French Politics

Also, even if they were the worst jerks ever it's ridiculous to use unreasonable people in Belgium to justify supporting a French administration.

From last page:

Edit: On closer watch, someone threw...water from a bottle. How disgusting. Truly.

And...he reached out and started grabbing at them and got surprised when they hit his arm away.

So, unless you have a deep loathing for environmentalists being...not all that uncivil, considering they were being provoked pretty bad, the video kinda doesn't really give a compelling reason to support Macron?

Wow someone who calls Mediapart an islamic-leftist website and originally supported Fillon is in fact supporting Macron, that is such a plot twist!

Is this about those Extinction Rebellion guys getting tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed?

They were being obnoxious, but not violent. Why be that extreme? As long as they weren't damaging public property, that reaction seems over the top.

For me it's always a pain to argue and even more not face to face but in short I think what happened recently in France paints an overall picture of severe cultural derailment where all the values are turned upside down !

Sorry if all of it looks scrambled when you read it because in my own head it is already rather messy and I have difficulties myself to write this but my point is that really I cannot tell you how much I am scared for the future of my country.

The fact I feel alone in this lane scares me even further.

Note that at the beginning of the video the narrator said :

That is a French demonstration ?

For me that says it all loud and clear.

Edited by Nuup-Kangerlua on Feb 16th 2020 at 8:12:45 PM

Wow, what we have here is a True Believer.

Today, Mediapart published a video titled L’affaire Mila est un «révélateur».

This is a video telling how, when the right-wing can say shit about Islam, they suddenly become feminists (and how actual feminists can fall in the trap of advertising them).

Is islamic-leftism the thing about calling islamophics out on their shit? Because then Mediapart is indeed islamic-leftist.

But can we think about this weird word islamic-leftist? In French politics, calling someone (or an organisation) islamic would lack punch. And calling them leftists would be ridiculous (as they would be openly leftist). But can you tell what is wrong about being islamic? Note that I didn't write islamist.

I say, if your criticism of a leftist organisation is that they are islamic (or islamic-leftist), you either don't understand these words, or you are being islamophobic.

Isn't Islamic Leftism basically Ba'athism?

Not really - if anything, Ba'athism is more Arab-focused than Islam-focused, especially with the emphasis on Arab nationalism. It's also often been accused of being another strand of fascism, especially the neo-Ba'athist strain espoused by Saddam Hussein.

You're looking for Islamic socialism.

to elaborate to people who don't speak french, islamic leftism translates to islamo-gauchiste, which inherently carries a negative connotation of the left. it's built on the template of bobo-gauchiste, itself a specifically pejorative version of just bobo, which wikipedia tells me can be roughly translated to the concept of Yuppie in english. It's a term who's more often used to parody angry right wingers seething about immigrants, islam, and so on than it is used and meant in earnest.

Edited by Yumil on Feb 18th 2020 at 10:58:03 AM

I just got news that the culprit for the Griveaux affair claims to have done it because Griveaux was running on a family values platform, which if true voids any sympathy I had for the guy.

Having an affair is a thing. Having an affair while running on family values is another, and while both things are perfectly legal, I think the latter is deserving of public humiliation.

Could be worse. You could have had a politician who runs on a family values platform and an anti-abortion platform who has affairs and demands that his mistress have an abortion.

Something that actually happened in USA politics with a former GOP Rep.

"whatever your politicians may have done, we did It worse" is pretty much the unofficial tag line for the gop at this point.

The attempt by the France Insoumise caucus to pull a written filibuster has been nullified by the Speaker, who used the nuclear option of Article 100 of the Rules of the National Assembly and a Constitutional Court opinion to assign a single orator for series of similar amendments !

https://twitter.com/LCP/status/1229819886903402498

A farmer in Alsace has shot one of the men who tried to steal the fuel-oil he stores for his tractor.

Master Thomas Hellenbrand who is the lawyer for the robber now in hospital says that the liberation of this farmer even though he has been indicted was an outrageous incitement of untolerable personal violence !

Part of my family lives in Western Puy-de-Dome County, near the border with Creuse County, the closest you can get in France to Wyoming in the USA where the closest Gendarmerie station is almost an hour away from your house so your call for help will probably not get you too far.

After all what is a gallon of fuel you paid compared to a human life ?

Please do not make waves because we have elections soon !

Edited by Nuup-Kangerlua on Feb 19th 2020 at 2:56:37 PM

I posted this in the COVID-19 thread, but I'll post it here too:

Any French tropers familiar with Le Monde?

Anyway, Le Monde recently ran an article praising Taiwan's response to COVID-19 despite being cut off from the WHO.

Le Monde: Taïwan se veut un modèle dans la lutte contre le coronavirus

There's been several pieces of foreign media complimenting Taiwan's handling of this virus recently. I guess the issue is becoming more relevant to them since the virus is hitting them too. France for example already has over 400 cases.

yeah, Le monde's a pretty good newspaper, arguably the least terrible among the big names.

Also, yeah, the virus is having some consequences over here. Companies have adopted a policy of avoiding physical contact at work, so no handshakes and others when you get to work and so on.

On another topic, the government decided to play the 49.3 card to get the retirement reform to skip the assembly vote. Coming from the same people who called Manuel valls's use of it the sign of "the end of their reign".

Rarely have I hoped a politician was this right about something.

The numbers of amendments to the law was staggering in many ways for me :

More than 40K at face value and even compressed through article 100 that was still about 29K so even when you suppose you can read and debate each amendment seriously within an hour, that would still have taken about three years and four months to expedite it even if you could work around the clock !

Exemple :

The sub-amendment N°42415 to the amendment N°26724

For the fourth alinea

To replace "with respect for" by "to respect the objectives of"

To think we could have missed (Sarcasm Mode) that opportunity for social reform !

Edited by Nuup-Kangerlua on Mar 7th 2020 at 6:34:16 PM

Emmanuel Macron refuses to denounce the Charlie Hebdo caricatures and points out that freedom of speech also means freedom to blasphemy

https://www.dw.com/en/emmanuel-macron-refuses-to-condemn-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-of-prophet-mohammad/a-54788078

Bravo! I am sick of people victim blaming this particular case.

Yes, for once he's doing something right.

Former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing died at age 94 from COVID-19 complications.

Edited by StFan on Dec 3rd 2020 at 2:35:55 PM

So, there is another sex scandal going on:After Duhamel incest scandal, French lawmakers bid to break omerta

Also, I know I have asked this question before but If the new bill is adopted, any sexual relations with a child under the age of 13 – whether considered consensual or not – will be criminalised, and punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a €150,000 fine. I was sure there was already a law about sexual intercourse between adults and children.

I’m horrified that France currently considers under 13s able to consent to sexual activity. Hell, I’m horrified that even if this passes France will still consider teenagers able to consent in that sense.

Thing is, is that actually the case? My memory says that France has an age of consent like all other parts of the world, 15 in their case. So I keep getting confused whenever someone proposes new laws there.

Under current law, there isn't a legal presumption that the minor didn't give consent, but it's still a punishable act for an adult to have sex with a minor under 15 regardless of consent.

For historical reasons, Anglosphere/common law nations tend to frame sex with a minor as non-consensual, while Continental/civil law nations are more likely to say that sex with a minor is simply prohibited. It's mostly a Distinction Without a Difference at this point.

Edited by Ramidel on Jan 22nd 2021 at 11:16:25 AM

Ahh I think I’ve found it, the current French law (at least based on Wikipedia’s quote) requires the offender to be an adult, so a person under 18 can have ‘consensual’ sex with a child.

That or where the law says “a sexual offence” it isn’t just saying “a sexual act” with weird translation, but means you have to be breaking some other sexual activity law for the age of consent to kick in.