Numpties – Page 8 – Wis[s]e Words

Welcome to Soweto Amsterdam

Published on August 25, 20101 Comment

Amsterdam has a problem. The city may be popular with tourists, but they all stay in central Amsterdam rather than sampling the delights of Amsterdam’s other neighbourhoods. This has been troubling the city council for years but now they think they’ve found the solution: marketing!

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.

Norm Geras is still a dick

Published on August 15, 2010

I haven’t paid much attention to old stormy Normy in years, but the warmad professor has not changed a bit. Blustering against a Guardian columnist skeptical about the War on Afghanistan, he goes for his old trick of defining acceptable and unacceptable dissent

Now, here’s something else it’s not at all difficult to understand. If P opposes C, not by giving due weight to the magnitude of the evil that is E, but by referring to it in belittling and sneering ways, as though anyone like R who takes E seriously, and disagrees with P about the advisability of course of action C, must be either of low intelligence or of dubious moral character or both, then she, P, might be thought by others not to have a morally serious attitude to the scope of the evil that is E, using evasion and mockery where a person of mature judgement would refrain from doing this in a matter of such gravity.

To use the War on Iraq as an example of how one should honourably disagree is sheer genius in its brazen cheek. It was after all his side, the people who wanted the war who “belittled the reasons or the motives or impugned the character” of anybody who did not share their passion. There was no reasoned argument, just all the sneering and belittling, evasion and mockery Normy wants his opponents to be guilty of. It’s just the teeniest, tiniest bit of projection going on there…

Your Happening World (10)

Published on March 23, 2010

Stuff worth mentioning:

Tories fail at getting the interwebs, again.
Analyzing Google Earth images only works if you know what you’re doing and don’t e.g. mistake two copies of the same picture as representing different years. If you do make that mistake, you might think that these pictures show the failure of land reform in Zimbabwe (i.e. it all went to pot once the whites were thrown off the land). It reminds me a lot of the people who thought they could detect Dan Rather using fake documents by examining a screenshot of a picture of the document in question, during that whole Rathergate fiasco…
Note: no defence of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe is meant with that last bit, just annoyance at slightly too racially motivated glee about the effects of land reform in that country (in the comment threads rather than the original post that is).
Reuters has a handy factsheet on what the new healthcare bill means when.
Speaking of which: cry hot tears for America, wingnuts, cry!
(May I add: BWAHAHAHA!)
Also: Journalista kicks off a thread on the likely effects of the law on freelance cartoonists. Unfortunately, it starts off a bit scaremongery.
Charlie Stross: Capital can flow freely, but labour is in shackles world-wide.

New rule

Published on March 16, 2010

Any political leader who, when asked about government debt/necessary spending cuts of tens of billions of euros and two-three times as large as the biggest normal government programme, proposes to save this kind of money by “cutting government waste” or “reduce government bureaucracy” is an idiot (bad) or thinks I am an idiot (worse). It is one thing to dispute the necessity of such severe cuts, but anybody who thinks tackling bureaucracy and waste will matter just does not understand the issue or is afraid to answer the question honestly. Both tendencies are bad and therefore any politician who answers in such a fashion has to be dismissed as a dilettante.

Unfortunately it was the new leader of the Dutch Socialist Party, Emile Roemer, who today revealed himself in this way, reacting to the news that budget estimates for 2015 show a deficit of 29 billion euros…. It’s a safe answer to tackle bureaucracy, but it would show more vision to either reject the need for spending cuts entirely, or to name government programmes that should be cut. The rightwing parties never hesitate to call for spending cuts in e.g. social security, why shouldn’t the leader of a leftwing party be equally bold in calling for cuts in defence spending, or propose putting up taxes for higher earners. But Roemer’s pandering shows he’s either afraid to lose voters that way, or he has no clue about his own spending properties.

a failed Womble

Published on March 5, 2010

That Rod Liddle bid for the editorship of The Independent in full:

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.

You can see the sole reason Liddle was refused this position was that the powers that be were afraid of his blunt honesty, not because he’s just another rightwing asshole who thinks he’s entitled to lead a leftleaning paper, or because he has a habit of posting racist comments on Millwall supporter sites (under pseudonym, natch). Title courtesy of Charlie Brooker, who described Liddle a while back as “a failed Womble who’s just been shaken awake in a shop doorway”.