Everyone involved with politics understands the current dynamic. It’s not hard to grasp. You take very tough economic times, add them to a heavy dose of political opportunism, and multiply both by the aggravating factor of a nihilistic commercial media, and what you get is ethnic scapegoating on a massive scale.

Matt Taibbi is talking about the teabaggers, but he could just have well been talking about Wilders. He started out as somewhat of a Fortuyn clone, but trading in much of Fortuyn’s anti-establishment vibe for more straightforward anti-Islam rhetoric, first within the VVD, then with his own party. Since the economic crisis reached the Netherlands however, he has not just talked about the dangers of Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of the country, but also about the economic cost of non-western immigration to the Netherlands. So e.g. he takes a populist stance against raising retirement ages, but ties it to cutting down foreign aid.

The scary thing is that this shift in emphasis might just have been the key to his succes. Two elections ago, the first in which his party participated, he got only the same number of seats as had been shared between him and the remnants of Fortuyn’s old party (nine). This election he got twentyfour seats, making his party the third largest. And despite continuing conflict within the CDA, it seems likely the next government will have PVV support, if not participation, leaving Wilder in a position where he does not need to compromise yet can demand concessions for his support. So we would have the nice explosive mixture of a rightwing government wanting to push through huge cuts supported by an xenophobic party eager to start the scapegoating in earnest….

Asteroid discovery from 1980 to 2010. Science fiction promised us a future in which a few brave men in small tin cans would have to go out and discover each one of them separately at great risk; instead it turns out high powered and not so high powered telescopes, lots of computers and the occasional unmanned probe are enough to discovered hundred of thousands of new asteroids in a few years…. A great age for scientific discovery, but not so heroic as we thought it should be…

The battle of Kursk — David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
A recentish history of the famous tank battle, making full use of the opening of Soviet state archives since the end of the Cold War.

Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory — Adrian R. Lewis
At first I thought the author had it in for the British — some American WWII historians do have a chip on their soldier about the way the UK treated the American contribution to the struggle in Europe after all — but in the end it turned out he had a much more valid case to make. What Lewis attempts to do here is to argue that the strategy and tactics developed for the Normandy landing were flawed both in conception and execution, with the methods developed in earlier landings in the Pacific and Italy ignored. I’m not sure how much I should believe him, but it’s a well made argument.

First Among Sequels — Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next is back in the first of a new series. If you like Fforde and Thursday Next, you’ll like this one as much as the earlier books in the series. Fun but slight.

Shades of Grey — Jasper Fforde
Much more ambitious is this book, in which Fforde takes his considerable inventioness and creates something more than just a cheap laugh. In a Britain of after the end everything revolves around colour, as in who can see red colours, or green colours, or yellow and how well you see a specific colour range determines your place in society. A classic sort of coming of age story in which the young hero discovers what his world is really like, it reminded me somewhat of John Christopher’s White Mountain series.

Hitler’s Empire — Mark Mazower
An indepth look at the economic realities of Nazi occupied Europe and how the nazi ideals were in conflict with the need to win the war. It’s a great book on a horrible but fascinating subject, looking at all aspects of the nazi economy, including the Holocaust.

The Dragon Never Sleeps — Glen Cook
Great space opera by an author best known for his dark fantasy, which does share some of the feeling of his fantasy works. I got this as a gift for my birthday, as well as the next book and it’s been great.

Passage at Arms — Glen Cook
Das Boot in space. ‘Nuff said. Very well done.

Spin — Robert Charles Wilson
Suddenly, without any fuzz, the stars went out, as something slid between them and the Earth. And then it turns out that while days go by down below, in the rest of the universe millions of years are passing… Apart from some slight niggles, an excellent grand scale science fiction novel.

Over the weekend, Sarrazin went even further. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag, Sarrazin waded into the fraught field of genetics, saying “all Jews share a certain gene, all Basques have certain genes that make them different from other people.”

The comment came as he was discussing the identities of different European cultures, but the reference to a Jewish gene has unleashed yet another storm of critique. Such references have been largely taboo in Germany since World War II.

When asked by the interviewer if perhaps he meant to talk of “races” rather than “cultures,” Sarrazin responded “I am not a racist.”

Had he only kept his racism to the usual Islamophobia, it wouldn’t have mattered, but talking about a “Jewish gene” when you’re a German banker? That’s asking for trouble. As The online archive at Der Spiegel shows Sarrazin has been Islamophobic for a long time without it harming his career much. He might have faced censure by his own party (the social democratic SPD!) and criticism from the usual quarters, but his job was safe and he has been described as a “provocateur” and “blunt talking” rather than “racist bastard” in respectable newspapers. One little mention of the “Jewish gene” has changed all that….

Geert Wilders is smarter; not only a “critic of Islam” but also a “friend of Israel” (and you do wonder how much of his Islamophobia is caused by this friendship and imbibing the Israeli views of it, or vice versa). He has kept his racism confided to acceptable targets and as a result is taken seriously as a coalition partner in the next Dutch government. That’s the bad news. The good news is that one of its intended coalition partners, the Christian Democrat CDA has gotten cold feet at the last moment, as many of its members do not feel comfortable with Wilders. As well they should: rightwing or leftwing, no non-racist politician should want anything to do with somebody who wants to use a specific ethnic group of citizens (and in the vocabulary of Wilders’ followers, if not always with Wilders himself, the word “Islam” is interchangable with “Moroccan”) as the scapegoat for all of our country’s problems.

So, which songs do you think about when Van Halen is mentioned? No you pervs, not “Hot for Teacher” but these two:

Jump:

And “Running with the Devil”:

Venom has never been a, well, a very good band; it’s more the sort of band you put on to shock your mother.

Yet the band does have a certain charm and attraction, as shown here in “Welcome to Hell”:

“Countess Bathory”:

I promised you pictures last Tuesday — here’s me signing the wedding certificate. No good photos of S. yet unfortunately.

Writing over at the Cato Institute, meanwhile, mortal non-cyborg law professor Glenn Reynolds acknowledges that the creation of godlike robo-humans might have negative consequences for both the environment and the poor souls who choose to remain in their current flesh-bag forms.

“The empowerment of ordinary people is a good thing, but it also carries with it the dangers inherent in empowering bad people,” he writes. “In a world in which individuals have the powers formerly enjoyed by nation-states, an already-shrinking planet can get pretty small.”

So how does Reynolds propose to remedy this? Does he think maybe we should make it illegal to inject the screaming hobo at the local 7-11 with matter-creating nanobots? Why, no! He thinks we should resign ourselves to the fact that the Earth is doomed and instead work on blasting off into space before we all die, since “humanity won’t survive the next thousand years unless we colonize space.”

Reynolds elaborates on this theme in an essay for Popular Mechanics, going into greater detail about the dangers the Singularity could pose for humanity. Among them: nanobots that emit mind-control drugs, computer worms that infect and kill our new robobrains, and even the possibility of putting “world-killer weapons into the hands of anyone having a bad-hair day.” Reynolds admits these things might be potentially bad, but he thinks we ought to go through with them anyway since the free market will naturally create a demand for remedies to nanobot-enhanced cocaine addicts that can fire cruise missiles from their fingers.

As Reed says, transhumanism, with its emphasis on how individuals could become superhuman is the perfect fit for the type of childish rightwing libertarianism practised by the likes of Kurtzweil and Reynold, a way to evade all your obligations to society forever. It’s sadly not a new or even uncommon strain in sf fandom — from the start there have always been people who genuinely thought fans were slans, better than normal people and who swanted to remove themselves from the common herd. Even in the infancy of science fiction in the forties there were nutters like Claude Degler who wanted to create a master race of fans by getting them to breed in his special lovecamp in the Ozarks.

But the real coupling of science fiction with of rightwing libertarian science fiction only took place from the seventies and can probably be blamed on one guy: Jerry Pournelle. If you’ve read his and Larry Niven’s Footfall, where you have a team of thinly disguised science fiction writers (Pournelle and friends basically) advicing the US president during an alien invasion, that’s more or less how he would like things to be in real life. A product of Boeing as much as of Analog, Pournelle was the seventies version of Glenn Reynolds, arguing for space colonisation as essential to America’s defence and the future of the human race. He was thick with the Team B loonies, the same sort of people who three decades later would rage about the Islamist threat but where then predicting a Soviet victory in the coming Third World War, less than a decade before the USSR collapsed…

Pournelle then established this political tradition of which Reynolds is the latest example, a tradition that mixes personal greed with a technocratic vision of the future and a deep dislike of having to deal with other people… L5 colonies for the best and brightest were the answer in the seventies, brain downloads today.

Smoking crabs. Apparently crustaceans like the cool, smooth taste of a fine cigarette.

I’m compiling a little list, of architectural sins of the founders (between 1945 and 1990, more or less) that have bequeathed us the current mess. They’re fundamental design errors in our computing architectures; their emergent side-effects have permitted the current wave of computer crime to happen …

Let’s not quibble about the examples Charlie gives, but assume that he is right to say that these are what makes computer crimes of all sort possible. But does it matter? Or should we just look at computer crime as an unfortunate cost of actually being able to do something useful with computers? Of the six specific “sins” Charlie mentions (von Neumann architecture, String handling in C, TCP/IP lacking encryption, The World Wide Web, User education and Microsoft) at least three are the way they are because that’s what made them useful in the first place. Von Neumann architecture, where data and code are stored in the same memory and can be freely mixed made it much easier to program computers, hack them to do all kinds of tricks and squeeze the most out of limited means — not so important now perhaps, but very important even a few decades ago. TCP/IP being simple and largely unsecure makes it easy to setup and use; it’s a “good enough” solution to the problem of coupling disparate computers and networks together. The World Wide Web is again something that worked from the start and could evolve itself towards ever increasing complexity, as the hackability that does make it vulnerable to attack also meant it could be extended quite easily to scale up and deal with new demands.

Even Microsoft, evil as it is and crappy as much of its software still remains, is the way it is because it has consistently tried to give people useful hacks rather than properly designed vapourware. Ironic as it is, I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion MS DOS and Windows did as well as they did because they were so open and easy to hack around in compared to their competitors.

As Charlie admits, the most secure mainstream computer today is perhaps the IPad, in which basically you can only do what Steve Jobs allows you to do: a consumer device like your television more than a real computer. Any fule knows that security comes at the expense of usability: the more secure a computer the less you can do with it, certainly the less you can use it in unexpected ways. The other side of the medal is that with increased freedom comes greater vulnerability.

On the other hand, even if the right choices had been made way back when, does anybody doubt that with our reliance on computers and the internet in our daily lives and businesses, computer crime would be any less? You use something, it will be abused.

As Jeroen Mirck reports, the Amsterdam Tourist & Convention Board has decided that branding and marketing neighbourhoods should be the key to winning over tourists. Some of the names suggested: ‘Amsterdam Docklands’, ‘Green Plantation’, ‘Swinging Melting pot’, ‘Little Amsterdam’, ‘Kinetic North’. Yes, they sound better in Dutch, but not much.

Not all neighbourhoods have gotten their own brand suggestions yet — the ones above are for parts of the city already relatively popular and gentrified. The more troublesome areas of Amsterdam have been left out of this consultation exercise so far, though the marketeers had a “hilarious” suggestion for Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, traditionally the part of the city with the most Black people: Soweto.