Amsterdam has one of the highest crime rates in the Netherlands despite legalizing prostitution and some drugs. Those are not crimes anymore. Take them off the docket, and it’s still 90 incidents per 1000 residents.
Crime per capita averages across Europe range from 45-65/1000.
For contrast, America’s most crime-riddled cities, like Memphis, Detroit, and Baltimore, often exceed 15–20 violent crimes per 1,000 people. Exceed, but nowhere near 90, so that might be something you’d want to address, eh? High crime?
Maybe it’s climate change that’s to blame.
Amsterdam has become the world’s first capital city to ban public advertisements for both meat and fossil fuel products. Since 1 May, adverts for burgers, petrol cars and airlines have been stripped from billboards, tram shelters, and metro stations.
Is it appropriate to suggest that prostitutes dancing in windows to attract sex work is advertising meat?
These aim for the Dutch capital to become carbon neutral by 2050, and for local people to halve their meat consumption over the same period.
“The climate crisis is very urgent,” says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party. “I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?
“Most people don’t understand why the municipality should make money out of renting our public space with something that we are actively having policies against.”
See. There it is. They don’t have policies against sex work; they actually regulate and tax it. Still making money, but they are not opposed. Meat and fossil fuels, however, are anti-Amsterdam, and the thinking goes like this. If we take the prompts away, people will be less likely to want or need either or both.
The meat and energy folks aren’t that excited about the move, but it doesn’t prevent them from advertising their wares elsewhere. The ban applies to city-owned spaces that it uses to generate ad revenue, not the entire city.
Stand at a tram stop in Amsterdam and you might no longer see a juicy burger or a 19 euro ($18.70; £14.90) flight to Berlin on the shelter.
Yet the same eye-catching offers can still pop up in your social media algorithm. And, let’s face it, many of us would be looking down at our screens until the tram trundles along.
If municipal bans leave digital platforms untouched, how much real world impact can they have on our habits or are they purely symbolic virtue-signaling?
There’s nothing wrong with living your supposed values, as long as you are not forcing them on others, but that’s the end goal. Progressive governments, by their nature, exist to manage human behavior, eventually by force.
The other issue is that both meat (not fast food, I can see why they’d not want to promote that) is essential to human health. Fossil fuels are critical to human flourishing. By stepping back from both in the name of the fake science of climate change, you are not just harming your city and nation; you are harming your people for a net negative result.
It’s bad enough living on the declining side of a civilizational arc, but they don’t want you to have a cheeseburger, either. Not happy? Smoke some weed in a coffee shop and have empty, meaningless sex. I’m sure your state provided stipend allows for such things since they promote that, but foods you need and cheap energy are verboten.
Stay on this path, and you’ll find yourself trapped in a political climate you can’t change, which is a result of the other, other issue. This is what the people in Amsterdam keep asking for, so I suppose they deserve it. Short of a concerted effort to change leadership and direction, they’ll keep getting suicidal empathized good and hard, until they can’t stop them doing it to you, whatever they decide IT is, whether they asked for it or not.
