It has something like 100 times as many users as PieFed+Lemmy+Mbin do together.

How is it a nightmare that I’m allowed to say “I’m not consenting to this shit”?!

Now they’re planning to revoke that right. Nightmare gone?

Like what gets done?
Depends on whether the police like what needs to get done or not. If they like it, it gets done.

A relatively recent small anecdote:
They forbade using spikes in your winter tyres on one throughfare street in the centre of Helsinki. The police said that so many people will be breaking that rule that they cannot fine all of them, so they will refuse to go enforce the restriction. And after they had gone public with that, the signs were removed as meaningless.

I’ve had two cases where a car has hit me. In the other case I was in my thoughts and accidentally stood in a wrong place waiting for the light to turn green. I was technically on the roadway – it just wasn’t very clear that that’s a road. A van intentionally crashed into me with a relatively slow speed and I called the emergency number. He fled the scene, but had to later come to an interrogation because I had seen the number plate. The police then said that I have a possibility to withdraw my demands, and if I don’t they will also fine me for having gone against the red lights. They don’t have enough resources and didn’t want to bother with this case, so they made sure it’ll get closed. I was young and very badly out of money, so I let the thing be and allowed them to close the case.

Here’s a photo from the spot. The place where I was standing is marked with a blue cross, the car came from the direction shown by the red arrow:

Then there was another case, where a car saw me about to cross a street and put the pedal to the metal in order to get past the crossing before I get there, speeding through an intersection at a ridiculous speed. As the car sped very close to me, I decided to hit its back window with an open hand to tell that “that was not okay”. The driver stopped his car in middle of the street, stepped out and shouted “Who are you to touch MY car?!” and then tried to grab my throat, leaving some bruises that I then got documented by a doctor (or nurse, or whatever he was technically). The man had said that I had ran across the street crossing, endangering the traffic, and the police told me we can close the case or they can open a case against me as well. I allowed them to close the case.

Here’s the spot where that happened; the car was coming from the direction of the crane, towards the direction where this picture is made from, and I was crossing the nearest crossing in the picture from right to left:

The police is so extremely under-resourced in Finland that I can absolutely understand they are kind of desperate. If they want to have time to investigate murders and other really serious crime, they have to leave something else undone. Or otherwise murderers can just run free. And because they need to choose things to ignore to save their resources, they tend to ignore things that are done by people that they assume don’t agree with their political views.

Those things with the two traffic incidents would have folded out differently if I hadn’t been an under 30-year-old guy with a long hair and if the the drivers hadn’t been middle-aged men in both cases. The police felt like those people were their peers and symphatised with them, so they wanted me to shut up. They also really sympathise with people who drive cars and typically dislike bicyclers. Of course, in the end, that depends on the individual. Each policeman has their own values and chooses what to ignore based on what they find important.

Here’s how Finland fares regarding policemen per 100 000 inhabitants:

and here’s the same for Germany:

…oh, apparently Germany has cut its police force a LOT. Last time I checked, their number was far over 400.

Well, yeah. Up to a point, we do.

But they tend to be based on people knowing that When I say “count the ticket, it’s hundreding” in the meaning “lower the flag, it’s raining” (based on the Finnish word “laskea” meaning both “count” and “to lower”, “lippu” meaning both “ticket” and “flag” and “sataa” being both the partitive form of “hundred” and “it rains”, the joke is about the Finnish language having funny homonyms.

And similarly here the arse of the joke is English being funny in having to meanings for the word “come”? It’s not usual to make such jokes with words that are actual cognates. They are more usually made with word pairs such as read and read, or read and red. I mean, jokes are goof things to have, but they shouldn’t be based on the laughee being ignorant.

What would be a fantastic name for a brothel, however, is this:

Thank you!

I cannot get that to work. I tried this link: https://piefed.europe.pub/post/35873 . And no. Nothing.

The US instituted a mandatory draft to fight that war.

But that was an offensive war, and most countries don’t do those.

Finland was much much safer before.

Depends on how you define “to be safe”. The Russia had declared that its goal is to return the borders of the Russian empire. That sounded a bit scary, but we shrugged it off, because it would require a war and that would hurt the Russia so much that such a war would be idiocy and therefore will not happen.

In case you don’t know where the borders of the Russian Empire were, they included for example these:

• Finland
• Estonia
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• half of Poland
• Ukraine
• Moldova

The Russia has declared that it wants to make all of those countries part of the Russian Federation.

So, we were not in danger, because the Russia would not be stupid enough to begin a war in Ukraine or in Finland, as it was clear that it would hurt the Russia’s economy more than it could ever be of use to it. The Finnish defence doctrine was based on the concept of credible defence. We were told in school that “they can attack us and they could most likely even take over all of Finland, but our army is able to incur such big losses to them that they will not want to do that.”
But then, it turned out that the Russia does not care about losses.

So, we found out two things:

• the Russia is really interested in acting to its declarations. They are not just empty words as we had assumed
• the Russia does not care about losses – therefore the doctrine of credible defence does not protect from the Russia

You can say that we were not in danger because we didn’t know that we are in danger. And in some way that’s true. But, once we found out that we are in danger, then, well, we were.
Since the doctrine of credible defence went down the drain, meaning that Finland effectively did not have a defence that is able to protect it, what else than joining NATO do you suggest we should have done to gain a level of defence capability able to keep the Russia out of Finland? Name one other option that we had.

Your idea that the Russia has a right to defend itself by preemptively taking over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova is, well… It would be impolite saying what it makes you look like.

EDIT: And of course this is relevant: In January 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 35 %. No “let’s join NATO” propaganda had been made at all, but in May 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 80 %. The only thing that caused this was that people around Finland saw that what we had been taught about the Russia in our schools was crap. It was part of the school curriculum to make sure every Finn knows that the Russia is not going to attack us, with an explanation of why not. And it seemed to make sense. And everyone had that in their heads. And then… We saw what the Russia is doing in Ukraine, and it was clear from that alone that shit, we are fucked! That meant, 80 % of the people decided they wanted a new kind of safety against the Russia.
Maybe you can say that they told that in our schools for about 40 years just so that in 2025 Finland could join NATO. But… Well, you know.
In May 2022 you could go to any bar to talk with random people and it would be clear that the assumption was “we are joining NATO. There is no other option.” There was no real dialogue about it, because basically everybody was of the same opinion. For the abovementioned reasons.

It’s lower than their inflation. They’d need an even higher interest rate in order to curb inflation.

I don’t think we could implement your suggestion. Our wartime maximum strength is about 700 000 soldiers and our population is around 5 600 000. That means, in wartime, one out of 8 inhabitants will be in different forms of military service. There’s no way we could pay an adequate salary for that many soldiers. And, that number is still a third less than how many soldiers Ukraine has, and Ukraine is just barely able to keep the Russia from advancing.

I’m not sure why you’re taking Vietnam war as an example, as it’s an offensive war and for example Finland has no plans to do anything like that.

Our military – numbers are public.

Yes, but the speed at which one can recruit soldiers in an emergency is not public.

maintaining offensive and diminishment operations

This is irrelevant, because most countries do not have any offensive operations to maintain in the first place.

You may not know what the phrase “proxy war” means, because in this context it’s rather insulting. And I do not think you meant to insult me or others. But do tell, why and how would Finland wage an offensive war?

Yeah, this is getting a bit off topic, but you’re making wild claims that would really need some clarification.

At the same time, the earlier interest rate of 21 % was considered too low, because a higher rate would have been needed to curb inflation.

Sounds good. Now they have had to choose between rock and a hard place, and chose to let the inflation increase so that companies could at least kind of keep existing in the short term. A sensible decision, but painful, because it means killing the economy in the longer term.

You could directly vote against being sent to die. You might not care about a ski hill funding request.

Uh, people choose when they are 18 whether they want to go to civil service or army. If they choose army, they will obviously be drafted if the Russia ever attacks, unless they have later had themselves removed from the drafting lists. To make a decision on how many soldiers we’ll need for the defence is actually an extremely good example of what kind of decisions absolutely cannot be made by a broad public vote. You need a military person relaying secret strategical information to the Ministers of Parliament. It cannot be relayed to all 5.6 million people without compromising the information. If such an amount of people knows about our military strategy, so does the Russia.

So, at least for that kind of decisions something else must be at place. Maybe there could be a restricted set of representatives that are allowed to vote in case we are attacked and you could then choose which one of those will handle your vote in this precise case – before they have talked with the military specialists.

A hit in the neck is definitely a miss from an intended target anyway. Can’t say how much or to what direction. It could have been that there’s been a target where the bullet would fly 30 cm behind the person to be guarded, but the bullet is taking a trajectory 10 cm off the intended and the person happens to their head 20 cm backwards just at the crucial moment.

But, I do believe that someone wanted that guy dead. I can imagine someone figuring that “he’s actively advocating killing politicians you don’t like, and I don’t like him. Therefore I am following his own instructions and this is acceptable.”

I personally think it’s a bad idea to kill a person like that, because it probably causes other people to get shot as well. It’s not a culture I want to see spread. But at least I do not see it morally as a very big problem that a person explicitly says that something is acceptable and then that thing is done to him. He wanted a certain kind of society and he got the kind of society he wanted. If there is life after death, he can spend that time being content of having changed the society.

What I’m saying is that there was a very much raised likelihood that someone kills him intentionally.

There is no concept of a parliament majority leader being able to block a proposal from being voted on.

I didn’t get what this is referring to. Is it some Canadian or US-American concept? I’d be happy if you could elaborate a bit!

You can change your delegation after disappointment with vote on an issue, and can choose to not delegate your vote on a mandatory military draft proposal.

I am already able to change my delegation after disappointment. Luckily I’ve never had to exercise that right. Also, another thing that flew far over my head: why is an exception specifically regarding mandatory military drafting important?

There was a very interesting tool/game someone made in Finland. You got shown the same problems the actualy Ministers of Parliament have to vote on, and all attachments that are available for public.

The idea was that it shows that direct democracy can work just fine.

I spent an evening trying to make my mind on whether I want to support expanding a ski centre in Lapland or not. Both sides had very good arguments! In the end I ended up thinking “Damn, this is a huge amount of work! If there was a system like this in place in Finland, I’d definitely want to outsource my part. I’d find someone that thinks more or less the same way as I do and I’d pay them to do the research and use my vote. It would make sense that people would sell that service to several citizens at once, bringing down the cost per person. I would not want to spend several hours each day researching something like ski centres 800 km away from my home – yet if only few do and vote, then the result is really random. So, I would definitely want someone to represent me.”

And then I figured that “damn, this is actually the system we have right now!”

Removed by mod

You’re acting like it’s a physical impossibility…

Why would it be a physical impossibility? Doesn’t seem to be for me. Or have I just thought what I do is hugging while in reality it’s not? Please elaborate.

Men secure in their own masculinity don’t have any problems hugging other men. And insecure men likely have toxic traits that make them bad friends.

Yes. How many men are secure in their masculinity? 5%? If the remaining 95 % can only have those 5 % as their friends, how do they find sufficient time for all that friendship?

For most men non-toxic men are not available for friendships. And especially: I don’t want to be friends with a toxic asshole, regardless of how much he moght (unbeknownst to himself…) need my friendship.

Most have no idea they need a hug.

They don’t want to because it would be gay. They want to be real men. And they feel sad and lonely and lost. If someone somehow got them to understand that all we men really need to do in order to be actually happy is to hug each other, this world would stop being a nightmare for us all.

That’s not really enough.

Also, such a small part of men are able to hug other men that if everybody needed to have those few as their friends, they’d very quickly run out of friendship capacity.

Of course, on Lemmy things also depend on your instance. I got banned fromba group by a mod that is at the same time a lemmy.ml admin for mentioning that China is putting Uyghyrs to concentration camps.

On lemmy.ml you can get banned for things you wouldn’t get elsewhere. The solution for that is to join a group for the same theme but hosted on another instance. I’m in three communities hosted on .ml, because their alternatives are not active enough. But, of course I always prefer the non-.ml alternative when available.

“All cops’ fathers have been married to people other than the cops’ mothers during conception”? Is that what “Out of wedlock” means? So, basically ACFHBMTPOTTCMDC?