Recent content by missjo

We've got quite a few pubs in the Netherlands that refuse to abide by the law and are being tolerated by the government, so far. I'm not really a smoker myself, but all this anti smoking nonsense is almost making me want to become one.

Yes but a real speakeasy would be a lot more fun.

I turn the tables and laugh, giggle and shake my head at people who wear modern clothes.

Yes I think we are. We are living in a society of consumers and individualism. In olden days we were told we should know our place, we were part of communities, families, neighbourhoods while today in big cities its a miracle if you even know your neighbours. In stead of teachers and parents...

Technically you can say that we have some issues, in one way or another we are trying to escape reality and shut out the real world... but then again so is anyone who watches tv, reads a book, plays computer games, etc, etc.

Sounds excellent. I like the idea of living like the Amish but am not at all keen on religion.

Nobody can prove it. The National Institute for War studies did a lot of very detailed research (especially after some American writer wrote a book claiming she knew who did it) and their conclusion is that we just don't know who betrayed them. As many of the SD archives were destroyed we will...

Oliebollen? No, I'd need to fry those and there won't be much hot food in my lunchroom :) But we may get a few around the end of the year.

There is really no way to say who betrayed them and how this traitor found out about them. Some sources claim that the message even told the Germans how many Jews there were, that is something a burglar would not have known. A burglar could have told the Germans about there being 'someone' in...

Nobody knows, they may not even have been betrayed (on purpose).

It fits very well with other historical sources. Many Jews in 1930s Holland lived like everyone else and experience no or little discrimination, or at the worst they were as much discriminated against as any other side of society, communists hated socialists, catholics looked down on...

Well that only proofs that looking at the past is not just a historical thing but also a regional thing. Dating a black guy would have given me as a woman in 1930s Amsterdam less problems then dating a communist or protestant. Not saying there was no racism, but compared to the situation in...

Also, people generally don't change much but the social barriers that keep us from misbehaving get higher and lower in certain eras. All the bad things that happened then happen today as well. I've done research into incest, pedophilia, teen pregnancy, rape, it happened in the 1930s as well as...

But some of the old diseases have been replaced by new ones. Old risks are now gone but we have different risks. Medical science moves forward but hospitals have gotten dirtier and the way you get treated in hospitals has gone downhill. As for getting arrested for dating certain women, not sure...

Exactly. Another problem is that the 1930s have SUCH a bad image that saying anything even remotely positive makes people accuse you of looking at the subject with pink sunglasses. And yes, people don't like to hear that sometimes progress isn't as good as we would like to think, we don't like...