Live From Brussels

Down with America!

Well know Belgian blogger Luc Van Braekel reports on the newest song by Raymond Van Het Groenewoud, a popular singer in Flanders who's been around for years.  The title of this new masterpiece?  'Down with America'.

Here are some of the (translated) lyrics (original Dutch below):

Hamburgers and cola, yeah, you knew that already. But do you also know the cause of the general decline?  Shortsighted thinking, talking loud, getting stuck in one-liners.  Down with America! Down with those American peasants! Down with America! Down with American colonialism!  Down with that ugly, biting English.  All that Aglo-saxon arrogance.  Yeah, a hot poker in their butt, and that's that.  Those foolish machos, oh man, they've been playing cop for sixty years.  I'm from the Belgian, the European panel, and I'm asking, clear my channel!

(Hamburgers en cola, ja dat wist u al. Maar kent u ook de oorzaak van het algemeen verval? Kortzichtig denken, luidruchtig spreken, eeuwig in oneliners blijven steken. Weg met Amerika! Weg met die boeren van Amerika! Weg met Amerika! Weg met het kolonialisme van Amerika! Weg met dat lelijke knauwende Engels. Al die Angelsaksische pretentie, arrogantie. Ja, een gloeiende pook in hun gat, en dat is dat! [...] Die dwaze macho's, moh vent moh vent, die spelen nu al 60 jaar politieagent. [...] Ik ben van het Belgische, het Europese panel, en ik verzoek u: clear my channel! [...])

If you are American, well, lucky for you!  You see, in Belgium we don't have that pesky First Amendment thing, meaning that there are actual laws prohibiting certain speech, including speech that incites hatred against people for their nationality... So why not send an e-mail here if you feel offended: the center for equality of opportunity and fighting racism, the official government sponsored institution set up to deal with this kind of thing.

In my opinion, speech should really be free and there is no such thing as a right not to be offended, but if there has to be a government sponsored thought-police anyway it is better to clog it up with complaints of the kind that the founders never anticipated than to just let it sit there...

New Orleans Blog with Camera

For the past few days, weblog The Interdictor  has been posting quasi-live updates on life in hurricane-wrecked and flooded New Orleans.  The blog seems to be run by employees of DirectNIC, who have gone through extraordinary efforts to keep their datacenter running.

They have also managed to keep a webcam feed on the air throughout most of the crisis, which looked mostly like this:

I've done some searching with Google Earth and the address information I managed to dig up for DirectNIC, and I've been able to recreate the camera location in Google Earth.

Seen from above, it looks like this:

For those of you who have Google Earth installed, here is a placemark file you can download to go there yourself: Download Interdictor_cam.kmz

Here is also a direct link to the location in Google maps.

Read This if You are British

Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal quotes from an article in De Morgen (one of the most prominent leftist newspapers in Belgium).  It is a full scale attack against the British and their behaviour as tourists in the rest of Europe:

The Huns are back, and they speak English with a variety of invariably common accents. No other nation manages to spoil other people’s holidays so thoroughly as the British. They do that all through the summer everywhere the sun shines with their unique mixture of wantonness and arrogance, their pathetic addiction to drink, their bad taste, and actually just their ugliness and thickheaded presence. There, that is a relief.

The actual quote is much longer, go read it if you feel like doing so.  The entire thing is bursting at the seams with crude generalizations and stereotypes.  One might even consider it racist in places.

...which is exactly what an MP for the far-right Flemish Interests (Vlaams Belang) party has done.  He has sent a complaint about the article to the official government institution that deals with racism and discrimination issues.

The funny thing is, due to a lawsuit brought by this same institution the Flemish Interest party had to change its name last year because its previous incarnation was condemned for being racist... on the basis of party publications that contained 'crude generalisations' about certain population groups, with the intent to incite hatred.

Back then, the aforementioned newspaper was wildly cheering on this verdict.  Oh, the irony!

Anyway, that's what it is like to live in a country without true freedom of speech...