Four years after their famous treadmill video, which was watched over 40 million times on Youtube, OK Go has made an even more impressive one:
It is based on the 1987 German art video Der Lauf Der Dinge.
Click here for the making of.
In Nederland kennen we sinds enige tijd identificatieplicht bij het stemmen. Dit lijkt logisch en terecht, aangezien het paspoort je bewijs van burgerschap is, en, op de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen na, politieke rechten als stemmen voorbehouden zijn aan Nederlandse staatsburgers. De concrete maatregel is bovendien doorgevoerd om het iedereen mogelijk te maken te stemmen buiten het dichtstbijzijnde stemlokaal, teneinde de opkomst te verhogen.
Er zijn echter nogal wat problemen met deze maatregel. Ten eerste: grote groepen kiezers vallen buiten de boot, omdat ze zich om wat voor reden dan ook niet kunnen identificeren. Bij de verkiezingen voor het Europees Parlement vorig jaar konden zo 150.000 mensen hun stem niet uitbrengen. De verwachting is dat er morgen 200.000 mensen hun stem niet zullen kunnen uitbrengen. Ten tweede: wanneer je in Nederland een paspoort wil, moet je je vingerafdrukken afstaan ten behoeve van een landelijke database. Wil je dit niet, dan krijg je geen paspoort. Daarmee zijn in Nederland je politieke rechten gekoppeld aan het onder dwang afstaan van je vingerafdrukken. Aaron Boudewijn is onlangs tegen deze bizarre situatie in beroep gegaan.
De burgerrechtenorganisatie Vrijbit heeft daarom een protestbrief opgesteld, die je kunt uitprinten en ondertekenen. Je kunt ervoor kiezen om niet te stemmen (dat raad ik af), maar ook om “onder protest” te stemmen. Dit uit solidariteit met al diegenen wiens stemrecht hun door de identificatieplicht wordt ontnomen. De voorzitter van het stembureau is verplicht om aantekening van zo’n protest te maken in het verbaal van bevindingen van het stemlokaal, en dit is openbaar.
De brief vind je hier (pdf).
Hoe strikt deze regels worden toegepast bleek vorig jaar in de ID-plichtige experiment gemeentes waar mensen geweigerd werden als hun paspoort één dag was verlopen, als mensen die elkaar al hun hele leven kennen weigerden om de stembureauleden hun ID-bewijs te tonen, zelfs kinderen waarvan een ouder voorzitter was van het stembureau mochten hun stem niet uitbrengen als ze weigerden om met een ID-bewijs aan hun ouders hun identiteit te bewijzen.
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In de praktijk blijkt dat door deze drempel volgens gegevens vorig jaar zo’n 150.000 mensen geen gebruik konden maken van hun stemrecht. De komende verkiezingen zullen dat er, volgens het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, zo’n 200.000 zijn. Dat aantal zal naar verwachting alsmaar groter worden naarmate meer mensen geen geldig identiteitsbewijs meer kunnen krijgen omdat zij weigeren om hun biometrische kenmerken in een digitaal overheidsregister te laten opslaan, of überhaupt weigeren deze gegevens af te staan voor opname in de reisdocumenten zelf.
De uitslag van de verkiezingen gaat daardoor mede bepaald worden door uitsluiting van bepaalde groepen uit de bevolking: mensen die geen geld hebben om een identiteitsbewijs te bekostigen, mensen die niet in staat zijn iedere 5 jaar twee keer naar het gemeentehuis te gaan en mensen die volkomen in hun recht staan om de vingerafdruk/gelaatsscan eis van de Paspoortwet in rechte aan te vechten.
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Het AD maakte vrijdag 26-2-2010 op de voorpagina melding van deze misstand met de publicatie dat een man uit Pijnacker een rechtszaak bij de Raad van State heeft aangespannen omdat hij uit geldgebrek om een nieuw paspoort aan te vragen niet zou mogen stemmen.
Er is ook sprake van rechtsongelijkheid en discriminatie, want wie geen vingerafdrukken wil afgeven ter verkrijging van een paspoort /IDkaart wordt de mogelijkheid ontnomen om verandering van politieke bestel te bewerkstelligen, met uitzondering van gewetensbezwaarden die over een rijbewijs beschikken.
There’s oddly little attention to this development in Dutch media. Yet, a political power shift has just occurred in Turkey, and its implications are unknown.
The detention of top military officers in Turkey last week was nothing less than a quiet piece of history. The military, long considered untouchable in Turkey, was pushed from its political pedestal with startling finality.
The moment, years in the making, was more whimper than bang. But it still raises an existential question for this NATO member: What sort of country will Turkey be?
The question goes to the very heart of modern Turkey, a Muslim democracy whose military was a potent force in the country’s political life for most of its 86-year history. Its strictly secular ideology permeated all aspects of public life, including the education system, the judiciary and the bureaucracy. The military, long considered the ultimate guardian of that secularism, has overthrown elected governments to protect it.
Not only has the military been politically defanged, but it has also proved unable or unwilling to fight back. Dozens of officers were detained last week, and several senior ones were arrested. Top military leaders met and managed to produce only a brief statement, never mind a coup.
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Turkey is moving into uncharted territory, causing deep anxiety among millions of secular Turks who fear that the country’s domineering prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a former Islamist who won 47 percent of the vote in the last election and now controls many of the country’s institutions — will trample their rights.
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How Turkey resolves this identity crisis will reverberate well beyond its borders. The country has the second largest army in NATO after the United States. It is strategically placed, with the former Soviet Union to the north and the Middle East to the south. It is a candidate for membership in the European Union. Decades of growth have made it the seventh largest economy in Europe.
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On Monday of last week, the Turkish authorities began detaining military officers and by the end of the week had more than 60 in custody, including two top retired generals.“Now the army is completely pacified, eliminated as a power from the political scene,” said E. Haldun Solmazturk, a retired general. “Now the military is touchable.”
That is a profound historical change. Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 by an army general, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who imposed radical changes in language and habits on a largely illiterate, agrarian society. The military, together with the judiciary and state bureaucracy, wielded immense power, guarding Turkish democracy “as if the country was a perpetually immature child,” said Halil Berktay, a history professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
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But to Mr. Erdogan’s critics, the arrests look suspiciously like raw efforts to silence the opposition. And now that he has control over most of the levers of power — the presidency, the government bureaucracy and Parliament — they worry that his impulses will be unchecked.
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A looming fear is that the last remaining institution with any power to oppose him, the judiciary, will soon fall to his Islamic supporters, who are unlikely to be less ideological than their rigidly secular predecessors.
Although I have nothing in principle against a Turkish entrance into the European Union (EU), I think the EU will really have to ponder whether its wants a huge country with this kind of political instability inside its borders.
That’s the CDA for you. De tweede helft van de titel van deze post is natuurlijk tendentieus, maar ze weigeren in ieder geval categorisch om samenwerking met de PVV uit te sluiten. De PvdA, echter, is off-limits. Nu heb ik met dat eerste geen moeite – ik ben tegen een cordon sanitaire – maar als je het op de keper beschouwd, is het wel bizar dat het voor het CDA ondemocratisch is om een ondemocratische partij uit te sluiten, maar volstrekt democratisch om een democratische partij uit te sluiten.
Demissionair premier en CDA-leider Jan Peter Balkenende wil na de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen van 9 juni niet regeren met de PvdA.Hij noemde een nieuwe coalitie met de PvdA van Wouter Bos dinsdag bij RTL Z niet geloofwaardig. ‘De kiezer zou het ook niet begrijpen als je nu het kabinet laat vallen om een paar maanden later weer door te gaan’, aldus Balkenende.
Ook PvdA-leider en oud-vicepremier Wouter Bos zei maandag al dat hij voorlopig even niet moet denken aan een nieuwe coalitie met het CDA. Hij heeft er zijn ‘bekomst’ van hoe het de afgelopen jaren is gegaan toen hij in het kabinet te maken had met het ‘harde, conservatieve en neoliberale’ deel van het CDA.
Documentary-filmmaker Annabel Park has started a new “grass roots”-movement, which is called, in obvious reaction to the Tea Party, the Coffee Party. They have launched a website, are becoming a big hit on Facebook, and hundreds of chapters are being set up. It seems that most of its supporters are former Obama-supporters who have become disgruntled with their President. They are targetting the same kind of negative feelings about the American government as the Tea party and in some ways are seeking cooperation, but they seem to be more moderate and reasonable. It all started with a Facebook message from Park some weeks ago:
let’s start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss ‘em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let’s get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.
Then many of her friends replied and before she knew it she was starting a party. The goal became to:
promote civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engage the government not as an enemy but as the collective will of the people, push leaders to enact the progressive change for which 52.9 percent of the country voted in 2008. (Washington Post)
I’m always fascinated by how quick these kind of citizen action groups can organise and grow so fast in the United States. With the use of a professional website, Facebook and Twitter a snowball effect occurs, supporters are found and chapters are build at an incredible pace. This new movement makes me wonder, what is the future of these kinds of organisations and how will their relation to the political parties develop?
The New York Times has an article on the Coffee Party:
It had nearly 40,000 members as of Monday afternoon, but the numbers were growing quickly — about 11,000 people had signed on as fans since the morning.
“I’m in shock, just the level of energy here,” said the founder, Annabel Park, a documentary filmmaker who lives outside Washington. “In the beginning, I was actively saying, ‘Get in touch with us, start a chapter.’ Now I can’t keep up. We have 300 requests to start a chapter that I have not been able to respond to.”
The slogan is “Wake Up and Stand Up.” The mission statement declares that the federal government is “not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges we face as Americans.”
This summer, Ms. Park said, the party will hold a convention in the Midwest, with a slogan along the lines of “Meet Me in the Middle.” The party has inspired the requisite jokes: why not a latte party, a chai party, a Red Bull party? But Ms. Park said that while the Coffee Party — and certainly the name — was formed in reaction to the Tea Party, the two agree on some things, like a desire for fiscal responsibility and a frustration with Congress.
“We’re not the opposite of the Tea Party,” Ms. Park, 41, said. “We’re a different model of civic participation, but in the end we may want some of the same things.”
Here’s a video featuring Annabel Park, from the Coffee Party website:
The New York Times article here. The Washington Post article here.
Our second month online (well, really the first, as we started late January) went well beyond our own expectations, both in terms of content and number of pageviews. In the following, some highlights of February 2010.
Mid-february, Dutch law student Aaron Boudewijn boldly refused to have his fingerprint taken up in a national database - a legal requirement in the Netherlands if you want to have a passport. Our blogging on the matter attracted many readers, presenting us with a boost in pageviews. For Dutch readers: nuttige links naar Aaron Boudewijns Twitter, burgerrechtenorganisatie Vrijbit, Radio 1 en RTV Utrecht interviews zijn te vinden hier en hier. Na enkele dagen opende Boudewijn een eigen weblog, vind de link hier. Hoe één en ander formeel aan te pakken wanneer je ook weigert om je vingerafdrukken af te staan vind je hier.
Pageviews r
eally went through the roof, though, with our blogging on the American fascination with Dutch speed skating culture during the Vancouver Olympics. The Crazy Dutch & Their Speed Skating was our top post in February. Check the follow-up here.
The elections for the municipal councils in the Netherlands on March 3 turned out to be a gift that kept on giving: in our Gemeenteraadsverkiezingen Idiotie series, the most silly and ridiculous tv and YouTube ads from local political parties everywhere were collected. See them here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The Dutch Balkenende IV administration fell on February 20. Reactions of the world were collected here. American blogger Matthew Yglesias commented on the breakdown of the Balkenende IV cabinet, and we responded here.
Before the fall of the cabinet, conservative CDA ideologue Cisca Joldersma threatened to spoil the fun for marihuana lovers everywhere. We responded here.
The increasingly disappointing record of President Obama in terms of civil rights was further explored in a blog about the presidential assassination of American citizens program and the anger at the UK for releasing torture evidence. More about Obama’s use of executive power here.
The personal faith of President Obama, and the consequences for his appeal among religious Americans, was explored here and here
.
Maartenp gave his top 5 reasons why Sarah Palin will not be the next U.S. president – we’ll see whether his predictions will be true. The future of the GOP was covered here.
The link between Lost, torture and the ticking bomb scenario was explored here.
We evaluated Jürgen Habermas’ critical stance towards the postsecular condition here.
In electronic music, we blogged about Four Tet, Jokers of the Scene, Miss Kittin & The Hacker, Kraftwerk, The Knife, Pantha du Prince, Underworld and Brian Eno and sweet remixes of old-time classics (including a-ha’s “Take On Me”).
We jumped on the Die Antwoord bandwagon on February 6 – arguably the internet hype of the month.
Lots of cool photography on the blog. See cockroaches doing science here, a stunning series of carnival pictures from around the world here, Chernobyl pictures here. Cool videos included one of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking singing about the universe, and a 7-minute guided tour through the International Space Station.
Know Your Meme, a collection of every Internet gag, hoax, YouTube video, or whatever that has ever attracted attention online, was referred to here. A huge post on Internet nostalgia, with lots of interesting links, here.
Of course, there was way more than can be summarized here. Please check out the tag cloud and category list on the right side of the screen for more! And also leave a comment, we’d really appreciate that. All in all it was a pretty darn good month. Be sure to keep visiting the Light Sound Dimension mainpage!
