When Jeremy alerted me to the rioting in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam and Urk I concluded that either American Idiocy has become our number one export or the Dutch failed to get all their morons to emigrate to the States. It’s probably a horrible mix of both.
The protestors are mainly pissed over the curfew imposed by the government. Unlike Amerika’s clusterfuck jigsaw which cripples a national response thanks to Science Deniers (Republicans and Libertarians) at the state, county or city level; their national parliament voted and agreed by a majority (not some two-third’s bullshit) to take their Outbreak Management Team’s recommendation. The recommendation was a curfew to limit people’s contact with each other to slow the spread while the vaccine gets rolled out.
If you’ve followed the news recently, you might ask, “Wait. Didn’t the Dutch government recently collapse? So there should be an election soon. How can they get anything done during a lame-duck period?” Jeremy explained to me how the people who occupy their pre-election positions are allowed to keep them until a new government is formed unless they did something pretty egregious, unlike Amerika (Turd Cruz, Josh Hawley and most GOPers in Congress). Italy has Technocrats take over for the interim, the “ousted” ministers, etc., may make decisions and do things to keep the state running unless it’s a major policy matter, this was what I expected; again, Amerika gets an F thanks to Mitch McConnell still having a couple months to throw sand in the gears.
So there’s a bunch of cranky Dutch residents pissed off about their “freedom” to spread the virus. Sounds familiar. With Urk (maybe it’s the ancestral home of Urkel?), the morons destroyed a CV-19 testing facility. Wow. Take that virus! The only upside there? Dutch cops don’t need to sweat over the protestors having military-grade weapons and copies of The Turner Diaries.
I’m sure there’s a version of this demonstration in Dutch…