Oh Those Crazy Cloggies – Page 5

Dutch Pirate Party does well in the polls

Published on June 25, 20122 Comments

Dutch election poll results 24-06-2012

You may have missed it, but Holland is slowly but surely being gripped by election fever as election night creeps closer. It’s still a while away though, as they’re being held on 12 September. Yet the electioneering battle has already started, still low key, as the various parties position themselves. The mainstream parties (social-democrat PvdA, Christan Democrat CDA, right-liberal VVD, and for now, the xenophobic PVV of Geert Wilders) are not doing well for the moment, with the last three of course hindered by their involvement in the current, disastrous government, while the PvdA still hasn’t learned to meaningfully oppose. Instead, as you can see the voters have polarised, with the echt-socialist SP winning big, while the centrist-liberal D66 also profiting; they always do if they haven’t been in government for a while, only to lose again once in office.

But the biggest news is hidden under the heading “Overige partijen” — “other parties: the Dutch branch of the Pirate Party would’ve been elected to parliament with one seat had elections been held today! That’s quite impressive for an internet only (so far) party with very little name recognition so far. It’s also a sign of health for our democracy if they do manage to get a seat in parliament; even better if they get a couple more, as they themselves are hoping.

The Dutch political system is one that naturally drives parties to the centre, as no party is ever capable of securing a majority in parliament on its own. This leads to periods of bland conformity as the rightwing parties get a little more leftist and the leftwing parties get a lot more rightwing; the nineties were like that, when VVD, D66 and PvdA outmanoeuvred the CDA to rule for most of the decade. For every action there’s a reaction and that gets you periods of greater polarisation as well as the rise of new parties. D66 got its start as the first of them, wanting to break open the cozy relationships between the old parties, but has long since been captured by the system; various other parties didn’t last long or became “confessional”, splinter parties you voted for to be ideologically pure but with no real hope of ever winning power.

Lately of course, with the near-simultaneous rise of the SP from small leftwing to largest leftwing opposition party and the xenophobic and populist movements of first Pim Fortuyn, then Geert Wilders polarisation has come back with a vengeance. This in turn naturally offers changes for new parties that deliberately refuse to place themselves on the old left-righ axis: the Partij voor de Dieren, the animal rights party managed this during the last elections, might the Piratenpartij follow them during this one? I hope so, because the system needs new blood and ideas.

Net Neutrality enacted in Holland

Published on May 10, 20121 Comment

Some good news from the Netherlands for a change:

On 8 May 2012 The Netherlands adopted crucial legislation to safeguard an open and secure internet in The Netherlands. It is the first country in Europe to implement net neutrality in the law. In addition, it adopted provisions protecting users against disconnection and wiretapping by providers. Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example.

[…]

In addition, the law includes an anti-wiretapping provision, restricting internetproviders from using invasive wiretapping technologies, such as deep packet inspection (DPI). They may only do so under limited circumstances, or with explicit consent of the user, which the user may withdraw at any time. The use of DPI gained much attention when KPN admitted that it analysed the traffic of its users to gather information on the use of certain apps. The law allows for wiretapping with a warrant.

Moreover, the law includes a provision ensuring that internet providers can only disconnect their users in a very limited set of circumstances. Internet access is very important for functioning in an information society, and providers currently could on the basis of their terms and conditions disconnect their users for numerous reasons. The provision allows for the disconnection in the case of fraud or when a user doesn’t pay his bills.

There are some specific Dutch clauses to the bill. The bill prohibits filtering of internet all together, providers cannot block any website or service whatsoever, no more blocking of Skype or Youtube on mobile phones just because it costs the providers money. But what it does allow is belief based filtering: there are a few providers who provide internet connections for e.g. Christians who’d rather not be confronted with the wicked outside and those are still legal. Which is as it should be.

The important thing is that no provider is now able to block services or websites they don’t like.

The end of the wietpas?

Published on April 30, 2012Leave a comment

One advantage of the collapse of the Dutch government is that the socalled wietpas might just be scrapped, at least nationally. Tomorrow it will be rolled out in the southern provinces, which means foreign socalled drugs tourists will no longer be able to buy dope in a coffee shop in Maastricht or any other southern city. Next year it was supposed to be put in force nation wide, but this still has to be confirmed by parliament and might just be declared “controversial” now that the government has lost its mandate. Which means that it can’t be treated in parliament until after the elections, scheduled for the 12th of September and who knows what will happen after them.

The whole wietpas legislation has been driven by drugs warriors in the CDA and the VVD, though to a somewhat lesser extent there; it’s far from a given that these two parties will return to power, while other parties are less than interested in this subject. If the wietpas quietly disappears into the dustbin of history this will be very good for Amsterdam, as some twentyfive percent of tourists come here especially for the dope…

It still leaves the southern border provinces with it, but I suspect that it will die a quiet death there too if it’s never put into law nationally.

You leave the country for one weekend…

Published on April 24, 2012Leave a comment

And the government falls again. You’d think the old rightwing parties, VVD and CDA had learned from their experiences with the LPF, but once again an extreme rightwing populist party has brought down a neoliberal government. This at the end of seven weeks of very serious negotiations about the 16 billion euros of spending cuts the three parties were engaged in, spending cuts that are now off the table.

Though unlikely to remain so for long, at least this will give the opportunity for the leftwing parties in parliament to minimise these cuts and steer them in the right direction, e.g. by ending the Dutch participation in the JSF. The collapse of the PVV support for the minority government will also mean the likely end of already agreed upon cuts, e.g. in the social workplaces, as well and just as important, the end of support from the other two parties for the PVV’s idee fixes, like the burqa ban.

Even more importantly, though Wilders and co will still be around after the next elections, this will probably be their high water mark, their moment of greatest power. As I’ve written about time and again, Wilders had to walk the tightrope between populism and power. He knew that if he had gone into a proper coalition government, he ran the risk of ending up like the LPF, splintered between the two old dirty fighters of Dutch politics, while if he had gone into opposition, his base would’ve deserted him because he couldn’t achieved anything that way, as had happened to the SP before. So he ended up with what looked like the best of both worlds, supporting a minority government while not having any governmental responsibility himself, yet he and his party still got into trouble anyway. And the voters have started to leave already, even before this happened.

The final result of this fall is the end to the myth that we need to make tough, harsh decisions right now, as no earlier date than 12 September for elections seems likely to be decided upon, while any drastic measures before that seem unlikely as well. And with that, the idea that we do need to conform to the EU demands for a budget deficit no larger than three percent of GDP seems less likely too.

A win all around than.

Nescio

Published on April 15, 20121 Comment

Because the MeFi thread about the Dutch writer Nescio reminded me of the song de Nits did about him and because it is now going through my head, I thought it would be nice to subject everybody else with it as well.

Nescio has just recieved his first English translation, roughly a century after he wrote the first of his most famous stories, the Uitvreter/Titaantjes/Dichtertje trilogy.

De Nits were a Dutch pop/art rock band, who had a couple of hits with Nescio, In The Dutch Mountains and J.O.S. Days and who share some of the same melancholy that Nescio specialised in in his stories.