French elections 2017: completing the hat-trick?

Also lol at complaining about French links in the French politics thread. But I guess foreign languages are for liberals #respectableGauche

I wasn't complaining.

Keep laughing Fred. Relax, and accept how dumb you are.

Seem to remember a debate here about Melenchon and anti-semitism... https://blogs.mediapart.fr/egalidad/blog/170717/vel-dhiv-melenchon-daccord-avec-lepen

you remember correctly and i argued specifically that melenchon was likely just as anti-semitic (or not) as le pen. it's hilarious to see that vindicated in such an obvious way.

Sure, that's what you were arguing back then..

ftr i didn't say le pen isn't an anti-semite. i said that dogwhistling was coming le pen AND melenchon.

― Mordy, Tuesday, April 25, 2017 2:18 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if it seemed like i was downplaying le pen's "antisemitism" it was bc i said that they both send dogwhistles (whereas lbi was trying to argue that le pen was somehow more explicitly antisemitic and i was contesting the 'explicitness'). please represent what i was arguing fairly.

― Mordy, Tuesday, April 25, 2017 2:21 PM (two months ago) Bookmark

Agree that the explicit angle - Melenchon being an anti-semite but Le Pen being anti-semeticer - is nonsense, if that's how it came across I retract.

Found something in English on how the remarks are being reported.

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/1.802131

I don't see anyone coming across well on this..

manu's approval rating cratering. RIP

This is what Macron tweets:

Journée internationale des #droitsdelhomme : les droits universels, l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes et les libertés fondamentales sont au cœur de mon action. C’est notre combat, chaque jour.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) December 10, 2017

vs. what is actually going on:
http://www.lemonde.fr/immigration-et-diversite/article/2017/12/16/en-france-une-politique-migratoire-d-une-durete-sans-precedent_5230634_1654200.html

Sorry, it's in French AND a paywall. In short: this government has the toughest policies on migrants we've ever seen. Police steal their belongings, sending out more and more people, making NGOs and shelters do police work (sorting people, etc.). All the NGOs and people who are helping the migrants are appalled and furious.

I know Macron has a good reputation internationally, but don't get fooled, his kind of centrism is nothing more than right-wing policies with prettier speeches. Fuck this guy.

For fucks sake. Yes, one racist can be better than another racist. Because racism is an actual thing that causes actual damage, and some people cause more damage than others. It's not just a tag to put on people so guys like xyzzz can feel better about themselves. Fucking stupid purity politics.

― Frederik B, Thursday, 13 July 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I live in a country where the right-wing populists are in control of immigration policies, and the other day the police straight up killed a man while trying to deport him. You don't know shit about what you speak, xyzzz.

Defeat this guy because he is worse than the left, don't try with the worse than Le Pen bullshit.

Dinsdale, do you live in a quartier with a lot of migrants on the streets?

here we go

~france~

Yes Fred I'll wait until French police kill a man while trying to deport him. My apologies to you.

just noticed we need to achieve safety by April or we are down, we have Chelsea, Man City and Arsenal in our last 4 games. Although by then I imagine Man City will be pissed up and sending out a hologram XI.

oops wrong thread!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-03/these-countries-are-getting-more-miserable-this-year

https://i.imgur.com/Pem0TAo.png

iirc you live in the usa so

yeah - #49 on the list!

Willing to bet on a v different picture if you broke that down by race though.

anyway I ain't gonna argue with Mordy about France, I know it's one of "your things", it's cool, too bad yr missing out

Miserable economies not miserable populations btw.

I have an image of the google street map cars driving through Kazakhstan, using state of the art facial recognition software to count the number of miserable looking people.

This is good on mapping out the French brand of racism, explaining the character of Macron's policies and remarks.

People often ask me to contrast racism and racists in France and the United States.. I prefer to draw connections, but here is one significant difference..

— I Said What I Said (@alwaystheself) December 19, 2017

it certainly chimes with my experience

in other news..... sheesh
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/20/french-race-row-erupts-as-feminist-forced-off-advisory-body

I saw a thread on this from the same person a few days ago:

If you read French, you can learn about recent events here: https://t.co/Wsuf2J58BY

— I Said What I Said (@alwaystheself) December 15, 2017

The racists who've been open with me about it here have all been proles. I've encountered no racism amongst my academic friends / colleagues but we never talk about such things so I wouldn't really know. Though it sounds consistent with what'd I'd expect. The colonial legacy is p much never explored in schools. my daughter's programme in histoire / géo terminale this year is on the USA, where they're discussing for instance the Vietnam war. Yet she's never learned about the French Vietnam War in school here. Nor about Algeria, despite the fact that her classmates have been largely Algerian (non rich immigrants to France end up in the same places).

police tactics against non whites : it's one thing if you're talking about the 6ème or whatever, but up in the 18ème and 19ème the street hassles (drug dealing, bootleg cigarette dealing, fake paper dealing) are chiefly non white affairs. the migrants who flood my streets these days are implicated in all of this because they're illegal and have no access to legitimate work (not that there is much of it to be found for people of their education level in the city), so they're vulnerable to organized crime, which is thus also an element in my environs. as a "good liberal" I'm supposed to look past that and tell the police to go away? I don't get that. I want the cops closing down the bullshit.

ime as an American from the American South I'd say you could substitute "French" for "American Northerner" in that twitter thread and get something equally legit

From that tweet thread:

The second major difference, which is actually linked to first, is that French racists routinely point to U.S. racism to excuse their own racism (something most U.S. racists can't do largely because they don't know anything about the rest of the world).

In other words, most U.S. racists can't point to another internationally-known racist boogeyman, so that's not part of their cultural repertoire. But many French racists try to silence critique of French racism by referencing the U.S.

This is completely true for Dutch racists as well, and I'd be surprised if it doesn't work this way for a lot of European countries.

I very much doubt UK racists do this btw.

We do that thing where we claim we were the first country in the world to abolish slavery (we were not...) to get away from the fact that we were a big slave trade nation. That is kinda like that.

Of course the French revolution abolished slavery (eventually) only for Napoleon to bring ti back.

I think UK does this as well?

(DK outlawed slave trade in 1793, but from 1803, the 10 years were then spent getting enough slaves to the colonies in the Caribbean so that the trade would not be needed any more)

(the real answer is 1848, and only after a slave revolt)

(and yes, I had to google that. and sorry for spamming this thread)

Yes, the UK, of all countries, we're forever slapping ourselves on the back over William Wilberforce.

The UK is enormously proud of abolishing slavery but neglects to mention that it was replaced with indentured servitude under more or less the same conditions.

Which lasted until WW1.

Oh yeah, "look to the US they're the REAL racists" is a pan-European experience ime, it works particularly well because anti-american sentiment cuts across party and political lines. Often accompanied by "you're importing US ideas that don't belong here" said to ppl w/ social justice concerns.

so turns out he is Sarkozy on steroids who knew

Why do you write that? Up till now he hasn't been doing anything fishy like Sarko. Or has there been something going on I am not aware of?

A lot of ex-PS voters who jumped on the LRM bandwagon are surprised to discover that he's not quite Hollande redux with a supplement of charisma, although when it comes to corruption that has certainly been the case so far (in that sense, Macron and Hollande are Sarkozy's twin antithesis). As far as I can tell, he's been remarkably faithful to the majority of his pre-electoral pronouncements, at least if you look beyond the Rorschach test.

I'm slow to the news and vague but what I meant had more to do with economic policies than anything. The age old dream of the right to have a French Thatcher might be happening, after all.

Would rather have you be specific

This was a good report on the protests - mobilisations, or more likely the lack of them:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/05/23/valeria-costa-kostritsky/may-18/

That article indicates why so few care about this mobilisation. Bored people want to play May 68, though tbf May 68 was bored people playing as well. A month ago I thought the cheminots might win this one; I’m not sure anymore. The student movement won’t go anywhere: it’s a small minority of humanities and social science students who care, no one else. When I’m around the marches I see large groups of pro-Palestinian activists, obv relevant to the students and the cheminots.

I'm slow to the news and vague but what I meant had more to do with economic policies than anything. The age old dream of the right to have a French Thatcher might be happening, after all.

so turns out he is Sarkozy on steroids who knew

A better question is how could anyone be surprised by any of this? There's a saying in France about centrists who like to label themselves "neither left nor right", that what they really are are "neither left nor left". He's been smart enough to hide most of his ideas during the campaign but it was quite obvious where his presidency would go to anyone who had been keeping an eye on him since his part in the Hollande governement.

Emmanuel Macron's assistant chief of staff Alexandre Benalla has been caught impersonating a riot cop on May 1st and beating up a protester. Mental. pic.twitter.com/I2L4kcY9Dw

— Ronan Burtenshaw (@ronanburtenshaw) July 19, 2018

wtf

the sensible centrists in action