Friday, February 21, 2014

PUBLIC LANGUAGE POLICIES

There's a minor uproar in The Hague about election material in various languages other than the ancient noble tongue of Brederode and Vondel.
Real Denhaguers, it is rumbled, do not need their party propaganda in Turkish, Somali, or Arabic. It is an outrage!
Why cant' all those foreigners learn English!   Dutch!

Never mind that most Dutch are nigh illiterate in that noble tongue.

The sense that immigrants are taking over dominates the internet discussion. And the usual argument is made that those who become citizens should make a far greater effort to learn the native speech, act less glaringly unnatural ('alien'), and participate in political discourse solely with the same tones and harsh gutturals as people sprung from the soil.

There is righteous fury that anyone should cater to the immigrant inability to become white   integrate.


Which echoes discord in the United States anent a very similar issue.



I also believe that there should be NO impartial official election material whatsoever provided for people who do not speak the dominant national language; the taxpayer should NOT have to pay for this.
Under ANY circumstances.



The reason being that I wish to produce convincing statements in Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese (and whatever other languages new citizens speak) asserting that the California Republican Party eats babies, proposes prostitution as a means of social control and a replacement for schools, wishes to run medical experiments on the old, the infirm, and the demented, and will raise fees for city services beyond all reason, enslaving those that cannot pay in vast work-camps deep in the savage interior.
I would very much like to present these as unassailable facts.
With no counter-voice, and no dissenting views.

"If the Republicans win, your children will be sold to Arab slavers, and your teeth will fall out. Organs will be forcibly harvested from poor people, and jack-booted storm troopers will be billeted upon the populace. Anyone who opposes George the Third will be shipped to Barbados to labour in sugar plantations or in the salt mines of Australia!"

If you vote Republican, your little daughters will be forced to watch Dutch bestiality videos!


I can think of no better cause than exposing the satanism, child sacrifices, drug dealing, and sex-torture dungeons of the Tea party and the Rightwing, in languages which have no legal standing, for the speakers of same whose ability in English does not extend beyond the very low level required for citizenship or paying parking tickets.
There is, in fact, utterly no reason at all for them to be well-informed and capable of making a rational and balanced choice at election time. But every reason why they should be utterly convinced that Republicans, most especially members of the Tea party fringe, are the very devil incarnate, vampires, zombies, and spreaders of filth, immorality, and athlete's foot.


If English was good enough for Jesus and Inbred Jedd, why it's good enough for damned well everyone!


Likewise, voters in Den Haag should not be provided important data in any other language than Dutch. Opinions of which I wholeheartedly approve, however, have to be given them at every turn.
By whatever means is most effective.
Including speaking in tongues.


That selective and one-sided information about social and political issues disseminated in other languages would benefit the liberals in California is a foregone conclusion; we have more people who volunteer for good causes, and more underpaid idealists, than the other side. Here in San Francisco there are any number of Democrats who will gladly translate the most cogently pointed statements into whatever language in which the baffled voter may be most fluent, for free even; whereas true Republican Expertise consists primarily of billable hours and opaque terminology, and even one measely page will cost several thousand dollars.

Free. Versus "professional billing rates".
Readable, versus rightwing gibberish.

Which side has the advantage?

Nu?



*      *      *      *      *


By the way: the fire escape is down the hall and to the right. There is a green exit light above the door. If you cannot read this sign, it is only right and proper that you should be burned to a crisp, and there is no point to your survivors suing the building owners or the insurance company, because you should have learned English, you retard.
Only English-speakers deserve to live.
Everyone else, just die.


Achtung! Geen woord hiervan mag vertaald worden, noch in het Nederlands, noch andere talen. Het gaat vreemdelingen volstrekt niet aan, en zo zij het willen begrijpen dienen zij geheel vloeiend to worden in de taal van Jesus en Shakespeare. Punt.
[Hikbolo! Ki mat kapratem den turulasan, pi lasan Nhulanda atawe lasan dene. Ngon taragurdena di pang-paringgi, ngen kiyayau engen inso tangarti-ne, djipakalau turuturu pi lasan na Djezuts ngen Shakespeare. Nukto.]



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5 comments:

Arno said...

This week I saw that the city of Deventer (where I live close by) had made "afvalkalenders" (calenders which tell you when to put what kind of garbage on the streets) in Dutch, English and Turkish! I mean, I can understand that political promotional flyers are being translated. Politicians here know damn well that there are quite a few of non-Dutch speaking citizens. And they desperately need their votes. But afvalkalenders?? Are they afraid the Turks won't put out their garbage on time? Now I expect the Polish here to complain that they are being discriminated..

The back of the hill said...

The entire world is afraid that the Turks won't put out their garbage in time.

Heck, he's been prime minister for over a decade now, and both a pest and a liar all that time.

Worst thing for the Turks, ever.

Oh, sorry, you weren't talking about Erdoğan, but compostables!


I assume that the strict division of garbage into categories is as rigidly enforced in the Netherlands as it is here, no?

Arno said...

*grins*

Yes, all garbage must be strictly separated on penalty of an angry garbage truck-driver. And believe, you don't want to mess with (Dutch) garbage truck-drivers!
Everyone (well, in the place I live) has 3 containers:
- a blue one for paper
- a green one for biological waste
- a grey one for everything except paper, biological waste, plastic, chemical waste and glass
Further we have plastic bags in which we can put our.. Plastic. Glass goes in the glass-container near the supermarket and chemical waste goes to my mother-in-law, I mean, in special boxes of course.. So how does garbage gets separated in the States?
When I still lived in the apartment in Oss all the inhabitants of the apartments had a couple of big containers where they could throw in all garbage. Sooo handy!

The back of the hill said...

Here in SF we have to separate our garbage into recyclables, compostables, and trash.

Blue, green, and black bins, respectively.

The back of the hill said...

It means that raccoons now have to work three times as hard to scrounge for food than before.

I'm thinking of putting out kitty kibbles for the beasties.

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