Hello everyone and especially our Finnish members.
Tomorrow, April 17, there is a general election to Finnish parliament. I am a bit curious on your views about this.
In the Swedish media at least, there has been a focus on Perussuomalaiset/Sannfinländarna/True Finns, and their success. This is partly because they have a critical view of immigration (which is a very sensitive issue in Sweden) and because they want to get rid of compulsory education of Swedish.
I am not that familiar with other countries which have compulsory education in minority languages. Switzerland and Canada come to mind, but I'm not sure the situation is comparable. In Switzerland people get education in the majority language where they live and then study one of the other national languages. In Canada I'm not sure how it works, feel free to teach me.
1) Which party will you vote for, and why? If you don't feel like telling people which party you are voting for, just mentioning some questions which are important to you could be interesting.
2) What is your view of compulsory teaching on Swedish? How do/did you feel about being taught Swedish yourself?
Just felt like mentioning that something similar happened in Austria some years ago, especially in Carinthia, where Haider's parties (he later founded his own one), which had always been against immigration, against joining the EU and against Slavic minorities in the country, managed to get pretty popular.
I'm personally still kind of torn on the issue of nationalist views in the context of neutral countries. Restricting immigration and [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism]other imports[/URL] are generally smart things to do if you can't compete economically with other countries (f.e. if their people do the same jobs for less money or if cheap imports could harm national enterprises) and you don't want to get too co-dependant on them. Strong co-dependancy kind of stands in conflict with the notion of neutrality, so I see the point of such movements. Unfortunately, at least in Austria, I guess the parties in question really overdid it and were way too radical, probably to appeal to racist voters at the same time.
yeah, in sweden we also have sverigedemokraterna, who are against immigration. the leader is called jimmie åkesson. here's a speech he made in 2014: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Qx7Wmb5as
a lot of people are starting to think immigration has gone too far, maybe because it's part of the muslims plan to take over europe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU
immigration could be a good idea though, if it's bad for the economy, so that people realize that we should get rid of money and make something more useful of it, like toilet paper.
i think teaching swedish in finland is unnecessary.
In the Swedish media at least, there has been a focus on Perussuomalaiset/Sannfinländarna/True Finns, and their success. This is partly because they have a critical view of immigration (which is a very sensitive issue in Sweden)
The major problem is the practically religious multiculturalism that basically all the other political parties and the entirety of the media professes, and where it has lead other European countries (such as Sweden, the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and others). As a Swedish, you can check the success of your multiculturalist experiment in your own country (although in many cases you'll have to check it from foreign media, as your own media is rather keen to censor itself, not unlike the Finnish media).
Another problem is that Finns are getting tired of political parties and the media treating their own citizens like trash. If you were to believe what the Finnish media claims, Finland would be like the US at the height of the Ku Klux Klan. It's no wonder that citizens are looking towards a party that does understand them and the real problems.
(It seems that the Finnish press is not the only one who is spreading lies about that party. For example check this BBC article with such pearls as "They believe that a low birth rate is not solved by immigration, as that results in problems and foreigners are do not fit into Finnish culture. Instead, young women should study less and spend more time giving birth to pure Finnish children. That is like a faint echo of Nazi ideology." I suppose the writer has been talking to the Green Party or some Finnish reporter.)
and because they want to get rid of compulsory education of Swedish.
The key word here is compulsory. Nobody is promoting removing the education of the language. What is being promoted is that the scarce teaching resources (which scarcity is aggravated even more due to the economic crisis and the need to cut on budgets) be used for more important subjects. You don't need Swedish to live and work in Finland. The amount of people living in Finland who speak only Swedish and do not speak Finnish nor English is a very small minority, and it makes no sense to force everybody to study the language just because of them. After all, there are other language minorities in Finland, such as Sami and Russian, yet they are not compulsory languages at school. The resources currently spent on teaching Swedish could be better spent in something more useful.
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Truncated wrote:
In Canada I'm not sure how it works, feel free to teach me.
Canadians in Ontario (where I live) must study French or English (the opposite of their full-time education language immersion choice) starting from the third grade of school. I'll make a visual layout of the school years assuming the child is in English-based education in Ontario (the most populace province in Canada; also where I'm from).
pre-school <-- This is not compulsory, but most busy parents choose to send their kids.
kindergarten <-- Education is compulsory starting now, at 4 or 5 years old depending on birth date. Primary school starts here.
grade 1
grade 2
grade 3 <-- French must be taught starting now.
grade 4
grade 5
grade 6
grade 7 <-- Junior high school starts here. French remains compulsory.
grade 8
grade 9 <-- High school starts here. French is no longer strictly compulsory, but as the credit system enters effect, French is grouped with some other courses as a choice for a compulsory credit. Most students pick French in their first year as an "easy credit".
grade 10
grade 11
grade 12
post-secondary <-- The student is on their own. Education is no longer compulsory.
You have been taught!
Thanks Lex, for the info. I guess it works the other way around then if it is a french-speaking child. Also, I'm a bit surprised it starts as early as 4-5 years (2 years earlier than Sweden), but I guess that's just what I'm used to.
Thank you also Warp, for your views on Finnish politics.
I am well aware of the non-success of Swedish immigration. As you can tell from nfq's post, (where he links to a speech by Hitler and says it's Sverigedemokraterna) Swedes lose all their senses when trying to discuss immigration. There is only one view which is allowed: more immigration. Anyone who thinks there should be less immigration is automatically a racist, regardless of the current level of immigration.
I think Swedish in Finland cannot really be compared to Sami or Russian, for two reasons:
1) Size, Swedish is the first language of 6%, Sami is the first language of 0.1%, Russian of 0.8%.
2) Geographic spread, Swedish is the only language spoken in some areas of Finland, such as Åland.
That doesn't mean it should be compulsory though, as you say. I am unsure of what I should think, which I guess is part of the reason for this topic.
Kuwaga: If you cannot compete with low wages in other countries, doesn't it make sense to import cheap labor? I think the problem, rather, is that immigrants in general have a lower rate of employment and thus cost money for the state (depending on how welfare-heavy it is). Work immigration for a targeted work sector has been successful in Sweden in the past, at least.
@Truncated: If you import cheap labor, those labor forces will either become citizens or they won't. In both cases, it reduces the buying power of your country's population, either by lowering the average wage or by preventing one of your own countrymen from getting that job (for a higher wage). Reducing their buying power by too much means they'll buy less products, and thus it can sometimes be bad for your country's economy. The main point though was that it makes you co-dependant on other countries.
I'm not really into politics, but I've determined that not a single Finnish party really matches with my views and thoughts, so I'm not really into voting for any party. There might be several fine candidates for me, except that their party stands for something I don't really like.
The compulosry Swedish in Finland (+ rivalry between Finland and Sweden that's very strong in Finland) seems to increase negative thoughts and attitude towards Swedish and Sweden in general, as you're not given a choice of learning the language. In my opinion, Swedish shouldn't be compulsory, as it's not really that useful or important language in Finland. People should be encouraged to learn foreign languages though, be it Swedish or some other language.
You don't need Swedish to live and work in Finland. The amount of people living in Finland who speak only Swedish and do not speak Finnish nor English is a very small minority, and it makes no sense to force everybody to study the language just because of them.
That reminds me of the status of Spanish in America; although in most areas the government is required to ensure that people can access services regardless of what languages they know, and the most common minority language by far is Spanish, the only part of the United States where children are compulsorily taught Spanish is Puerto Rico, and elsewhere there are usually ESL classes for kids with poor or absent knowledge of English, and Spanish is the most commonly taken foreign-language class by native English speakers in high school, but the only language that children must learn is English.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Warp wrote:
The major problem is the practically religious multiculturalism that basically all the other political parties and the entirety of the media professes, and where it has lead other European countries (such as Sweden, the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and others). As a Swedish, you can check the success of your multiculturalist experiment in your own country (although in many cases you'll have to check it from foreign media, as your own media is rather keen to censor itself, not unlike the Finnish media).
The idea that you "can't discuss immigration" or that multiculturalism is "practically a religion" is a stubborn lie that's kept alive only by those opposed to immigration who use it to gain sympathy.
Fact is, immigration is the top political issue in the entire European Union other than maybe the economic crisis. We're discussing it right now. There are tons of people on other websites discussing it now. There's no honeymoon for this issue on either side.
That said, there's a lot to be told about this issue. It seems to me that Western Europe is experiencing something similar to what the US has been for the last couple of decades with immigrants from Latin America. After the passage of liberalizing trade agreements like NAFTA, a lot of the US manufacturing industry was shipped over the border, and likewise a lot of small farming communities and small businesses south of the border were decimated, so there was a huge swell of immigrants who began coming there illegally in search of opportunities. A lot of them planted roots, had kids here (which, in the United States, guarantees citizenship to children) and began "taking" jobs for lower pay and living outside the system for the most part.
So what we're seeing here in Western Europe, albeit with a different origin, is similar in effect. Immigrants tend to perform worse than the native population in almost every category because they tend to be poor, uneducated, unassimilated and therefore lack the same kind of opportunities that the majority population does. Since those conditions are usually accompanied with crime, a lot of the kids drop out and get involved with criminal organizations or end up populating prisons.
Now basically what opponents of immigration will have you believe is that progressives (such as the Green Party you so derisively namedropped just now) don't care about any of this and are uninterested in even acknowledging this reality, let alone do anything to improve it. That's also a lie. What I've described is how it is all over in the West where there has been significant immigration. This is not in dispute by anyone, and it makes sense at that. It's also pretty clear what must be done: invest in people, because unless you can pull them from their own little unassimilated communities and teach them the language and get them into a position where they can get a job, you're basically condemning them to remain there for the rest of their lives. Right-wingers would rather have us not spend any more money on them (they consider the whole issue a lost cause, anyway) because they "should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps". You can chalk that one up to right-wingers generally believing problems will solve themselves if only you hope for it badly enough.
Given that little abbreviated backstory, a lot of people are really pissed and the reaction for years has been the usual bigotry: calls to tighten security at the border, and the whole "go back to where you came from" bullshit. However it's been getting worse over the last couple years as anti-immigration has become a political movement and we're seeing a lot of ugly shit like openly racist and Islamophobic politicians. It's not nearly as bad as it is in the United States just yet, but given that the politicization of immigration in Europe is coinciding with one of the most serious economic crises in history, it's not unlikely that things will get worse.
Warp wrote:
(which scarcity is aggravated even more due to the economic crisis and the need to cut on budgets)
This is also an extremely misguided idea posited by those who want to use the crisis for reasons of increasing the gap between rich and poor. During an economic crisis, the main problem you have to worry about is wasted human and industrial resources. You can't crawl out of a crisis with half the country is sitting around twiddling its thumbs.
So you invest money into the economy in the form of stimulus in order to get the country working again—the bill can be paid off after the recovery. Austerity is basically the extreme opposite of that idea: instead of investing in the country so that it can get back on its feet, you take away numerous vital public services and essentially force the taxpayer to foot the bill for everyone. Austerity measures are usually implemented by right-wing political parties who at the same time grace the business world with tax cuts that have been proven to be ineffective in actually helping the economy.
In the Swedish media at least, there has been a focus on Perussuomalaiset/Sannfinländarna/True Finns, and their success. This is partly because they have a critical view of immigration (which is a very sensitive issue in Sweden) and because they want to get rid of compulsory education of Swedish.
Interesting. Interesting to hear a foreign view on Finnish elections.
So the voting and vote counting is now over.
True Finns, i.e. Perussuomalaiset (which more accurately translates as "Average Finns" in my opinion) did rise a lot, and they became the third largest party.
I principally supported three parties: The Pirate Party, the Christian Democrats, and the True Finns. I knew True Finns were going to rise in any case, so I focused my attention to The Pirate Party, which in my opinion drives some important things which are greatly neglected by most politicians today. Such as critical attention to the subtle driving of censorship and media giants driven copyright laws today.
Unfortunately, in the area I live in, the Pirate Party party had no candidates I could really honestly support; all of them had one or more things which I would object to. Most often that would be emphatic atheism.
I also did not vote any candidate from Christian Democrats, because I was afraid of that my vote would not really have any practical effect, because that party usually receives a relatively small number of votes in any case. And also, their ideals are nearly the same as those of the True Finns party, with just more emphasis on the Bible. In retrospect, I maybe should have voted them.
So I ended up voting for the True Finns party (the candidate which I voted for was not elected, but that does not matter), because the ideals of that party have a great overlap with the ideals I also support. Such as frank and honest dealing with immigration policy (recognizing the treat of Islam and the statistical significance of immigrants-originating violence and crimes), emphasis on how the European Union and the increased self-imposed global liabilities in general adversely affects regular Finnish people, such as farmers, and the nation as whole. I did not vote their leader though, because I don't like him. While I did vote for that party, I am also somewhat concerned about what they bring for the future of Finland. There's always some delicate balance between good extremism and bad extremism. I only hope that they do not become the new nazis.
It has been my observation that the other "large" parties up to this date have pretty much played by the rules of those who make lots of money and want to make even more, and by the rules of those lukewarm who just want to do their best to not offend anyone (humanism), which is in my opinion a quite un-Biblical principle. I have never seen any wisdom in voting any of the big parties; especially so after I earned about the oftly-practiced concept of "party discipline", which basically means that every party member must forgo their personal views and vote according to what the party leadership decide. They become puppets, and nothing that they declared in their electorial campaign matters.
And then there's the Green party "Vihreät de Gröna", which is all about humanism and green ideals popularism in my opinion. In particular, I find myself in stark opposition to their view of nuclear power. After the votes were counted, I happened to do a brief analysis on the voting statistics. It was funny and insightful in my opinion that pretty much everywhere in Finland, the Green Party receives only neglible votes. They are treated as what they are -- a joke -- everywhere except in Helsinki (and possibly some other big cities). Helsinki, the most nature-deprived area of Finland, suddenly gives the Green Party a support of a whopping 17 %. Wow. So you don't have access to nature, so you compensate for it by nudging on the Green Party? Thanks for the nice thought, people. Too bad the Green Party does nothing that actually helps. (Your mileage may vary; this is just my perception.)
Since you asked, Truncated, about the role of Swedish teaching in Finland, I might add that it is my opinion that it should be completely voluntary; it should be added to the palette of foreign languages that can be studied when children begin studying foreign languages, and if the child chooses (or their parent chooses for them) to not study Swedish, not now nor later, then so be it; and if they do study it, so be it. That should be enough. Today, for Finns, English plays a much more major role than Swedish does. Swedish is one of the official languages of Finland, while English is not, but in my opinion if we had compulsory Swedish, we should have compulsory Sami as well (I feel terribly sorry for the situation of Sami-speakers in North Finland), maybe compulsory Romani language as well because there's quite many of them in Finland... And maybe compulsory Russian, because today there are towns in which you hear Russian more than you do hear Finnish (same goes for Swedish, too. With Russian it's a recent phenomenon though). The today situation is a sad joke that is held together by humanism and that is greatly objected towards by most students year after year; it is a historic remnant. But this opinion paid no role in my voting decision.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Bisqwit wrote:
the Pirate Party party had no candidates I could really honestly support; all of them had one or more things which I would object to. Most often that would be emphatic atheism.
I suppose this shouldn't be too hard to believe, coming from you, but it's still somewhat surprising that you'd actually refuse to vote for someone because of a personal belief that there is no God.
I don't know the Pirate Party of Finland, but generally atheist politicians are really not interested in expunging religion because the separation of Church and state is already a done deal. There is no such thing as a "war on religion", except to keep the state free from religious bias, as is the general and often constitutionally defined ideal. I've personally voted for Christians before even though I'm an atheist, because those particular candidates realized that religion and politics are separate domains. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that; why not vote for the atheist candidates if you otherwise approve of their policies?
I suppose this shouldn't be too hard to believe, coming from you, but it's still somewhat surprising that you'd actually refuse to vote for someone because of a personal belief that there is no God.
I have nothing against atheists in general. What I was talking about was empathetic atheism, putting emphasis on atheism. Such people who judge their peers with atheism, i.e. recommend a peer if he/she is an an atheist and strongly dismiss as a loon if he/she believes in a god. Such a person is likely to vote against anything that anyhow positively helps belief systems of any sort. Such a person will likely emphatetically work to weed out any religion-related teaching from schools, at least any such that works from attesting perspective. Any such that begins from the assumption that the claims of the religion are a fact. Such a person is sometimes even beyond the ideal of "I disagree with you, but I support your right to believe so". Such a person is likely to make statements like "we are educated and smart people; we don't need 'Holy books' written by sheep-herders thousands of years ago to tell us how to behave"; and they thus explicitly abandon that which to me is God's wisdom that is infinitely better-founded than what humans collectively can devise. In my Bible-biased view, such a person is likely to make decisions that will make the people progressively more ill, and which will collect God's wrath upon the nation.
These are my thoughts on why I would not vote for an emphatetically atheist candidate, even if they happen to be driving some goal that I positively agree with, even if nobody else was driving that particular goal. Maybe I should call them atheism fundamentalists or fanatic atheists for better clarity.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
I'm flabbergasted that countries have political parties that base and pride themselves centrally on religion. It's really kind of nonsensical from my point of view.
I mean, sure, Kevin Rudd was a Christian, but no one gave a damn, it probably helped that he never mentioned it. I mean, hell, the current Australian PM isn't aligned with any religions (Amusingly, she's less popular than Rudd for completely unrelated reasons). Then again, bringing up religion here in politics is basically a death sentence in the polls... people automatically assume that you're a nutcase of some sorts (This probably has to do with the fact that the any religious parties here are seen as extremely conservative to the point of destruction).
Values dissonance at its finest, peoples. I won't drag on any longer, I just felt that I should express my absolute surprise that non-American parties would base themselves so centrally on religion.
I am aware that this reply will most likely result in me being shot in the face akin to a shotgun, but I wish to state that I am in no way against religion and have made this reply to simply state that the differences between the worlds of politics are quite incredible, at least, from my perspective. It's probably worth noting that most Australians don't even really care too much about religion anyway, so what, you worship a god/s, when's the next barbicue?!
and they thus explicitly abandon that which to me is God's wisdom that is infinitely better-founded than what humans collectively can devise.
Think about it from an atheist's point of view: If humans invented God, then God's wisdom is just human wisdom in a different package, and thus it's not impossible that we could agree on some things, unless someone falls for extreme fundamentalism.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
The idea that you "can't discuss immigration" or that multiculturalism is "practically a religion" is a stubborn lie that's kept alive only by those opposed to immigration who use it to gain sympathy.
I didn't say anything even resembling "you can't discuss immigration" in my post. You are reading something that isn't there.
As for multiculturalism being an ideology not much unlike a religion, it just is true. It was especially true 5 to 10 years ago, and it still is to a large extent today among many influential people, a large part of the media, and many politicians (the Green Party being the most blatant example). You just have to read what they themselves write to realize this. You don't even have to take the word of "some right-wing fundamentalist" for it. I don't know how it is in your country, but it certainly is so in Finland (and Sweden, from what I can see).
The situation has marginally improved lately, but there are still many influential people here who take multiculturalism, with all of its dogmas, like a religion. You wouldn't believe the blatant lies that the multiculturalists come up with in their writings. (For example in one infamous case the Finnish police had to issue an official rebuke to a newspaper article which claimed that an immigrant was stabbed to death by a racist. No such stabbing ever happened, by anybody.)
Now basically what opponents of immigration will have you believe is that progressives (such as the Green Party you so derisively namedropped just now) don't care about any of this and are uninterested in even acknowledging this reality, let alone do anything to improve it.
About the only "commendable" thing about the Finnish Green Party is that at least they do what they profess, unlike many other parties who say one thing but do the opposite. In other words, they say one thing, but when it comes the time to vote for new legislation, they vote for the exact opposite. At least the Green Party is open about their position and vote according to it.
The problem is that the Green Party has an absolute multiculturalist agenda: No amount of immigration is ever enough, and laws restricting immigration are always too strict and must be alleviated.
Right-wingers would rather have us not spend any more money on them (they consider the whole issue a lost cause, anyway) because they "should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps". You can chalk that one up to right-wingers generally believing problems will solve themselves if only you hope for it badly enough.
I find it a bit amusing how you talk about lies, and then just repeat lies yourself.
Warp wrote:
(which scarcity is aggravated even more due to the economic crisis and the need to cut on budgets)
This is also an extremely misguided idea posited by those who want to use the crisis for reasons of increasing the gap between rich and poor.
Way to miss the point completely. I was talking about compulsory Swedish teaching in Finland. It was in no way whatsoever related to immigration or anything else.
Bisqwit wrote:
I principally supported three parties: The Pirate Party
I will never support that party. Why? Because they want to make me unemployed.
And no, this is not just prejudice. I have talked to them. Their position was that if because of their policies I become unemployed (because the gaming company I work for becomes bankcrupt), then tough luck. Sucks being me. They couldn't care less.
I hate intrusive DRM and draconian copyright laws like everybody else. However, that's not the only agenda that the Pirate Party is pushing. If they had their way, they would destroy companies and make people unemployed.
Here are some of the reasons I voted for the True Finns (and I'd like to repeat what Bisqwit said about the name; the translation is not very fitting and the original Finnish name does not sound as nationalistic or mean that immigrants can't be members or anything).
1) The media. I am sick and tired of the media trying to tell me what to think. Mass media in Finland is controlled almost completely by green left-wing academic liberals, who think anyone voting for True Finns is a hillbilly redneck who doesn't understand what he's doing and only votes for True Finns because he is angry and wants to protest. For the last month before the election, all major Finnish newspapers were filled with articles where arrogant editors tried to analyze why the Finns are so angry and explained how voting for the True Finns will drive us into an era of darkness filled with hate and racism. I'm glad people instead decided to make their own minds and didn't fall for the smear campaign.
2) Freedom of speech. Even though the green party claims to be the most liberal major party in Finland, the green minister of justice Tuija Brax has passed or tried to pass laws which significantly diminish freedom of speech. The green party seems to think that to eradicate racism and hate speech, any means are acceptable. And they should of course be the ones who define what racism actually is. They have among other things tried to pass a law that would make posting a link to a website containing racist material (or, again, what they consider racist material) a criminal offense. It is the green party and their friends who are taking our society into a more and more totalitarian and orwellian direction, even though this is exactly what they blame the True Finns for.
The green party is not the only culprit here; when the Muhammad caricatures were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten in 2005, the then Finnish Prime Minister rushed to apologize to the Muslim world, even though Finland had nothing to do with the incident. When the Danish PM was asked if he was going to apologize, he said "listen here: we do not apologize for our freedom of speech". In general, it is this kind of spinelessness and political correctness gone crazy that characterizes Finnish foreign policy, and it really brings my piss to a boil.
3) Immigration. Immigration is something that our politicians simply can't see as just another branch of politics that can and should be viewed analytically and critically. Personally I believe this is because we have been taught to tip toe around the subject ever since we were kids for fear of being labeled racists, because being a racist in this country seems to be a bigger offense than being a rapist or a pedophile. Immigration has be seen by our politicians as some unavoidable phenomenon that we simply need to adapt to, even though it's not. Immigration policies should be looked at from the point of view of how they benefit or damage Finland, because immigration can never be a solution to world poverty. I could write like a hundred pages on this, but I'll just stop here as I'm sure most of you know what I'm taking about.
4) The EU. I'm not as anti-EU as the True Finns party. I do think, however, that the EU has weakened Finnish democracy a great deal by taking decision making further and further away from the people. Something like 70-80% of our legislation comes from the EU, and we have virtually no control over it (well, Finland does have 13 out of the 736 representatives in the European parliament but you can guess how much power they have over anything). The EU passes (and has passed) ridiculous laws and directives, which don't take into account the differences between countries at all; is it really that surprising that the same laws and directives don't work for two completely different countries like Romania and Finland? In this light I'm very worried about how almost all other parties in Finland want to move towards a single united European nation. The EU should be a trading union, nothing more.
5) Sentences for violent crimes. The Finnish justice system is completely screwed up. Raping someone or sexually abusing children usually gets you a few months of conditional discharge plus a small fine, i.e. no punishment at all. Drunk drivers get fined a bit and might lose their license, but that's it. Then again if a 17-year-old burns down a church by accident, he gets sentenced to several years in jail or when someone tries to stop a fight or defend themselves, they go down just as hard as the assailants. Writing hurtful stuff on the Internet about politicians recently got one man over two years in prison. Well that's OK, he said, because in Finnish prisons prisoners can earn over 2000€ a month by working. Sometimes prisoners can earn more than the prison guards! A foreign prisoner once described a Finnish prison as a 5-star hotel. Hopefully we'll see some changes now.
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As for compulsory education of Swedish, I'm against it. In fact, I think that the position of Swedish as our second national language should be re-evaluated. I just don't see why Swedish should be preferred over Russian, German, French or Spanish just because 6% of the people speak it as their native language. This is coming from a future teacher of Swedish.
In my opinion there should be a second compulsory language, but kids should have more languages to choose from. The teaching should also begin earlier than it does now (7th grade, 12-13-year-olds) to avoid students developing negative attitudes toward whatever the language they study.
There's a common misconception (promoted by the media and the multiculturalists) that people and political parties who criticize immigration would want to stop all immigration. While there certainly are individuals who fit that description (and who often are truly racist even by the strictest and most accurate definition of the word), that's not the general sentiment.
Where immigrants come from does matter. That's a huge taboo to say, and breaks political correctness very blatantly, but it just is a fact. Not all cultures are the same, and people who rise in one culture often have quite different attitudes from people who rise in another. Also environmental factors, such as poverty, crime and corruption can mold people's attitudes and ideologies. When you grow up in a certain environment, you tend to learn bad attitudes. Again, this may be a taboo, but it just is a fact.
This is not just theoretical fear-mongering. We have hard statistics on how well immigrants from different countries integrate into the hosting cultures from different parts of Europe. Unlike the multiculturalist dogma claims, not all of this (nor probably even any significant part of it) can be attributed to prejudice and racism by the hosting country. It just is so that people from certain cultures integrate on average significantly more poorly than from other cultures. Immigrants from some countries don't generally have too much difficulty in integrating, fitting in, and being a productive member of the hosting community, while immigrants from certain other countries in average do. And this doesn't have anything to do with skin color or religion.
Should rich countries try to help poor countries so that their citizens can, in time, live better lives? Definitely. If rich countries have the resources, the right thing to do is to try to help countries with less resources to get on their feet. However, this is not accomplished by importing some thousands of people from that country (from the millions there), especially if those people have a track record of non-integration, isolation tendencies and destructive behavior. That helps nobody. The only thing it does is to diminish the capability of the hosting country to help the poorer country.
It doesn't help that sustaining a person who doesn't integrate and doesn't earn his own living in a rich country is really expensive. The money which goes to sustain one such person in a rich country could help dozens of people in their country of origin.
However, immigrants who have a good track record of integration and contributing to the hosting society, are quite benefitial. Nobody opposes those. It's just the leftist media who wants to give a picture of the "racist" average citizen opposing all immigration.
Oh wow. What Kyrsimys said is exactly how I feel about politics in the Netherlands. So yeah, I'm pretty sure this planet is going to hell.
Anyway, as I know nothing of Finnish politics, I'm just gonna shut up now.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure this planet is going to hell.
I'm quite pessimistic myself as well. Even though the True Finns (I also find that translation a bit inaccurate; the Finnish for "true finns" would be "aidot suomalaiset", not "perussuomalaiset") got 39 seats in the parliament, that's just not enough. There are 200 seats in total, and as long as they don't get at least 101 of them, nothing much is going to change. All the other parties are simply going to vote against them.
This is not unprecedent. AFAIK this is exactly what has been happening in Sweden for years, with their equivalent party.
I'm flabbergasted that countries have political parties that base and pride themselves centrally on religion. It's really kind of nonsensical from my point of view.
I too believe that the Republican and Constitution Parties (United States) are abhorrent to a reasonable populace.
I'm glad the name issue with Perussuomalaiset finally got resolved.
According to MTV3 news, the official English name of the party is now "The Finns", which is an adequate translation of the meaning of the Finnish name of the party.
The extreme nationalism 'ish name "True Finns" cited in this thread never had an official position, despite being widely used in foreign media, including the Wikipedia.
