Bruce Sterling reports on the Dutch War on Culture

class war, Dutch politics
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Bruce Sterling comments on the philistinism of the current Dutch government’s arts policies:

“There are absolutely no policy reasons for the €200 million of cutbacks. This deal was struck with the PVV in exchange for its support in parliament of the minority cabinet. The intention is to inflict irreparable damage on an entire profession. Zijlstra is striving to decimate and eliminate this professional group’s creative, innovative and critical potential. Not a single member of his own party (VVD), or anyone from its coalition partner, the CDA (Christian Democratic Party) has opposed him. As far as they are concerned, traditional art is merely the superfluous ornamentation of a society. Contemporary art is labelled as alienating, and even, although no one actually says it out loud, as ‘degenerate art’.

The notion of “entarte kunst” does fit in well with the rightwing “populism” of the PVV and Wilders, as I also noted yesterday, but as Bruce Sterling indicates, the betrayal of the art by the supposedly respectable CDA and VVD is just as nihilistic. This is something that would not have been possible twenty or even ten years ago, but a decade of relentless rightwing philistinism in which everything had to be reappraised solely for its commercial potential has eroded the sense of social responsibility these parties used to hold. Obviously, there have alwas been disagreements over the arts and funding thereof; what’s new is the idea that they shouldn’t be funded at all, apart from very respectable high culture institutes like the Rijksmuseum or Concertgebouw. This is an ideologically driven attack, one that wants to make art safe for the rich and only aimed at their tastes.

Rightwing hobbies

class war, Dutch politics, Geertje Wilders, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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Total cost of Dutch culture budget v total cost of JSF

So we got ourselves a rightwing minority goverment in the Netherlands a while back, who now rule with support of the racists aka Geert Willders and his “Freedom Party”. Wilders thanks his success by pandering to the worst prejudices of the socalled common man, while the government thanks its succes to pandering to Wilders. Which explains why while the government tries to sell us on how Maturely they are trying to handle the Very Serious Task of getting Holland’s finances back in order in the wake of the bankers’ crisis, the sort of measures they come up with is to slash the culture budget. As the picture on top shows, the total amount of money the government spents each year on culture is roughly 450 million euros: a lot of money, but nothing compared to the 7,6 billion euros it would cost to buy the F-35. So why is that sacrosant when cutting the cultural budget is only penny ante stuff?

Because stopping money being “wasted” on opera, theatre and other “leftwing hobbies” as Wilders put it, is a goal in itself for this government. It keeps Wilders and its voters happy, can be spun as showing how serious the government takes the budget deficits and pisses off the leftwing opposition. Who cares that it doesn’t help achieve its nominal goal as long as white elephants like the F-35 are kept fully funded but does destroy a lot of cultural capital?

Pure pandering. And to add insult to injury, not only are the budgets slashed, the value added tax paided on art and other cultural products will be upped as well, from six to nineteen percent. Except on porn. Because wanking is a rightwing hobby…

The Second Anglo-Dutch War — Gijs Rommelse

books and books review, history
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The Second Anglo-Dutch War


The Second Anglo-Dutch War
Gijs Rommelse
230 pages including index
published in 2006

I’m not sure if in these enlightened times they still do it, but if you ever come across a Dutch naval ship with a broom in the top of her mast and you want to know what’s that all about, read up about the Second Anglo-Dutch War and especially the Dutch raid on Medway, when the English fleet was “swept” from the sea. Yes, though these days the Dutch have been reduced to the butt of cheap racist jokes about dope smoking and homosexuality in the English consciousness, there once was a time when Holland was Britain’s greatest enemy and competitor, despite the common ground between the two countries. In fact, it was exactly this common ground that was the problem. England and Holland both were dependent on trade for their prosperity, both tried to monopolise the lucrative trade in e.g. spices and it was inevitable that they would fight for supremacy — it took four wars in total for England to get the upper hand. Of the four wars, the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) was the one with the clearest Dutch victory.

Apart from that very general outline however, I knew little about this war, so I’m glad Gijs Rommelse decided to turn his thesis into a proper book. The Second Anglo-Dutch War‘s main interest lies in determining the causes of the war, how commercial, as well as both foreign and domestic political considerations on both sides drove the countries to war. In process Rommelse also delivers an overview of the war itself, giving short and to the point accounts of all aspects of the war, including the struggle in the Americans and the privatering both the English and the Dutch engaged in. This was after all as much as anything a war about trade.

Read more…

They came from the seventies

posts interesting only to me, science fiction
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From James Nicoll: which of these female sf/f authors who debuted in the 1970ties do you know? Italicize the authors you’ve heard of before reading this list of authors, bold the ones you’ve read at least one work by, underline the ones of whose work you own at least one example of.

  • Lynn Abbey
  • Eleanor Arnason
  • Octavia Butler
  • Moyra Caldecott
  • Jaygee Carr
  • Joy Chant
  • Suzy McKee Charnas
  • C. J. Cherryh
  • Jo Clayton
  • Candas Jane Dorsey
  • Diane Duane
  • Phyllis Eisenstein
  • Cynthia Felice
  • Sheila Finch
  • Sally Gearhart
  • Mary Gentle
  • Dian Girard
  • Eileen Gunn
  • Monica Hughes
  • Diana Wynne Jones
  • Gwyneth Jones
  • Leigh Kennedy
  • Lee Killough
  • Nancy Kress
  • Katherine Kurtz
  • Tanith Lee
  • Megan Lindholm (AKA Robin Hobb)
  • Elizabeth A. Lynn
  • Phillipa Maddern
  • Ardath Mayhar
  • Vonda McIntyre
  • Patricia A. McKillip
  • Janet Morris
  • Pat Murphy
  • Sam Nicholson (AKA Shirley Nikolaisen)
  • Rachel Pollack
  • Marta Randall
  • Anne Rice
  • Jessica Amanda Salmonson
  • Pamela Sargent
  • Sydney J. Van Scyoc
  • Susan Shwartz
  • Nancy Springer
  • Lisa Tuttle
  • Joan Vinge
  • Élisabeth Vonarburg
  • Cherry Wilder
  • Connie Willis

Lots of names I recognise but either never read or only read a few stories off in various anthologies.

Reviews up at SF Mistressworks

books and books review, posts interesting only to me, science fiction
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Dept. of self promotion: the last few weeks I’ve gotten some old and new reviews published at Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks site, dedicated to showcasing good books by female sf writers. Thought it might be good to point y’all at them.

The Female Man — Joanna Russ: “The Female Man is a tough book, but not a hard book to read. Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer and everything in here sparkles”

Ammonite — Nicola Griffith: “Nicola Griffith’s goal was to create a world populated solely with women without falling back on clichés about what such a world would look like. No “seven-feet-tall vegetarian amazons who would never dream of killing anyone, no “aliens who are really women or women who are really aliens”, but “the entire spectrum of human behavior”. ”

The Sword of Rhiannon — Leigh Brackett: “What sets The Sword of Rhiannon a touch above other pulp adventure stories is both Brackett’s writing and that elegiac sense of loss that comes across through it.”

Sign of the Labrys — Margaret St. Clair: “The infusion of what at first seemed a fairly standard science fiction story with a dose of Wicca worked pretty well. If necessary, you can ignore all the Wicca mumbo-jumbo and just think of it as psionics.”