Oh I do. When somebody come with some bigoted ideas about the subject of rescue at sea I raise the same arguments as I do here.
I did not say that Norwegians are all angles, or theat everybody in Norway have the same ideas about everything.
Is that the case where you live? If so it must be a boring place.
Can you tell me when suddenly farming required migrant labour to prevent the price going up?
( yes Iâm thankful my strawberries are still at 1950âs prices, thanks to immigration NOT, distribution is a far bigger cost than the farming and picking, ask any farmer or supermarket)
In Australia we pick grapes and olives with machines which were invented to keep the price of the goods down and continue with a economic policy of having only skilled workers.
Unfortunately they were bloody well trained in Aussie. A court case at the moment is charging a president of the Comancheros with a crime list longer than my arm. We sent him to Aussie aged two, what a bloody education.
I am reminded of when Peter Ustinov was going through Aussie immigration and was asked if he had a criminal record.
He replied â I didnât know it was still a requirement.â
It appears that the people living up in Northern Norway doesnât share your gloomy view of their part of the world.
CNNâs Sanjay Gupta visited the region to find out for himself. He came back with a different view from the popular view.
Unfortunately it is not available for free viewing in USA, but thanks to the public TV Channel NRK in Norway you can see it here:
Without advertisements and with Norwegian subtitles thrown in.
I know, it is all Socialism. CNN cannot be trusted, like Fox NewsâŚ
Then the Maersk Etienne has finally managed to âget rid ofâ the survivors they picked up over one month ago:
The former tug âMare Jonioâ, with the migrants, is now in the port of Pozzallo in southern Sicily.
The tanker âMaersk Etienneâ is underway to the Gibraltar Strait.
They are taking the survivors ashore, but only for medical treatment:
take them back to where they accidentally fell into a boat where they can get a refund from the people traffickers and start a new life?
Some people in Singapore would have liked to send all Expats back to where they came from as well.
They tried that once and the economy collapsed
Watch and learnâŚ
So today the majority employer is a foreign company, oops.
He is defiantly not a fan of the Expats in Singapore, if that is what you are implying.
He is a âSingaporean Bananaâ. (Google it) Very British with an Oxford accent.
âSingaporean Bananaâ - so I looked it up - âwhite on the inside, yellow on the outsideâ - sounds pretty racist to me.
To which I replied:
"There arenât many people from any place or condition looking for a home in the Arctic wastelands of Alaska, Canada, or Russia either.
Are you saying you donât know that âNorthern Norwayâ has a land area of around. 96,225 km2 or 37,153 sq miles north of the Arctic Circle?
And you call me geographically ignorant ⌠Iâm not even a Norwegian fanboy much less a fanatical promoter of all things Norwegian.
So you Googled it, like I advised.
You missed the fact that although much of Northern Norway is north of the Arctic Circle, it is not a âtundra wastelandâ, like the relatively small part of Alaska, Canada and Russia that is north of the Arctic Circle.
Thanks to the Gulf Stream the climate is not as cold as in those places. (Thank you for sending some warm water our way, but please stop throwing your plastic garbage in it)
Singaporean banana; that explains the stuffed monkey on his desk. I was still pondering why a man who expects to be taken seriously has a stuffed monkey on his desk until he ran to the beach to an excruciatingly bad sound track and dove headlong into shallow water. Thatâs when I stopped watching.
Iâm learning through the magic of the internet that Svalbard is a charming community with jobs in the coal mines and much wildlife diversity to amuse those who enjoy nature on their time off. Sounds like the kind of place restless migrants are looking for.
Wikipedia:
Polar bears are the iconic symbol of SvalbardâŚand the people moving outside the settlements are required to have appropriate scare devices to ward off attacks. They are also advised to carry a firearm for use as a last resort. A British schoolboy was killed by a polar bear in 2011. In July 2018, a polar bear was shot dead after it attacked and injured a polar bear guard leading tourists off a cruise ship. In August 2020 a Dutch man was killed by a polar bear at a campsite in Longyearbyen. The polar bear was shot dead. Svalbard and Franz Joseph Land share a common population of 3,000 polar bearsâŚ
Maybe you need to Google âArctic Norway Wastelands.â (About 608,000 results (0.34 seconds)
If you are going to use quotation marks, make sure they contain the material you claim. I did not use the term tundra. Please donât pretend I wrote something I did not.
Let me rephrase my original point as it seems to have escaped you along with the fact that there are vast wastelands in northern Norway.
"There arenât many so called ârefugeesâ looking for a home in the Arctic wastelands of Norway.
If Norway sent a ârescueâ vessel to the coast of Libya and loaded up with ârefugeesâ how many do you think would jump over the side as soon as they discovered their destination was a frosty wilderness above the Arctic circle?
My guess is they would wait for the next ferry to Italy or some other sunny beachfront on the Med where they could sell trinkets to the tourists while they wait for a ride to Germany or the UK.
Sorry, your Google page is kind of outdated, or written for American consumption only.
Norwegian coal mining has/is being shut down:
End comes to 100 years of Norwegian coal mining at Svalbard | The Independent Barents Observer.
The Russians are still mining coal in Barentsburg, but more to maintain a presents on Svalbard then for economical gains.
It is true that Polar Bears is a constant danger to those that venture outside the main settlements of Longyearbyen, Ny-Ă lesund and Barentsburg and to be armed when doing so is compulsory. This is to scare Polar Bears, killing them is not allowed except as a last resort.
PS> Polar bears doesnât exist in mainland Norway. Even Finnmark is not cold enough for them. No sea ice either.
I did and I got 1410000 hits. That is probably because everything to do with Arctic, Norway and wasteland is included.
(Even a silversmith in Kautokeino showed up on the first page)
FYI Svalbard is not part of Northern Norway, it is a separate archipelago and has a special status. (Google it)
There is a lot of misconceptions about Arctic in general and maybe Northern Norway in particular. Here is the 10 most common:
10 Common Misconceptions About the Arctic
There is already one, but it is on charter to an NGO and has the same problem with getting rid of the people they pick up as everybody else.
PS> The largest group of non-Norwegians living in Longyearbyen on Svalbard are Thais and they are not refugees, or have been forced to live there. There are about 200 of them:
There are also some from the Middle East and even Brazilians that has settled there. An Iranian run a Kebab shop from a Red Van:
And there are a Brazilian Fast Food Restaurant, among other international offerings.
No McDonald or KFC so I presume it can be seen as a wasteland.
PS> As you can imagine there are some real âcharactersâ living in Longyearbyen.
Here is one of them: