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In the last week, Macron/France : - call[s] to 'cut off' social media during riots sparks backlash in France (france24.com) - passes bill to allow police remo

In the last week, Macron/France : - call[s] to 'cut off' social media during riots sparks backlash in France (france24.com) - passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people [2] - blames Video games [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36615378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36615378 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36616037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36616037 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630151

rayiner 3y ago
Macron has to do something to divert blame from France’s importation of a underclass from its former colonies. I don’t see how Europe isn’t totally screwed. Their tight-knit social democracies are not compatible with immigration. But without immigration they don’t have enough workers.
- volfied 3y ago
  They don’t have enough workers they can exploit
  - layer8 3y ago
    The demographic trend (age curve) is a real problem, difficult to solve without immigration.
    - GloomyBoots 3y ago
      It’s impossible to solve with immigration. Even with an immigrant population that was completely willing and able to assimilate (unlike those in question), that process takes generations and requires a lack of ethnic ghettos and a high proportion of native and nativized people relative to immigrants. No honest person would say that we could solve Japan’s falling birthrate by rapidly and continually pumping it full of Europeans and expect it to remain recognizably Japanese. But anyway population fluctuates. These things tend to work themselves out normally when your main goal is the good of the nation and not just inflating the GDP as quickly and recklessly as possible.
      - 0xcafefood 3y ago
        Right. And in fact, immigration doesn't solve the issue for a very basic reason. A system that says "The number of working-age people must be at least 5x the number of retirees" is literally demanding unending (super)exponential growth. It's fundamentally impossible on a finite world. It's going to break down at some point. The only question is whether that happens before or after filling the developed world up with immigrants from the undeveloped world.
    - hirako2000 3y ago
      Immigration seen that way to me is similar to considering human as cattle. If moral matters in the question. If not. difficult to solve? I have no strong opinion to the question of contraception but it would be sensical to promote and educate people (both men and women) that parenting is good (arguing with nature is hard) especially when the nation needs more births. I feel obligated to apologies, but won't. I do accept to having to point out I'm in no way stating contraception should be illgal or anything of that sort. I concede that for solutioning the short term issue of shortage of workers, there are no other scheme to employ, I'm out of idea. No wait! There are officially almost 3 million unemployed residents in France. I won't try to demonstrate it's in fact double this number, nor bring up the argument a few million don't really work given they do just as little as they get paid. We are taken for fools. And a number of idiots found no alternative than setting stuff on fire. It's not just immigrants rioting.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      The only real solution is family planning. You don't want a pointless exponential population growth Ponzi scheme where each person has to have three children with their partner. What is necessary are people that join the workforce exactly at the same rate as people exit the workforce. That is the only way you can avoid the Ponzi scheme. This means when someone is in their mid fourties and will retire in 20 years, someone needs to give birth to a child so that it will grow up and start working just in time for the retiree. If children get born too early, then you run into the problem of them needing their own caretakers. These children don't compensate for someone else leaving, so they add to the population and their future caretakers will also add to the population leading to an exponential Ponzi scheme.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    BINGO
  - rayiner 3y ago
    They don’t have enough workers period. In 1960, most European countries had about 5 working age people per retiree. By 2050, there will be less than 2 workers per retiree in France, and just over 1 in Spain.
    - agentgumshoe 3y ago
      So we need to eradicate more retirees then? Seriously though, workers on what? I find it quite odd to base the value on workers as being a percentage of retirees, that's entirely detached from demand, productivity and opportunity. "We need more workers to fund the old ones that stopped!" I get the basic logic, but it's stupid.
      - michaelt 3y ago
        How else would pensions get paid?
        NibsNiven 3y ago
        Pension funds earn from investing.
        michaelt 3y ago
        Investments in businesses with no employees, which sell their wares to unemployed people?
      - Telemakhos 3y ago
        > Seriously though, workers on what? This is the unexamined premise that keeps on going unexamined. Europe makes less and less each day, growing more and more dependent on China for production (as on the US for security, although Europe seems a little less dependent on Russia for energy now). Automation fills the tedious, low-skill jobs that remain onshore, and the promise of industrialization, digitalization, and now AI is that fewer human workers are needed to sustain equal productivity. Why does the sane world that frets about offshoring and AI gutting employment also need unskilled immigrants to be "moar workers?"
  - sremani 3y ago
    Without immigration France does not have a healthy demography. As much as I am against exploitative forms of immigration, France has strong Unions and Strikes are their national past time. Not an expert in French economy, but a first hand look is their major corporations are luxury brands but the rest of the economy is a meh! Airbus is a collab with other EU countries and perhaps Dassault and a strong defense sector. I would be surprised if French economic pie is not dominated by government and its private sector is rather limited.
    - 0xcafefood 3y ago
      > Without immigration France does not have a healthy demography Having a large and rapidly growing underclass also sounds like an unhealthy demography. Immigration won't solve the problems facing France, it'll make them worse.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  You dont need more workers when you have mass unemployment
  - hiatus 3y ago
    Labor is not fungible. A janitor can't take a week training course and become a surgeon.
    - ekianjo 3y ago
      Its not appropriate to answer here in a few lines since France suffers from many issues related to education, a social net that removes incentive to do some kind of work, quotas in certain activities and immigration thats completely uncontrolled. It is a complex set of problems yet the conclusion is not that France needs to import more workers. Its rather an issue on how existing resources are allocated.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      So France is suffering from an influx of immigrant surgeons?
- dekken_ 3y ago
  > But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. I think this is hard to prove. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
- constantcrying 3y ago
  >But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. Youth unemployment in France is at 17%.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    The unemployment is part of the system. Without the threats of cheap replacement the employees would hold power.
    - constantcrying 3y ago
      Sure, but obviously France does not need more workers, given that statistic.
      - PeterStuer 3y ago
        I agree, but how would you propose to lower the number of potential workers in France? For context, Macron tried to push the retirement age up, thus increasing the pool of potential employees.
        constantcrying 3y ago
        This is of course a hard question. One step certainly would be to encourage French companies to hire and train their own population. I don't think pushing up the retirement age matters too much for youth unemployement, as those two groups compete for very different jobs (no 60+ year old will start vocational training as a nurse). "How do we make the economy good" is obviously an extremely hard problem. I think a very important question is whether the 17% are actively seeking for jobs or considering themselves already entirely removed from the system. France has a large industrial base, with many, many large companies (and suppliers for those companies), training people to have skills relevant to those companies seems an important consideration.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    You can have unemployment as well as a worker’s shortage. You can have lots of need for nurses and carpenters, and also have lots of young people not qualified for those jobs who don’t have other prospects.
- ndlan 3y ago
  It's going to be very dirty, but it can be solved. I still hold some faith.
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nahel_Merzouk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nahel_Merzouk A cop shot an unarmed teenager in the face point blank. So he wouldn't get away. What kind of "social contract", or whatever one would call it, is that? I mean, being invisible and rightless, but allowed to work and get a tiny fraction of the value your work represents, until someone just murders you and then makes it out you were such a danger to them? I don't know about other Germans, but if I was treated that way, I would burn things down, too. At the least. Show me that you have no problems killing me, and that you wouldn't miss a beat, and I would not just roll over and live out my life making you richer and even bolder in that insolence. The thing is, we aren't treated that way (neither are Swedes or whoever you might have in mind) and most of us leave the whole "don't wait until it's you" mostly to a poem by Niemöller, where it doesn't make any demands of us.
  - yes_really 3y ago
    > I mean, being invisible and rightless, but allowed to work and get a tiny fraction of the value your work represents, until someone just murders you and then makes it out you were such a danger to them? [...] I would burn things down, too. What are you talking about? Literally everything you are complaining about is false. > being invisible They are not invisible. There are riots with extreme violence when one of their criminals is shot by police, even though the cop is facing a murder trial. In contrast, Muslims in France committed multiple attacks against ethnic French people and there were zero riots. If the Muslims in France are invisible, how come a death of one of their criminals causes such indignation to result in a violent riot? But multiple terrorist attacks / targeted assassinations / stabbing / shootings / murders perpetrated by Muslim in France against the ethnic French population don't cause enough indignation to result in a riot? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Marseille_stabbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Marseille_stabbing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Paris_knife_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Paris_knife_attack - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_police_headquarters_stabbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_police_headquarters_stab... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nice_stabbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nice_stabbing > being rightless Tell me, what rights do ethnic French people have that Muslim French citizens don't? > allowed to work and get a tiny fraction of the value your work represents You must not be familiar with the French welfare state. I guarantee that the Muslim immigrants and their children receive MUCH more from the government than the work they produce. > until someone just murders you And is prosecuted for it! > I would burn things down, too Consider you don't know what is happening in France before you proclaim support for riots and violence.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Their tight-knit social democracies are not compatible with immigration. But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. People keep saying both of these things, and it's not clear that either of them is true? I mean, the whole "race riot because a cop murdered a nonwhite person" phenomenon is also pretty American, and it's not exactly a tight-knit social democracy? The racism is definitely a problem, but you have to remember that quite a lot of the younger generation of nonwhite people are French; i.e. born in France holders of French nationality, considered to be "French" by the French census, educated in French schools, and occasionally shot at by French gendarmes. If France did not want to be full of Algerians it should not have tried to make Algeria French, at the cost of a huge number of lives, but there is no time machine for that.
  - GloomyBoots 3y ago
    > The racism is definitely a problem, but you have to remember that quite a lot of the younger generation of nonwhite people are French; i.e. born in France holders of French nationality, considered to be "French" by the French census, educated in French schools, and occasionally shot at by French gendarmes. Citizenship and ethnicity are two different things. Nobody is denying the existence of French citizenship, but this insistence on denying the existence of French ethnicity (as the French state insists on doing) is just dishonest. The difference between the two has been acknowledged for as long as multiethnic states have existed.
  - cm2187 3y ago
    > If France did not want to be full of Algerians it should not have tried to make Algeria French, at the cost of a huge number of lives, but there is no time machine for that. Are you suggesting mass algerian immigration is some sort of retribution for colonisation? I am not even sure I see the link. Germany has mass turkish immigration, I can't remember Turkey being a german colony. And if you want to talk about past misdeeds, we can also discuss the barbary slave trade and piracy (which by the way was the original reason for the French colonisation).
    - pjc50 3y ago
      Alergians choose to go to France because they already speak French, and the first Algerians migrated to European France while they were part of the French Empire.
- throwaway6734 3y ago
  I don't understand how most of Europe hasn't been more hair-on-fire emergency over the past decade about this.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    They're too busy trying to deal with all of the unemployed people, they don't have time to deal with all of the theoretical unfilled job openings.
- roenxi 3y ago
  Although true, it is the "tight-knit" there that is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Europe had a couple of options to merge socialism and migrations: - US style, incorporate the migrants into the fabric of society by forming detectable enclaves that, nevertheless, don't riot in the streets. - Focus on cheap energy over environmentalism, allowing everyone to enjoy rising standards of living. - Migration that cynically but effectively focuses only on skilled migration, forming an over-class of highly skilled and motivated migrants to support the socialist underclass. The issue here is they seem to be trying to bring in a new underclass, then stomp them repeatedly with COVID policies and living-standard squeezes (look at the cost of energy people, this is a crisis for someone!), then throw the police at them. A bold gambit with questionable prospects.
  - 0xcafefood 3y ago
    > US style, incorporate the migrants into the fabric of society by forming detectable enclaves that, nevertheless, don't riot in the streets. I seem to recall street riots in the US during the summer of 2020. Is the US actually avoiding the same fate as Europe, or is it just not currently at a flashpoint?
    - roenxi 3y ago
      The US rioters weren't recent migrants were they? My understanding is it was age-old class politics.
      - 0xcafefood 3y ago
        A lot of the rioting in France isn't by recent immigrants either, but more like second and third generation descendants of immigrants. A lot like the groups rioting it the US.
        selimthegrim 3y ago
        Noted descendant of immigrants George Floyd, yes. Have you had your morning coffee yet?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alienicecream 3y ago
  They could promote policies to increase child birth among the native population and to foster a culture, including religious values, that support that. The justification that they need to import foreigners to support the elderly is nonsensical on it's face. If wealth is the cause of low child birth, what's going to happen when these immigrants achieve the same level of wealth as the native population in the next generation? The logical conclusion is that they are not importing these people to address the economic issue, but for ulterior motives, like diluting the native stock to diminish an ancestral identity that buttresses nationalism.
- onetimeusename 3y ago
  I don't think needing workers is why immigrants were brought to Europe. That seems like an excuse government gives but it's contradictory that immigrants from other cultures were brought in by the government to work but then also have higher unemployment and use more welfare, citation in here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France I guess the government could have just got it badly wrong. In theory, worker shortages would lead to higher wages and government efforts to stabilize birth rates like what Japan is trying to do. I think the actual reason is something like a vast western empire promoting diversity as a good thing for your country. The 2015 immigrant surge into Europe was not because EU countries needed workers. Similarly, countries that have tried to block immigration like Poland and Hungary are accused of being far right fascists and uncooperative and NGOs from the US come after you. The general belief seems to be that too many white people is a bad thing and backwards.
  - Shawnj2 3y ago
    On the other hand countries like Japan are having a demographic crisis where they have populations that are very old because there aren’t as many young people, and one of the primary reasons Japan doesn’t have as many young people as other countries is because they have very strict immigration laws. As a person whose parents are from India I take offense to the idea that family values in western countries are somehow incompatible with immigrants, both of my parents came to the US separately and decided to get married and have kids out of their own volition. Europe obviously has separate problems and migrant workers aren’t exactly the same as tech workers from India coming to the US but just because other cultures are different doesn’t mean they’re from alien planets or something.
    - onetimeusename 3y ago
      Having children is not really the problem although what family values are differ across cultures (monogamy vs polygamy, etc) and as I said, I don't think immigration into western countries is strictly because of a lack of workers. There is a deliberate plan in place to change the demographics of western countries to be more favorable to those in power. Things like the Diversity Immigrant Visa and the deliberately uncontrolled immigration into western countries right now are completely detached from a need for workers. The US is actually spending money to undermine Hungary through NGOs because Hungary is attempting to control immigration. H-1B even keeps wages down. The benefits of this accrue to a very small class of people. Although I am sympathetic to Indians, I think people in India would not like it if a lot of Europeans showed up. It says here that Indians are 3.1% of the population of Great Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indians. I can't imagine Indians would appreciate it if 3.1% of India were European immigrants. Neither would people in a lot of other countries. I think people in the West have a right to their own culture if other people do because the nation of immigrants propaganda is revisionist. Japan has chosen not to import people. I don't think the choices are to let people in or die.
- cm2187 3y ago
  I don't think they don't have enough workers. European countries mostly de-industrialised and have very little use for an uneducated workforce. But they would decline demographically at a similar rate than China or Japan without mass immigration.
- adventured 3y ago
  > But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. They have lived beyond their means for a long time. The solution is they have to either boost productivity generally with a mostly stagnated population, have fewer people at present levels equivalent of output, or accept a lower quality of life. You can see the fact that they're living beyond their means even in supposedly well-off countries like Denmark / Norway / Finland / Sweden / Netherlands, where the household debt to income figures have been shockingly high for 10-15 years now. They're the most indebted people in world history, pretending it's sustainable (maybe for Norway, thanks to their extreme per capita pollution output via fossil fuels). https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm The Baltics and some parts of Eastern Europe, are the best positioned going forward.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  So how is Bangladesh doing with those Biharis and Rohingyas?
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    More analogous to the current situation, should Pakistan ask all Bengalis to pack up and leave because their experiment in living together clearly failed?
- mjhay 3y ago
  Stay classy, HN.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ren_engineer 3y ago
In 2016 Macron said he didn't want to be a "normal" president and made references to being like Jupiter, the guy has always been a power hungry psycho with an inflated ego
wazoox 3y ago
And they love patronizing everyone about human rights and democracy, while in practice taking model on Russia and China. The very definition of hypocrisy.
pjc50 3y ago
July 7: we blame video games for these people smashing up Paris July 14: we celebrate the time our ancestors smashed up Paris so hard they briefly turned France into a democracy
dehrmann 3y ago
The US government used covid as an excuse to soft-censor misinformation from social media.
oh_sigh 3y ago
How exactly are they going to remotely activate it if, say, Google/Apple don't put a backdoor in just for France(which I'm pretty sure they won't). Is that bill just saying the police can hack your phone with a warrant?

rayiner 3y ago

Macron has to do something to divert blame from France’s importation of a underclass from its former colonies. I don’t see how Europe isn’t totally screwed. Their tight-knit social democracies are not compatible with immigration. But without immigration they don’t have enough workers.

volfied 3y ago
They don’t have enough workers they can exploit
- layer8 3y ago
  The demographic trend (age curve) is a real problem, difficult to solve without immigration.
  - GloomyBoots 3y ago
    It’s impossible to solve with immigration. Even with an immigrant population that was completely willing and able to assimilate (unlike those in question), that process takes generations and requires a lack of ethnic ghettos and a high proportion of native and nativized people relative to immigrants. No honest person would say that we could solve Japan’s falling birthrate by rapidly and continually pumping it full of Europeans and expect it to remain recognizably Japanese. But anyway population fluctuates. These things tend to work themselves out normally when your main goal is the good of the nation and not just inflating the GDP as quickly and recklessly as possible.
    - 0xcafefood 3y ago
      Right. And in fact, immigration doesn't solve the issue for a very basic reason. A system that says "The number of working-age people must be at least 5x the number of retirees" is literally demanding unending (super)exponential growth. It's fundamentally impossible on a finite world. It's going to break down at some point. The only question is whether that happens before or after filling the developed world up with immigrants from the undeveloped world.
  - hirako2000 3y ago
    Immigration seen that way to me is similar to considering human as cattle. If moral matters in the question. If not. difficult to solve? I have no strong opinion to the question of contraception but it would be sensical to promote and educate people (both men and women) that parenting is good (arguing with nature is hard) especially when the nation needs more births. I feel obligated to apologies, but won't. I do accept to having to point out I'm in no way stating contraception should be illgal or anything of that sort. I concede that for solutioning the short term issue of shortage of workers, there are no other scheme to employ, I'm out of idea. No wait! There are officially almost 3 million unemployed residents in France. I won't try to demonstrate it's in fact double this number, nor bring up the argument a few million don't really work given they do just as little as they get paid. We are taken for fools. And a number of idiots found no alternative than setting stuff on fire. It's not just immigrants rioting.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    The only real solution is family planning. You don't want a pointless exponential population growth Ponzi scheme where each person has to have three children with their partner. What is necessary are people that join the workforce exactly at the same rate as people exit the workforce. That is the only way you can avoid the Ponzi scheme. This means when someone is in their mid fourties and will retire in 20 years, someone needs to give birth to a child so that it will grow up and start working just in time for the retiree. If children get born too early, then you run into the problem of them needing their own caretakers. These children don't compensate for someone else leaving, so they add to the population and their future caretakers will also add to the population leading to an exponential Ponzi scheme.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  BINGO
- rayiner 3y ago
  They don’t have enough workers period. In 1960, most European countries had about 5 working age people per retiree. By 2050, there will be less than 2 workers per retiree in France, and just over 1 in Spain.
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    So we need to eradicate more retirees then? Seriously though, workers on what? I find it quite odd to base the value on workers as being a percentage of retirees, that's entirely detached from demand, productivity and opportunity. "We need more workers to fund the old ones that stopped!" I get the basic logic, but it's stupid.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      How else would pensions get paid?
      - NibsNiven 3y ago
        Pension funds earn from investing.
        michaelt 3y ago
        Investments in businesses with no employees, which sell their wares to unemployed people?
    - Telemakhos 3y ago
      > Seriously though, workers on what? This is the unexamined premise that keeps on going unexamined. Europe makes less and less each day, growing more and more dependent on China for production (as on the US for security, although Europe seems a little less dependent on Russia for energy now). Automation fills the tedious, low-skill jobs that remain onshore, and the promise of industrialization, digitalization, and now AI is that fewer human workers are needed to sustain equal productivity. Why does the sane world that frets about offshoring and AI gutting employment also need unskilled immigrants to be "moar workers?"
- sremani 3y ago
  Without immigration France does not have a healthy demography. As much as I am against exploitative forms of immigration, France has strong Unions and Strikes are their national past time. Not an expert in French economy, but a first hand look is their major corporations are luxury brands but the rest of the economy is a meh! Airbus is a collab with other EU countries and perhaps Dassault and a strong defense sector. I would be surprised if French economic pie is not dominated by government and its private sector is rather limited.
  - 0xcafefood 3y ago
    > Without immigration France does not have a healthy demography Having a large and rapidly growing underclass also sounds like an unhealthy demography. Immigration won't solve the problems facing France, it'll make them worse.
ekianjo 3y ago
You dont need more workers when you have mass unemployment
- hiatus 3y ago
  Labor is not fungible. A janitor can't take a week training course and become a surgeon.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Its not appropriate to answer here in a few lines since France suffers from many issues related to education, a social net that removes incentive to do some kind of work, quotas in certain activities and immigration thats completely uncontrolled. It is a complex set of problems yet the conclusion is not that France needs to import more workers. Its rather an issue on how existing resources are allocated.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    So France is suffering from an influx of immigrant surgeons?
dekken_ 3y ago
> But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. I think this is hard to prove. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
constantcrying 3y ago
>But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. Youth unemployment in France is at 17%.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  The unemployment is part of the system. Without the threats of cheap replacement the employees would hold power.
  - constantcrying 3y ago
    Sure, but obviously France does not need more workers, given that statistic.
    - PeterStuer 3y ago
      I agree, but how would you propose to lower the number of potential workers in France? For context, Macron tried to push the retirement age up, thus increasing the pool of potential employees.
      - constantcrying 3y ago
        This is of course a hard question. One step certainly would be to encourage French companies to hire and train their own population. I don't think pushing up the retirement age matters too much for youth unemployement, as those two groups compete for very different jobs (no 60+ year old will start vocational training as a nurse). "How do we make the economy good" is obviously an extremely hard problem. I think a very important question is whether the 17% are actively seeking for jobs or considering themselves already entirely removed from the system. France has a large industrial base, with many, many large companies (and suppliers for those companies), training people to have skills relevant to those companies seems an important consideration.
- rayiner 3y ago
  You can have unemployment as well as a worker’s shortage. You can have lots of need for nurses and carpenters, and also have lots of young people not qualified for those jobs who don’t have other prospects.
ndlan 3y ago
It's going to be very dirty, but it can be solved. I still hold some faith.
johnnyworker 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nahel_Merzouk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nahel_Merzouk A cop shot an unarmed teenager in the face point blank. So he wouldn't get away. What kind of "social contract", or whatever one would call it, is that? I mean, being invisible and rightless, but allowed to work and get a tiny fraction of the value your work represents, until someone just murders you and then makes it out you were such a danger to them? I don't know about other Germans, but if I was treated that way, I would burn things down, too. At the least. Show me that you have no problems killing me, and that you wouldn't miss a beat, and I would not just roll over and live out my life making you richer and even bolder in that insolence. The thing is, we aren't treated that way (neither are Swedes or whoever you might have in mind) and most of us leave the whole "don't wait until it's you" mostly to a poem by Niemöller, where it doesn't make any demands of us.
- yes_really 3y ago
  > I mean, being invisible and rightless, but allowed to work and get a tiny fraction of the value your work represents, until someone just murders you and then makes it out you were such a danger to them? [...] I would burn things down, too. What are you talking about? Literally everything you are complaining about is false. > being invisible They are not invisible. There are riots with extreme violence when one of their criminals is shot by police, even though the cop is facing a murder trial. In contrast, Muslims in France committed multiple attacks against ethnic French people and there were zero riots. If the Muslims in France are invisible, how come a death of one of their criminals causes such indignation to result in a violent riot? But multiple terrorist attacks / targeted assassinations / stabbing / shootings / murders perpetrated by Muslim in France against the ethnic French population don't cause enough indignation to result in a riot? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Marseille_stabbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Marseille_stabbing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Paris_knife_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Paris_knife_attack - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_police_headquarters_stabbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_police_headquarters_stab... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nice_stabbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nice_stabbing > being rightless Tell me, what rights do ethnic French people have that Muslim French citizens don't? > allowed to work and get a tiny fraction of the value your work represents You must not be familiar with the French welfare state. I guarantee that the Muslim immigrants and their children receive MUCH more from the government than the work they produce. > until someone just murders you And is prosecuted for it! > I would burn things down, too Consider you don't know what is happening in France before you proclaim support for riots and violence.
pjc50 3y ago
> Their tight-knit social democracies are not compatible with immigration. But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. People keep saying both of these things, and it's not clear that either of them is true? I mean, the whole "race riot because a cop murdered a nonwhite person" phenomenon is also pretty American, and it's not exactly a tight-knit social democracy? The racism is definitely a problem, but you have to remember that quite a lot of the younger generation of nonwhite people are French; i.e. born in France holders of French nationality, considered to be "French" by the French census, educated in French schools, and occasionally shot at by French gendarmes. If France did not want to be full of Algerians it should not have tried to make Algeria French, at the cost of a huge number of lives, but there is no time machine for that.
- GloomyBoots 3y ago
  > The racism is definitely a problem, but you have to remember that quite a lot of the younger generation of nonwhite people are French; i.e. born in France holders of French nationality, considered to be "French" by the French census, educated in French schools, and occasionally shot at by French gendarmes. Citizenship and ethnicity are two different things. Nobody is denying the existence of French citizenship, but this insistence on denying the existence of French ethnicity (as the French state insists on doing) is just dishonest. The difference between the two has been acknowledged for as long as multiethnic states have existed.
- cm2187 3y ago
  > If France did not want to be full of Algerians it should not have tried to make Algeria French, at the cost of a huge number of lives, but there is no time machine for that. Are you suggesting mass algerian immigration is some sort of retribution for colonisation? I am not even sure I see the link. Germany has mass turkish immigration, I can't remember Turkey being a german colony. And if you want to talk about past misdeeds, we can also discuss the barbary slave trade and piracy (which by the way was the original reason for the French colonisation).
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Alergians choose to go to France because they already speak French, and the first Algerians migrated to European France while they were part of the French Empire.
throwaway6734 3y ago
I don't understand how most of Europe hasn't been more hair-on-fire emergency over the past decade about this.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  They're too busy trying to deal with all of the unemployed people, they don't have time to deal with all of the theoretical unfilled job openings.
roenxi 3y ago
Although true, it is the "tight-knit" there that is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Europe had a couple of options to merge socialism and migrations: - US style, incorporate the migrants into the fabric of society by forming detectable enclaves that, nevertheless, don't riot in the streets. - Focus on cheap energy over environmentalism, allowing everyone to enjoy rising standards of living. - Migration that cynically but effectively focuses only on skilled migration, forming an over-class of highly skilled and motivated migrants to support the socialist underclass. The issue here is they seem to be trying to bring in a new underclass, then stomp them repeatedly with COVID policies and living-standard squeezes (look at the cost of energy people, this is a crisis for someone!), then throw the police at them. A bold gambit with questionable prospects.
- 0xcafefood 3y ago
  > US style, incorporate the migrants into the fabric of society by forming detectable enclaves that, nevertheless, don't riot in the streets. I seem to recall street riots in the US during the summer of 2020. Is the US actually avoiding the same fate as Europe, or is it just not currently at a flashpoint?
  - roenxi 3y ago
    The US rioters weren't recent migrants were they? My understanding is it was age-old class politics.
    - 0xcafefood 3y ago
      A lot of the rioting in France isn't by recent immigrants either, but more like second and third generation descendants of immigrants. A lot like the groups rioting it the US.
      - selimthegrim 3y ago
        Noted descendant of immigrants George Floyd, yes. Have you had your morning coffee yet?
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alienicecream 3y ago
They could promote policies to increase child birth among the native population and to foster a culture, including religious values, that support that. The justification that they need to import foreigners to support the elderly is nonsensical on it's face. If wealth is the cause of low child birth, what's going to happen when these immigrants achieve the same level of wealth as the native population in the next generation? The logical conclusion is that they are not importing these people to address the economic issue, but for ulterior motives, like diluting the native stock to diminish an ancestral identity that buttresses nationalism.
onetimeusename 3y ago
I don't think needing workers is why immigrants were brought to Europe. That seems like an excuse government gives but it's contradictory that immigrants from other cultures were brought in by the government to work but then also have higher unemployment and use more welfare, citation in here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France I guess the government could have just got it badly wrong. In theory, worker shortages would lead to higher wages and government efforts to stabilize birth rates like what Japan is trying to do. I think the actual reason is something like a vast western empire promoting diversity as a good thing for your country. The 2015 immigrant surge into Europe was not because EU countries needed workers. Similarly, countries that have tried to block immigration like Poland and Hungary are accused of being far right fascists and uncooperative and NGOs from the US come after you. The general belief seems to be that too many white people is a bad thing and backwards.
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  On the other hand countries like Japan are having a demographic crisis where they have populations that are very old because there aren’t as many young people, and one of the primary reasons Japan doesn’t have as many young people as other countries is because they have very strict immigration laws. As a person whose parents are from India I take offense to the idea that family values in western countries are somehow incompatible with immigrants, both of my parents came to the US separately and decided to get married and have kids out of their own volition. Europe obviously has separate problems and migrant workers aren’t exactly the same as tech workers from India coming to the US but just because other cultures are different doesn’t mean they’re from alien planets or something.
  - onetimeusename 3y ago
    Having children is not really the problem although what family values are differ across cultures (monogamy vs polygamy, etc) and as I said, I don't think immigration into western countries is strictly because of a lack of workers. There is a deliberate plan in place to change the demographics of western countries to be more favorable to those in power. Things like the Diversity Immigrant Visa and the deliberately uncontrolled immigration into western countries right now are completely detached from a need for workers. The US is actually spending money to undermine Hungary through NGOs because Hungary is attempting to control immigration. H-1B even keeps wages down. The benefits of this accrue to a very small class of people. Although I am sympathetic to Indians, I think people in India would not like it if a lot of Europeans showed up. It says here that Indians are 3.1% of the population of Great Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indians. I can't imagine Indians would appreciate it if 3.1% of India were European immigrants. Neither would people in a lot of other countries. I think people in the West have a right to their own culture if other people do because the nation of immigrants propaganda is revisionist. Japan has chosen not to import people. I don't think the choices are to let people in or die.
cm2187 3y ago
I don't think they don't have enough workers. European countries mostly de-industrialised and have very little use for an uneducated workforce. But they would decline demographically at a similar rate than China or Japan without mass immigration.
adventured 3y ago
> But without immigration they don’t have enough workers. They have lived beyond their means for a long time. The solution is they have to either boost productivity generally with a mostly stagnated population, have fewer people at present levels equivalent of output, or accept a lower quality of life. You can see the fact that they're living beyond their means even in supposedly well-off countries like Denmark / Norway / Finland / Sweden / Netherlands, where the household debt to income figures have been shockingly high for 10-15 years now. They're the most indebted people in world history, pretending it's sustainable (maybe for Norway, thanks to their extreme per capita pollution output via fossil fuels). https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm The Baltics and some parts of Eastern Europe, are the best positioned going forward.
selimthegrim 3y ago
So how is Bangladesh doing with those Biharis and Rohingyas?
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  More analogous to the current situation, should Pakistan ask all Bengalis to pack up and leave because their experiment in living together clearly failed?
mjhay 3y ago
Stay classy, HN.

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ren_engineer 3y ago

In 2016 Macron said he didn't want to be a "normal" president and made references to being like Jupiter, the guy has always been a power hungry psycho with an inflated ego

wazoox 3y ago

And they love patronizing everyone about human rights and democracy, while in practice taking model on Russia and China. The very definition of hypocrisy.

pjc50 3y ago

July 7: we blame video games for these people smashing up Paris July 14: we celebrate the time our ancestors smashed up Paris so hard they briefly turned France into a democracy

dehrmann 3y ago

The US government used covid as an excuse to soft-censor misinformation from social media.

oh_sigh 3y ago

How exactly are they going to remotely activate it if, say, Google/Apple don't put a backdoor in just for France(which I'm pretty sure they won't). Is that bill just saying the police can hack your phone with a warrant?