Oh look, it’s another pointless inquest to establish what we already know, that Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered, that his killers got away with it and of course, that this inquest is “not a forum to determine
culpability or compensation, still less to dispense punishment”. It’s not as if anybody important was killed and we can’t have the police be afraid to murder innocent people if they really really believe they’re terrorists…
The inquest will hear from 75 witnesses, including 48 serving police officers who have been granted anonymity, and Tube passengers.
The first police officer will appear later in the week.
Among those who will be speaking for the first time will be policemen codenamed C2 and C12, the two specialist firearms officers who shot Mr de Menezes dead.
Far be it for me to say that this is the perfect opportunity for some spontaneous vigilante justice, but what the hey.
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?
It’s back to the eighties again, considering the complete and utter collapse of the Anglo-American financial world and the sombre news from the budget in Den Haag: can mass unemployment be far behind? If so, this old classic by the Janse Bagge Bend is shockingly relevant again.
It’s long been demonstrated, by such purveyors of wingnuttia like Alicublog and Decent Leftspotters like Aaronovitch Watch, that wingnuts tend to run in circles. Get slightly dotty about the Muslims and before you know it you don’t believe in evolution anymore, think giving women the right to vote was a bad idea and abortion a crime against humanity. It’s not enough to just believe in one patently false evil belief, no, once you go wingnut, you go wingnut all the way.
So it came as no suprise when, according to DutchNews, one of the Islamophobes of Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration party is revealed to be clueless about climate change as well, denying the melting of the Arctic:
‘Our schoolchildren should be learning to spell and do sums not that pathetic polar bears are drifting around on ice floes because we go on holiday by plane,’ the paper quotes him as saying.
And yet this party won nine seats at the last elections and is consistently predicted to do even better next time. Makes you proud to be Dutch.
The Mercenary
Jerry Pournelle
223 pages
published in 1977
The Mercenary is one of those books in my collection I’m a bit ashamed of. Not because it’s so badly written, but because its politics are so embarrassing. Having it on my bookshelves is a bit like owning a collection of books about the nazis and the Second World War; you can be genuinely interested but it still looks bad to see a row of red and black bookspines with swastikas plastered all over them. Yet it’s precisely because of its politics that I kept it when I was purging my collection a few years back and why I reread it now. The Mercenary is a book that stands at the root of one of the more succesful –and distasteful– science fiction subgenres: mil-sf and in it can be found a lot of what makes the genre so awful so often.
Science fiction has always had a large conservative, rightwing streak running through it and Pournelle falls squarely in this tradition. This in itself is not a problem; some of science fiction’s best writers, like Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper or Robert Heinlein were conservatives or had rightwing sympathies and you can still enjoy (most of) their stories without necessarily agreeing with their politics, even when they’ve made them explicit. What makes Pournelle different is that he goes beyond this. He’s not just a conservative, but a reactionary. His politics as shown in The Mercenary have fascist overtones, though I don’t believe he’s a fascist himself. No doubt if you asked him he would describe himself as an American conservative and believer in a strong democracy, though weary of the wisdom of the average voter, but what comes across here is his deep pessimism and mistrust of democracy and his yearning for a saviour to safe democracy from itself.
