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“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Another missed opportunity for Jamie Dimon to just shut the fuck up.

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

ha ha ha! Nice try weird people.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Even though I know this is a bad idea, I’m off to do it anyway!

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

We won’t go back.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

We still have time to mess this up!

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Today in Veganism: No Swiss for You Ms!

Today in Veganism: No Swiss for You Ms!

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The residents of the Swiss town of Gipf-Oberfrick have denied a Swiss passport to a Dutch born vegan.

A Dutch vegan who applied for a Swiss passport has had her application rejected because the locals found her too annoying.

Nancy Holten, 42, moved to Switzerland from the Netherlands when she was eight years old and now has children who are Swiss nationals.

However, when she tried to get a Swiss passport for herself, residents of Gipf-Oberfrick in the canton of Aargau rejected her application.

And what did the Dutch vegan in question have to say about this?

Ms Holten, a vegan and animal rights activist, has campaigned against the use of cowbells in the village and her actions have annoyed the locals.

The resident’s committee argued that if she does not accept Swiss traditions and the Swiss way of life, she should not be able to become an official national.

Ms Holten told local media: “The bells, which the cows have to wear when they walk to and from the pasture, are especially heavy.

“The animals carry around five kilograms around their neck. It causes friction and burns to their skin.”

She added: “The sound that cow bells make is a hundred decibel. It is comparable with a pneumatic drill. We also would not want such a thing hanging close to our ears?”

And for the counterpoint, here is a representative of the local Swiss People’s Party (motto: No Dutch Vegans Allowed!!!!):

Tanja Suter, the president of the local Swiss People’s Party, claimed Ms Holten has a “big mouth” and that residents did not want to grant her citizenship “if she annoys us and doesn’t respect our traditions”.

This is now the second time that Ms. Holten has been denied Swiss citizenship.

Responding to the rejection, Ms Holten said: “I think I spoke my mind too often, and I say it out too loud.”

Ms Holten, who describes herself as a freelance journalist, model and drama student, has also campaigned against a number of other Swiss traditions like hunting, pig races and the noisy church bells in town.

She was previously rejected for citizenship in 2015 after residents voted to block her initial application.

We interrupt this post for the obligatory:

We now return you to your regularly scheduled vegan bashing.

The case has now been transferred to the Cantonal government in Aargau, which can overrule the decision and can still grant her a Swiss passport despite the objections of the locals.

Local residents in Switzerland often have a say in citizenship applications, which are decided by the cantons and towns where the applicants live rather than federal government.

It is still very difficult to be granted Swiss citizenship and being born in the country does not give the children or even the grandchildren of immigrants the automatic right to be Swiss.

As far as I’ve been able to determine Ms Holten is not a Marine and does not do crossfit…

Reader Interactions

107Comments

  5. 5.

    Feebog

    Read this earlier and it reminded me of a woman I know who is a vegan and allegedly a feminist. She is also a Trump supporter. A number of her Facebook friends have pointed out the inconsistency, but she does’t see it. I have concluded she is just not that bright.

  13. 13.

    James Powell

    As far as I’ve been able to determine Ms Holten is not a Marine and does not do crossfit…

    I don’t get this. Can someone explain?

  39. 39.

    burnspbesq

    That was some pretty good work by the Houston secondary. Brady held the ball for about ten seconds and still had to throw it away.

  41. 41.

    ruemara

    @Major Major Major Major: Um, naughty films?

    And I have to lol a lot at this story. She’d be annoying even if she wasn’t vegan, but some vegans can be very, very irritating even though I support much of their principles.

  42. 42.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Omnes Omnibus: I think it’s where Bakersfield is, and it’s ag, mining and Republican. Wasteland mid-CA. But burnsie will actually know.

  46. 46.

    J R in WV

    @Feebog:

    I have often suspected that insufficient levels of protein and related nutritional factors not found in vegetables can sometimes cause a lowered intellectual capacity.

    No offense to anyone of any digestife persuasion..!

  50. 50.

    Mike in NC

    Daily Kos just ran a cartoon from a Swiss newspaper showing Trump grabbing a woman by the crotch. Next panel showed Putin grabbing Trump’s crotch.

  53. 53.

    J R in WV

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I can see an old family cowbell, brass, from where I’m sitting. Yes, we collect stuff, esp old family stuff. This was my Grandma’s cowbell. She had a tiny farm for the families food from around 1932-1950 or so. Grape arbor, apple orchard, chickens/pigs/milk cow veg garden, hayfield, about 8 acres.

    On the very head of Marsh Fork of Coal River, on st rt 3. Now you know my roots.

    We used it on our milk cow, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Clank, clank. There she is!

    ETA: No where NEAR 5 Kg in weight, more like 1…

  55. 55.

    WaterGirl

    @J R in WV: My sister did that to herself. Once the whole low fat craze started decades ago, she started eating low fat everything. And since she was vegetarian to start with, she really screwed herself up. By vegetarian, I mean the “I don’t eat meat” kind, not the “trying to eat right and make sure you get enough protein and things you need kind”. If she is serving her husband steak and potatoes and a salad, she eats some potato and a salad. She really screwed herself up, she is now OCD and ADD and not the same person she used to be. She didn’t get enough protein and her brain didn’t get enough good fat.

  61. 61.

    chris

    @J R in WV: That’s what I remember. The boss cow wore a bell about the size of a large apple. It was so you could locate the herd in the dark in a large pasture. At 4AM, no, I don’t miss it.

  62. 62.

    waysel

    @J R in WV: Article said the 5 kg bells are ceremonial, once a year for a cow wing ding, sort of specialty item. Not at all typical. Data seems sketchy.

  66. 66.

    WaterGirl

    @WaterGirl: Not making a judgment that being OCD or ADD are bad things, just that she wasn’t either of those things before and I think she messed with her brain chemistry. She also doesn’t get that you need a certain amount of fat to be able to take in certain things your body needs.

  68. 68.

    NotMax

    Few things more grating and irksome to be around than ‘my way or the highway’ zealots.

    Whether fundamentalist or foodamentalist.

  69. 69.

    chris

    @WaterGirl: One of my siblings did that. She was anemic but they caught it early when she fainted on the stairs. Just trying to be healthy but she did no research.

  71. 71.

    J R in WV

    So the story in the British paper about the Swiss cows supported the Dutch lady vegan, regarding cow bells, noise and weight. But then a farmer pointed out that those were festival cow bells, collector bells, only used one day a year. The rest of the year they use relatively tiny cow bells of brass.

    These are smaller than the little one I have from my Grandma, and appear to go tinkle, tinkle, rather than clank, clank or even Bong, bong.

    When we once stayed in a small hotel in the French country village, they told us they hoped the train across the road wouldn’t bother us. We were thinking 135-car unit train of coal running 60 mph, they were talking 2 passenger cars, electric, the loudest part was the little bell that was the crossing warning, which was a very dainty little bink, bink, bink sound while the crossing bar was down. Not so loud at all.

    some folk are just nuts…

  73. 73.

    Adam L Silverman

    And we’re back. We saw some deer on the corner where I hoped we’d get the taco truck. And some bird was screeching its head off way back in the scrub.

  76. 76.

    WaterGirl

    @Adam L Silverman:

    And some bird was screeching its head off way back in the scrub.

    Pretty sure that screeching was some poor bastard trying to come to terms with what will be happening next Friday.

  77. 77.

    J R in WV

    @WaterGirl:

    Some vitamins are water soluble,, and some are not. Those are fat soluble, and need some fats to dissolve in to get to the parts of your body that need those Vs.

    Oops!

  79. 79.

    frosty

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Here, it would be Madison and Milwaukee with Jefferson and Waukesha counties in between.

    So where I am it’s Philly and Pittsburgh and Alabama up the middle. (h/t Carville)

  80. 80.

    J R in WV

    @satby:

    To be fair, the pic in the Daily Mail story of the cows wearing the festival bells, they were nearly the size of a bowling ball. They looked like 12 lbs of metal, with a wide leather collar. But the other 364 days they wore something about the weight of an iPhone. Or two.

  81. 81.

    NotMax

    Who can hear the cowbells, anyway, over the sound of alpenhorns?

    Spent a week in Geneva many decades ago – the spic-and-span cleanest and the absolutely dullest city have ever been to.

  84. 84.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @frosty: Politically speaking, I think “the South” starts about thirty miles outside of any major metropolitan area

    Bill Belichik with his hoodie looks like an angry oompa-loompa

  85. 85.

    J R in WV

    @frosty:

    No, no, Kentucky in between. That’s why it’s often called Pennsyltucky, because it’s more like Kentucky than PA. ;-)

    My Grandpa was from up there, PennsyDutch, descendants of Hessian soldiers who went awol from the Red Coats in the Revolution. He married a girl from a riverboat town in Kentucky, and his sisters sent her recipes from the German folk of PA, so she could make him home cooking like he had on the family farm.

    So Sunday dinner at Grandmas was somewhat eclectic, compared to bog-standard southern cooking. This was the Grandma with the cow bell I can see from this computer laptop where I surf and post on B-J.

    Alabama, the very idea!

  86. 86.

    SRW1

    @waysel:

    The occasion the ceremonial 5kg bells are used for is ‘Almabtrieb’, which is the cattle drive to bring the cows, which have spent the summer months on mountain meadows, back down into the valleys. A big traditional thing, usually taking place on a weekend, for which the Swiss cowboys (who do this cattle drive on foot ) dress in the Swiss version of Lederhosen.

  88. 88.

    MattF

    An old friend of mine is Swiss. He once gave his mom a chain saw for her birthday. It had a starter motor, out of consideration for her advanced age.

  89. 89.

    Adam L Silverman

    @J R in WV: As someone who lived in Central PA, and who when I lived in the Philadelphia suburbs before that dated a woman from Altoona, I can reliably say that the area in the center of the state is referred to as CA for Central Alabama.

  94. 94.

    divF

    @Gin & Tonic: I noticed that (1) the sizes of the bells are graded down for younger children, and (2) the youngest children are wearing ear protection.

    This thread made me think of the following from LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness:

    Next, forty men in yellow, playing gossiwors. The gossiwor, played only in the king’s presence, produces a preposterous disconsolate bellow. Forty of them played together shake one’s reason, shake the towers of Erhenrang, shake down a last splatter of rain from the windy clouds. If this is the Royal Music no wonder all kings of Karhide are mad.

  101. 101.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @NotMax:

    In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

  103. 103.

    Alicia Wright, Ph.D.

    I too, as a USMC Combat Veteran, would request clarification of this remark.
    Thank you. SEMPER FIDELIS OOOHHHRRRAAAHHH!?

  104. 104.

    HeartlandLiberal

    Seriously? Cow bells and church bells bother her? Why in $DEITY’s name would she want to live in Switzerland, then? I think the Swiss citizens have made the right decision. We only got to spend a week there when we lived in Europe decades ago, but damn, we went out of our way to hike and camp in a valley where all we could hear were the cow bells and church bells.

  106. 106.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Alicia Wright, Ph.D.: The other day, the person who tweets as the “Angry Officer” tweeted out:

    Has anyone met a Marine who does crossfit who is also a vegan? Because that would be the single most annoying person in the world.

    I put that up as a post here:
    https://balloon-juice.com/2017/01/12/its-funny-because-it-would-be-true/

    I’ve worked on a number of Joint teams or in a number of Joint assignments with Marines. I’ve had a number as students when I was assigned at USAWC. And have had the honor and privilege of being a guest at the annual USMC birthday dinner/dining in held by the Marines in the Carlisle, PA area.

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