In places like Amsterdam – as opposed to for example the Sittard-Geleen area where the housing shortage is much lower or Schouwen-Duivenland where it’s negligible – it takes about TWO DECADES to find affordable housing.

Twenty years.

This housing shortage in Holland’s central area results in a great deal of homelessness, by definition. People may find alternative ways to house themselves but they still need the blasted “inschrijving” (registration) to be allowed to exist here officially. Rules have been loosened in recent years, by which I mean that municipalities can now allow you to use their office address, but in order to register without having an official residence you have to have ties.

(I have worked and lived in Amsterdam for most of my adult life in the Netherlands, with the exception of a mere few months elsewhere, but I don’t qualify. I have much stronger ties to England than to the Netherlands. I don’t quite qualify as a Dutch citizen any longer in all sorts of ways; I’m not sure how to explain, qualify or phrase it. And that’s apart from things such as that the Dutch are sometimes offended by for example my English understatements because they don’t want to know about my Englishness as I speak Dutch.)

Support for homeless people generally is not free in the Netherlands and often very limited. Just like for women who flee from domestic violence, it usually requires being registered as living locally (having local ties), which requires having a local home address.

(This latter mechanism also often pushes homeless people out of the mandatory Dutch healthcare system because it has the same address requirement. Are you surprised to learn that there’s a Dutch concept called “address fraud”?)

People are frequently forced to run all over town all day long, to several different locations to apply for access for 1 night, to be sent to a specific location for the night, to be sent to a different location in the morning, then back to the other location if they want to apply for another night and then perhaps back to the other location or to a different location if they want a meal.

Typing this is exhausting enough. Doing it is on another level.

All the while, it may be freezing cold and pouring and while these tired souls walk all over town, they get soaked and so do their belongings. Remember: They have no place where they can dry their things.

Support websites sometimes use language in which the organizations seek to distance themselves from the people they are supposed to serve. They speak of “these people” and create invisible walls between us and them.

Utterly deplorable.

It makes some people write or decide that it’s better to die under a bridge than to rest in a temporary bed. Not because they want to be miserable and die but because they want to live and be seen as human.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01831-z#citeas

Explainer, in Dutch:

https://www.trouw.nl/wetenschap/studie-zet-theorie-over-geheugen-op-zijn-kop~bd116ce9/

Dutch minority opinions no longer welcome in politics in the Netherlands. A newspaper screenshot below, in Dutch.

Poverty and homelessness can happen to anyone. It’s not unheard of after a divorce and it also happens to people returning from abroad to densely populated home countries with housing shortages and an abundance of regulatory restrictions. Those are just two examples.

Yet I reckon that common responses when a well-educated person claims to have no income are the following.

• Has a drugs or alcohol problem or shopping addiction.

• May be developing dementia and doesn’t know where her money is or how much comes in when.

• Is trying to scam the system and is hiding income or savings.

The simple reality is that more often than not, yes, they have almost no income.

Increasingly often, people fall victim to a costly scam. Don’t judge them. It even happens to savvy investors!

Don’t use suspicion or negative expectations as your standard approach. Assume that people are telling the truth. The adage “Trust but verify” is a very good guideline for all sorts of situations.

8 December 2024

10 November 2024

This varies wildly… I know that, so I decided to risk erring on the cautious side in my new environment.

I’ve been overdoing it a little bit, I’m learning from observation of people using laptops around me, but I would rather overdo it a little bit than really piss people off who are usually working pretty hard and on their feet all day.

I do set myself a limit. On days when I don’t use public transport, I can afford to be slightly more generous if I want to.

I am so glad that I am where I am now. A much healthier environment. I definitely made the right decision. I feel so much more… human? The opposite of otherized. Singled out. That’s really what I needed.

I’m basically just like everyone else now. I’ve always liked having a nice mix of people around me. I don’t like being surrounded by people who are all poor or all rich or all miserable or all of the same nationality and ethnicity. Particularly being surrounded by misery affects me. You somehow end up absorbing that misery. That’s possibly or partly because I want to solve it. And I rarely can.

The weather is supposed to be miserable tomorrow. I may stay in. I have plans for Wednesday and I am so looking forward to that!

Well, okay, I didn’t dwell on what it means to be human, but I did address everything else. I’ve noticed before that she and I seem to think similarly. A warm homecoming for me. 🙏🏻

Changing Life as We Know It

Event will explore the role of genetic modification and our understanding of humanity.

Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky will be a keynote speaker for the FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) Symposium, a public event on November 16 in Manhattan. What are the ethical issues surrounding genetic modification? How do we define – and regulate – the line between benefit and harm? In what ways do these possibilities force us to make decisions about the value of life and impose judgments about what makes a life worth living – or even what is considered “normal”?

Learn more and register: https://thehastingscenter.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=040b74da78731d913e883748f&id=63f4e21622&e=4a8ce9611a

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/nov/13/stalker-posted-photos-porn-sites-police-response-traumatising

There appears to have been some deepfake porn video with my face in it too, at the end of 2022, but there was no massive harassment and I mostly shrugged about it. I’ve been through a lot worse within the past 16 years. This was around the time that possession of deepfake porn also became a crime in England, in addition to creation.

An empath is a very different creature, people.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/10/narcissists-only-more-devious-the-truth-about-dark-empaths

I just read that, in connection with Liam Payne’s demise.

But it’s okay to do this to another human being in Europe, in the UK and in the US?

Letting refugees drown comes to mind first.

The phrase “crimes of abandonment” makes me wonder how it’s defined, though.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had a legal duty of care for each other’s wellbeing? In real life, most humans act like predators – and it’s getting worse, certainly now that Trump has been reelected. We are living in scary times.

https://abc7ny.com/post/liam-payne-death-investigation-police-raid-hotel-workers-homes-confiscating-possible-evidence-including-cell-phones-marijuana/15522461/

I’m utterly exhausted today. Physically. I also had that a week ago or so. There must be a virus going around. That’s the kind of thing that can cause this.

https://nos.nl/l/2543324

This is enabled by the profound otherization of the residents by the rest of society.

I’ve recently “escaped” from what I have started referring to as a penal colony for people aged 55 and over. Many of its tenants there have physical impairments; most were much older than I.

They aren’t like naughty five-year-olds, but that is how they often get treated, and/or as if they all have dementia.

Most older adults do not have dementia.

(Off the top of my head, I think it’s 1 in 8 if you are over 60. It means that 7 out of 8 people my age do not have dementia at all.)

I mistakenly thought that this was essentially a regular apartment, just with an age restriction. There are similar restrictions, for example for families with children for some housing. I was number 1 on a waiting list of 2600. I needed a place to live (and the other place that I looked at had a major issue that would take an indeterminate amount of time to resolve).

The level of contempt that I was exposed to on account of living there – my address – still brings tears to my eyes. This came mostly from staff at the real estate outfit that owns and operates the building and staff at the local municipality.

When staff belittles and scolds tenants as a matter of habit, and tenants are supposed to keep their mouths shut at all times, this opens up the way for criminals to move in.

Who’s going to believe anyone who dares speak up? Who dares speak up if residents are taught to keep their mouths shut? What use is speaking up if anything you say gets ascribed to your “dementia” anyway?

Continue reading →