Oh Those Crazy Cloggies – Page 10

Dutch police’s takedown notice for “Al Quida magazine” is illegal

Published on April 11, 2011

Public Intelligence hosts issues of Inspire, supposedly a magazine run by Al Quiada. For some reason the Dutch police took offence to this and demanded they remove the magazine from their server:

he National Crime Squad (DNR, Dienst Nationale Recherche) of the Dutch National Police (KLPD; Korps landelijke politiediensten) has threatened to shut down Public Intelligence if we do not remove the issues of Inspire magazine which are made available on this site. In a request made to our hosting provider in late February, the Dutch National Crime Squad demanded that we remove all issues of Inspire magazine from our website and refrain from distributing any further issues of the publication. The notice describes the magazine’s content as “illegal” under Dutch law: “Due to the content of this magazine which is considered illegal according to the Dutch law due to the inciting content related to Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, we would like you to remove this magazine from your website.” The notice goes on to state that if the content is not removed from this site, the Dutch police “will under the force of circumstances take down your website on the dedicated server in the Netherlands according to Dutch Law.”

It’s unclear why Dutch police thought it needed to take action against a foreign website for hosting an allegedly dodgy webzine –it’s not as if they’ve solved every crime in the Netherlands or even manage to keep up with bicycle theft– but one thing is clear: this demand was illegal. First, if this was an official demand, it would’ve needed to have been authorised by the officier van justitie (Dutch equivalent of a D.A.) but after a rechter-commissaris had granted permission for this authorisation. This hasn’t happened in this case. Second, Dutch police are not allowed to asks people to voluntarily do anything that they normally would need jucidial authorisation for. Otherwise it would be very easy for police to intimidate people into doing things they have no right to ask from them because they wouldn’t have been able to get judicial authorisation.

In this case this demand wasn’t authorised and quite likely wouldn’t be, so the Dutch police acted illegally and against guidelines set out by the ministry of justice by asking Public Intelligence to take down this “Al Quida magazine”. The responsible people for this therefore need to be slapped on the wrists.

(More at Arnoud Engelfriet’s excellent internet law blog. (Dutch))

No more imperialistic adventures for Holland

Published on April 9, 2011

The current Dutch government has decided the department of defence needs to save one billion euros on its budget to help pay for the bankers crisis, which in concrete terms means that the current support for NATO’s airwar in Libya is Holland’s last imperialistic adventure for the foreseeable future. To pay for its deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade the Dutch army already had had to cannibalise itself, selling of equipment like the brand new Panzerhaubitze 2000 only afew years after they had been taken into service. Now the army is going to get rid off even more stuff, including all its remaining tanks and nineteen more F-16 fighters, as well as four out of ten minehunter ships, not to mention a fair few airforce and army bases. More importantly, 10,000 jobs will disappear: some through natural wastage, others by not filling in vacancies but most, some 6,000 in total will be through redundancies.

It will be hard on these people of course, not to mention on the towns and cities dependent on the bases threatened with the chop. Yet I can’t help but wonder, as I’ve done before, why we’re keeping an army anyway if we’re not willing or able to spent the money to support it properly. What do we really need an army for when the chances of war breaking out in our corner of Europe are the lowest they’ve ever been in the past two thousand years. Is it just there to, like we did the past decade, tool about in other people’s countries in service of some vaguely worded humanitarian interests everytime the US or UK ask us to? Now we can’t even do that anymore the moment is there to give it the chop entirely, transfer those few elements we might still need to the police forces, then spent the money we would’ve spent keeping useless armour in service to retraining our soldiers for more useful vocations.

Ten Years of gay marriage — Holland still not washed away by the tears of an angry god

Published on April 1, 2011

picture from the World's first gay marriage

You think what with the monotonous regularity God strikes immoral countries, at least according to Yankee fundamentalist wankers, Holland would’ve long ago been wiped out by a superflood/earthquake/volcanic eruption combination for being the first country to make gay marriage legally the same as “normal” marriages. Yet ten years later, we’re still here, gay people can still marry if they want to and no sign of any wrath of god yet.

One of the few times I’ve genuinely been proud of my country. No nonsense, no hysteria, just a (belated) recognition that yes, there is no reason why gender should matter in who you could marry. The only thing that mars it is that civil servants who have problems with performing gay marriages can refuse to do the work they’re paid to do. Ten years should be enough of that nonsense.

Five years ago.

Beeldverhaal: new Dutch tv series about comics

Published on March 27, 2011

Michael Minneboo blogs about a new Dutch documentary series on comics, to be broadcast in October. Eight parts long, each episode will take a different comics character to symbolise a specific genre or style of comics. SoSuperman will represent superhero comics and why they never quite made it here, while longrunning family strip Jan, Jans en de Kinderen will symbolise the slice of life (auto)biographical strip. The presenter of the series is Jean-Marc van Tol, one of the people behind the runaway succes of Fokke & Sukke and somebody who always seemed interested in not just making strips, but in thinking and writing about them as well; iirc he used to be active on the old Comix e-mail list as well.

The series is going to be called Beeldverhaal (picture story), something of a pune or play on words, as it’s both an old Dutch synonym for comics and in this context, the history of pictures. Those interviewed for it include Barbara Stok, Maaike Hartjes and Michiel Pol — who reported about it in his cartoon diary — so it looks like the documentary makers have taken the time and effort to get to know and understand contemporary Dutch comics and its history. Good or bad, it’s about time Dutch television paid some attention to the ninth art, other than through the annual “look at the weirdos” reports from the big comics cons.

More on the Cancellation of Eisner

Published on March 15, 2011

cover of Plots #12 by Jeroen Steehouwer

In the comments thread at Michael Minneboo’s original post (Dutch), Peter Moerenhout responds with his own experiences in publishing a comics zine (also Dutch), the Flemish-Belgian Plots. It’s interesting to read his comments to see the quite different strategies Plots and Eisner used.

Plots got 28,000 euro subsidy to publish twelve issues, nine of which were sold for 5 euro per issue, 2 more for seven euro and one for ten euro, but this was a double length issue. Each issue sold some 600 copies, with the normal issues having 84 pages and the double issue 148 pages. This as compared to Eisner that got 30,000 euro for only five issues and sold them for fifteen euros and managed to sell at most a 1,000 copies or so per issue. The former broke even but the later lost money. The big difference? Eisner paid its contributors but Plots didn’t, if I understood Peter correctly, which meant that they could spent less per issue. Peter also muses that if they had had an actual advertising budget, it might have done better, yet the Eisner people had this but it didn’t matter. Both magazines failed, or at least could not carry on without more subsidies.

Such failure is not preordained: Zone 5300 is a similar sort of magazine that has been mixing comics with the detritius of cult culture since the mid nineties, first as a monthly US comics size pamphlet, currently as a quarterly magazine. It has helped quite a few Dutch cartoonists get their step up from fandom (Maaike Hartjes, Barbara Stok, Jeroen de Leijer, Marcel Ruiter undsoweiter) as well premiered quite a few good international cartoonists for the Dutch language comics market, like Jim Woodring. It has had its ups and downs but so far has always managed to weather the various crisises it went through. It can be done, but you need money, talent and probably quite a bit of luck…