Oh Those Crazy Cloggies – Page 5

No more coffeeshops by 2010?

Published on November 10, 2008

That’s what one criminology professor says in an interview (Dutch). Henk van de Bunt, who last year co-wrote a report on the growing of marijuana in the Netherlands and the growing interest organised crime has in it, says continuing foreing pressure as well as this growing criminalisation of softdrugs that will lead to the end of the Dutch tolerance for it. The problem is that while buying and selling softdrugs is tolerated (not legal, just not actively prosecuted), growing it and selling it wholesale isn’t. And while growing weed once was done by amateur and homegrowers, organised crime has gotten increasingly involved with it. It’s this creeping criminalisation that will be the death of the coffeeshop, according to van de Bunt.

Now there have always been predictions about the end of tolerance as long as this policy has existed, but this time this prediction might be more accurate than usual. In the past decade the Dutch police has become much more aggressive in combatting the growing marijuana, which has driven out the amateurs and hobbyists as they can’t take the risks anymore. Meanwhile political pressure, both on council and national level to limit tolerance has increased as well. A few weeks ago for example two councils near border with Belgium decided to close down all coffeeshops in their cities because of troubles caused by drugs tourism, while the current government has pledged to forbid coffeeshops from opening near schools.

This is all part of an unspoken campaign to end tolerance of softdrugs not be explicitely ending it, but by making it so unworkable that it has to be ended. By going after the homegrowers the police has encouraged the spread of organised crime into the cannabis trade, which makes the case for ending tolerance that much easier. You can’t argue that ending tolerance will drive the trade udnerground if much of it already is in the hands of the mob anyway. The other prong of this campaign is to put more and more “reasonable” restrictions and demands on coffeeshops, to make it harder to open one or keep one open, death by a thousand cuts. To completely end tolerance has not yet been politically viable, but the van de Bunt is right to think it’s not that far off anymore, thanks to this silent campaign.

A better solution would be to legalise softdrugs completely, both retail and wholesale and make the growth of them a state monopoly. Chances of that happening are not so good though…

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)

Mind Your Language

Published on November 6, 2008

Dutch football fans-no connection to the post whatsoever, I just liked it.

The misuse of English by the Dutch is one of Martin’s pet peeves and it’s the NRC Handelsblad’s English language blog’s too, only they call it Denglish.

You say tomato, I say pomodori. They call it Denglish; I call it Nederlish. Denglish could be anything, any odd amalgam of Danish or Deutsch or Dutch and English, whereas I don’t know any languages other than Nederlands that have Neder as a prefix, so Nederlish saves confusion.

There are a couple of Dutch misuses of English that really do get my goat. First is the TV ad for hair remover Veet, which has the tagline ‘…what beauty feels like’. This is pronounced by the female Dutch voiceover artist as ‘wod byoody feelz lahk’.

Byoody? WTF’s ‘byoody’? Is she trying to be American? Can’t she read? What? Drives me totally nuts every time I see it.

The other major irritant is a recent poster campaign for the anti-AIDS NGO ‘One Mens’. It’s supposed to mean ‘One man’ as in ‘One man can make a difference’. But in that case, it should be either ‘One Man’ in English, or ‘Een Mens’ in Dutch, not the bastard hybrid offspring ‘One Mens’.

Speak one or other, dammit!

Cloggie Blogger Boundaries Blurred

Published on November 6, 2008

On the face of it it looks like Dutch law is catching up with the modern world a bit. From the NRC Handelsblad:

New law will protect sources of bloggers
Published: 5 November 2008 15:34 | Changed: 5 November 2008 16:33

By our news staff

Journalists, bloggers and other opinion-makers are to get the legal right to protect their sources under new legislation published by justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin on Tuesday.

The minister has decided not to impose a strict definition of a ‘journalist’ so that other people can join public debates.

But Hirsch Ballin stressed that there could be occasions when the public interest may outweigh the right to protect confidential sources and that a judge will have to make a ruling in these cases.

The right of journalists to protect their sources is to be enshrined into Dutch law following a warning from the European court for Human Rights last year. The warning came after Dutch reporter Koen Voskuil was held in custody for 18 days for refusing to reveal the identity of a source.

“… there could be occasions when the public interest may outweigh the right to protect confidential sources”. What occasions, and who decides what the criteria are? Are they to be left to judicial discretion, or will they be pre-decided by politicians?

This move might look sensible on the face of it, but by blurring the lines between blogging and journalism, ordinary unpaid citizens without the clout of a large media organisation behind them who write about political or financial malfeasance may well find themselves under the close and unwelcome scrutiny of the courts and security services, without the legal resources to defend themselves.

But maybe that’s the idea.

He May Be Leader In Waiting But Can Obama Get My Kitchen Done?

Published on November 4, 2008

The US’ citizenry may be going to the polls in record numbers today and voting Obama (as well they should, when these are the people they’re up against), but I’m a bit lacking in election fever myself. because this is a fair summary of what’s happening at our house:

Nah, it’s not really – our builders don’t wear hats.

One builder is a South African misanthrope who’s an object lesson in how the colonial Dutch have taken all the worst Dutch qualities, like didacticism and bad manners, and amplified them. The other builder is a miniscule Glaswegian of indeterminate vintage who with his Russian girlfriend was expecting a baby 3 days ago, and who jumps like a scalded cat whenever his phone beeps.

Everything is covered in plaster dust, it’s cold, the water’s off, I’m holed up in the bedroom with an instant coffee because I tripped up over the cat and broke the glass in my cafetiere which is going to be a bugger to replace in Holland and the laundry is piling up and to get clean socks I may have to go and buy some.

But aren’t Bernard Cribbins and Lego absolutely made for each other?

And Still They Come…

Published on November 3, 2008

How very mysterious: yet another giant Lego figure has washed up on a European beach, this time in Brighton rather than Holland:

The Lego man is 6ft tall in red, yellow and green. It is presumed to have washed up on the beach, but whether it has come from a cargo ship or from across the Channel is not clear.

Brighton resident Gerry Turner, 34, said: “It’s very odd. God knows how it got here but people are saying it’s from Holland because it’s got some Dutch writing on it. It must have fallen off a boat of something. The kids love it.”

Children helped stand the Lego man up on the beach, but are still mystified as to where it came from. One said: “It’s great, but we don’t know why it’s here.”

A spokesman for Brighton and Hove City Council said it didn’t know the origin of the Lego man, but said it was fine for it to remain on the beach.

He said: “There’s no problem at all. It will be interesting to see how long the Lego man stays there for. We’ll keep an eye on it.”

Here’s the Lego man that washed up in Zandvoort in 2007:

You know what this means: either it’s a PR stunt gone horribly wrong, or there’s at least two (and possibly an entire flotilla) of giant Dutch Lego men bobbing along quietly below the radar off the coasts of Europe, for all the world like unanimated golems waiting for their moment to come ashore and get the magic word and follow their prime directive.

I wonder what the activating command might be?