How that legislation will look will depend on a lot of committee work down the road, and what parliament actually ends up passing is another open question.
Still, this proposal has the backing of several ministries, so there's a large change that something good will be passed. But whether it'll fulfill all the promises of the IMMI plan remains to be seen.
edit: although to be fair, in the context of an article written in English aimed at a general audience this is not an easy situation. Properly using just the first name might throw off people who don't know about the Icelandic conventions (that would be most of them) who might then consider this use as strangely personal. On the other hand, repeatedly using the full name might look weird too. Personally I'm not convinced these are worth the trade-off of being culturally incorrect, but I'm not the one making the calls.
That's not the case with patronyms, so this usage has never developed. In Iceland you'd never use just the patronym. It's not a proper name, just an indication of parental lineage.
Most countries that have same sex unions have a different set of laws for them, usually for religious and political reasons. The Church of Iceland opposed the recent change, but it lost that battle.
Regarding Jóhanna, it's sad that the first openly gay head of state is also so openly incompetent :)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html
Apparently it didn't work all that well.
If Iceland, an already-recognized nation, decides to do this, trying to get things shut down without their consent could / would be seen as an attack, and it becomes a far larger issue than simply enforcing laws within your jurisdiction.
More in depth or higher class pieces that are not expected to be widely consumed may well then go a step further and assume the reader has detailed knowledge of name systems (for example Chinese "Family Name, Given Name" ordering).
So to reiterate the expression of one of the parent posts they appear to be writing to their audience. Be offended or confused if you like.
Care to elaborate?
Her coalition government's only redeeming quality has been to suck less than their predecessors which facilitated the giant ponzi scheme which took down the economy. They're wasting a lot of effort on the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
One shining moment of incompetence was the press conference right after the president announced that the Icesave debt repayment bill would go to a public referendum.
She announced (well, mumbled actually) that the government was "disappointed" in the President's decision to bring the matter to a vote in a rushed international press conference hours after the announcement.
What they should have done is explain calmly that this was part of the democratic process in Iceland, and how the result might affect any future debt repayment.
Examples like these and countless others have shown that her and her government can't think two steps ahead, manage PR and foreign diplomacy horribly, and generally seem more interested in their pet leftist issues (which they can finally shove through, now that they're in power) rather than solving the problems facing the nation.
But what do I care, I moved abroad shortly after this all went down.
how unbiased. leaves me wondering if those previous governments had any pet rightist issues of their own. something to do with banks, do you think? bringing down the entire economic system, perhaps?
pet leftist issues don't sound so bad after all. i should look up which they are. i might even like them.
It will be much more difficult to convince a Kentucky farmer that the US should invade Iceland with it's white Christians, as supposed a strange-sounding nation with non-white non-Christians(sad, but true).
And though Iceland doesn't have a military, it does have friends who do. It is interesting entertaining the idea of a US invasion of Iceland. It would result in an immediate hostility towards the US from many nations, as it would be to attack a friend(if they attack Iceland, they can attack us), especially from the Nordic region(whose commercial powers are not to sneeze at).
Anyways, data safe-heaven, great idea.
Dude, seriously... who's talking about invading Iceland? Are you out of your mind? I never even suggested that!!!
Did the MPAA / RIAA mafia need the U.S. military to invade Sweden to shut down The Pirate Bay's servers a few years ago? That's right, they didn't. They merely contacted their obedient, corrupted "friends" in Washington D.C., and had the U.S. government pressure the Swedish government, and the Swedish government had the Swedish police raiding The Pirate Bay... even though Stockholm is way out of U.S. jurisdiction.
Sweden has professional armed forces, defense and high-tech industries, natural resources, land. Sweden needs the U.S. less than Iceland does. This means that the U.S. can pressure Iceland whenever it wants, and Iceland will obey because the small and the weak don't make the rules. International relations are, essentially, bullying. It sucks, but being in denial won't help.
It's not like I'm some bitter right winger either, my views align more closely with theirs in theory. But in practice they're about the worst thing that could have happened after the crisis, sans the incumbents.
They've failed to enact any meaningful change to financial regulation or government oversight since they took power. They've failed to implement the government transparency that was widely demanded of them (e.g. doing secretive dealings with the IMF). The issue of changing the constitution is now dead in some committee.
As an example of something that's (still) being done right check out the election of the Best Party in Reykjavík. Their agenda (here in Icelandic: http://www.bestiflokkurinn.is/ur-starfi-flokksins/samstarfsy...) includes things that are actually relevant to improving short- and long term life for the population. They've set up an instance of a "shadow government" at http://betrireykjavik.is (running http://github.com/rbjarnason/open-direct-democracy), a fair amount of their policies are being drawn from there. So they're actually listening to their constituency.
google translate helped me make sense of the pages you link to. do i understand correctly that they run the Reykjavik council? sounds like a down-to-earth party representing the interests of the people more than those of the corporations. unusual, that.
also, i like how they use open direct democracy. i wish there were more reporting about this.
all in all, this sounds a little like reverse disaster capitalism: seize the crisis to install laws that benefit the people. disaster socialism? ;)
You really don't see how your words could have been interpreted that way?