MOVING OUT

Not out of The Hague, mind you, but out of WordPress though. The increadible ease of Posterous had made me transport the blog over there. It’ll make it easier for me to keep updating more regularly, mainly. Visit the new blog on ilja.posterous.com.

Why eternal compromise breeds absolute corruption

I’ve always found it difficult to formulate, or adhere to, a set ideology. It’s why, after ten years, I left the Dutch Labour Party PvdA, the party that saw fit to draft a new program of principle on the panic of the post-9/11 months. It was truly pathetic.

But my unease with the social democrats was much deeper: although I sympathise with a lot of their humanistic viewpoints, I find great fault with their general view of society, and the citizen: it’s paternalistic, condescending, and therefore eventually ignorant. Unfortunately, this problem is not endemic to the PvdA – it is shared by Dutch politics as a whole.

Holland is a democracy. At least, that is what it’s called. In reality, we have only one moment in four years to decide on the fate of the nation. And that really isn’t a choice at all. First of all, we vote for a party, never a particular candidate. But much more importantly, a government is usually made up of a coalition of at least three parties. That means compromise, but also that the viewpoints that were so vehemently debated during election time now suddenly aren’t that important any more. So if you’ve voted for a certain party because of a certain issue, you’re quite likely to feel cheated.

What it breeds is contempt: contempt on the part of the electorate for the whole craft of politics, contempt on the part of the political élite for the electorate inbetween elections. And it truly is an élite. Because no candidate can ever be targeted or elected specifically, even astonishingly incompetent people can languish in prominent positions for as long as the party doesn’t abandon them. There have been several instances of this, and it seems to get worse. Again, this isn’t helping politicians’ credibility along.

So we have a set of organisations that can’t really be called to responsibility, that divides jobs up among themselves and their friends according to the whim of the day, that sees the chance  to ignore issues (the EU vote, the whole question of integration and immigration) that are critical to society and that is unwilling to even listen to alternative voices.

There’s a word for that. It’s not democracy – it’s corruption. Worst of all, this rule of expediency has now brought to power a breed of politician that seems to have no respect for the fundamental principles of our society and its basic rights. I’m usually a paragon of optimism, but the situation appears to become desperate. We could never claim we didn’t see it coming, though.

And hello, The Hague!

Today was our day of moving from Amsterdam to The Hague, from the musty, smoggy inner city to the seafront (or as close as we could afford). I had been enormously nervous last week, with some financial matters still not resolved, the wrong tiles being delivered and whatnot, but Marieke had proved herself to be an absolute tower of strength. Today, it appeared, the roles were reversed – while Marieke gazed in horror as the removal men seemingly played bowls with her possessions, I strangely enough didn’t really care at some fundamental level. The removal men weren’t the quickest people and turned out to become positively riotous when it turned out that they had to carry our stuff in by hand instead of by using a lift (their company clearly hadn’t informed them). Luckily, at some point my sister-in-law appeared and started helping, and her appearance clearly inspired the men to carry two boxes instead of the single one she carried, and generally helped them to get on with it a bit more. Still, I believe I carried more than any of them.

Some time ago I told myself that after my first day in the Hague I was going to take a swim in the sea. This, I am now going to do. If you shouldnt’ hear from me again, the shark problem in the North Sea is clearly more prevalent than people had sofar imagined…

What’s in a name?…

This guy already regrets the naming of his ‘authentically Austrian grill’. Fate sometimes plays cruel jokes…

Apple, get out of my hair

I’ve been an Apple user since, oh, 1987 or so. That’s a full twenty years and then some. In all, it’s been a happy cooperation. Some highs, some lows – but not that many, honestly. I’ve always treasured my macs, defended them even in times that it wasn’t all that easy to defend them. But the quality of the machines and the OS have been such of late that I’ve had little reason to complain. Well, apart from that disintegrating hard drive, maybe.

There has been one thing all these years that continues to bug me, though. It is summarily summed up in three words: Apple Knows Best. The whole Mac OS, the Mac ‘experience’ so to speak, is riddled with this issue and whilst it has become far less prevalent in recent years, this mentality still exerts its influence over how your Mac works and how you work with your Mac.

I remember the times in which it was easier to get into the Bank of England’s vaults than the innards of your Macintosh, when Apple repairmen would be forbidden to devulge what precisely had broken inside your cherished machine and had to replace whole components instead of single parts – with you holding the bill.

Nowadays all that has passed, but there is one particularly irritating trait of OS X that still makes life difficult, and that is the OS’s tendency to decide the urgency of tasks for you. Let me give an example. When I am doing something in iTunes and insert a CD, it assumes that that CD has become the focal point of my existence drags me to its content list, irrespective of what I was doing – even if I were working in a totally different application which might not necessarily be less important to me than the playlist for Jeff Wayne’s excellent musical version of War of the Worlds.

It is the same thing with other applications, and I honestly can’t stand my machine, a TOOL, prioritising on my behalf. So Apple, in the unlikely case you’re reading this: STOP IT!