Hopefully this won’t jinx it again

posts interesting only to me
Published on

but S. has been home from hospital since Tuesday and hopefully she will be able to stay home a bit longer than at the previous attempts. It has been a rough couple of months for us, but things happened very quickly last week. First she had an operation the doctors had been dithering about for some time, then she heard she could go home almost immediately afterwards. And she did recover incredibly well, much better than we’re used to. So now she’s been home for a few days, things are going reasonably well and we hope to keep it up.

One small thing that cheered her up quite a lot was recieving a Half Man Half Biscuit cd in the mail from a well wisher; you know who you are, thank you.

Dutch government is responsible for the death of Muslim men at Srebrenica

Dutch politics
Published on

Ever since the Srebrenica Massacre happened, the Dutch government has always denied any legal (or moral for that matter) responsibility for the murders as the Dutch troops were operating under UN mandate and hence the UN was ultimately responsible — but unindictable under international law. There have been various lawsuits against the Dutch state started by victims and their family, all of which were rejected: until now.

The Dutch court in Den Haag decided today that the Dutch troops had been wrong to force three Muslim men to leave the Dutchbat compound to be killed by Bosnian Serb troops and therefore the Dutch state was culpable in their deaths. From the report about the case at Radio Netherlands:

Hasan Nuhanovic – an interpreter for the Dutch battalion of UN peacekeepers (Dutchbat) which was responsible for protecting the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia – and the next of kin of Rizo Mustafic, a Dutchbat electrician, filed a lawsuit against the Dutch state alleging that Dutchbat knowingly handed over their relatives to the Bosnian Serbs.

The Dutch were in charge of Srebrenica when, under the command of then-general Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb forces overran it and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The two men had sought refuge at the Dutchbat headquarters with their families. Mustafic was forced to leave and separated from his wife just outside the compound fence. She was taken away and never heard from again; he was killed by Bosnian Serb forces. Nuhanovic was allowed to stay, but his relatives were forced to leave. The remains of his father and brother were recovered in 2007 and 2010.

The court ruled that Dutchbat, which abandoned the enclave in the face of a superior Bosnian-Serb force, should have foreseen that Mladic’s soldiers would kill the men, noting that Dutchbat had witnessed the abuse and execution of Muslim men at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces. The three were the last of a group of 5,000 men who had sought refuge in the Dutch compound.

Guessing from previous experience, I’m sure the Dutch government will do everything it can to minimise the impact of this ruling, though it would do better to accept it wholeheartedly. The Srebrenica Massacre is the logical outcome of socalled humanitarian interventions, but we haven’t internalised this message yet in the Netherlands. Hopefully this ruling will show that we cannot ignore the consequences when we do attempt to throw our weight around again…

Comic strips on strike

Comix, Dutch politics, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
Published on

Blast, the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics

As I posted about a week ago, the current rightwing supported by racists Dutch government is putting through radical cuts on the arts. Though these measures have already gone through parliament, resistance against them hasn’t ended. And although comics in general barely get any government support anyway, that doesn’t mean cartoonists aren’t engaged with this struggle. Which is why today a dozen or so odd comic strips in as many daily newspapers had the same message.

Shit! The spending cuts on arts are also hitting us! Ehh... I see no difference

Each participating comic drew its regular cast as stick figures, with some variant on the slogan “the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics”. Participants include Peter de Wit’s incredibly popular sarky psychiatrist Sigmund (top), as well as Fokke & Sukke (bottom), Mark Retera’s Dirkjan and many others. It’s of course unrealistic to expect this protest to change many people’s minds, but it is a good way to show the disastrous consequences of the slashing of art funding even to people with little use for art. Everybody reads the funnies after all.

Anthology bashing is sometimes necessary

Feminism, science fiction
Published on 2 Comments on Anthology bashing is sometimes necessary

The debate about science fiction and fantasy’s inherent gender imbalance (particularly acute in the UK) is rumbling on and one of the latest flashpoints has been the editing of the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, yet another anthology series heavily skewed towards male contributors. Rose Fox has probably the best summing up of the whole conflagration, the ebb and flow of which is intensely familiar to everybody familiar with Racefail two years ago. The editor of the series is called out, defends himself, more people chose sides, rhetoric gets overblown on both sides and it all gets a bit heated with the original point obscured. Which in turn prompts Cheryl Morgan to go meta and explain why these sorts of contratempts are counterproductive:

Before going into the specific issue at hand, let me say that I think anthology bashing is not terribly helpful. Looking at a single anthology, you have no idea where the real problem lies. It could be the editor, it could be the publisher, it could be the submissions, you can’t tell. Also, just as an individual’s reading and voting habits are more likely to be a product of cultural conditioning than of conscious sexism, so an individual editor is more likely to choose stories based on cultural conditioning than a deliberate intention to exclude a particular group of writers. The objective of pointing out gender imbalances (or any other sort of imbalance) should be to encourage people to examine their cultural conditioning, not to decide who we are going to burn at the stake.

I disagree.

Yes, these confrontations are unpleasant for everybody involved, but if you are worried about the gender imbalance in science fiction and would like to see more women being published, than you do need to rake editors over the coals when they produce female free anthologies. That the whole sf&f publishing field is guilty doesn’t excuse individual failure; blame is a renewable resource. It doesn’t matter why a given anthology has few or no female contributors, only the end result matters. Just like readers like me need to address their biases in chosing who they read, so editors need to work towards getting more female writers published if they care about the gender imbalance of fantasy and science fiction. It’s hard is not an excuse to not do this.

And especially because the majority of editors and publishers isn’t consciously deciding to be sexist and to ignore women, it’s important to call them out on their subconscious but systemic biases. Each controversy like this carries the message that it’s wrong to publish anthologies skewed towards male writers, that you will need to pay attention to which writers you approach and accept submissions from, or you might find yourself in the centre of a shitstorm. Confrontation and “anthology bashing” are necessary tools, if not always the right tools…

All of which also means that, if you’re a reader concerned about the huge gender imbalance in science fiction, you should not buy any anthologies that makes this worse. I therefore won’t buy any anthology that isn’t at least forty-sixty percent women-men. No matter how good it is.