Archives for 2012

Same procedure as last year

posts interesting only to me, Sandra
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I don’t like New Year’s Eve; never have. It’s a holiday that always puts you in a melancholy mood as you’re supposed to reflect on the past year and get swallowed up in all the instant nostalgia television and the news media bombard you with. Not to mention all the obligatory partying on the night, which always seems to be going on somewhere else than where I’m at. It all puts me in a maudlin mood and I can’t stand that. then again I’m somebody who can get wistful because the novel I’m reading is almost finished…

2012 has been a strange year anyway, it would’ve been a good year if not for one little thing: the job went well after a bit of a hiccup in 2011 (switching assignments), financially everything’s alright, the cats are in good health, it’s just that this has been the first year without Sandra. And when you’ve been with somebody for eleven years it’s very strange to not have them around anymore. Very strange and painful. Not a day that hasn’t gone by without me being reminded of her not being here. Especially today.

Sandra always liked New Years eve and the crazy fireworks the Dutch get up to tonight (and in the runup to tonight and for several days afterwards (the cats are less impressed)) and always wanted to be in the thick of it, while my first instinct had always been to hide away from it. Despite this mismatch, we had some good New Years’ Eves together, going out to Nieuwmarkt to watch the mobsters, the Chinese kids and the students competing with each other as to who could light the biggest bang, as well as that New Year’s party back in Plymouth, the last year she lived there, that had been just perfect. Without her? Eh, what’s the point.

Death of a linesman

Football, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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The Guardian reports on the death of linesman Richard Nieuwenhuizen, beaten up at an amateur game in early December and what it means for Dutch football:

Yet moments after the players started shaking hands with the three volunteer officials, Nieuwenhuizen was knocked to the floor, then punched and kicked in the head by several of the Nieuw-Sloten team. Parents immediately ran on to the pitch to try to defuse the situation and get some control. Nieuwenhuizen eventually got back to his feet but he was knocked to the floor for a second time. Witnesses report that one of the Nieuw-Sloten players then took off his shirt, presumably to make it harder for him to be identified, before kicking Nieuwenhuizen while he was on the ground and then running off. Mykel, Nieuwenhuizen’s son, saw everything.

As the article makes clear, the case has become a rorschach blotch for every Dutch anxiety about modern society: racial tension, lack of respect for authorities, youth gone wild, etc. The victim was a white man, a linesman from Almere, the perpetrators allegedly are Moroccan boys from one of the Amsterdam districts with a high level of Dutch-Moroccans. Mix that in with the fact that the victim was a linesman, an authority figure, when there has been a string of horrible assaults of authority figures — police officers, first aid workers, ticket inspectors — in the last few years and you got an incident that was tailor made for Geert Wilders to exploit. Which he promptly did, but which fortunately hasn’t gained much traction

A tragedy such as this of course needs to be taken seriously, though I do think it’s easy to overreact to it as a country or a sport. The vast majority of football fans and players at all levels of Dutch football are decent people and to make great moral judgments out of one incident, no matter how tragic, seems wrong.

Health care as a moral issue

posts interesting only to me, Reefer Madness, sciencebollocks
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Alex talks about medical surveillance technology and the assumptions driving it and how wrong they can be and in the process makes a point that can be applied more generally:

Now, there is obviously some truth to this. Giving up smoking is a really good idea, as is taking your damn pills. But it is also highly problematic. For one thing, it assumes that the problem is non-compliance. In that sense, it transfers your problem from the domain of reality – a physical problem to be solved – into the domain of morality – a statement about good and bad. Rather than being poor, stressed, addicted, etc, the problem is that you are wrong and a bad person. As a rule, this is normatively evil, and of course it only works if the problem is not actually a real problem.

I’ve seen this sort of reasoning play out, or at least this was what it looked like from the outside, in the hospital Sandra stayed in for most of the last two-three years of her life. Sandra was a smoker, had been for decades and while fully aware of the risks, she also was certain that this would not be the thing that killed her and of course she was right… For her, as for many other people, the short term benefits of having a quick fag were more important than the long term health consequences.

Now when she first went into hospital it still have a couple of smoking rooms on the premisses, where both staff (more of whom smoked than you’d expect) and patients could go to. Then one day, in the middle of winter these were closed down because some busybody in higher management decided they don’t belong in a hospital. So now all those patients had to trundle out in the cold to get their fix, which certainly for Sandra didn’t do much for her health.

It’s that sort of attitude where the health health health message has to be driven home, even to people who are in no state to quit smoking, who are dealing with much more immediate problems and need the stress release fags offer. No, people need to be harassed and bullied into doing the right thing, even when it’s inappropriate.