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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2025

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  • Yes, that’s what happened in NL too. The previous government was a horrible combination of extreme right-wingers, a farmers party and the regular right-wingers, who all didn’t like or trust each other. Predictably they failed to realise even the simplest of their promises and they blew it all up when right-wing voter opinion started to turn sour after it looked like they would have to water down some of their promises in order to get anything done. The last election was a massive win for centre parties, although we unfortunately narrowly failed to make the left-wing party the biggest one. And this pattern has played out in a similar way in several EU countries in the past year(s).



  • Regardless of which e-mail service you end up using, I find that an incredible simple rule to filter all e-mail with the word “unsubscribe” in it’s body to another folder saves your sanity. It’s still a folder you should go through a few times a week to read all the newsletters and shit you’re subscribed to, and sometimes the occasional false positive, but your inbox will mostly contain e-mail you actually want to read. I have another rule that filters mail from specific senders that I want to read immediately to my Inbox before it hits the unsubscribe rule, but those exceptions are uncommon enough (I only have 7 after years of doing this) to not take much work.







  • Obviously fuckheads are responsible for their own degenerate behaviour. But there’s a lot more to this then just some random fuckheads being fuckheads. The reason this night was worse than any other we’ve had in history was because the perfect circumstances were created for maximum fuckery. And those circumstances were created by our government. They were warned countless times by many different groups that this was the worst possible way to go about doing things and they stuck their heads in the sand and did it anyway.

    The whole existence of fuckheads is one of the reasons we have a government in the first place. It’s their job to keep our society functioning as best as possible even though fuckheads exists. And they definitely failed to do their job this time.


  • Fireworks are only legal on new years eve over here. And there are a few countries in the EU where insanely powerful explosives are also legal (basically hand grenades), so they very easily find their way into our country, even though they’re not legal here. The police do what they can but it’s impossible to make more than a dent.

    Fireworks used to be a fun way to have a great party. But as they got harder and louder, and the country got more and more densely populated, the problems also started to pile up. So the tone slowly shifted from a big party, to a rowdy night, to eventually a largely lawless night where it’s more and more outright vandalism and rioting, instead of having a party. The past years it’s been “normal” to have several deaths, thousands of wounded and scores of cars, houses and other buildings (from bus stops to supermarkets) burned down on new years eve. So even though the Dutch as a people are very resistant to changing their culture, the call to outlaw all fireworks got larger and larger. So large that even the last right-wing parties gave up their resistance last year and admitted that the only way forward was to do away with it altogether. But instead of banning it immediately they wussed out and said they would ban it after one more year with fireworks, even though everyone in law enforcement, the fire departments and medics begged them not to.

    So naturally, everyone wanted to go out with a bang, and they basically succeeded. At half past midnight every mobile in the country got an emergency text to only call 112 (our version of 911) in life-threatening situations, since they were completely overwhelmed. Even though they doubled their normal capacity and every policeman, fireman and medic in the country was working as hard as they could to keep things under control. In my opinion political heads should roll for this but it seems the general opinion is to shrug your shoulders and keep on keeping on. Ironically the rest of the year the Netherlands is a very tame country, with less than 100 murders a year in the entire country for example. It’s just this single night that got completely out of control.