December 9, 2010

Between Stadelhofen and the lake you find the opera. The lakeside was very beautiful today with the snow lying on the Uetliberg. I walked along the lake and then along the Limmat and I was surprised to see that someone seems to have been playing paintgun around the old buildings along the river as you can see on the last picture.

Julien Assange is really the man of the month, in charge of Wikileaks he is the man that the US authorities want to charge for high treason and the Swedish authorities want for rape charges. The latest publishing from Wikileaks was a large number classified documents on the communication between the US and their embassies. I don't really know what I think about leaking classified information but there is at least one very positive aspect of it. For a long time now we have been going in a direction of a surveillance society where big brother is constantly watching us. The authorities can demand information about our whereabouts on the web and telephone communications. Privacy seems to be a notion of the past but at least the Wikileaks shows that this is not only a one way thing, the authorities are watching us but we, the public, are also keeping an eye on them. They can't expect to get away with any kind of behavior which will probably in the long run force them to well consider their actions and keep them within moral and legal frames.

December 1, 2010

Winter has come! There is plenty of snow on the Hönggerberg and on the Bahnhofstrasse the Christmas shopping has kicked off. The have change the lightening this year as the old one was so profoundly hated by everybody.

The Swiss once again got through a xenophobic vote although I am not quite sure it was really out of xenophobia that they voted the way they did. The vote was whether or not to deport all criminal foreigners. Listening only to the slogan I can understand that people voted for the suggestion, after all, who wants to have criminals of any nationality? It is only once you looked closer in to what the proposition really was about that you almost had to be against it. The proposition was that you will get automatically deported without having any kind of individual hearing about your personal circumstances meaning that you can be born in Switzerland, lived your whole life here and then be deported to a country where you have never set your foot. True to the Swiss mentality tax fraud is of course not one of the crimes that would lead to deportation.

I think that this vote is mostly about that we are all longing back to a society where the crime rates are so low that we could leave our door open and were never afraid to walk home alone at night. In nostalgia we are blaming what is the biggest difference between now and then, namely the amount of foreigners. It was quite clear in the aftermaths that the cantons most favorable to the proposition were cantons with the lowest amount of foreigners and probably the lowest crime rates as well. I am therefore convinced that this is not about disliking foreigners, it is about being afraid of them, or rather afraid of the unknown.

Another less philosophical reason could simply be that people are victims of catchy slogans and to lazy to read what the vote is really about.