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Your Montreal example is off base. That riot was a planned attack as part of a year long civil war in Quebec, not a night of panic caused by a sudden emergency.
by lupire 2y ago
Your Montreal example is off base. That riot was a planned attack as part of a year long civil war in Quebec, not a night of panic caused by a sudden emergency.
Civil unrest is not the same as panic.
- astrange 2y agoYou can tell from France that French people just naturally like rioting. (Americans have a highly mythologized idea of protesting based on misunderstanding the Civil Rights movement, so they think that 1. all protesters have strong morally correct political causes and 2. protesting does something good for those causes, and therefore think the French are noble workers fighting for their rights here. In fact they don't accomplish anything, the government just ignores them and are never voted out for this, and they're mostly advocating for wild conspiracy theories anyway.)
- zdragnar 2y agoThat's a not widely held belief of the French protesters in America. I suspect most of us (certainly most of the people I know) see the various strikes in the news and are happy we don't live there. On a personal anecdote, I recall a French student who attended my university in America comment at one point how surprised he was by the amount of content our courses got through, since we weren't frequently interrupted by strikes of one sort or another. That said, I do agree with the most of the rest of your points. Plenty of people here have overly romanticized views of protest and civil disobedience.
- jfengel 2y agoEven Duolingo repeatedly cites French workers being on strike (en grève) in its examples. They sound peaceful, but inconvenient.
- hobs 2y agoThe same America that's legalized hitting protestors with your car?
- astrange 2y agoThe protestors are there because they think they have an effect. The people trying to legally kill them want to stop them, because they also think they have an effect (and oppose it). Both of them are wrong. (I should say this also comes from a misunderstanding of Vietnam War protests. Namely, they think they stopped the war, when in fact they didn't do nothin.)
- drewcoo 2y agoThose protesters are clearly being noticed. That is the intended effect.
- astrange 2y agoBeing noticed isn't the same as changing anything. They may have lowered their expectations, but I think they mostly want to actually change things. (Though like anything else with a lot of young people, some of them just want to get laid, and it works for that.)