One of the local free newspapers carried a thinly disguised press release from a digital tv channel that shall remain nameless about a survey done on how much people are getting it on in perverted, libertine Holland. The answer turned out to be not so much: a quarter of the interviewees turned out to have sex never or hardly ever, with another quarter only having sex a few times each month. This despite eighteen percent admitting to having had affairs and another twentyseven wanting to have affairs — somebody has way more fun than they should.
Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
Inarticulate spaces
At Making Light, Abi talks about learning Dutch and, as with learning any language, finding new concepts absent in her mother tongue:
But equally strange are the vocabulary items that teach me some concept which has been lurking all my life in the inarticulate space between the English words I know. One such word is anderhalf. Literally, it means “another half”, but it is actually “one and a half”.
These “inarticulate spaces” are what most often trips me up when trying to write an English post about something I’ve only got Dutch sources of. Frex, why doesn’t English have an expression as simple as “er vraagtekens bij zetten“, putting question marks to some explenation offered to you? Or even as simple a concept as “bestuur“, a nebolous group of people who administrate an organisation and where it doesn’t matter who they are exactly? Or something generic like “gemeente“, not quite translateable with city council or municipality or “wijk“, which is not quite a neighbourhood and might be the same as a borough, though I’ve mostly seen that used for New York rather than as a generic term.
And why oh why is it so difficult to get an English translation of hottentottententoonstellingstentjetoegangspashoudercontroleur?
New mushroom species discovered in Holland
You’d think that in such a densely populated, crowded and completely manicured country like the Netherlands the only new species to be found to be single celled, but you’d be wrong. Because late last month an entirely new mushroom species (Dutch) was found in Schouwen-duiveland, an island in my home province of Zeeland.
The new species was discovered during a research week organised by the Nederlandse Mycologische Vereniging (Dutch Mycological Society), who regularly organises this sort of trips to less well researched parts of the country. the new species wasn’t the only surprise, as they also found several species new to the Netherlands.
It seems that despite the fact that it’s almost impossible to think of any part of the Netherlands as being nature, rather than nature park, we can still be surprised by new or rare species.
Holland is becoming a human rights pariah
That’s the conclusion an Amnesty International led symposium reached last Friday, due to our immigration policies and especially the detention of socalled illegal immigrants. Between eight and ten thousand immigrants are jailed each year without having comitted a crime and they stay there on average some 97 days, with twenty percent being in prison for half a year or longer. These are people who have applied for asylum or leave to remain but were rejected and/or who didn’t have the right kind of documents and I.D. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that many of those jailed will leave prison without being either deported or leave to remain, but are just thrown out on the streets again, to be jailed again the next time the police taks to them.
Once in prison you can’t do anything but sit in your cell. Neither work nor study is allowed, contact with the outside world is limited and there is little to no organised activity within prison. In some cases the detention centre is worse than a regular prison is ever allowed to be, which means murderers and rapists are treated better than people whose only fault was to not have the right kind of papers.
The criticism isn’t new, as it’s largely unchanged from the criticism in the 2008 Amnesty International report on migrant detention in the Netherlands (PDF). What’s worrying is that the current government is much more hardlined on migration, actually planning to make not having valid papers a crime. It also wants to “intensify” deportion policies i.e. wants to deport more people more often. Already the government tried to deport Iraki Chritians depsite having recieved a letter from the European Court of Human Rights forbidding this. Incidently the responsible minister, Gerd Leers, was once mayor of Maastricht but had to leave his post because of alleged corruption — nothing proven, but enough smoke that the city council was afraid to find fire and sacked him.
But that’s just a coincidence. It doesn’t matter whether Leers is corrupt or not, because we’ve seen the immigration policies of successive governments in the Netherlands only get worse during the past decade. For a certain part of the electorate, being tough on immigration is a good thing and whether or not the methods use are illegal or immortal is not important. With the PVV feeding the flames of xenophobia (loudly drumming on their desks during the emergency debate about the deportation of those Iraqi refugees) and our rightwing minority government dependent on their support, I expect things will be getting worser still. There certainly doesn’t seem to have been any great rush in improving migrant detention after the publication of Amnesty’s first report two years ago…
Your (rolling) papers, please
With a new rightwing government in power in the Netherlands it was just a question of time before the coffeeshops would be targeted again. Attitudes towards cannabis and coffeeshop culture have been hardening on the right in the past decade or so, at least amongst national politicians and there’s less and less support for continuing the policy of tolerance towards cannabis users. The latest argument in this battle is the nuisance coffee shops supposedly cause, especially those aimed at foreigners.
Normally we do everything to lure visitors to the Netherlands, but as soon as they come here to toke up without risking jail, it’s a nuisance. Sure, there’s no denying that some coffeeshops do annoy their neighbours and the mega popular ones down by the Dutch-Belgian and Dutch-German borders are not places you would like to live next to, but on average coffee shops cause much less disturbance than e.g. pubs routinely do. People who’ve enjoyed slightly too much hash are more likely to fall asleep than cause trouble after all, unlike your average lager lout.
So the government has come up with the brilliant idea to introduce a “wietpas“, a membership scheme for coffeeshops, where you have to get a pass to be able to buy cannabis. Only Dutch people would be able to get such a pass so no filthy foreigners will get their hands on our weed.
You can guess what that would mean for tourism in Amsterdam. One of the few things that makes the city something more than a secondrate Vienna is the ability to score cheap, safe weed and enjoy it without harassement. As the Amsterdam bureau for tourism has calculated (Dutch), of the four and a half million tourists who visit Amsterdam each year, roughly a quarter visits a coffeeshop during their stay. That’s more than a million people, who each stay on average two days and spent around 100 euros — and not just on cannabis either. How many of those will continue to come to Amsterdam if they can’t get their fix anymore?