Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

You are such a drama queen. One does not shut down the economic activity in Brussels by locking down a few roads.
Don't even get me started on the inefficiency of having 7 governments and 500 members of parliament in a state that was organised using the legal equivalent of spaghetti-coding in the last 40 years; that is the real problem the politicians are not getting anything done. Apart from a handful of confused people who invaded a legally unilingual Dutch area around Brussels without realising that they have done so, the two populations your speak of have no issue with each other.
Furthermore, the economic impact of the dramatically rising cost of energy is enormous. The politicians and governments of the world who are responsible for keeping people happy, for the largest part by providing economic stability, have failed to act on the numerous warnings by scientist in the last 30 years, and are completely failing to display courage in leadership by taking some radical decisions. A public protest is a democratic right; it is how people voice their dismay in a constructive manner.
OTOH closing off roads is illegal, and those responsible should be arrested.

Posted by Zombie at Wed Jun 18 21:01:58 2008

Zombie: I completely agree with just about everything in your comment...  Except for the drama queen :-).

I am perfectly happy with public protests and demonstrations (indeed, I have organized some and attended quite a few).  But about this particular protest, I just can't help but wonder if they've done the fuel-thinking.

As for the "too many governments": yes please - let's reduce complexity.

Instead of "getting stuff done" our too many politicians are falling over each other bickering about fictitious issues which (as you point out) simply are not there.  This is what I meant by the "trying to estrange".  There is no issue.  It's being fabricated.  And this is costing a lot of time and money and preventing real stuff from being done.

Posted by Philip Paeps at Wed Jun 18 21:26:10 2008

Just in case I wasn't clear before: I mostly agree with the farmers' unhappiness and the problems they want to call attention to are real problems which really need political attention.  They are very right in making a lot of noise to try and get the government to do something instead of wasting time trying to make the "spaghetti code" worse.

My "problem" is with the way they are making the noise: expensive and unnecessarily polluting and probably counterproductive.  By blocking roads, they are annoying the wrong people - people who want to get to work and do stuff.

The people they want to reach with their demonstration are completely unaffected and can blissfully continue ignoring the real problems and creating fake ones.

Posted by Philip Paeps at Wed Jun 18 21:33:34 2008

The freedom principle would seem to be violated by the right to strike or organise actions such as today's. Yet, the right to strike is deemed essential in our state and may not be touched, even if it results in a shutdown of public transportation systems or 20K people getting stuck in an airport.
My great political idol, the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher, manage to quash the power of the unions in the eighties. Thanks to that, things muddle along at their hardly functional level in the UK on a daily basis. That wouldn't happen here because all the big parties as linked with powerful unions. No, wait, not VB and LDD. Yes, that's it. They should get an absolute majority and fix this!

Posted by Zombie at Wed Jun 18 21:55:00 2008

Zombie: :-))

Philip: i agree with you about inefficient government - it's ridiculous how we have so many sub-units, commissions, parliaments and governments to manage what is the equivalent of London's population.  I think we could function with about a tenth of the state's employees (and politicians) than we have now.
 
The problem is that the power is in the hand of people who have a lot of interest in keeping the system over-redundant - to ensure they and their friends will get a cushy government position.

Posted by elise at Thu Jun 19 09:40:39 2008

Redundancy is only useful when it comes to hardware. Redundant politicians are just that .. redundant. It'd be very useful if we could get rid of them. Since when do we have 7 governments though? :/ I thought it was 5...

In any case, we'd function just fine with 1. But since people seem to like this artificial linguistic border -- for reasons that elude me --  I suppose maybe they'd prefer two or three governments. Still a lot less than 5 .. or 7!

Posted by Bram at Thu Jun 19 09:55:49 2008

Hey, I also had that remark when I heard of those farmers complaining about high fuel prices driving their tractors to Brussels to protest... they could have come by train or bus and saved a lot!

But so far on the ironic part of the subject.
You (and Zombie) are mixing up 2 separate matters: (1) fuel & economics and (2) our dear Belgian political system (mmmmmmpff!) You are right they do have one thing in common: a self-maintaining institute called government.
But it's not "they don't have time to ... because they're wasting time on..." In my opinion it's more of a "They can't fix this just like they can't fix that." Am I saying they are incapable? No, I do believe there are some capable and smart people among them, but the system they inherited is preventing them to get any work done. Hence the "self-maintaining": it apparently prevents them to change the institute in order to allow them to get some work done.

Posted by Jo at Thu Jun 19 10:19:36 2008

As an inhabitant of the utter north of the "famous" BHV region - it ends at my front door - I often get sad by people from outside the region not seeing the need for the simple split up in a B and a HV. Which is - let me get this clear! - not the same thing as splitting the country. But yeah... the people in Tibet probably also get sad by the rest of the world not caring about the Chinese in their country. (now who's the drama queen here?)
Mmm, replacing the whole bunch of spaghetti code by something completely new and more performant would be even better, I agree. But that definitely seems more than one bridge too far for our self-maintaining institution...

As for the fuel prices: they still don't reflect the real cost. If you would bring into account all real costs like pollution and health impact, we would have to pay a lot more! The painful thing is what we pay for it isn't really going where the costs are made nowadays. Same for food prices. If the real price was to be paid for everything, most of the world's population was to starve because they couldn't afford food. Which indeed points me to the only real problem on this world: one species growing so "successful" they're digging their own grave. Nooo, not ants or cockroaches...

Posted by Jo at Thu Jun 19 10:22:06 2008

One concept:
Peak oil

you should look into it. These protests are only the begining. People will not understand what is happening.

Posted by onno at Thu Jun 19 11:51:19 2008

@Jo: Philip and I are also BHV inhabitants. I think I can speak for the both of us when I say that we don't care. When I go to cast my vote, I vote for the folks I think are the most competent. I don't cast my vote based on linguistic skills or the lack thereof. There is, quite simply, no need to split it. This problem does not exist. There are many real problems which should be dealt with. Now is not the time for pretending to be solving made up problems. The time for that is after hell freezes over and thaws out again. Not a moment sooner.

Anyway, back to oil and angry farmers. AFAIK we haven't quite reached the peak-oil-peak yet. The current price of oil is mostly related to incredibly bad politics. You may have heard something about some sort of war going on in the Middle East. This region is also the region where most of our oil comes from. War and export generally don't go together all that well. The "civilised" world has been incredibly foolish for the last century. We've all become very dependant on a product that's pretty scarce to begin with, and even more rare in our little corner of the world. As though that wasn't bad enough, we've also been increasing our dependence to unprecedented levels. This is stupid.

We've known that oil isn't an infinite resource for many generations. But no one did anything. There are alternatives available. We're not using them. Alternative methods of transport are being discouraged. Where they are available at all they're organised by companies who have their heads up their collective arse. Alternative methods of energy generation have been available for thousands of years. We're not using them. Where they're available, the large utilities companies aren't cooperating by adjusting the grid and governments are bogged down in outdated rules and regulations.

Not only are we currently entirely dependant upon a finite resource, we're also wasting the vast majority of it. Inefficient transport & generation of electricity and "disposable" items made out of petrochemical substances, to name but a few stupidities. Again, alternatives are available. But people are stupid. Politicians are afraid to make changes and companies are afraid to make the necessary investments. All because of some very bizarre idea of economic interests. Let me put it this way: if farmers can't use their tractors, you will starve and your economy with you. Game. Set. Match.

Posted by Bram at Thu Jun 19 14:07:43 2008