Dutch Politics

It was an opening to further discussion... it's not uncommon, and it's a reflection on Dutch Politics at the moment. Be crass and direct, and sort things out afterwards... so here's a more elaborate redo of the locked thread:

There are a couple of dutch people in tvtropes, and it's been creeping into various other discussions... so why not have a thread where we can fight amongst ourselves about our politicians and their parties?

And of course answer questions people from abroad might have about them.

Just to light the fire... I think the Pvd A is a shameful excuse for a political party, they've sold out to the lowest common denominator and they're still trying to cling to a moral highground that no longer exists.

It illustrates how divided the country has become in the last ten to twenty years. We could have had a new Purple Cabinet, but due to the way people campaign these days and the way they have dug their heels into the sand, it's become damn near impossible to see a situation where two parties on respectively opposite sides of the political spectrum work together.

People tend to blame the VVD for this, while I tend to blame the Pvd A for this. The Pvd A tends to fall back on the notion that they own the moral right in politics. They present themselves as infinitely tolerant but they've managed to dismiss legitimate concerns from the population. They've taken on just as hard a stance as their opponents have.

I think the reason the VVD won the recent elections was because they managed to not rock the boat and claim they were holier than the pope. It's the noose around the Pvd A's neck right now. They want to present themselves as a moral an tolerant party, but they're not actually moral and tolerant in how they're handling certain situations.

Take a look at Utrecht, a Pvd A mayor, with a gay couple that got harassed by Morocan youths, the police did nothing because they didn't have the ability to act, while the mayor kept talking about how they weren't going to stand for this kind of intolerance against homosexuals... and the whole case got dismissed in court. Not because there wasn't a case, but because nobody actually cared about the whole situation. Because if they actually stood up against homophobia they would offend their consituents.

Same thing with the whole ritual slaughter debacle. Going by their own manifesto they should be in favor of a ban on ritual slaughter, but because they have a large number of islamic voters they were split on the issue. Appease one group of voters or stick with your principles and piss off those voters.

The VVD has no such problems, they don't claim to be a party based on morals, they're a party based on money and equality. Which in this case means that they won't treat groups differently based on their background.

Which is of course remarkable, one party claiming to be tolerant is fighting for inequality, while the other claiming no such thing is fighting for equality.

Simplified example: You're not allowed to wear anything on your head.

Pvd A: except for you, you can ignore it. VVD: that means you too, you have to follow the law.

As a country we've managed to seperate tolerance from equality, and our politicians are split between the two concepts since they cannot be united. You can't be tolerant and promote equality, and right now the public seems to think Equality is a more noble concept.

I'm probably supposed to be saying something here, but I simply can't be bothered to care about politics. They all look the same to me, and pointing fingers at each other won't help much either.

The only thing I think about Dutch politics now is that Geert Wilders' antics are surely entertaining.

Whatever is happening there, they're beating the neighbours.

EDIT: Argh, link won't work.

{ fixed it. You need to put double curly brackets around one-word page names. — @?Madrugada}

edited 23rd Jul '11 4:29:48 PM by Madrugada

That's it in theory, but I have never seen any far right politician target Sikhs or Jews for their ritual headgear.

I think that's because the veil is associated with repression of woman while turbans and kippah's aren't.

Sikhs and Jews are invisible groups here. We have no Sikh-community to speak of, and Jews aren't seen wearing religious headgear that covers most of the face. Neither group is heard protesting that they should be exempt from the rules in place.

i know its old news, but look how the Dutch Labour Party shunk in the 2017 general elections, from 38 seats to a mere 9, a merger with Democrats 66 is definitely necessary. i suppose the merger will be called "People's Party for Labour and Democracy".

edited 1st Jun '18 8:10:23 AM by Wazzupguys

i suppose that a merger between the Christian Democratic Appeal adnd the Christian Union is als onecessary, and it will obviously be called the "Christian Democratic Union".

So, there is a dutch thread here

Heard there was an illegal Covid measures protest in Amsterdam today, which got rough.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220102-dutch-police-disperse-thousands-protesting-in-amsterdam-against-covid-lockdown

At least 30 arrests made. Ain't this year starting splendidly....

There seems to be one like every week these days. There clearly is ongoing unrest around corona measures, especially in the Randstad.

Didn't Omicron basically start in South Africa and spread to the Netherlands, before spreading everwhere else? Or am I over-simplifying.

I happened to be leaving Aruba on the very day Omicron in the Netherlands was headlined on TV news. Everyone was trying to leave at the same time, I felt like I was in World War Z or something.

I think it was first detected in South Africa, but that’s different from it actually starting there.

I know when a variant emerged in the UK a lot of noise was made about how our detection capability probably meant we found it in the UK before other countries with it present found it in their own countries.

It was discovered in about a dozen countries within a week of South Africa announcing the new variant, I don't think we can say where it arrived first. I think it is clear the virus was already going around globally at that point.

They seem to discover new variants about a week or two after it's been circulating. Probably the incubation period.

Aruba was pretty cool, though. Anybody been there?

No, but being a tropical island, it must be great for vacations.

It's actually rather unusual in being a desert. Helps keep the humidity down 🙂

Oh, I didn't realize. Well, we learn next to nothing about our island dependencies in school, so there you go. A bit of a shame, really. Most of our mainland citizens don't know the first thing about those islands.

Mainland French people are not better in that regard.

Facebook’s data center plans rile residents in the Netherlands: Locals say Big Tech data centers will syphon away all their green energy.

TBF, our green energy could be syphoned away by a toaster. We really need to reconsider nuclear energy.

12% isn’t nothing, though the continued use of coal is a massive negative.

I’d have expected the Netherlands to be big on both wind and tidal power.

We are big on wind and tidal. What we are not is big. Our strip of dune and swamp is somehow home to seventeen-and-a-half million people, and there's not enough space for windparks to power all those homes. Green energy is well and good, but it is not very space-efficient.

Edited by Kayeka on Jan 10th 2022 at 11:16:28 AM

You’ve got a pretty big chunk of the North Sea haven’t you? Is wind that space inefficient?