Sometimes, a city or state does something so mind-numbingly dumb that it makes the resulting facepalming sound like a standing ovation at the Royal Albert Hall. We sure see enough of that here in the United States, two recent examples include the inexplicable election of two clueless "democratic socialists," neither of whom has done an honest day's work, as mayors of New York and Seattle. But there's a difference; in those cases, it was a majority of voters who did something dumb. We may expect our elected officials to be a little sharper (and in that, we are all too often disappointed).
Which brings us to Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. That formerly fine city, beset with things like antisemitic attacks on soccer teams, has decided that what's really important is to ban billboards advertising fossil fuel products - or meat.
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.
At one of the city's busiest tram stops, adjacent to a grassy roundabout bursting with vibrant yellow daffodils and orange tulips, the poster advertising landscape has changed.
They now promote the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, and a piano concert. Until last week it was chicken nuggets, SUVs and low-budget holidays.
OK, promoting museums and local culture, that's not a bad thing. It's the mandating of that coverage that I have trouble with. But this appears to be the city's official policy.
Politicians in the city say the move is about bringing Amsterdam's streetscape into line with the local government's own environmental targets.
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.
Halve meat consumption? Why? Are we falling back on the cow flatulence argument again? Or the "it takes 72 gallons of water to make a pound of beef" argument, so often made by people who don't understand the hydrocycle, or that water sometimes just falls from the sky, in a phenomenon people call "rain?"
As you might expect, I have some questions.
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First, when we talk about fossil fuel advertising, does this include anything made from petroleum by-products or using petroleum precursors? Because that means banning the advertising of smartphones, of shoes, of clothing made with any synthetic materials, of ballpoint pens, of lipstick, lip balm, shampoo, of the plastic bottles that shampoo comes in - or, for that matter, will you ban any depiction of any plastic, in anything, anywhere? What about toothpaste? Deodorant? Are those to be banned from the city's billboards, as well?
Second, who is paying for these billboards now? It's a safe bet that, before now, the companies that sell food were paying for the advertising, and by "food," I mean "meat." As my late grandfather was fond of saying, "Eatin' ain't eatin' unless there's a dead critter involved." Who will pay for the advertising of public institutions, like museums and art galleries? Will the taxpayers take yet another European-style soaking for this?
Third, is this to remain a purely symbolic bit of horse squeeze, or will the city move to ban these things outright, in the name of the climate? If so, has anyone done any analysis to see how much effect banning steaks and burgers in Amsterdam will have on the global climate? I have a pretty good guess: "Not at all." So even a ban would be pointless. At the end of the day, Amsterdam, what are you really trying to achieve here?
None of this makes any sense. None of this will have any measurable effect on, well, anything. This is a city so absorbed in omphaloskepsis that they have lost any connection to anything resembling good sense. It's virtue signaling on a municipal scale, and that's all it is. Predictably, the far-left (for Europe, which is really saying something) is in favor of this - and we can safely leave it to someone from something called the "GreenLeft Party" to chime in:
"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."
To Anneke Veenhoff, I would say only this: Your policies are stupid, and so are your priorities. If you're worried about the future of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Western Europe in general, you'd better stop worrying about irrelevancies like your carbon footprints and start to worry about the steady flow of "refugees" from the Middle East and North Africa that your governments seem to welcome, with free housing and welfare benefits. This presents a far greater danger to Amsterdam than cheeseburgers.
