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I saw a clip the other day of an American comedian doing crowd work in Paris. He asked the audience what America should do, and the French said - something like
by josephg 4mo ago
I saw a clip the other day of an American comedian doing crowd work in Paris. He asked the audience what America should do, and the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.
To me that sounds crazy! But, I can see how it works for the French. They protest all the time, and the government is very responsive to the needs of the people. Much more so than the American government sees to be.
- nicbou 4mo agoIs the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries?
- boricj 4mo agoProbably because we have a well established history of regularly changing regimes. Since we overthrew royalty in 1789 we've had five republics, two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events. If anything, the longevity of the Fifth Republic is starting to become unusual (only the Third Republic and the Ancien Régime have lasted longer). Maybe we're overdue to flip the table again as per tradition.
- Lerc 4mo agoHow well did they turn out for people each time?
- soco 4mo agoHealth insurance, unions, paid vacation... al in all I'd say not that bad.
- sarchertech 4mo agoPlenty of other countries have those things as well. And plenty of countries that have even more frequent political upheaval don’t have those things. I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections.
- tremon 4mo ago> I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections In fact, it's quite easy to find examples of political violence being used to reduce worker protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
- Lerc 4mo agoalso >two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events. Do you think you'd still have the Health insurance, unions, and paid vacation after another roll of the dice
- boricj 4mo agoI'm only pointing out that ever since the French revolution, we have a rich history of regime change (and also of strikes and demonstrations). Some were due to external factors (like the Vichy régime during WW2) and some were bloodless (like the end of the Fourth Republic). Us rolling the dice whenever we have a major political crisis is a meme at this point, for better or for worse we're just not the kind of people to keep the same constitution around for 250 years.
- nicbou 4mo agoI don’t think that addresses my question.
- breezybottom 4mo agoThose two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting.
- dgellow 4mo agoIt’s not contradictory, protesting doesn’t make sense as a one time thing, you have to continuously put pressure and show you have power as a group
- breezybottom 4mo agoOnly if you have a government that isn't responsive or accountable to you.
- smoe 4mo agoI don't know how effective the French protests are, since I haven't lived in Europe for a while. But even as a Swiss, at least judging from TV, protests in the U.S. generally seem very tame. Not advocating punching the police as a default, but in my opinion, protests need to be disruptive if they're going to get anyone's attention at all. I don't really see what a few people standing on the sidewalk with cardboard signs are supposed to accomplish.
- ramgine 4mo agoAmerican police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate.
- pesus 4mo agoAnd if there isn't violence, the police tend to escalate things and make it violent. I suspect this works to prevent/neuter any serious protests so long as the potential protestors still have something to lose, and in America there is very little in the way of a safety net, so living conditions would have to (continue to?) deteriorate quite a bit before protests started heading in a French direction.
- mc32 4mo agoI don't know if you know, but quite a few European countries are known to send police or "state" confederates into protests to give authorities an excuse to Escalate. You also see lots more water cannons being used over there. In Paris the burning and destruction typically happens in the outer "boroughs" of the city -usually by disaffected groups -sometimes they happen to be disenfranchised- though typically they harm the older generation's property and that generation typically frowns upon the destruction. Of course, in the US, we've had organizations who on paper are for justice and redress being found to foment agitation. It's a total corruption of their mandate. We had an "anti-hate" group paying hate groups to "do things"[1]. [1]https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119311/witnesses/HHRG-119-JU00-Wstate-ONeilT-20260520.pdf https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119311/witnesses/...
- LiquidSky 4mo agoI feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side?
- andrepd 4mo agoI know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.
- josephg 4mo ago> "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. They worked like that when I was in Paris ~3 years ago! At the time, people were rioting over the retirement age changes. I walked around the city the day after the protests. The city smelled like burned plastic. There were burned out rubbish bins and the husks of melted lime bikes & scooters all over the place. I've never seen anything like it.
- lII1lIlI11ll 4mo agoOnly if you believe that always caving in to a violent mob burning random (private citizen-owned, non-government) cars in Paris leads to better outcomes for the country.
- al_borland 4mo agoFrance is a much smaller country. When there is a mass protest in the US, it ends of being a bunch of smaller protests all over the country, which lacks the power of a single concentrated protest. These various satellite protests just end up being a minor nuisance, which don’t amount to much. The media in the US often ignores the protests they (or their owners) don’t agree with. This also weakens them significantly. I remember having to go to Twitter to see what was going on with a lot of the Occupy Wall Street stuff, because the news was acting like it wasn’t going on. Without attention, and fractured across the country, it faded out. The protest area where I was living at the time slowly shifted into a homeless encampment, before they eventually cleared them out.
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoDemocracy needs real journalism to function. Having all the rich people own all the journalists isn't going to end well. We need to find a working business model for journalism that doesn't rely on rich folks.
- al_borland 4mo agoI think news outlets need to be run as a non-profit to remove the types of people with aspirations of wealth, instead of aspirations to report and inform the public, from the sector.
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoUsually rich folks buy newsrooms not to make a profit, but to control the narrative. No journalist joins a newsroom to become rich. Famous, maybe, but not rich. The business model used to be advertising, but the internet destroyed that model. And we don't have a replacement, while democracy doesn't work without someone holding the politicians to account.
- BurningFrog 4mo agoBy what measure does it work for the French? They have 8% unemployment, 30% less GDP per capita than the US, and many other problems. Government by caving in to riots is not in general being responsive to the needs of the people.
- bumby 4mo agoWell gee, to start France has higher healthcare quality/access, higher life expectancy, much lower treatable mortality, better work-life balance (less hours worked, more guaranteed leave), lower wealth inequality, higher voter turnout (indicative of less apathy or less efforts to disenfranchise), among others. One of the problems with just using economic metrics is it seems to confuse the fact that the economy is supposed to serve society, not the other way around. So it leads one to wonder: with those better economic measures, what is it buying for US citizens?
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoMany Americans have a strong bias for measuring everything in money. If you've lived there, it can be shocking how pervasive the thinking is in EVERY decision.
- bumby 4mo agoTo quote de Tocqueville: “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men…”
- rapsacnz 4mo agoAlso France scores hugely better on the international cheese index
- WarmWash 4mo agoAll these things become meaningless when you cross the ~50th income percentile. Besides work/life balance, the US gets much better as you earn more, and frankly high earners are generally less concerned with time off work too. Also why the US enjoyed ~30 years of European brain drain, those benefits are much less enticing when you are the one paying more and getting less.
- Waterluvian 4mo agoI think it’s important that the ultra powerful never feel they’re unreachable by guillotine.
- frogperson 4mo agoThat's alot less risky in France where the police have more than an 8th grade education, no guns, and aren't jacked up on right-wing hate propaganda 24/7. You punch a cop in the US and there's more than a 50% chance, that a given cop has been dreaming of "protecting himself" by any means necessary. In other words, you are going to get shot in the chest.
- killbot5000 4mo agoOr a shot in the back.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- squidsoup 4mo agoIt is much more than that, egalitarianism is fundamental to French culture.
- whack 4mo ago> the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire. I'm trying to wrap my head around this as well. Do these people want "punching the police and lighting things on fire" to be a freely permitted form of free speech? If so, should anyone be legally allowed to destroy any amount of stuff, for any reason they feel unhappy about? Or is this a case of "blowing stuff up should only be permitted for causes I like, not for causes I dislike"? If not, do they see the irony in endorsing behaviors that they simultaneously believe should not be legalized?
- xeonmc 4mo agoMaybe in their eyes those are the less-violent alternatives than their other options.
- RobotToaster 4mo ago> god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion - Thomas Jefferson
- mfcl 4mo agoNo, it should be illegal, otherwise everything would get destroyed whenever someone is slightly destroyed. Illegality serves as a kind of filter so that when enough people risk jail or death for a cause, that's because they really had enough. I haven't given that a lot of thought, and it feels weird to say, but maybe the opinion that an act should be done and should be illegal can be true at the same time. When a citizen commits a crime, they messed up. When ten commit a crime, they messed up. When half the village destroys the chief's home, the chief messed up.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 4mo agoI think you've misunderstood. Such things are also illegal in France. But there are times you need to be prepared to break the law to bring about political change, eg if a government repeatedly demonstrates indifference to public concern. Suppose you are living under very corrupt or autocratic governance, and you protest in the conventional way (marching, waving signs and banners and so on) bu the government simply ignores it, or slanders the protestors for having a different opinion. What do you do then?
- beloch 4mo agoIn Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he reviewed Roman records and compared provinces with heavily fortified seats of power to ones that weren't as fortified. The ones that were more fortified tended to be governed in a way that was more callous, less efficient, and less popular. He concluded that it was good for governors to have a reasonable fear of those they governed. The U.S.'s institutions of power are heavily fortified. Political leaders of most countries travel about with a security detail of a few cars at most. The U.S. president has a gargantuan motorcade that's only rivaled in size by those of third world dictators. Arguably, the U.S. president doesn't hold power so much as wield it in the interest of oligarchs, who are even more insulated from the public. If Americans want better government, what they really need to do is make oligarchs and politicians feel like they might actually be made to feel the consequences of their actions. That doesn't necessarily have to mean violence though, if people are creative enough. e.g. Elon Musk wants so much to control what the world thinks of him that he bought Twitter and had Grokipedia made in an attempt to kill Wikipedia, since they have honestly reported on his misadventures with the same standards of rigor applied to other public figures. If you want to make Elon Musk feel consequences, just never let up on him. The dude made Nazi salutes during Trump's inauguration twice. His DOGE idiocy is why Texas livestock is being banned in other countries because of screwworms. Keep talking about that and don't stop.
- ranger_danger 4mo agoThat only works for the French because they're afraid to disappear their own citizens. US has been doing it for the last year and a half.
- themaninthedark 4mo ago>US has been doing it for the last year and a half. Individual jurisdictions have been doing that for much longer than a year and half. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-police-detain-americans-black-site https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...
- tremon 4mo agoYou are basically admitting that the US is already past the point of no return on the road to full-blown oppression: too many government workers not accountable to the people.