reports say]. Europeans, especially in rural areas, might have done similar things back in the day (nearly a century ago), but not many (actually none) modern Italians, Frenchmen, Dutch etc even consider the notion appropriate, much less practice such things as honour killings in 2013.

>PS. Most Muslims don't want to beat their wives or deny their daughters an education, nor do they want to engage in 'honor killings'.

Did anybody say it was "most muslims" doing it? And does it have to be 51% or close for it to matter? I don't even want 5% doing it.

Not to mention that there ARE muslim countries in which most people DO "deny their daughters and education".

But besides those things there are other issues, such as: the role of women, attitudes towards sex and sexual imagery, attitudes towards civic law, freedom of speech (including religious satire), etc. If they were totally OK with civic law in a democratic society, they wouldn't push for separate religious (sharia) courts in Western countries.

>Those of you up-voting this should be ashamed of yourselves.

Condescending, pro-censorship and abusive. That's your answer to my "bigotry"?

>Iceland had 0.00021 UNHCR refugees per capita in 2013. same number for sweden was 0.0097 (almost 50x). I think its fair to say that iceland could take a bigger reponsibility internationally.

Why do they have a "responsibility" in the first place?

What about the responsibility of those responsible for the refugees, including Western countries fucking up the refugee countries (igniting conflicts, maintaining colonies and neo-colonial pals as leaders, putting diplomatic pressure, helping topple and de-stabilize those places, etc) to install their lackeys and grab their resources, to stop doing it?

>Conservative religious beliefs aren't exclusive to Muslim immigrants.

Of course not.

But, outside the US (or just the US's Bible-belt), they are pretty much relegated to an insignificant minority in modern secular Europe. Even catholic Italy, with it's Vatican et al, could not care much about having a PM that openly hangs around with prostitutes and models (sometimes two at a time) in coke fuelled parties (how's that for a indifferent look towards "conservative religious beliefs"?).

They are, however, everything BUT a minority affair with regards to muslim immigrants.

It's like only having a 2-coast US and then adding an influx of Bible-belt population (only worse). The bible-belters might end up a bit more liberal than when they were alone, but the previous 2-coasts-only country will skew to the conservative.

One detail from that interview that didn't get much attention: when those guys went through official channels inside NSA and brought their allegations of wrongdoing to the Inspector General, the Inspector General recommended criminal prosecution of them. From the article:

Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.

Of course they should, unless you really want to see things like codes for ICBMs or "Report on how to shut down half the national power grid because of XYZ" plastered all over Reddit.

There are some things government, unfortunately, must keep secret to ensure safety of the governed.

Remind me again how telling the Chinese when and how the NSA was hacking them makes us or our country safer?

http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/06/nsa-leaker-edward-snowd...

"has divulged information to the Post which showed how computers in the SAR and on the mainland had been targeted by the NSA over a four-year period."

Pointblank, this had NOTHING to do with the domestic NSA surveillance he was uncovering. It just gives the Chinese a really good idea of how you're carrying out your surveillance and allows them secure their networks.

For all of the security stories about the Chinese hacking Google and other US companies and stealing their secrets, I find it ironic nobody seems to care this country had been trying to locate and disrupt this sort of state sponsored hacking.

So yeah, this is WAY beyond what I consider "whistleblowing"

Most democratic countries have a very nation-state-oriented view of democracy, where it's a group of people who rule themselves democratically. That tends to lead towards emphasizing citizenship a lot, so e.g. many European countries would be much stricter about conditions under which they'd extradite one of their own citizens. But Snowden isn't one of their citizens, so falls in a different category of basically "not our responsibility".

> they're supposed to be democratic countries and protect this sort of stuff on its own merits

Considering that the entire point of a democracy is a compromise from principles to practicality, I'm surprised you expect a democratic country to be impractical for the sake of principle.