Holland – Wis[s]e Words

Blog fodder for June 12th through June 15th:

The Netherlands: Victory for Transgender Rights | Human Rights Watch – The law on transgender rights that the Dutch Senate approved on December 18, 2013, is an important step toward equality, Human Rights Watch said today. The new law will allow transgender people to change the gender marker in their official identity papers to their preferred gender. It does away with previous requirements for taking hormones and surgery, including irreversible sterilization, though it is a step short of complete personal autonomy for the decision.
On Telling the Truth – People of Color in European Art History – I’m sick and tired of suffering in silence. I’m sick of “keeping things civil”, and I’m tired of giving the benefit of the doubt to people who mean me nothing but ill. There is real violence happening to myself and other bloggers for more reasons than that people do not like what we have to say…people take exception to who we are, how we speak, what we look like, who we call friend, and who we call family. No one is obligated to justify their existence.
Holland’s World Cup win over Spain wasn’t the return of Total Football – Louis van Gaal has created something new – Telegraph – The 3-4-3 that Van Gaal played on Friday night was essentially a reactive formation designed to combat Spain’s dominant midfield. The wing-backs did not venture too far forward, and with midfielders Nigel De Jong and Jonathan de Guzman essentially screening the back three, Holland reverted to a 5-2-3, or even a 7-3, without the ball. And seeing as this was Spain, they were quite often without the ball.
Maliki’s most solemn hour — The Arabist – Just days ago, ISIS pushed forward from its safehouses and camps in the Nineveh Governorate, which it had won control over in the past months, to take over the city of Mosul. It has attacked several other cities in northern Iraq as well, and disrupted the siege that federal forces in Iraq brought against it and its allies in Al Anbar Governorate this Spring. Mosul was living under a state of siege with the government resorting to an air bridge due to the danger ISIS ambushes posed to highway traffic. The group has for over a year now been following a strategic campaign it dubbed "Soldier's Harvest": the aim has been to retake the territories lost by al Qaeda-aligned jihadists during the final years of the U.S. Occupation by terrorizing the local authorities into quitting the fight. ISIS would then fill the resulting vacuum caused by their retreat. "This started in rural sections of Iraq such as the desert regions of Anbar and the Hamrin Mountains that stretch across Diyala and Salahadd
Portugal indebted to Angola after economic reversal of fortune – "Portugal is in a tricky situation. It needs Angolan money and must also watch out for Portuguese residents in Angola," Filipe explains. About 100,000 Portuguese nationals currently live in the former colony. Much as with Brazil in the past, many young Portuguese, dogged by unemployment at home, see their future in Angola.

It takes somebody who’s strange to your part of the world to truly see what makes it special. Here’s Abi Sutherland on what makes Noord Holland’s polder landscape so different from everything else she’s used to:

The more I go out into the polder, the more I see how that narrow, dark line is the focus of the whole landscape. It gives everything else scale and context. The sky is vaster and emptier against its peaks and curves; the clouds are fluffier for its sharpness. It frames and defines the fields around me. And it surrounds my journeys as well, lying at the beginning and the end of every path. Everywhere I go, I’m heading toward it—though, like a mirage, it dissolves into individual trees, houses and villages as I draw near. But then the ever-varied unified silhouette reappears, reformed, when I leave the settlement and reach the next set of fields.

I grew up on the not quite an island anymore of Walcheren, living in Middelburg, on the mid-east side of it. Growing up we did everything — going to school, the beach, visiting family elsewhere on the island — by bike, which nine out of ten times meant heading out from town into the polder landscapes in the heart of it. Largely flat, with Middelburg one of the oldest and therefore highest settlements, with the rest of Walcheren built polder by polder around it, whichever direction you looked, you’d see a human build line on the horizon. To the east, we’d see the same narrow, dark line of towns and villages Abi talks about; every other direction there would be the dunes. Which look natural, but are of course as artificial as the towns themselves.

As a kid, you don’t really question the landscape you grow up in, or think it anything other than natural, in both senses of the world. Sometimes it’s seeing the old and familiar to new eyes to make you realise how unnatural the land you grew up on is.

Articles with the Tag Holland

Your Happening World (June 12th through June 15th)

Growing up in a human made landscape