BasBasBas.com

Tag: politics

  • To fail or not to fail… Piratenpartij 2.0

    I’m writing this post in English for two reasons. The first is that I find it easier to express myself in English, having lived abroad a lot over the last years. The second is that the eyes of pirates worldwide are upon us!

    For the last few months I’ve been the campaign manager for the Dutch Pirate Party. Even though last night’s results are disappointing in one way, we’ve accomplished something to be proud of. From being a very small group of people, we’ve formalised a political organisation, jumping all the bureaucratic hurdles along the way. We made it. With hardly no grassroots activity (except for in Brabant) and almost no funds, we’ve managed to convince thousands of voters (exact number unsure at this moment) and to reach millions of people. As a communication specialist I have to say that’s a spectacular result, even though it didn’t get us a seat in parliament.

    If you look at the below map, you can see there are pirates almost everywhere in The Netherlands!

    Via twlevo.

    Now we face a choice. To fail or not to fail. So we didn’t get seats in parliament, which isn’t easy to accept, seeing the fact that some of us sacrificed their lives for this, over the last months. What we do have is national awareness and support! We cannot let our ideas, our principles, our vision go to waste.

    What we need to do is ORGANISE. In my eyes, the most fundamental challenge in our campaign was having to cope with almost zero grassroots activism. That’s why I believe the main focus of the Pirate Party in the next months, should be on setting up local chapters that are self-organised modules in a lean mean Pirate machine. The idea of local groups is to give our formal organisation a more informal character and base. This informal character will attract a lot more people that can support the organisation in a lot of ways. These local groups will have FUN first and they’ll combine it with activism. That’s the opposite from what a lot of us have been doing in the last months: work hard first and hopefully have fun along the way.

    We cannot let our new government ignore the fact that copyrights and the patent system are up for reform. We cannot let them take away more privacy without being challenged. We need to get the local organisations growing, so that we can group together whenever it is most needed.

    We’ve worked hard. We can be proud of ourselves.
    We said we wanted to remix politics; now we’ll have to!

    For a free information society.

    Yaaarrs truly,
    Bas

    P.S. Let’s support the people of Piracy Festival (June 19, Utrecht). They still need some volunteers. See you there!

    (this post is a crosspost from the Pirate Party blog)

  • Silence!

    In case you’re wondering why it’s been so quiet on this blog lately… There are a few reasons.

    • I’m working on my graduation thesis about the Future of Music Distribution which is quite hard work;
    • I’m working for a record label here in Bulgaria, working on the internet side of things, mainly promotion;
    • I’m doing an assignment for a political party here and helping them out with their internet campaign, since the parliamentary elections are coming up;
    • I’m making videos for SpinEARTH.tv – although haven’t finished any recently… Actually, I attended a show and accidentally deleted the video I made there. F!!K!
    • I’m going to be speaking on a conference about self-development and social psychology in Prague next month and brainstorming about what I want to say. I want it to be groundbreaking and paradigm shattering!

    On top of all that, one of my best mates visited me for 7 days last week annnnddddd we saw the sun come up quite a few times.

    Will resume a more regular blogging schedule soon though. 🙂

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • Bulgaria’s inferiority complex?

    I’m sure I’ll offend someone with this; good. This needs to be said and people have to start becoming aware of this. The following is possibly the biggest hurdle for the Bulgarian people and it needs to be discussed.

    A few months ago I was on Bulgarian English-language news website Novinite.net, where I often got into discussions with other readers through their commenting system. One day one of the people argued that foreigners that come to live in Bulgaria must be the lowest of the low in their country. Why else would someone move to Bulgaria? Most of the commenters on the newsportal are Bulgarians that have moved abroad, mostly the USA. They are very hateful and find reason to despise just about everything. They point: the corruption is the fault of them, they hate parties on both sides of the political spectrum, except for the extreme right-wing party Ataka. It’s like they’re reading the news just to get an affirmation that their move abroad was a good choice. These people are among the most negative Bulgarians I’ve come across and  they mask their own insecurity and feelings of inferiority by pointing, pointing and pointing.

    Many people I meet have trouble understanding why someone from Holland would ever move to a country like this (twice!) and even bother to pick up a few words and sentences. To me, Holland is organized, linear, and everyone stays in their own bubble. To some that might sound appealing, but to me that sounds boring – and on top of that, the weather’s always shit. I went to Bulgaria to taste a little more of life. The food is better and more authentic, the people are not emotionless robots when they’re working, and they worry a bit less about their time. Whereas in Holland people look up the exact times of the bus and try to be at the busstop the minute before the bus comes, here people are more likely to simply go to the busstop and wait. That’s what I like, that’s why I’m here.

    But why I really believe there’s some type of underlying inferiority complex in the Bulgarian society is the expressions of powerlessness people give. They feel their vote won’t change a thing, they feel it doesn’t matter who they vote for, they feel corruption can’t be solved….. They feel completely powerless to change anything about Bulgaria. That’s why I believe this is a more important thing to handle than fixing corruption, the justice system, or anything else. People have to believe they can make a difference; and then they will. The state of Bulgaria is improving, but slowly and with a determination to make a difference, from person to person, this process could speed up ten-fold.

    People need to stop pointing at politicians, politicians need to stop pointing at each other, companies should stop pointing at politicians and politicians should stop pointing at companies. We ALL live in this country and we ALL want to have the best we can get; every time you point a finger, you can also pick up some of the litter on the streets and make a real difference.

    Life’s not perfect people, nor will it ever be. Stop expecting to get something great, while you don’t believe other people deserve something great to happen to them. You are part of those other people, we are one society. Now stop pointing or holding out your hand and DO something. Anything at all. Make a difference today.

    BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

  • I’m Fasting in Solidarity with the People of Zimbabwe

    The situation is getting very bad in Zimbabwe. Hyperinflation, lack of clean drinking water or food, violent oppression of citizens, Mugabe is destroying his country through clinging on to his power. We’ve all seen the images.

    I got word from Avaaz that hundreds of activists, including Desmond Tutu, have started a hunger strike in solidarity with the 11 million people in Zimbabwe who can have only one meal per day, or less.

    It’s time for a change. This Sunday, February 1, heads of state are meeting in Ethiopia. A call has gone out for people to fast in solidarity during that day. The pledge is as follows:

    We, the undersigned, pledge to fast for a day in solidarity with the Zimbabwean people. We call on leaders throughout Africa—and the world—to act now to decisively support their struggle for justice, democracy, and survival.

    The fast is just from sun up to sun down. I’ve always wondered about fasting, about ascetics, or Muslims during Ramazan/Ramadan, what they go through. I’m quite sure I won’t enjoy the fast, but it’s for a great cause and after all, I have a choice. Many people around the world do not.

    Take the pledge. Do it with me and 25,000 others. Just for one day, between sun up and sun down, how hard can that be?

    Go to take the pledge now!

    Photo by Sokwanele – Zimbabwe, shared under a Creative Commons license.

    Are you in? Why is this worth fasting for?

    Keep in touch with me next Sunday to see how I’m doing. Follow me on Twitter.

  • Politics 2.0

    The influence of new media on current day politics

    An essay by Bas Grasmayer

    The 20th century was the age of mass media. The impact of radio during the first half of the century and that of television during the second brought politics closer to home. Starting from people grouping around the one radio in their neighbourhood, to the radio in their street, until the point that everyone had a radio in their home. The same happened for television and through these media politics entered the living room. Through sound at first, but later through moving images which became more detailed and more accurately coloured over the course of the last century.

    We’re now close to ten years into the new century. Television and radio are still important, but there is a new player in the field of mass media: the internet. This essay will look at how the internet has already influenced politics and hopes to answer, in part, the following question:

    How is the World Wide Web as a medium influencing
    politics and the government right now?

    New Media

    In the 2008 US Presidential elections, politicians were seen embracing new media. Barack Obama became microblogging service Twitter’s most followed user and YouTube set up a site called You Choose ’08 dedicated to the elections. On the latter, campaign teams posted videos hoping they would go ‘viral’, a term used to describe the phenomenon of certain content on the internet being spread out through huge networks of users, which is often initially an exponential process. Ron Paul, who was running to become the Republican presidential candidate, had so much support on the internet that TIME magazine at one point commented that due to “his  success  recruiting  supporters  through  new  social  media  channels” he was “the  new  2.0  candidate”.

    (more…)

  • Drugs, Prostitution and Same-Sex Marriage

    That’s the title of a 10-15 minute presentation I’m giving soon for my Intercultural Communication classes at Yeditepe University, here in Istanbul. I designed it in such a way that it can also be enjoyed without my vocal explanations and here it is!

    Drugs, Prostitution and Same-Sex Marriage

    View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: travel international)

    The Intercultural Communication course is likely to be the most innovative course I’ve taken during my higher education (sadly — universities should make more use of modern technologies). Every Tuesday, we get into a classroom at 4 o’ clock in the afternoon and have a video conference with a class in Lincoln, Nebraska, US. We present ourselves, our culture, customs, daily lives and our countries to each other. It’s fascinating, because both the Turkish class as well as the American class have students from many different backgrounds.

    This part of the Intercultural Communication course, called Global Classroom, has been quite fun so far. We’ve managed to make 2 students from the Nebraskan class dance in front of the camera and they’ve managed to make 2 of our students wrestle in front of the camera (or was it Jiu-Jitsu?).

    There’s only a few sessions left, so I hope I actually get to do my presentation, as our lecturer wanted everyone to prepare one, but there will be no time to actually execute all of them.

    I hope the presentation has given you an insight into Holland’s liberal policies and if you have any questions please feel free to reply. I love answering questions about these issues.

    How about in your countries, how is your government dealing with these issues? What is your personal opinion on these matters? Has the war on drugs failed? Is same-sex marriage morally wrong or is keeping it illegal a form of discrimination? What about prostitution?

  • Netherlands to ban ‘magic’ mushrooms starting December 1

    Dutch Christian Democrat minister of Public Health, Ab Klink, has announced the ban of selling and growing ‘magic mushrooms’, or shrooms, will take place on December 1. This knee-jerk reaction follows a media and political hype caused last year by the suicide of a 17-year old French tourist who was said to be under the influence of mushrooms at that time. It was also her second suicide attempt.

    Politicians got riled up as the media started covering every mushroom mishap in Amsterdam. Since nobody really stopped campaigning since the last government was formed – as they’re doomed to fail – they saw this as a good chance to speak up, speak out and win votes. At the cost of liberty and sanity.

    Ab Klink, minister of Public Health, previously asked the Coördinationpoint for the Assessment and Monitoring of new drugs (CAM) to research illegalizing shrooms. They concluded that these are the risks involving mushrooms:

    • Health of the individual: no risk.
    • Public health / society: minimal risk.
    • Public order / safety: minimal risk.
    • Criminal involvement: no risk.

    The CAM advised against a ban on mushrooms for the following reasons:

    • The smartshops selling the mushrooms might replace them by substances which carry more risk;
    • It will lead to shrooms being sold in tablet-form, like XTC pills;
    • Users would pick mushrooms in nature, which could lead to serious problems if they mistake the wrong type of mushrooms for the ones they are looking for;
    • Users might switch to other drugs, which might be more interesting from a criminal perspective and possibly carry more risk for usage
 Leading to more danger to the public;
    • The banning of mushrooms is a rather tough sanction given the current problems its causing;
    • Maintaining a ban would bring costs.

    What did Ab Klink do? Ban them! Of course. The CAM was surprised as this is the first time a minister has ignored the advice of this advice organ. Minister Klink is obviously tripping. Or maybe he’d like to see the Bible as our lawbook?

    Dutch ‘smartshops’ that sell magic mushrooms and other legal mind-altering substances are taking this to court. For updates on this matter you can follow Dutch blog Red De Paddo (Save The Shroom).

    Recently a Christian Democrat politician called for the closing of all coffeeshops in Holland and illegalizing cannabis. In a follow-up poll, Dutch citizens expressed their opinions about the Dutch policy regarding drugs. 36% want coffeeshops illegalized, but 34% wants to see them completely legalized. Coffeeshops in Holland are currently in a grey area, more can be read about this in the article below or on Wikipedia. In short the sale of softdrugs is legal in Holland, but supplying coffeeshops of them is not.

    Last year I wrote about the pending mushroom ban in several articles, one of which is reposted below, the others can be found via these links:

    Stay updated. Follow my Twitter feed, or subscribe to this blog by RSS or email.

    Below a repost of my article “Dutch government to ban cultural identity“. (more…)

  • Turkey Bans Blogger

    UPDATE!! — It is now known why Blogger is banned in Turkey. Click here for the new article.

    Since today, whoever tries to access Blogger or any *.blogspot.com domain from Turkey will get the following message on my screen:

    Blogger's banned in Turkey screenshot

    Click to enlarge.

    This is the same message we get if we try to visit YouTube, which is also banned in Turkey. In the past blogging platform WordPress.com has been banned as well (read more), to much dismay of many Turkish bloggers.

    It was suspected that the reason for this has something to do with Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, who has in the past managed to get WordPress, Google Groups, as well as Richard Dawkins’ website banned. It was then suggested however, that Oktar was active in Istanbul courts and this verdict was passed in Diyarbakır in South East Turkey.

    UPDATE – It is now known that it was Digiturk, not Adnan Oktar, that caused the ban. Read the new article here: 
    http://www.basbasbas.com/blog/2008/10/26/digiturk-causes-turkish-ban-of-bloggerblogspot/

    Turkey’s EU ambitions seem paradoxical to the infringement on the freedom of press and speech of its citizens, residents and visitors by banning sites like this. This is not China. This has to stopped. Good thing the EU’s making a blacklist of censoring countries and are creating software for people in censoring countries to use to overcome the censorship (Global Online Freedom Act).

    The court order of the ban on Blogger is also in very stark contrast to yesterday’s court approval of gay and group sex. Turkey’s a country of opposites.

    Some useful links to unblock YouTube/Blogger (blogspot)/other blocked pages in Turkey:

    Help get the news out and Digg this article or Stumble it or Buzz it!

    Stay updated. Follow my Twitter feed, or subscribe to this blog by RSS or email.

  • Letter from Zimbabwe

    Quite a while ago I got in touch with a fellow blogger named Nick, who I met via the wonderful StumbleUpon community. He’s a young guy who got in touch with the United States justice system at a rather early (but common) age. He blogs about how this all happened and about life in prison. Felonious Ramblings is definitely one of my favourite blogs and recently I saw a very interesting story pop up in my inbox.

    Nick, like me, is quite concerned about various political or humanitarian situations around the world. One of these is Zimbabwe, of which I don’t need to remind you how bad the situation is. A friend of him who was born and raised in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) forwarded him a letter. The guy is Anglo, meaning British Colonial, but lives in Europe now. His family however is still living in Zimbabwe and is having to deal with president Mugabe’s madness and insane grip on his power. Whoever is not pro-Mugabe, or white, faces serious danger in Zimbabwe.

    Following is an email from the guy’s sister in law. Who wrote this in a bit of a hurry it seems, but still it’s very easily readable and tells a very good story about the situation in this country. It seems like it’s turning into anarchy and it reminds me a lot of the situation displayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda. We cannot let something like this happen again, so I’d like to urge you to read and share. Stumble it, email it, share it on Facebook, Digg it, Buzz it… Whatever’s your preference.

    Dear all,

    It has been quite a weekend. We were made very aware of impending problems on our Mount Carmel farm before it even started. Various letters came in as well as verbal warnings from concerned people all over the district. People were told that Mt. Carmel cattle and potatoes would be dished out to them.

    The election campaign is being fought on “one hundred percent empowerment” ie. taking everything that belongs to people who are not black and giving it to Party faithfulls. The Party has got nothing else to offer the people…

    People were told if they did not come they would be beaten. President Mugabe arrived in our little town of Chegutu that afternoon and people were only informed that morning.

    (more…)

  • My Interview about Wilders

    A few weeks ago I was interviewed about my views on the Geert Wilders movie Fitna by Alex, a PR professional, journalist and blogger from Bulgaria. I have a strong opinion about this, so when he asked me, I immediately told him yes and we made it happen. It was published a while ago and now I figured it’s time for a crosspost.

    What were the first consequences of the Geert Wilders video “Fitna” in Holland?

    Well, the first consequences actually came before the film was released. For about three months, we’ve been waiting for this film, not knowing what would be in it. Given the statements Wilders had made in the past though, a lot of people were worried that it might be very offensive to Muslims and spark riots in some of the immigrant areas of our cities.

    So the main consequence was a lot of fear and a big debate about Islam and it’s position in our society and western society – and how far the freedom of speech goes.

    After the release it stayed pretty calm. I think it’s less bad than what was expected or feared for and the tension really seems to be gone now. Or in the background.

    Was it changed because of that Armageddon-expectations? And in fact this couldn’t be the main version?

    I doubt it. If those expectations had come true, Wilders could have said “Look! I was right.”

    I don’t think it was in his interest to tone his film down. I would find it hard to believe he would done that, it’s not his style.

    Do you feel kind of disappointed of the final result?

    Partly. I was expecting a well produced film, though this is cut and pasting with fragments we have all seen numerous times, probably hundreds, in the case of the 9/11 footage even thousands of times. I am happy that he didn’t go as far as others said, because that could have caused national problems as well as international problems for the Netherlands (politically as well as economically). Some countries were threatening with boycotting Dutch products for instance.

    Can you find Wilders right in any of his statements expressed in the movie?

    Yes, with regards to Islamic extremism being a problem we need to be concerned with, like any form of extremism. No, with regards to the fact that he doesn’t limit his judgment to the small group of the 1 billion Muslims that is extreme, but is generalizing all Muslims.

    Although he himself claims he doesn’t; he is talking about the Islam, not the Muslims. I think that’s just a childish point, because when speaking about a faith in this way, you automatically talk about its followers.

    You’ve lived in Bulgaria for about an year. What makes Wilders differ from Volen Siderov?

    Well, I lived there a half year, and I assume Volen Siderov is from Ataka (?), but I didn’t get enough of an impression of him or them to say anything about that. Sorry.

    I do think Bulgaria is in a very different position than Holland though. Since the Islam in Holland came through immigrants; in Bulgaria through occupation by Turkey. If I wasn’t misinformed, at least.

    Can we expect that Geert Wilders will be treated like they did to Theo van Gogh?

    Times have changed a bit and both are different. Since the politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated, politicians have been getting a lot more security. Since Theo van Gogh, any politician that makes sensitive statements regarding Islam gets more security. Theo van Gogh didn’t have this, as far as I know.

    Geert Wilders has a secret address and has to change from residence every so often (I don’t know and I think they keep it secret for his safety). But yes, he is under threat and I’m sure that there are some crazy people who would try to get him if they just saw the chance to do it.

    It can be either Muslims who think he has insulted their faith/prophet, or people who don’t like his angry and right-wing tone (which can be extreme at times) and are concerned about the future of the Netherlands or just personally upset by him.

    http://bigtandem.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/bas-about-wilders/

Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin