Tariffs and Africa

President Obama on his visit to Ghana: “The African continent is a place of extraordinary promise as well as challenges. We’re not going to be able to fulfill those promises unless we see better governance.”

We’re not going to fulfill those promises either by clinging to our tariffs and dumping our agriculture products so cheaply on the African market either though. I know that governments like to point out the problems with corruption in many African countries as a way of saying that we in the Western world can’t do anything to stop poverty as long as the people in African countries live in corrupt systems. We also like to throw hissy fits when it comes to tariffs imposed against our business.

I’m not sure where I stand exactly on the political spectrum of things: am I a socialist or a liberal or an  – in theory impossible –  hybrid of the two? I do know that when reading Adam Smiths‘ Wealth of the Nations (which gave birth to economic liberalism) I wonder how economic liberalism has strayed so far from its Genesis. Smith posed the thesis that a free market would be more beneficial to society and as a testament to his vision: with society he meant the society of the entire world. Nowadays we like to preach about liberty and economic freedom but we refrain from actually practising it. We’re forcing African countries to accept our produce, but are imposing walls when it comes to African produce entering the European market. Not very liberal and I’m not sure that’s the kind of European Union our founding father Jean Monnet envisioned when he drafted his plans for Europe.

Dropping the tariffs we impose against agricultural products from African countries and stopping the subsidising of our own farmers (which we are forbidding African countries to do themselves) would mean that our European farmers would face very difficult times indeed. It would mean loss of jobs, loss of income and it generally would be a BAD thing for the European economy.  It would also be the RIGHT thing to do. Sometimes going against your own best interest in order to do something in the best interest of the world as a whole is the thing to do even if it is a hard sell to your own voters. We won’t feel the immediate positive impact of such an act, but it will make the difference in 50 years.

To punish or not to punish

Yesterday I had my class of 12-year-olds for the last time. I wanted to play a historical game with them and I had (painstakingly I might add) created a game of cards for them to play.

Most of them loved it, but a group of five kids could not have cared less. It’s not the caring less that bugged me as it’s very hard for the kids to concentrate during the last week of school when all their teachers could care less too, but the fact that they destroyed the cards I had so lovingly made. I arranged a date with detention for them. Tomorrow after two they will report to me and I will give them an asignment to complete while in detention. But I’m wondering what kind of asignment I should give them. Make them write the same sentence over and over again as is currently the rage in school? Or help them prepare for a test for which I know they won’t study on their own so this dentention could be all the studying they would do for this?

The first would be double punishment: take away their free time and make them do a crappy asingment, but it’s not very constructive.

The last would be a punishment that could turn out to be a reward when they perform better on their test then they would have done otherwise. Maybe it’s too constructive…

I’ll think of something tonight I hope…

European Elections

Last thursday the Dutch could vote for the European Parliament. The last couple of years we have turned from being the  champions of Europe into the biggest Eurosceptics on the continent. Which is a strange, strange development if you take our history of being an open and tranquil country into acount.  And I must say, to me it’s also a scary development. Not scary in the sense of ‘the world as we know it is going to collapse’, but scary nonetheless. The next decade in Dutch politics is going to be a decade of instability and uncertainty.

Suddenly there’s talk about there being a single Dutch identity, that all Dutch share, but that outsiders try to undermine (read: there are too many muslims here). Suddenly people can swing from voting for a  party from the left end of the political spectrum to voting for a party on the right end. Alexander Pechtold, the leader of D’66, a liberal party that leans to the left, spoke in an interview with a Dutch paper about a conversation he had after giving a lecture. A young man came up to him to tell him that he thought it was a good speach and how he was going to vote either for Alexander Pechtold or for Geert Wilders (party: PVV). For your information, Geert Wilders is the platinum-dyed politician who thinks the Koran is as evil as Mein Kampf.

Thursday proved that a lot of people turned away from the traditional parties in The Netherlands. D’66, the party that is most unequivocally pro-European and PVV, the party that’s most unequivocally anti-Europe were the big winners of the night. In less then two years there will be elections for the Dutch parliament. Will Wilders win big in those? Polls indicate that his will become the largest party in The Netherlands. Polls also show  that the forming of any coalition will be immensly tricky. To  form a majority coalition parties will need a combined total of 76 seats in parliament. All, but two major parties have ruled out Wilders as a coalition-partner.

We’ll have to wait and see, but it looks like there’s a lot of instability in the future of Dutch politics.

 

I voted for D’ 66 by the way, I’m very, very much pro-Europe.

Prop 8: the Plessy vs. Ferguson of our day

 

Me too! Me too!

Following the ridiculousness that was the passing of Prop8 and the upholding of it in the California Supreme Court some links:

Photogallery: Day of Decision

We won’t back down

“It will be OK”

Schwarzenegger: Prop. 8 Will Be Overturned

Justice Moreno — The Lone Dissenter

The Big Gay Chip on my Shoulder

Disappointed, but gay as ever

Let’s face it, in this struggle the right side is not the Christian right side:

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.’

It’s high time the US starts to think about what seperation of state and church truly means. In The Netherlands, where I live, we don’t recognise church-only marriages. You have to get married at our version of city hall to have a legally recognised marriage. After that you can have your marriage blessed in a church ceremony if you want, but that’s not a legal marriage if you didn’t stop at city hall first. My husband and I didn’t have a religious ceremony, just the wedding at city hall, which was a nice and warm ceremony. I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t be implicated in the US. Next to the fact that you’re denying a significant portion of your citizens the basic right to commit themselves before the law to the person of their choice you shouldn’t even want to have religion interfere like this with your constitution and the premises on which you build your country. You shouldn’t want majorities to dictate the way minorities can live their lives.

And really, if God thought homosexuality was such a huge and unforgiveable sin there would be more about it in the bible. Jesus would have said something, it would be one of the commandments, not just a footnote in Leviticus along with putting your woman in a tent for two months if she gave birth to a girl because that would make her more unclean then giving birth to a boy. If you want America to live according to the literal text of the bible: better start building some tent camps for your women.

This photo broke my heart, this engaged couple now has to live with the realisation that they won't be able to get married for now

 

So heartbreaking

Yeah you are!!!

A victory for traditional marriage according to the freakshow at protectmarriage.com/