Friday, March 21, 2014

Darkness falls - 2

I'm not principally against Geert Wilders. I think any democratic system needs its outliers and maverics. And I'm for freedom of speech. But I found the whole scene uncanny. It's not about Geert Wilders, it's about some strange daemon that has settled on out time.

Washington Post + Sportpalast speech
At a party meeting Wednesday evening in The Hague, where his Freedom Party is set to win the most votes in municipal elections, Wilders asked supporters whether they wanted “more or fewer” Moroccans in the Netherlands. 
His supporters chanted back: “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!” before breaking into applause. 
“Good, we’re going to take care of that,” Wilders said.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

The end of this blog is near

In the winter holidays I read this blog post by Joe Moran that extrapolates the number of blog-posts in time. This is a decreasing number. His prediction is:
As another year ends, I note that I have once again managed to post less on this blog than last year. At this rate I am on course to achieve complete radio silence by 2017.
Inspired by this prediction I did the same extrapolation for my own blog. This is the result. My blog will cease to update somewhere in 2015:

Joe Moran does not mind the slow decline of his weblog:
Perhaps this is no bad thing. One of the many salutary bits of advice in William Strunk and E.B. White's classic book The Elements of Style is that no writer should offer their opinions 'gratuitously' because to do so is 'to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case'. 
And maybe the slow decline of my own weblog would be no bad thing either. One look at the statistics is depressing enough:
The most popular post is the one where people erroneously search for drugs and prostitution in Rotterdam. Imagine how disappointed they must be when they read a page about psychogeography! And I'm quite sure that:
Probably my weblog is too inoffensive to draw much attention. I should include more questionable content: