Politics

For the next decade or so, the southern edge of my small home city on the north side of Zürich will be a complex linear construction site, after which we’ll have a segment of a bicycle highway between Zürich and the upper Glatt Valley, and a mostly-brand-new train station with two additional platforms connecting to a new tunnel straight to Winterthur. This is great. But in the meantime, that complex linear construction site has been placed directly over what used to be my bicycle commute, which gave me the opportunity to find a new one. ...

As a left-leaning white kid who grew up in what turned out to be a dying Southern city, going from a fully-integrated Montessori elementary school in a neighborhood named after the white flight it later suffered to an East Memphis middle school whose history includes a massive expansion of its boarding program for Little Rock families resisting integration in the 1960s, I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to point to the premature end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 as the point at which it All Went Wrong. ...

I waited long enough to write about Kein 10-Millionen Schweiz that I get to do so in the past tense, with a sense of relief, albeit incomplete. Yes, dear reader, the Swiss People’s Party ran yet another Schwarzenbach referendum to attempt to create their little island without resorting to kinetics, and despite some fear based on early polling numbers that maybe this time they’d managed to do it, with a campaign that tried (but ultimately failed) to break from their explicitly fascist house style (in the sense of “blame foreigners for everything, including the traffic caused by your own love of cars, and do it mostly with red, white, and black ink”), we will once again not be Doing A Swexit. ...

A year and some after Switzerland’s plucky protofascist poster art collective cum Trumpist political party, the SVP (Swiss People’s Party), screamed Verfassungsbruch! (lit. “Constitution break!”; fig., accusative: “you’re breaking the Constitution!”) on the floor of Parliament at the admitted non-implementation of their unimplementable vandalism of the Swiss constitution in the name of nativism, they’re back at it again with the almost-reasonable-sounding Selbstbestimmungsinitiative (lit. “self-determination initiative”; SBI if you’re into hashtags). One has to read the details to see how broken it is. Let’s have a look. ...

I don’t think I’ve ever written a completely optimisic post about politics, but today seems as good a day as any to try. Today was an Abstimmungssonntag (“referendum Sunday”) here, and the most important question before Switzerland at the national level was a revocation of the federal government’s authority to levy a compulsory television and radio fee: NoBillag. I’ve already written about this referendum, and how it represented not a mere return of four hundred francs per year to every household, not a mere privatization of a few television and radio stations (one of which I’m listening to right now), but a frontal assault on public media and an attempt to drive the country’s media landscape into low-information territory; in other words noch ein Schritt zum kriechenden Beitritt der Schweiz in die vereinigten Staaten(1). ...

My opinion on Billag(1) is complicated. It seems like it could fairly simply be replaced by payments from the general fund, overseen by a non-political body to evaluate applications for funding from SRF and regional providers. What we have in NoBillag, instead, is an attempt to Americanize the Swiss media landscape. Thankfully, I’m not the first to point this out, and I hope I won’t be the last. tl;dr, hey Switzerland, you want Bundesrat Trump? Because NoBillag is how you get Bundesrat Trump. ...

On the shores of Lake Sarnen in central Switzerland, there’s a museli factory. (Of course there is.) It makes many different kinds of muesli for various markets. One of these is an organic chocolate-amaranth concoction that’s basically the only thing my daughter will eat for dinner this week. I happened to glance at the ingredients, and it occurred to me that there are basically three kinds of people in the world. ...

This is going to make me sound somewhat more libertarian than I actually am, but here goes: The most important duty of a state is its effective control over and responsible application of the monopoly on violence, delegated to it by its citizens, in the service of the protection of its citizens, and the protection of all people present within its territory. All the other trappings of statehood — a currency, a post office, universal healthcare, the name of your state on a placard at the UN General Assembly, some transportation infrastructure of some sort, passports, some stamps you can apply to passports issued by other states, a national Olympic team and/or Eurovision Song Contest entry (as appropriate), a flag — are nice to have, but not really essential. ...

Putting aside the discomfort of being an immigrant in a mildly xenophobic land, and the hypothetical ballistic solution to Switzerland’s furr’ner problem, I’ll add my voice to the growing chorus of confusion and ask what, in reality, just happened. So here, translated into English, is the new Article 121a of the Constitution of the Swiss Confederation: Article 121a Immigration Control Switzerland controls immigration independently. The number of residence permits for foreigners in Switzerland is limited by annual quota and a maximum limit. The maximum limit applies to asylum-seekers as well. The right to settlement, family union, and access to social services are subject to limitation. Quotas are to be defined to the advantage of Swiss citizens in the economic interest of Switzerland. Cross-border commuters are covered as well. The application of an employer, level of integration in Swiss society, and financial independence are especially influential criteria [in the decision to grant a residence permit]. No treaty may be signed in opposition to this article. The details are a matter of law. ...

In order to outline a more effective defense against Ausländer than the Masseneinwanderungsinitiative can provide, and with a deferential nod to Randall Munroe, I decided to do some back of the napkin estimates of what it would take to make Switzerland a literal island. tl;dr: it’s probably not worth it. ...