And the next president will be....

[Catsquotl]

Who the F cares.

We lost our government last week.
Our president who has been the longest reigning president since effur finally had enough. He decided that a long paid summer holiday on the tax payers expense would be the the right thing for him to do before leaving politics all together.

This man who is as slippery as an eel in a bucket of snot decided that continuing to allow refugees to bring over their close family (spouses and kids) is just to much of a principal matter to continue his government to come to term a final time.
Off course he hasn't made sure every parent who suffered the loss of their child due to his enlightened way of delegating away the way people with non dutch sounding names were extra and falsely scrutinized. but that's beside the point.

AH well,
On to new elections and a farmers party who will undoubtedly become one of the greatest and then fuck everything up even worse..
As they say. The road to hell is paved with good intentions..

A farmer attacked a wild wolf the other day, the mayor sanctioned the killing of the beast.
We only had 3 or 4 wild wolves in the Netherlands
, slowly made their way back here over the last few years.

I think a farmers party will see the end of those vile creatures again in this neck of the woods.
Easing of the use of pesticide regulations... Check.
supporting monoculture farming over diverse nature area's? check..

Ah well.
If I was watching it as a comedy I'd cry because of the bad taste...

[Wind]

And here in Finland we've just got the most right wing government in ages, although per American standards that might be still more in the mid center or even "left". Our right wing party together with the nutty nationalist Finns party formed a government, although they needed a few smaller parties to join too. Just half a decade ago we had the worst government possibly ever and it wasn't even in this right wing oriented one. Now besides that we have also become a NATO vassal country as before we used to be proud of our relatively neutral stance here although we were still rubbing shoulders with USA.

Speaking of NATO, Joe Biden is coming to visit us later this week. That's going to be a huge media circus and I can imagine what might be going on in the border now with us and Russia, because we are part of NATO now too. People believe that NATO brings them peace, but I see that it only brings militarization.

[Chuckie]

And here in Finland we've just got the most right wing government in ages, although per American standards that might be still more in the mid center or even "left". Our right wing party together with the nutty nationalist Finns party formed a government, although they needed a few smaller parties to join too. Just half a decade ago we had the worst government possibly ever and it wasn't even in this right wing oriented one. Now besides that we have also become a NATO vassal country as before we used to proud of our relatively neutral stance here although we were still rubbing shoulders with USA.

Speaking of NATO, Joe Biden is coming to visit us later this week. That's going to be a huge media circus and I can imagine what might be going on in the border now with us and Russia, because we are part of NATO now too. People believe that NATO brings them peace, but I see that it only brings militarization.

I guess the big question is,"Where is Putin willing to stop?"

[Fred Steeves]

Who the F cares.

We lost our government last week.
Our president who has been the longest reigning president since effur finally had enough. He decided that a long paid summer holiday on the tax payers expense would be the the right thing for him to do before leaving politics all together.

This man who is as slippery as an eel in a bucket of snot decided that continuing to allow refugees to bring over their close family (spouses and kids) is just to much of a principal matter to continue his government to come to term a final time.
Off course he hasn't made sure every parent who suffered the loss of their child due to his enlightened way of delegating away the way people with non dutch sounding names were extra and falsely scrutinized. but that's beside the point.

AH well,
On to new elections and a farmers party who will undoubtedly become one of the greatest and then fuck everything up even worse..
As they say. The road to hell is paved with good intentions..

A farmer attacked a wild wolf the other day, the mayor sanctioned the killing of the beast.
We only had 3 or 4 wild wolves in the Netherlands
, slowly made their way back here over the last few years.

I think a farmers party will see the end of those vile creatures again in this neck of the woods.
Easing of the use of pesticide regulations... Check.
supporting monoculture farming over diverse nature area's? check..

Ah well.
If I was watching it as a comedy I'd cry because of the bad taste...

Eelco, you're a good person to further elaborate on this. From what I've seen over here anyway, have an affinity for your smaller farmers over there who look to be being driven out of business, just like is standard fare over here.

But then until your new thread I had never heard of "monoculture farming", so had to quickly educate myself on it just a tad, what's the overall story on how you see this whole mess? And who do you feel holds the high moral ground and why, or is it not quite that simple in your view?

And here in Finland we've just got the most right wing government in ages, although per American standards that might be still more in the mid center or even "left". Our right wing party together with the nutty nationalist Finns party formed a government, although they needed a few smaller parties to join too. Just half a decade ago we had the worst government possibly ever and it wasn't even in this right wing oriented one. Now besides that we have also become a NATO vassal country as before we used to be proud of our relatively neutral stance here although we were still rubbing shoulders with USA.

Right and left wing used to mean something over here, but it doesn't any more - in the establishment mainstream anyway. It's all just varying degrees of right wing pitted against each other to the death, with only cursory differences residing on the periphery. I'm not going to try and speak for people in your neck of the woods, you would know much better, is a uni party developing over there as well?

People believe that NATO brings them peace, but I see that it only brings militarization.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBPrvDY6hzo

[Catsquotl]

Eelco, you're a good person to further elaborate on this. From what I've seen over here anyway, have an affinity for your smaller farmers over there who look to be being driven out of business, just like is standard fare over here.

But then until your new thread I had never heard of "monoculture farming", so had to quickly educate myself on it just a tad, what's the overall story on how you see this whole mess? And who do you feel holds the high moral ground and why, or is it not quite that simple in your view?

Well there's trees and then there's the wood.
No moral high-grounds anywhere in sight.

I realize that for many people the dutch farmers and their political victory seems like a breath of fresh air in our rather dumbed down political landscape.
However All is not good. One of the biggest political parties and the provider of many a president was a farmers oriented party that now lost a lot of their voters to the new farmers party.

Also to keep in business as a farmer you either need to be heavily subsidized, have a sizable amount of land (often under morgage) and utilize many a modern (pesticide rich and monoculture like) planting schedule, not to mention the milk quota's en methane gas tax thing for being able to keep cows in a way that is profitable.

All this means that those small spots of nature we try to preserve here, are under constant stress of having their "rights" diminished in lieu of some farmer that is farming close bye. The whole farmer uprising if you will had to do mainly with regulations around the amount of nitrogen produced.. Which mainly means that the farmers in uproar were meat producers and those who "need" want to use large amounts of fertilizer.

I have already long lost my faith in any kind of politics as I've shared on other occasions, I just felt it was a cop out of our late president Mark, to let his cabinet blow up over something as silly as symbol politics that dichotomizes the refugee "problems" when his involvement in that subsection has already caused many a heartache.

-----
Amnesty International: 'Surcharges affair in the Netherlands is a violation of human rights' The Dutch allowances affair is a violation of human rights, Amnesty International states in a report. The human rights organization has investigated the algorithms used by the Dutch tax authorities in the implementation of childcare allowances, and concludes that there is ethnic profiling and discrimination based on social class. According to Amnesty International, there is a chance that such a scandal will happen again, also in other countries.
-----
around 1200 kids were taken from their homes through the above mentioned practices.
Which among other transgressions should have been enough to kick him out long ago.

Will the next government do better? I highly doubt it. For starters they will have to make some decisions on how and why we aren't able to reach our climate goals for starters, which will grind the whole of the decision making in important matters to a halt. Oh and wildlife will go down, as our farming methods are rather selective in what kind of animal life and vegetation will be allowed to thrive and which species are no longer welcome, i mean pests and weeds(no not the kind that is sort of legal over here...)...

[Wind]

I'm not going to try and speak for people in your neck of the woods, you would know much better, is a uni party developing over there as well?

That's a good question, Fred.

We have many political parties here and that's a good thing for democracy.
The biggest parties are the one on the right which is the National Coalition Party , the nationalist Finns party and the Social Democrats.

Usually the left heavily disagrees with the right, especially on economic issues and how they should be handled. Then in some things there is almost unilateral agreement like when it came to joining NATO fast last year. There is a lot of disagreement and it's often a tug of war between the right and the left or center middle.