Those damn Lib'rul European Sssocialists! Fox News and Bill O'Reilly has proof!
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Those damn Lib'rul European Sssocialists! Fox News and Bill O'Reilly has proof!
:haha:
Oh Fox News. How you make me giggle.
I have to say, I'm quite astounded that such TV shows actually exist. If someone tried to establish such a show over here, he wouldn't live to see the end of the day (figuratively speaking). Regardless of his audience - we actually seem to have learned that such crass demagogics don't have a place in a public broadcast.
They do make some interesting points in the response:
Sadly, around 03 Fox won a court ruling that stated they were perfectly in the legal to run a news station off of lies and distorted information. Its been a nonstop train to crazy town ever since.
The response to the response is fun though ;)
My reply was to khen, you've just got a quicker clicker :p
Although I do like how he has to cave at the end of the video, the % stats are wrong because its a smaller country :bulb:
We've all seen the Portugal video by now
Anyone else get a big freak out at those platinum blonde Fox News Barbie Dolls? *shudders* They almost look like Stepford wives. Where's their battery pack? :eek:
I'm fairly certain that's the only type of female correspondent allowed on the network. Honestly, I can't think of a single brunette or red-head. Seriously creepy though.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Loving O'Reilly's conceit and cover-up at the end "the statistics over there are different". WTF?! Has the metric system invaded percentages as well?
Women are supposed to stay home, silly boy. Don't you know how conservatives work? Those are clearly damaged goods who can't please a man.Quote:
Originally Posted by NGS
what?
:confused:
Does Amsterdam have a significant problem with organised crime related to eg. legal drugs and prostitution??
I thought blondes were supposed to be the posterchildren for your gender. Always preferred brunettes myself though. Unless we're talking about Swedes...your thoughts, Minx?Quote:
Originally Posted by littlelolligagged
For the most part hair-colour is immaterial, except sometimes when it's black :downcast:
Swedes may be overdoing the blonde thing though. It's getting to the point where a lot of Swedish girls are beginning to look like clones.
It's being addressed more now than it used to be. Basically the city does background checks on everybody who wants to get a license in the hospitality industry. The policies are said to be rather successful. What people don't get to hear is that Amsterdam is actually cracking down on a lot of things. Big night clubs have been raided and closed down because they didn't fight the use of illegal drugs effectively enough. Coffee-shops are also being boarded up faster than you can say alcohol if they sell anything besides marijuana type stuff or sell to minors.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aimless
The number of window workplaces for prostitutes have been drastically reduced over the last 5 years.
People who actually know the Amsterdam of roughly 10 years ago consider it to be a rather tame place. Go to Youtube and look at clips of the canal parade of this year and try to find somebody who's actually showing private parts. At the beginning of this century that wasn't entirely unheard of.
Sounds like everyone is being stupid. O'Reilly implied that the Dutch legal/social approach was responsible for a wave of crime in Amsterdam that was reflective of liberal values. And the response video implies that these policies haven't led to any organized crime at all.
In other words, silly, simplistic implications. The "response to the response" video tries to make a more careful distinction, but I think it's still pretty tortured because they cast the first (and biggest) stone.
The assertion that it didn't lead to organised crime is true as such. It is a bit myopic though if you take into consideration that the semi-legality made it an attractive source of income for organised crime.
I think it's not much unlike how garbage collection in NYC was (is?) run by the mob.
I do think it is amusing that they use Amsterdam as an example of liberals leading to organised crime, considering the USA probably has more organised crime. That said, the response to the response did have a point saying that the availability of drugs and hookers attracts people looking for just that, and drug tourism is a problem, especially in border areas.
Funny that the first video mentions that coffeeshops are being closed more often lately, this week a study concluded that the closing of all coffeeshops in two counties near the Belgian border has lead to a decrease in nuisance caused by drug tourists (which was the reason they were shut down in the first place), but also to an increase in crime and hard drug use by youths.
I think you're right, the folks who fly all the way to the Netherlands just do tons of pot and sleep with prostitutes are probably not helping things.
Similarly, intuitively I think legalizing things that are illegal in most other places can lead organized crime having some role. After all, when you legalize something the people who have the most experience running such a business are the folks who are doing it illegally elsewhere. Part of why American organized crime has fingers in the gambling scene of early Las Vegas.
Actually, the real problem is that we haven't really legalized the drugs-thing at all. It's tolerated which makes it a lot harder to keep it clean. Prostitution is less of a problem, at least the prostitutes who work by the book. There is of course also still prostitution going on in the informal economy and that's where there are problems with organised crime.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Organised crime doesn't go away, it adapts to whatever is lucrative at the time and while some that are part of organised crime have become legitimate* business people and no longer need the criminal element of their organisations to be profitable they simply cannot disassemble the criminal structure. The few who try usually suffer terrible consequences.
*Ironically, in an effort to hide their criminal incomes many organised crime groups have been very successful in business - Cash opens most doors and business needs cash, even dirty cash.
I see no reason why Amsterdam should be immune to this reality.
If you legitimise a business that becomes more profitable using mafia-tactics, then I don't know what you can expect...
On a side note, organized crime does not necessarily mean mafia type of organizations with liquidation, violence etc., I know people who are involved in growing and distributing marihuana and, at least at that level, it's not violent at all. And one guy around here who was convicted of running a criminal conspiracy (= organized crime), only ran a (too big) coffeeshop, and because it was too big it was criminal, and because it was a business with several people working there, it was classified as organized crime.
That said, I do live far from Amsterdam in a much more quiet area, so it's likely to be very different in Amsterdam.
No place is immune, but in Holland they do background checks on the investor and given sufficient suspicion the authorities can refuse to give licenses. That's proven to be a quite effective tool in Amsterdam. Shady business people are driven out. Not just out of sight, but out alltogether.Quote:
Originally Posted by termite
Interesting, made me think of this thread.
Quote:
August 17, 2010
A Dutch City Seeks to End Drug Tourism
By SUZANNE DALEY
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — On a recent summer night, Marc Josemans’s Easy Going Coffee Shop was packed. The lines to buy marijuana and hashish stretched to the reception area where customers waited behind glass barriers.
Most were young. Few were Dutch.
Thousands of “drug tourists” sweep into this small, picturesque city in the southeastern part of the Netherlands every day — as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city’s 13 “coffee shops,” where they can buy varieties of marijuana with names like Big Bud, Amnesia and Gold Palm without fear of prosecution.
It is an attraction Maastricht and other Dutch border cities would now gladly do without. Struggling to reduce traffic jams and a high crime rate, the city is pushing to make its legalized use of recreational drugs a Dutch-only policy, banning sales to foreigners who cross the border to indulge. But whether the European Union’s free trade laws will allow that is another matter.
The case, now wending its way through the courts, is being closely watched by legal scholars as a test of whether the European Court of Justice will carve out an exception to trade rules — allowing one country’s security concerns to override the European Union’s guarantee of a unified and unfettered market for goods and services.
City officials say they have watched with horror as a drug tolerance policy intended to keep Dutch youth safe — and established long before Europe’s borders became so porous — has morphed into something else entirely. Municipalities like Maastricht, in easy driving distance from Belgium, France and Germany, have become regional drug supply hubs.
Maastricht now has a crime rate three times that of similar-size Dutch cities farther from the border. “They come with their cars and they make a lot of noise and so on,” said Gerd Leers, who was mayor of Maastricht for eight years. “But the worst part is that this group, this enormous group, is such an attractive target for criminals who want to sell their own stuff, hard stuff, and they are here too now.”
In recent years, crime in Maastricht, a city of cobblestone lanes and medieval structures, has included a shootout on the highway, involving a Bulgarian assassin hired to kill a rival drug producer.
Mr. Leers used to call the possibility of banning sales to foreigners a long shot. But last month, Maastricht won an early round. The advocate general for the European Court of Justice, Yves Bot, issued a finding that “narcotics, including cannabis, are not goods like others and their sale does not benefit from the freedoms of movement guaranteed by European law.”
Mr. Leers called the ruling “very encouraging.” Coffee shop owners saw it differently.
“There is no way this will hold up,” said John Deckers, a spokesman for the Maastricht coffee shop owners’ association. “It is discrimination against other European Union citizens.”
If Maastricht gets its way, many other Dutch municipalities will doubtless follow. Last year, two small Dutch towns, Rosendal and Bergen op Zoom, decided to close all their coffee shops after surveys showed that most of their customers were foreigners.
The situation has not made for good neighborly feelings. Many residents of border towns criticize Belgium, France and Germany for tolerating recreational drug use but banning the sale of drugs. “They don’t punish small buyers,” said Cyrille Fijnaut, a professor at the University of Tilburg law school. “But they also don’t have their own coffee shops, so that leaves us as the suppliers. Our policy has been abused, misused, totally perverted.”
As business has boomed, many of the Dutch coffee shops — dingy, hippie establishments in the ’80s and ’90s with a few plastic tubs of marijuana on the shelves — have become slick shops serving freshly squeezed orange juice and coffee in fine china.
The Easy Going Coffee Shop has a computer console at the door where identification documents proving that customers are 18 or older are scanned and recorded. Tiny pictures on driver’s licenses are blown up to life-size on a screen, so guards can get a good look at them. Behind the teller windows, workers still cut the hashish with a big kitchen knife, but all sales are recorded on computerized cash registers.
Mr. Bot’s ruling last month is only an early step in determining whether Maastricht can enforce a Dutch-only policy. A final ruling by the full court is expected by the end of the year.
But Mr. Bot’s finding, a veritable tirade on the evils of drugs, surprised many legal scholars, who expected the European Union’s open market rules to trump any public order arguments, as they have in other cases. Sweden, for instance, which has a long history of struggling with alcohol abuse, was obliged to take down most of its anti-alcohol laws restricting store hours and sales, as they were seen as impinging on free trade.
Polls show that a majority of the Dutch still believe that the coffee shops should exist. But the Netherlands once had 1,500 of them; now, there are about 700. And every year, the numbers decline, according to Nicole Maalste, a professor at the University of Tilburg who has written a book on the subject. “Slowly, slowly they are being closed down by inventing new rules, and new rules,” Ms. Maalste said.
Much of the criminality associated with the coffee shops, experts say, revolves around what people here call the “back door” problem. The government regulates what goes on in coffee shops. But it has never legalized or regulated how the stores get the drugs they sell — an issue that states in the United States that have legalized medical marijuana are just beginning to grapple with.
In recent years, the tremendous volume of sales created by foreigners has prompted an industry of cultivating cannabis and other drugs within the Netherlands — some estimate that it is now a $2 billion a year business — much of it tangled in organized crime and money laundering operations, experts say.
Advocates for legalized sales and coffee shop owners argue that trying to restrict foreigners will only encourage them to buy illegally in the streets. They also say that coffee shops have other selling points: they pay 450 million euros a year in taxes and provide thousands of jobs.
Mr. Deckers, the shop association spokesman, said coffee shop owners were so skeptical that the European Union would allow restrictions on sales based on nationality that they encouraged the city to get a ruling on the subject. They doubt Mr. Bot’s arguments will stand. “We know he is wrong,” Mr. Deckers said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/wo...e/18dutch.html
Drug tourism and trafficking is indeed a big problem (I grew up in a border area myself too, we used to have the biggest coffeeshop in the entire country, so probably in the world). I am not against a Dutch-only policy, if they can get it past the courts.
Drug tourism and trafficking is also the big reason Roosendaal and Bergen Op Zoom recently closed their coffeeshops. Nuisance from foreigners dropped dramatically, but the use of hard drugs among youth increased. Not sure if that is what you want, either.
This is the part that is insane. You can sell weed, but you can't buy supply. It has been shown that decriminalizing the users works, why wouldn't it work for suppliers?Quote:
Much of the criminality associated with the coffee shops, experts say, revolves around what people here call the “back door” problem. The government regulates what goes on in coffee shops. But it has never legalized or regulated how the stores get the drugs they sell — an issue that states in the United States that have legalized medical marijuana are just beginning to grapple with.
And the problem with foreigners would be solved if only other countries would go into the legalization route.