Glob-a-log

Holland is a small country but it does make it into the international papers quite a lot. Most of these stories used to deal with our quaint habit to decriminalise things other countries prefer to keep as their favourite Bogeyman issues – things like soft drugs, prostitution, euthanasia and abortion.

The last few years, however, there have been occasions the country could have done without certain big stories: the assassination of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, for instance – or the latest home movie by one of our cuckoo right wing politicians: Fitna.

So, it is with both nostalgic and chauvinistic pride that I present you with the following, more old-fashioned and extremely Dutch story:

The Christian nudist site – Gan Eden – and the nudist park Flevo-Natuur in Zeewolde are planning a nudist church service for 28 September. This is a result of the great success of an earlier such service at the end of June in which 80 nude people participated. Only the pastor, who came from the Roman Catholic diocese of Utrecht, was clothed.

I do find it slightly disappointing that the pastor does wear clothes on these occasions. It would have been more fitting – and more fun – if he had worn his dog collar but nothing else. It is a minor miracle though that Rome did permit that first service at the end of June and will also tolerate the September encore.

If the Pope and/or the College of Bishops would decide to veto nudist church services they’d be able to make a fair doctrinal case against these happenings. You would have to go back a bit, to the book of Genesis, to be precise, but the Bible tells us that by eating from the forbidden fruit Adam & Eve (and all their descendants) both lost their innocence and the right to go around naked without dying from shame.

Me, I think all of that is a lot of naked bollocks but then I’m not a Catholic who wants to attend church services – naked or clad, I might add. So, this time I could even sympathise with any old-fashioned, spoil-sport cleric who would tell these nudist to go and have some naked beach volleyball tournament if they must but to put on some clothes whenever they want to enter the house of their Lord.

On the other hand, maybe it would be better to leave these things to God Himself. When the Lord was still our Landlord He managed to kick us off the paradisical premises the moment we’d outstayed our welcome, so I guess He would be able to remove a few nudists from a Dutch church if He so wished.

Still, it would be fun to watch these naked pilgrims, going to church and singing this old and venerable hymn:

Holy God, we praise Thy Name;
Naked here, we bow before Thee!
All on earth Thy scepter claim,
All in nudist heaven adore Thee;
Infinite Thy vast domain,
Everlasting unclad reign.

A Dutch newspaper article today leads with “Elf jaar cel voor doden ongeboren kind”, which translates as ‘Eleven year sentence for killing unborn child.’

No, it’s not a ‘run of the mill’ abortion story but yet another sordid tale of a relationship gone bad. He is a truck driver; she was seeing someone else when he was on the road. He claims she had psychological problems, wouldn’t talk to him and mistreated the other kids. So, in fact, he is saying his pregnant wife drove him crazy enough that he lost it and stabbed her fifteen times, hitting her uterus four times in the process. Crazed enough to start this attack in their home and finish it off in the street.

Now, these are the ‘facts’ mentioned in the newspaper article. Well, some facts and a lot of ‘he said’ and ’she did’ – but that is nearly always the case when it comes to the unravelling of relationships. Most people don’t end up stabbing their partners fifteen times and killing their unborn children but all of us have been through or witnessed the breaking up of (long-term) relationships. Most of the times, this does not make for a pretty sight.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk much more about this particular case. Making judgements based on a single newspaper article is seldom wise. I don’t know enough about the case, and nothing about the people involved. As I started to say, it seems to be yet another sordid story about a lethally toxic relationship, ending as still too many of them do.

What hit me though was the almost ritual mentioning that the court had considered the fact that the convicted showed remorse. (As a kind of sad, black joke the man also said he hadn’t wanted to harm the innocent child…)

I had never really considered this phenomenon before, but now the thought hit me: Why would a perpetrator’s remorse be a mitigating factor? Surely, it should mean the opposite? Let me explain. Most of us accept that you can’t punish people who are so crazy that they don’t understand the nature and consequences of the crimes they commit. In some of these cases the court declares these people unfit to stand trial.

That is also why most countries don’t prosecute children as adults: Because children can’t be expected to have developed a full understanding of their own acts and the consequences of these actions. Obviously, we are talking about a gliding scale. Some kids will be more (or less) mature in their judgements – as there are different levels of accountability for people with a history of mental problems. These are never simple matters.

Still, the premise is there – and I think it’s a sound one: That the law must take into account that not every perpetrator may be fully fit to stand trial. Meaning that you must differentiate between people who don’t and can’t know what they have done and those who are fully aware of it.

In other words, that someone, after the fact, is immediately capable of feeling a deep remorse about what he or she has done should not be seen as a mitigating factor but as the exact opposite. If a knowledge of good and wrong is part of the basis on which we judge people, then remorse is a sure sign that the perpetrator of a crime knew all along that what he or she did was, in fact, criminally wrong.

I’m not suggesting that people who show remorse in court should be sentenced more heavily than those who show indifference but I think it would be wrong to treat them with any more leniency than anyone else who was deemed fit to stand trial.

Never mind the suspicion that these tears are more informed by self-pity and self-interest to begin with: Even if these are honest tears, they do not help the victims of the crime and all they show is, truly, that even the accused accepts that what he or she did was unpardonable.

Ah well, here’s another story from the shallow end of the gene pool:

A Mendocino County woman who was trying to kill mice in her trailer with a gun ended up shooting herself and another person. Sheriff’s officials say the 43-year-old woman pulled out her .44-caliber Magnum revolver after she saw the mice scurrying across the floor of her trailer on Highway 20 in Potter Valley. But she accidentally dropped the gun, which went off as it struck the floor. The bullet went through the woman’s kneecap, bounced off the keys sitting on the belt loop of a 42-year-old man in the trailer and grazed the man’s groin before ending up in his coin pocket.

You often hear about trailer trash but less often of people who trash their trailers, while trying to shoot mice with a .44-caliber Magnum revolver. It’s like a very weird movie, ‘When Dirty Harry met Tom & Jerry’ or something. Still, even Tom wouldn’t be clumsy enough to kneecap himself and almost castrate a fellow cat while trying to shoot Jerry – but then I don’t think many cartoon characters have ever won the Darwin Award.

I suppose this mental Mendocino County woman should call herself lucky that she can still hear the laughter wherever she now shows herself but I don’t suppose she will appreciate this fact – or will ever quite feel the same whenever she hears that little speech Clint Eastwood made, that ended with that now famous question, ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’

Still, if I were one those trailer mice I think I would move, however bad a shot that madwoman proved to be. Someone who is dumb enough to use a .44-caliber Magnum revolver to go after a few rodents, might very well decide to set fire to her own trailer (and any unfortunate house guest) in order to smoke them out. That she might very well burn herself to death in the process will not be much of a comfort when you’re a bit of mouse roast yourself.

Okay, it’s a tragedy: a man lost his life and all of that – but it’s still kind of funny too…:

A man was sentenced to 35 years in prison for stabbing his roommate to death after an argument in their Houston apartment about stinky feet. He pleaded no contest to murder. Court documents indicate the man initially claimed self-defense.

I love the self-defense part.

I wonder how the whole of that argument ran. Maybe it had something to do with natural defense systems. How a frightened octopus sprays ink when it thinks it’s under attack. Or, more to the point, how skunks spray their attackers with their Weapon of Mass Distraction.

So, this killer might argue that by complaining about his smelly feet, his victim had tried to rob him of his most important line of defense – and by doing this the latter had threatened the former’s survival: So, stabbing the guy would be a clear case of self defense indeed.

QED!

Perry Mason would have been so proud…

So, when the British government isn’t busy playing ‘Spot the terrorist’ and awarding the winners a 42 days in a detention camp of its choosing (or seven bullets in the back of the head, of course, if they are Brazilian electricians), they are funding agencies who play ‘Spot the racist’ in Britain’s nurseries – although, somewhat disappointingly, the agency doesn’t instruct these nurseries to kill the offending infants:

Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency. The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care. It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can “recognise different people in their lives”.

The guide goes on to warn that children might also “react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying ‘yuk’”. Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”

I do love that last bit. Encouraging people and institutions to turn informer is so Noughties – or, if you want, in the Zeitgeist of the East-German Stasis, or Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution.

You often wonder how all of these well-meaning people and institutions can get almost everything so desperately wrong all of the fucking time. Not that I’m sure that the National Children’s Bureau belongs in the category of people who do mean well. The bureau is probably stacked to the rafters with the kind of folks who could bore you to death during a sex orgy and whose passions are train-spotting, bird-watching & anorak-knitting, when they are not busy making life a living Hell for their fellow citizens, that is.

The only question clueless crusaders like these raise is whether they were beaten up too many or not nearly enough times when they were kids themselves.

Back to the serious matter of identifying racists through their reaction to certain types of food though. It’s an interesting way of going about things – although even old Joe McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities didn’t quite go as far as calling anyone who professed a love of red herrings a dirty commie rat.

Anyway, I have to declare an interest here and I’m ready to come out of the closet and declare it on this here blog. I loathe deep-fried food like, for instance, Kentucky Fried Chicken. So, does that make me the kind of bigot who

a) Hates the American military and all its mustached colonels
b) Hates all American states starting with a K
c) Hates all people who stereotypically eat fried chicken (or the PC crowd who frowns upon the mentioning of these stereotypes) or
d) Hates cross-eyed, cross-dressed and/or street-crossing chickens with a deep Southern drawl?

More to the point though, would I have learnt to love both deep-fried food and PC zealots more if my old nursery had reported my youthful ‘yuks’ to some early equivalent of the National Children’s Bureau? I suspect not. Though it might have installed a hungry wish to see all PC state informers in a thoroughly satisfying, deep-fried state.

(Picture lifted from the wonderful neatocoolville.blogspot.com)

This from the delightful book ‘Hopscotch & handbags” by Lucy Mangan:

“A few years ago, I was sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea with two friends. We had all been without sex or relationships for a very long time and were feeling decidedly like spinsters-of-the-parish. So we fell to discussing whether the time might have come tp purchase a vibrator (or rather, three. I’m very fond of both my friends, but I’m an old-fashioned girl at heart and I draw the line at sharing sex toys.)”

It is, as I said, a delightful and terribly insightful book (and look) into the world of maturing or, at least, growing girls. This column, however, is not about that book. It’s just that when I read the above quote, a slightly inconsequential thought hit me - to wit: Why is it perfectly normal these days for women to own any number of vibrators and other sex toys and talk about these matters openly, while men don’t have this option?

In other words, why are Tarzan or Popeye vibrators, or dildo duckies & dormice not merely accepted but ever so slightly sophisticated, while the whole concept of blow-up dolls and hand-held vagina replicas is embarrassing to the self esteem vanishing point of seriously disturbing?

I’m sure it has to do with image, and self-image. If we disregard the use of sex toys by couples, for a woman to own a vibrator or dildo is, in a way, to say: ‘I don’t need a man to get orgasms.’ The fact that you also don’t need toys to get an orgasm is irrevelent; the possession of a sex toy can be seen as evidence of ‘liberation’ and, as I already mentioned, a certain level of sophistication.

For men it is a different world. Men are supposed to be the hunters; the ones who need to be able to brag about their conquests. For a man to be found out as the owner of a blow-up doll or some other toy, is to be exposed as someone who can’t get a real woman.

So, where a woman can claim that she uses a sex toy because she has no need for men, a man will do everything he can to hide his toys because they are proof that he can’t get the women that he must need.

I know all of the above is an oversimplification, but not by very much, I think - and isn’t that a bit weird? In almost all other matters most men and women at least talk the talk, when it comes to emancipation. Walking the walk is, obviously, a different matter entirely.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice, to imagine a world in which three men could have the same kind of conversation about their sex toys as Lucy Mangan had with her female friends? Mind you, get these things out of the taboo sphere and you probably couldn’t stop men talking about these toys. Just look at the amount of time and energy men spend on discussing stereos, cars, mobile phones and any other damn gizmo you can think of.

So, if having sex toys would ever become normal (let alone even vaguely sophisticated) for men, it’s hard to see how they would ever stop talking long enough about those stupid toys for them to use them.

Here’s an interesting story for you:

Seventeen years ago, a couple of criminologists at the University of Maryland published an interesting paper about the 1976 District ban on handguns — a ban that was recently overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds it was inimical to the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms to protect themselves. The researchers employed a simple procedure: They tabulated all the suicides that had taken place in Washington between 1968 and 1987. Colin Loftin and David McDowall found that the gun ban correlated with an abrupt 25 percent decline in suicides in the city.

I’m not really sure if the suicide argument is a valid one in the ongoing dispute about the letter and the spirit of the Second Amendment but it is, at the very least, an interesting phenomenon. I have to declare an interest here: I’ve always been in favour of the decriminalisation of suicide, assisted suicide and euthanasia. I don’t think it’s the business of the state to interfere in these matters, apart from making sure that these assisted suicides and other forms of euthanasia are, in fact, that and not a way to do away with people who are ’surplus to requirements’ in the eyes of their relatives.

So, to me anyone who owns a gun should also have the right to use it to end his or her life. It’s a messy death and cleaning up after such a suicide will, no doubt, bring even more trauma to the surviving friends and relatives but that can’t be helped. Suicide will always be ‘messy’ and killing yourself in the privacy of your own home, with your own gun, is at least a less antisocial method than jumping from public buildings or bridges, or jumping in front of trains etctera.

Anyway, I think that it would be intellectually and morally dishonest for anti-gun (or pro-legislation) campaigners to play this suicide card. Their arguments rest – or should rest – in the realm of the common good. I.e., that the ownership of guns forms a threat to others within the community. To use these figures to argue that guns should be made illegal because their owners could use them to harm themselves is simply a silly form of interfering with a person’s right to make decisions that involve matters of his or her private life (and death.) Making guns illegal for this reason would make as much sense as banning the sale of rope.

Another interesting story in the British papers today, ticking all the right tabloid boxes:

MORE than £80million will be spent on new technology and other measures to crackdown on drugs in prisons, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said today. The Prison Service is to introduce mobile phone blockers in high-risk areas to stop inmates using smuggled handsets. Hi-tech chairs which scan inside the body for smuggled contraband will also be introduced at every jail in England and Wales by next March.

First, I’m dying to know: What are hi-tech chairs and how will they be used exactly to ’scan inside the body’. The ‘hi-tech’ bit seems to suggest that it will involve more than this chair’s leg being rammed into the arse of a prisoner by a strong & sadistic guard. Okay, so maybe it’s a chair that has been taught to do the arse-invasion by itself, while those (strong & sadistic) guards look on approvingly. Anyway, more details please.

I’m a bit baffled by the proud announcement that phone blockers will be installed. We all know that phones are almost as popular a contraband in prisons as drugs – and these phone blockers have been around for years and years. So, what kept our prison authorities from installing these things, let’s say, ten years ago? Did their staff protest against their installment, since it might complicate the drug smuggling deals they did on their phones with the inmates? Or is this yet another one of those baffling ‘human rights’ issues, where it may be against the law to own a mobile when you are a prisoner but whereby it is illegal for the government to interfere with people making calls on them?

Anyway, back to the major issue, which is that the government, by way of its Justice Secretary, have announced that they will waste yet another (comparatively smallish) amount of cash on the War on Drugs. I’m not sure why they even want to bother. All these people are already (more or less) safely in locked up prison, so it’s not very likely that they will be able to be a menace to the citizenry at large, taking out their car for a spin of driving-while-drugged-to-the-gills, or committing further (outside) crimes to feed their habit.

Me, if I were working in a prison I would prefer all the inmates to be drugged-up and too happy & uncoordinated to create any problems, apart from the occasional overdose.

Anyway, as with all other campaign in this stupid and wasteful War on Drugs, I think it is safe to predict that this one will be an abject failure as well. There are always these cute stories in the paper, about pigeons being trained to fly in drugs, or family members trying to smuggle in stuff inside their babies’ nappies.

While all of these things are, no doubt, also happening, it is worth recalling that a lot of the smuggling and dealing is done by the prison staff itself. In other words, it’s one thing to try to save a sinking ship, out on the high seas, but quite another to think you can ever succeed at it, while half of the crew are busy drilling ever more holes in the walls at the same time.

To put it bluntly, if the government and the Justice Secretary would really be serious about climbing down on drugs use in England’s prisons, they would have to go after all those corrupt prison officers as well. That’s possible, in principle, but you know what? I’m pretty sure that the building of all the extra prisons you’d need to lock up all those prison officials who are involved in the smuggling and selling of drugs, would cost a Hell of a lot more than the measly £80million which Her Majesty’s government is prepared to spend on this latest, ill-fated campaign.

The world press and most of the world’s politicians have been condemning Robert Mugabe and all his works for quite some time now – and though in some cases there has been more than a whiff of kettles calling pots black, they have been right to do so. Mugabe is a monstrous waste of space and in any half-decent universe he would have been forced to suffer as much and die as painfully and slowly as the people and the very country he has ruled and abused for so long.

I don’t need to tell you that the universe doesn’t do decent, or just, or fair. So, most of what has happened in the Zimbabwe case is that various organisations, the media and our show-boating politicians have been making angry & hurt & concerned noises on camera – and almost none more so than the Labour party, which still forms Her Majesty’s Grossly Incompetent government.

Mostly incompetent, that is, since Britain’s Home Office have been sending a lot of letters lately which didn’t get lost in the mail, were not abandoned on trains or stored on now vanished comaputer disks – and more’s the pity, and much more’s the shame:

Letters obtained by The Observer show that the Home Office continues to order failed Zimbabwean asylum seekers to return home in the face of mounting violence. A removal letter, sent at the end of May to an exiled London-based member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, states: ‘The support that you have been provided with is to be discontinued … You should note that there is no right to appeal against this decision … You must now leave the United Kingdom.’

It’s one of those questions that keeps popping up when you look at human history: Who are the foulest creatures on earth? Monsters like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and, for the moment still on a smaller scale, Robert Mugabe, or the persons, institutions and states that tolerate, condone and sometimes even actively support them? To a certain point monsters just follow where their perverse nature and sick minds lead them. Most of them may follow these urges willingly, gleefully even, but insanity is most probably part of the whole sorry package.

There are no such ‘excuses’ for the ones who choose to live with and accommodate these bloody dictators. Hitler’s vision of a pure, Aryan race was as fatally flawed as it was murderously obscene – but how would you have described a British government at that time who would have supported this policy? Then Prime Minister Chamberlain was happy to sign an agreement which delivered some of Germany’s neighbours into the hands of the Third Reich.

What if he or his successor, like the Home Office now, would have gone further and would have written a letter to the Jewish refugees that had escaped to England, politely informing them that they had to return to Germany and to the waiting ovens, because: ‘The support that you have been provided with is to be discontinued … You should note that there is no right to appeal against this decision … You must now leave the United Kingdom.’?

History has been unkind to the memory of Prime Minister Chamberlain but it should spit on the graves of all those inside the Home Office and the rest of the government who sent these letters and rubber-stamped this despicable policy.

The dubious pop group Nazareth once recorded a song called ‘Love hurts’ which became quite undeservedly famous.

These days, it’s not just love that hurts, though – not with the cost of oil being nowhere near a barrel of laughs:

Last week Angelina Eversole, 34, from Kentucky, was charged with selling prostitution services for a $100 (£50) pre-paid petrol voucher, effectively offering herself for 25 gallons of unleaded. Mrs Eversole’s arrest marks the latest consequence of the rising petrol price, which has increased 39 per cent in 12 months.

Ah yes, the oldest of professions paying homage to the mighty oil dollar – or petrol voucher, in a pinch. The meter is running, indeed.

I wonder how this might influence the romantic world of love, or the passionate realms of sex. Will we ever be able to record post-coital conversations like this?

“Was it as good for you as it was for OPEC?”

Or:

“Did the world move for you too? No, those were US army tanks rolling into Saudi Arabia.”

Interesting times, my friends, interesting times indeed.