Wis[s]e Words – Page 535 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Amsterdam: brewery ‘t IJ to close?

Published on September 16, 2008

Brewery ‘t IJ is a small local Amsterdam beer brewer-cum pub where they still brew beer for the love of it. Founded in 1985 it has become one of the best small brewers in the Netherlands, while the pub is mellow and popular with serious beer fans as well as the more casual drinker. No wonder then that the Amsterdam city council is trying to shut it down. And why are they trying to close ‘t IJ down? Not because its customers are causing trouble, not because there are fistfights every night or lots of drunken people crawling home all hours of the night (a bit difficult as the pub is only open from three in the afternoon untill eight in the evening), not even because people are smoking in the pub . Nothing of that is going on, so why is Amsterdam city council (or rather, the Stadsdeel Centrum sub-council, a bigger collection of NIMBYes and prigs not seen in this country) trying to shut down Brewery ‘t IJ

Because their customers are drinking their beer outside, on the terraces, — are you ready — standing up!

Yes, really. It its verboten to drink while standing up, even though you’re doing so on licensed premises. And they’re actually checking up on this as well, with ‘t IJ having gotten two warnings already. Next time it will be a fivehundred euro fine, then a thousand euro one and if that doesn’t
help, the pub will have to shut down for a week. Worse, any warnings on file will remain there for two years. The reason for this policy? Gods know, nobody else does.

As the AT5 news report shows, try and explain this to your customers, especially when half or more are from outside Amsterdam and not used to the petty rule lawyering of Stadsdeel Centrum, which has also been known to ban rainbow flags as “intrusive advertising”. What sane person would suspect drinking standing up, on the pub terrace would be a problem?

Suspicious as I am, I wonder why Stadsdeel Centrum has embarked on this policy. Is it just another example of the way they try to bully everything out of the city centre that doesn’t fit their idea of a nice little suburbanised Amsterdam, a sort of Vienna-lite but without the charm? Or is theresomething more sinister going on?

(Found at Komma punt Log.)

Solicitere

Published on September 16, 2008

It’s back to the eighties again, considering the complete and utter collapse of the Anglo-American financial world and the sombre news from the budget in Den Haag: can mass unemployment be far behind? If so, this old classic by the Janse Bagge Bend is shockingly relevant again.

Why am I not suprised?

Published on September 15, 2008

It’s long been demonstrated, by such purveyors of wingnuttia like Alicublog and Decent Leftspotters like Aaronovitch Watch, that wingnuts tend to run in circles. Get slightly dotty about the Muslims and before you know it you don’t believe in evolution anymore, think giving women the right to vote was a bad idea and abortion a crime against humanity. It’s not enough to just believe in one patently false evil belief, no, once you go wingnut, you go wingnut all the way.

So it came as no suprise when, according to DutchNews, one of the Islamophobes of Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration party is revealed to be clueless about climate change as well, denying the melting of the Arctic:

‘Our schoolchildren should be learning to spell and do sums not that pathetic polar bears are drifting around on ice floes because we go on holiday by plane,’ the paper quotes him as saying.

And yet this party won nine seats at the last elections and is consistently predicted to do even better next time. Makes you proud to be Dutch.

The Mercenary – Jerry Pournelle

Published on September 13, 2008

Cover of The Mercenary

The Mercenary
Jerry Pournelle
223 pages
published in 1977

The Mercenary is one of those books in my collection I’m a bit ashamed of. Not because it’s so badly written, but because its politics are so embarrassing. Having it on my bookshelves is a bit like owning a collection of books about the nazis and the Second World War; you can be genuinely interested but it still looks bad to see a row of red and black bookspines with swastikas plastered all over them. Yet it’s precisely because of its politics that I kept it when I was purging my collection a few years back and why I reread it now. The Mercenary is a book that stands at the root of one of the more succesful –and distasteful– science fiction subgenres: mil-sf and in it can be found a lot of what makes the genre so awful so often.

Science fiction has always had a large conservative, rightwing streak running through it and Pournelle falls squarely in this tradition. This in itself is not a problem; some of science fiction’s best writers, like Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper or Robert Heinlein were conservatives or had rightwing sympathies and you can still enjoy (most of) their stories without necessarily agreeing with their politics, even when they’ve made them explicit. What makes Pournelle different is that he goes beyond this. He’s not just a conservative, but a reactionary. His politics as shown in The Mercenary have fascist overtones, though I don’t believe he’s a fascist himself. No doubt if you asked him he would describe himself as an American conservative and believer in a strong democracy, though weary of the wisdom of the average voter, but what comes across here is his deep pessimism and mistrust of democracy and his yearning for a saviour to safe democracy from itself.

Georgia should be all Hezbollah now

Published on September 9, 2008

According to at least one anonymous US military adviser Georgia should emulate Hezbollah:

A defense analyst I spoke with, who advises American ground forces, said to rebuild the Georgian military along conventional lines might be the wrong approach. Instead he suggested a different force model, that of Hezbollah. What Hezbollah did so effectively, as was shown in the 2006 Lebanon war, was combine modern weaponry with a distributed infantry force that fought in guerrilla fashion. Fighting as distributed networks, Hezbollah rarely presented an inviting target for Israeli air and artillery attack, but their well trained tactical units were able to swarm at the point of attack of Israeli armored incursions and hit the Israelis hard with precision anti-tank weaponry.

Equipped with top-shelf anti-armor systems, such as the U.S. Dragon and Javelin and the Russian-built RPG-29 and AT-14 Kornet, such a force would perhaps better be able to exploit Georgia’s mountainous and urbanized terrain against channelized Russian armored columns than a conventionally organized combat brigade, as Hezbollah did in south Lebanon. The lessons from the initial Russian incursion into Grozny in 1994 are instructive as well. Fighting in small tactical teams organized around close range anti-armor weapons, the Chechens savaged Russian
tank columns.

This “analysis” only makes sense if you believe in the Official Truth of Georgia as innocent victim of the perfidious Russia of course. A Hezbollah style army doesn’t work so well if you actually want to invade any seccessionist areas protected by the neighbouring superpower. Not that this model of resistance would work as well against the Russians as against the Israelis in 2006 as unlike them, the Russians are not that bothered about losing a couple of thousand soldiers subjugating a difficult enemy. The Chechens may have beaten off the Russians back in 1994, but didn’t do quite so well the second time around.

(Via Jamie.)