French Politics

That's great, I don't know if we have laws like that in the US but we really should if we don't.

edited 17th Oct '17 5:13:54 PM by Fourthspartan56

Of course conservatives are already complaining that whistling construction workers could be punished. Because it's more important to protect their freedom to catcall women than it is to protect women from harassement.

Ugh, fucking typical. "Oh won't someone think of the Predators".

Macron sets out counter-terror programme for next five years

I understand that no country can welcome all the people in the world, but something about his words here (though I'd like to read or hear the original words from his mouth), makes me think that he's intending to use brain and money drain from some refugees and migrants in order to strengthen France's economy (while there's a risk that the home countries the people came from will become poorer both in regards to those two things.

The counter-radicalisation plan sounds decent, but not great, since it doesn't seem to (openly) contemplate the possibility of cooperation and most of all free will agency by members of communities that are at the greater risk of having some of its members radicalised (in other words, to tackle terrorism by radicalised Muslims, it would probably be a bit better to ask and give greater range of civil action to the local members of the community, so that they will freely cooperate with the authorities and/or institutions that deal with this).

edited 19th Oct '17 7:46:52 PM by Quag15

He was already set on bypassing Parliament, bypassing the Constitutional Council is only more of the same bullshit.

>Not referring to constitutional council

Wait, how in the world is that supposed to be his decision?

The President can refer a law to the Constitutional Council, but others can as well.

I think it's more about picking your refugees according of a scale of..."emergency" I guess? Like, say, a Rohingya would be super high, but someone who just came because France is a richer country than his own wouldn't.

However, it is super hard (both technically and morally) to draw lines, so it's easier said than done. It's what I think they are aiming for.

An interesting article by Emmanuel Carrère, a writer, on Macron's personality after following him for a week. It is not objective (the writer says that he exactly belongs to Macron's target voters) but it is quite enlightening anyway - whether you like EM or not, it is not useless to understand how he works.

The counter-radicalization plan sounds smart, but the thing is that it's extremely difficult. While there are many theories about why radicalization happens, I want to present a model I was recently introduced to in a psychology class specifically about radicalization:

In order for an individual to become violently radicalized, there are four factors worth looking at. It's worth noting that these are more like a Venn diagram than a checklist, and not all need to be present:

1) Psycho-social difficulties, particularly on a group or peer level, or feelings of exclusions from the 'in-group' by default. For example, Arab-speaking children being told that it's not French to speak Arabic at their school, or being excluded from certain activities because of ethnic or religious background.

2) Political discourses and societal practices that create in and out-groups and de-legitimize the institutions people belong to. In other words, the debate over whether or not a person born in North Africa can ever truly be 'European,' delegitimizing an aspect of immigrant identity that they cannot shed causes extreme disenfranchisement.

3) Access to an ideologically charged environment that offers coherence, recognition and meaning. This one speaks for itself.

4) Access to an environment that condones and approves of violent social and political practices.

Traditionally, #4 has been a focus of attempts to catch people before their radical behavior becomes out-and-out violent, but with access to the Internet, this has become increasingly difficult to do. Traditional thinking, suppressing criminal neo-Nazi or salafist groups, does not work as well anymore.

The solution that seems to work now is targeting #3, creating alternatives to the social orders created by radicalized groups in order to give those who feel disenfranchised and powerless some means to feel like their actions - and their lives - have value. The question is specifically how to go about that, because the radicalization process is almost completely different from person to person.

I'm assuming Macron has smart people looking at this, and people with experience in these kinds of environments, but it'll be interesting to see if they can deliver a cost-effective measure against radicalization without getting heavy-handed.

edited 20th Oct '17 5:44:19 AM by math792d

Germany had success with youth groups offered by non-profit organisations and the church. This way you "catch" them early, ensure that they socialize in a positive manner and they might engage themselves later in said non-profit organisation or the church, so that they can get recognition even if they are otherwise not particularly successful. Problem is to actually reach the "outsiders" and get them to visit one of those groups. But I am convinced that those organisations do a lot of good work in terms of prevention.

Perhaps an offer in the internet would be a good idea...something easy accessible which can draw people in step by step, first by creating a community online and then leading them to RL contact. But that is in area in which those non-profit organisations are just taking the first steps.

edited 20th Oct '17 11:51:13 AM by Swanpride

My branch of Engineers Without Borders goes to really bad neighbourhoods and teaches kids to code. We've got 14-year-old proficient Python programmers already, and we've only been at it for a couple of years.

Coding doesn't immunize you from becoming a shitlord, but it's a great asset in the workplace and for self-development, for sure, so half the reason of becoming an asshole is gone.

Does Germany have effective...hm...channels of communication with its mosques? I know that there's significantly more church-state integration in Germany than in, say, France or the US but I don't know if there's been as much work with the Islamic religious community.

That's putting it mildly. In France, the Church and the State were forcibly separated in 1905.

There is communication, but imho it needs improvement. The problem I see is that the Turkish mosques are very well organised and very powerful, while actual German mosques, which are usually lead by liberal Muslims, are smaller and therefore have a harder time to organize themselves in the same manner. The main Muslim organisation which has something to say about anything is very conservative and in a settled (and sometimes not so settled) way they are fighting against the more liberal leaning mosques. But there are the first people in the Government who are talking about the need to have a German Islam in Germany instead of a Turkish one, so I am hopeful.

But no other religious organisation has the same rights as the Christian churches have. Still, the approach is more to be inclusive. For example the mass at reunification day involved preachers from more or less every bigger religion in the country. At the same time, our churches do their part, too. The more liberal Mosques have partnership with churches for inclusive events....but naturally they are also the ones which have to deal quite often with hatred from the conservative Muslims. Ironically I think that the Refugees will help. A lot of them either come from countries which weren't quite as fanatic or they fled from fanatic Muslims in the first place.

edited 24th Oct '17 11:37:19 PM by Swanpride

That's actually pretty awesome.

Still, this strategy obviously would be absolutely hell to employ in France, since they went for aggressive secularization instead of state-supported pluralism, and it's really hard to replace religious institutions with secular emotional support.

Well, Germany has this too, kind of. For a lot of Germans the church has been replaced by being part of some sort of sport club and/or participating in a non-profit organisation...there are the ones lead by the church, but also the ones which are entirely secular AND independent from politics (though the members naturally tend to lean more towards the left for obvious reasons).

So perhaps France needs something along the line, an organisation which invites everyone to participate and which gives people the feeling of belonging to a community.

Aside from the "Germany does it better" bit I already read about 452 times, it's full-stop apples and oranges. Mostly because in Germany, the majority of the muslim population comes from Turkey which A) is Atatürk's country, who was a pioneer of moderate islam and B) was never a German colony, which means that you don't quite have the same level of resentment towards your host country when it lets you down.

France mostly has North African muslim immigrants, who came from three countries France colonized, who arrived when it needed fresh unqualified workers, and then were thrown away and parked in suburbs with no perspectives in life. The rise of salafism came because for a long while, Saudian money was the only money that came in those Cités, and the politicians realized that far too late or, in the right-wing's case, didn't care because the more you radical islamism is visible, the easier it is to push security front and center, which is all they can do nowadays.

Mais l'Allemagne fait mieux quand même. Starting by not colonizing... eer, never mind. Actually there's a suprising lack of resentment from immigrants coming from Germany's old European colonies and occupations. And I wonder what the GDR's immigration policy was. But that's a topic for another thread?

Isn't that just because Germany had its colonies taken away long before they gained independence? It's not like with France where their colonial rule is largely still in living memory.

The German colonial empire was substantially smaller, also it was sub-Saharan and Oceanic instead of having large middle eastern and North African segments.

edited 25th Oct '17 6:25:44 PM by Silasw

I actually didn't say that Germany does it better. I just mentioned some things Germany is trying out while also mentioning a lot of stuff which doesn't work all that well in Germany. What does work to a certain degree though is offering an alternative community for young people to belong in order to keep them from falling into the hands of right wing organisations (or sects, for that matter).

And if you had actually read carefully what I have written, you might have noticed that I have identified the Turkish Moslems as a huge problem (because they tend to be very conservative) and expressed the need for our politicians to encourage a German Muslim community, because that's the liberal one.

Btw, is there something along the line of a French Muslim community?

Germany went late into the colonizing game due to Bismarck being so much against it, what it took was taken away after WWI and taking care of its old colonies is more or less part of the whole being responsible for the past thing Germany has going on. There is still resentment, though, but we are mostly talking about very specific groups, not half of the African continent like it is the case with France.

edited 25th Oct '17 9:39:57 PM by Swanpride

That and the Turkish community did not come from a German colony anyway.

I met with my grandfather yesterday in Paris, he was born in Algeria and had to flee the country in 1962 aged 16, after living through 8 years of war. The memory is still very much alive, we even discussed it - fascinating talk.

Since we're bringing up Algerian migration into France, I'd like to bring up my favorite band of all time.

More relevant to this thread, and actually in French:

My feeble attempt at translating this pun-heavy rhymy piece:

Paris seeks ban on ‘Sugar Daddy’ dating site targeting students