Oh Those Crazy Cloggies

Amsterdam: brewery ‘t IJ to close?

Amsterdam, beer, Dutch politics, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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Brewery ‘t IJ is a small local Amsterdam beer brewer-cum pub where they still brew beer for the love of it. Founded in 1985 it has become one of the best small brewers in the Netherlands, while the pub is mellow and popular with serious beer fans as well as the more casual drinker. No wonder then that the Amsterdam city council is trying to shut it down. And why are they trying to close ‘t IJ down? Not because its customers are causing trouble, not because there are fistfights every night or lots of drunken people crawling home all hours of the night (a bit difficult as the pub is only open from three in the afternoon untill eight in the evening), not even because people are smoking in the pub . Nothing of that is going on, so why is Amsterdam city council (or rather, the Stadsdeel Centrum sub-council, a bigger collection of NIMBYes and prigs not seen in this country) trying to shut down Brewery ‘t IJ

Because their customers are drinking their beer outside, on the terraces, — are you ready — standing up!

Yes, really. It its verboten to drink while standing up, even though you’re doing so on licensed premises. And they’re actually checking up on this as well, with ‘t IJ having gotten two warnings already. Next time it will be a fivehundred euro fine, then a thousand euro one and if that doesn’t
help, the pub will have to shut down for a week. Worse, any warnings on file will remain there for two years. The reason for this policy? Gods know, nobody else does.

As the AT5 news report shows, try and explain this to your customers, especially when half or more are from outside Amsterdam and not used to the petty rule lawyering of Stadsdeel Centrum, which has also been known to ban rainbow flags as “intrusive advertising”. What sane person would suspect drinking standing up, on the pub terrace would be a problem?

Suspicious as I am, I wonder why Stadsdeel Centrum has embarked on this policy. Is it just another example of the way they try to bully everything out of the city centre that doesn’t fit their idea of a nice little suburbanised Amsterdam, a sort of Vienna-lite but without the charm? Or is theresomething more sinister going on?

(Found at Komma punt Log.)

Dutch mumps epidemic: how religion threatens public health

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, wingnuts
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You wouldn’t think it possible anymore in a modern, rich country like the Netherlands, but we are in the midst of a mumps epidemic. Actually, that’s not quite right: only part of the country is influenced by this epidemic and not so coincidently, it’s the most Christian part, the socalled bible belt, which stretches from my homeland of Zeeland, up to the central part of the Netherlands. This is where the communities of strict protestant churches are the largest and unfortunately many of these churches belief vaccinations, like insurances, are incompatible with a proper Christian belief. If god wants you to be sick, you will be sick and you shouldn’t attempt to thwart the will of god. More sane christians argue that if god wants you to be sick you will get sick, vaccination or not, but these are hardcore.

Normally, this isn’t that much of a problem, apart for those unfortunates who get polio because their parents refuse to protect them against it. But get enough of those loons together and it’s not a question of a few children getting diseases they needed have had, but you get a proper epidemic threatening not just them, but everybody. Vaccination programmes only work if enough people participate; once you get enough unprotected people infected, the risk that you will get the disease as well despite your vaccination gets much bigger. Which seems indeed to have happened, as about a quarter of cases in this epidemic concern vaccinated children as well.

In other words, this is a case in which freedom of religion conflicts directly with public health. Because of their beliefs about vaccination, these Christian groups endager not just themselves and their children, which is bad enough already, but also the rest of us. that’s why vaccination programmes should be mandatory and religious beliefs not be allowed as a reason to opt out. Especially since so often it’s the parent‘s beliefs which are responsible for the refusal to protect the child.

Negerzoen

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, Racism
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negerzoen

We had another p.c. scandal here in the Netherlands last week, with hordes of defenders of common sense crawling out of the woodworks to defend the noble negerzoen. The negerzoen is an old-fashioned Dutch treat (though of Danish origins) and consists of a mixture of egg white and sugar, surrounded by a thin layer of mock-chocolate, all on top of an almost stale biscuit. The picture on the left shows a typical example.

The controversy was that the manufacturer of these negerzoenen finally came to the conclusion that the name of this chemical delight might be slightly on the racist side, a “negerzoen” literally translating as a “negrokiss”, which in combination of the look of the thing is slightly … suspect … This years or even decades after the product (dating from 1927) had been rebranded in other countries, but then us Dutch tend to hang on to our slightly racist (“but we don’t mean it that way, though!”) traditions…

Anyway, this sensible discussion evoked the inevitavble storm of pc angst, with all the usual assholes coming out to loudly declare the ridiculousness of the idea, drawing the usual flawed comparisons and in general acting as if the renaming of a not very nice snack most people stopped eating by the age of twelve means the total surrender of all traditional Dutch values. You know the type; if they were American they would’vde been doing stories on the war on Christmas… It’s all very tiresome and stupid. They know full well that it’s just not right, but are just trying it on for shock value and to show how freethinking they are, this herd of independent minds.

Dutch supermarkets

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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One of the things that shocked my partner S— the most after she moved over to Amsterdam were the supermarkets, which just couldn’t hold a candle to the ones she was used at home. Even our “national pride”, Albert Heijn, she found to be second rate. She is not the only one, it seems:

Freshness, novelty, seasonal – these concepts have no meaning here, where goedkoop!
(cheap) is the only the battle cry. The stores are staffed by rowdy teenage boys stocking the shelves
between chatting up the cheese girls, with nasty middle-aged women working the cash registers.

Just try getting bread after 4pm on a Saturday afternoon. You didn’t plan ahead for bread? Well, then, you probably don’t deserve it. At the Swine, things like coffee, cola and crackers can suddenly take on the mystique of rare goods. It’s like Poland, circa 1975.

How can a supermarket run out of Coke? Ask Albert Heijn, the market leader in this bizarre off-the-shelf stocking technique.

Plentiful, however, is the produce, a rapidly decaying mass offering little more selection than your corner store back home. You wanted that kind of lettuce? Too bad. The Swine must be the last stop on the banana boat — stuff goes off as you’re leaving the store, if not sooner.