Hamlet

I have finally actually seen Hamlet (the Gibson version, courtesy of Minipoppy). As is often the case with Shakespeare plays, I actually only follow about half of it when I'm not paying close attention, but that's enough to get an impression about what is interesting about the play.

What stood out to me was how many different sayings come from Hamlet, not just references people know, like "to be or not to be" or "alas poor Yorick" addressed to the jester's skull, but phrases that I hadn't thought about where they'd come from, but (I assume, unless they're attested from the bible) were first attested in Hamlet, like "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "the play's the thing [Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King]"

And now I actually remember which of the non-Hamlet characters are which.

Whenever I see Shakespeare, whether the story inherently makes sense or not, I'm left thinking what I'D do with the story, which I attribute to how many strengths the stories have, whether or not they also have problems. What Hamlet made ME think of was A Beautiful Mind, where both main character sees visions which, to them, are as real as everyone else, yet knows they're different somehow.

That's almost certainly not consistent with all of the original text, but is what the film made me think of. Try to tell what is vision and what is reality. After all, imagine two members of your family A and B. If B says A is a murderer and you have to kill them, and A says B is your imagination, how would you feel? Would you kill A? Ignore B? How would you try to tell the difference?

From that point of view Hamlet's hesitation makes perfect sense: if you have a voice in your head telling you to do something, how CAN you trust it?

Dutch Politics

I've been following Paul Koch's blog about Dutch politics (http://www.quirksmode.org/politics/blog/). It's well written and interesting; I recommend reading it. I think it's a good example of learning about anything at all can be very interesting, but the topic is inherently mainly interesting because learning anything at all about any foreign politics gives you a much better perspective on how the politics of your own country is, and how it could be different.

For instance, they have a more proportional system, and their coalition negotiations might be a good analogy for how British coalitions would have to be formed if we moved to a more proportional system.

The current situation is that the far-right anti-Islam party made massive gains in the polls but not as much as lots of people feared, and is now the third-largest party out of many. The first attempt as a coalition between centre-Christian (CDA), right (VVD), and far-right (PVV) has fallen apart because CDA didn't really want it, which is laudable in that they don't want to collaborate with PVV at any price (as don't all of the other parties, except VVD), but Koch opines that it's actually a lot less good than that. Wilders' PVV is not ready for government and probably never would be, so he says that if coalition negotiations HAD been taken seriously, they would hopefully have fallen apart due to HIS fault, which would have massively reduced his popularity. Whereas now, he can continue saying to people out of work and worried about immigration "look, the main parties don't take you seriously, continue to listen to my good but unfocused and unimplementable talking points."

The current parliament has an unusual dearth of possible coalitions. The far-right coalition having been thankfully defused, the only other obvious one is one that also seemed unlikely before the election, Green-Purple. Purple is a name for the government which combined Centre-Left labour PvdA, Right VVD and centre-intellectual-secular D66 and passed all of the socially liberal legislation famous for existing in the Netherlands. Purple happened because normally there's a left or right or centre-left or centre-right alliance, but in this case, the left and right compromised on economic issues (more to the right) in order to have an alliance without the centre-Christian CDA who are socially liberal, but less socially liberal than all the other major parties.

Currently, Purple needs a fourth party to make a majority, most obviously GreenLeft who started as a primarily green party, but have recently shown they're responsible enough to actually serve in government, or possibly one of the other left parties.

However, this will be difficult to negotiate, as Centre D66, Centre-Left PvdA, and GreenLeft are all economically left of right VVD, but last time the VVD's economic agenda was followed a lot more closely than the others' were, and VVD is the largest party, so unlikely to want a coalition if it doesn't get anything it stands for!

If this coalition doesn't work, then no-one knows what they'll end up with. All of the other possibilities coalitions too small to have a majority, have a very bare majority, contain parties even more opposed than those above, have too many small non-traditionally-government parties to be stable, or contain a centre-left alliance (which is the government which just FELL, falling out about Afghanistan, triggering the election, and now is unpopular and too small), or comprise the three centre parties (which is traditionally never done -- it's like a labour-conservative alliance, in principle possible, but admitting that the parliamentary process doesn't work and only appropriate in times of war).

Whatever happens, the Netherlands will almost certainly withdraw from Afghanistan and not immediately implement the more loony anti-islamic ideas of Wilders, but everything else is not sure. However, spending months negotiating is just normal.