SBB pays me 26 Franks.

I just found a 26 Franks cheque in the mail from SBB. They'd fought really hard to not pay me for a delayed train. The officers on board refused to certify that the train is late, until I promised I'd use it only to get money from Deutsche Bahn. The Swiss officers wouldn't give me a form to request compensation for the delayed train. Not on train, and not on the ticket counter. The guy on the ticket counter almost shouted: "Those forms you either get from the train crew, or you don't get them at all. That'd be all. Next!"

Die europäische Linke

Ich zähle mich nicht zur europäischen Linken, und ich könnte es nicht. Hier ist ein Abschnitt aus einem Interview mit Christopher Hitchens darüber, wie er der Linken immer skeptischer gegenüberstehen musste:

CH: Yes. What it meant was that after the collapse of official communism in 1989, there was only one nominally communist/socialist regime left in Europe that hadn’t been part of the Warsaw Pact for some time, or of the Moscow orbit, and that was Yugoslavia, which were, I’ll condense it a bit, there was a mutation from state socialism into state national socialism. In other words, the assets of former Yugoslavia were taken over by Slobodan Milosevic and a gang around him in the Serbian Socialist party so as to create out of a slowly dissolving federation a greater Serbia by force, and to get that by means of ethnic cleansing. It was a pretty classic, fascistic recipe. They took over the Yugoslav National Army, which had been the army of the whole country, and took over a lot of the assets of the country. And they embarked on a campaign of, effectually, genocide against Bosnians – Bosnian Muslims, Croatian Catholics and others in the name of Serbo nationalism, also of Serbian orthodoxy, Serbian Christian eastern orthodoxy, which had its own appeal to the Russian right wing and other nasty recrudescent groups at the time. And I thought well, good God, surely NATO can’t stand by, or Europe can’t stand by and see fascism come back and massacre civilians, bombardment of civilian cities right on its border just after the end of the Cold War. But no one, no one in Europe was able to do anything about it. Most of the European countries backed the same climb they would have done in 1914, you know, the Austrian state with the Slovenians, that the Germans tended to back the Croats. The French and the British were pro-Serbian. It was pathetic. And as you remember, it went on for years. We had to just watch it happening.

HH: Yes.

CH: …how pulverizing of this society. And rape camps, scenes of people being stuffed onto trains for deportation, amazing stuff, until finally, the United States decided to intervene. And I thought now if the left can’t take a lesson from that, when will it? What would it take? And when the United States decided to intervene, and it put a stop to it, too. It not just put a stop to the mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo and elsewhere, but it got rid, in the end, got rid of the Milosevic regime and restored Serbia to some form of democracy. If the left had had its way, Milosevic would have conquered and annexed Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. And there would have been a greater Serbia built on the mass graves of the populations. All of them were against the intervention. I thought well now, this is not a difference of emphasis.

Einfach hübsch

Dank an Katja!

Warum menschliche Kinder in den ersten Monaten so anstrengend sind

Die Antwort ist in Minute 8.

Funny line in a talk

Hitchens: I saw this coming, they gave as the official sermon: of course there will be an earth quake; because women insist on uncovering their faces.

[laughter]

Hitchens: Now, we all know of the seismic effects of the female gender.

Rushdie: Speak for yourself.

Hitchens: It can move mountains!

Anführungszeichen

Ein witziges Detail aus den Folien eines Vortrags. Ein Industrievertreter hält an der Uni Bern einen Vortrag über seinen Auftraggeber, eine Versicherungsgesellschaft. Für sie entwickelt er Software, die unter anderem folgende Aufgaben hat:

• Erfassen von Offerten
• Erfassen von Verträgen
• Erfassen von "Schadensmeldungen"

Die Anführungszeichen stehen tatsächlich nur bei Schadensmeldungen. Ich finde immer mal wieder erstaunlich, wie schnell Berater die Gefühlswelt ihrer Auftraggeber übernehmen. Es erinnert mich daran, wie unglaublich schnell Neulinge beim Sanitätsdienst der Bundeswehr die allgemeine Annahme übernehmen, dass alle "Patienten" übertreiben um sich vor der Arbeit zu drücken.

Christopher Hitchens in defense of forbidding Burqas

The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burqa […] are often described as seeking to impose a "ban." To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face.

I'm surprised that he doesn't much distinguish between forbidding the clothing in public institutions, and wearing it in private.