French Uprising of December 2018

[Elvis]

The racist charge is becoming a tired trope and juvenile dodge to the issues

What's tiresome is the racist trope of blaming refugees for Europe's problems while dodging the real issues.

[Sounder]

I expressed what I see going forward, we can talk about it, cast aspersions, or wait and see how things play out. I am open to all possibilities.

Although things are continuing to seem a bit tedious here, so I expect other pursuits will continue to feel more productive.

I do love you all.

[Sounder]

What's tiresome is the racist trope of blaming refugees for Europe's problems while dodging the real issues.

'while dodging the real issue', the 'real' issue is lack of local control or input, as expressed in my opinion. One of the fellows points would be taken as racist by folk around here, but he does make other points that might well be considered by folk that really do need to expand their range of possibilities for consideration.

How will the forces for change align themselves as our future unfolds?

I have a few ideas in this regard, but surely not to be heard in this environment.

[DrEvil]

The racist charge is becoming a tired trope and juvenile dodge to the issues Dr. Evil.

I would you rather you tell me what you think about my opinion regarding these happenings, and hey take a chance, tell me what you think is going on.

Ffs. You're the one posting the racist shit. I don't actually think that you personally are a racist, but the author of that piece definitely has some "questionable" attitudes.

My opinion of the current populist movements is as follows:

I understand why the French got mad when they raised taxes on gasoline, but I strongly disagree with them. The taxes should be even higher. They should be high enough to force an immediate shift away from fossil fuels, but they should also be coupled with some serious incentives and cash handouts to help people adapt, and a rapid expansion of carbon neutral public transport, bike and scooter lanes etc. Just doing the tax part was stupid of Macron and played right into populist sentiments.

I agree with some of their other grievances, specifically the contempt for the current ruling class and system, but I fucking hate how it manifests, with right wing governments popping up all over the place and entrenching, rather than fixing the system. If the Yellow Jackets eventually becomes a political party I suspect it will be similar to the shitshows currently underway in Hungary, Italy, Poland, the US, Brazil and the UK.

Tl;dr: things will end badly.

[Sounder]

Excellent Dr.Evil, I see how folk of your persuasion respond as you do. I will say however that ideals will often be smashed by reality and that is what regular people realize and what preening do-gooders seldom seem to get.



My thought before getting sidetracked.

3. no control of their currency and banks

It seems that for MMT to work the nation state must issue the currency.

I heard that the US is 'missing' 21 trillion dollars. Don't know how much is missing, but in any case, for those large sums to be moved around, there must be large scale fraud committed by very large banks or even the fed itself. Who knows?

[Sounder]

Dr. Evil wrote...

The taxes should be even higher.

So, what do you do. Bleed turnips for a living?

But please, not the 'really I don't think you beat your wife' line. Surely we are more subtle than that.

Opps trivial shite, I'm outta here.

[Heaven Swan]

This cartoon may illustrate the sentiment Sounder is referring to.




I wish we'd stick to arguing the issues here, not shaming members for posting something another member doesn't agree with. If everyone thinks the same way discussion dies and we learn nothing.

[DrEvil]

@Sounder: I just wanted to make it clear I was referring to the author being racist, not you.

And I said taxes on fossil fuels. Don't take things out of context. Fossil fuels should be priced to reflect the actual cost, and the best way to get people off something is to make it cheaper to go for the alternative (in this case electric vehicles).

(Income taxes should be progressive, going from zero if you make below a certain threshold, up to 70-90% on the top earners.)

Excellent Dr.Evil, I see how folk of your persuasion respond as you do. I will say however that ideals will often be smashed by reality and that is what regular people realize and what preening do-gooders seldom seem to get.

What the fuck are you even talking about?

I heard that the US is 'missing' 21 trillion dollars. Don't know how much is missing, but in any case, for those large sums to be moved around, there must be large scale fraud committed by very large banks or even the fed itself. Who knows?

1) You can't even stay coherent between sentences.
2) This is relevant how exactly?

[DrEvil]

This cartoon may illustrate the sentiment Sounder is referring to.

...snip...

I wish we'd stick to arguing the issues here, not shaming members for posting something another member doesn't agree with. If everyone thinks the same way discussion dies and we learn nothing.

I agree, up to a certain point. Sounder could have found any number of actual, decent writings on the subject, but instead opted for the bottom of the barrel, and it's far from the first time he's done so.

And I know what he's referring to, and I agree with most of what the Yellow Vests want, I just don't think opposition to a shitty system automatically leads to good results. Just look at the US. People were sick and tired of Washington fucking people over and elected the least qualified person to fix it, with predictable results. That's what I'm worried will happen with the Yellow Vests. I hope I'm wrong, but looking at similar movements elsewhere I'm not optimistic.

All it takes is one charismatic asshole to tap in to that anger and you get Trump redux, which then spends four years normalizing terrible policies (see: Obama's continuation of the war on terror, or everything Reagan did), which in turn sets the stage for an even worse demagogue down the line.

[JackRiddler]

Let's accept that this fellow is conservative and questionable in his racial assumptions. He still has opinions that are shared among wide swaths of regular and working folk.

My opinion and in a similar vein to his, is that the 'yellow vests' and similar populist movements yet to arise will have an increasingly coherent expression of the need for more local and citizen involvement in the creating of law and policy. People are tired of far off bureaucrats creating dictats that we must live by and pay for while they live their well paid and tax free lives in service to the EU.

So yeah, scream racist while you ignore the fundamentals of what is going on, it's always good to have something to suck on.

Oh you poor poor man. Since when did racism become such a bad thing, right? You can go commiserate with Steve King about the PC tyranny. Why don't the cultural elitists show more understanding for regular folk, right?

No, you don't get to weasel out of the racism. Your authority or analyst is not a man of the people, he is also not German, French or European and he knows jackshit about any of it. He's Tomi Lahren talking about "rapefugees" and Trump with his wall talk about the flood of rapists and terrorists and the collapse of society because of the alien brown other. It's absolutely shameful. It's also just straight made up. Majorities no longer loyal to Berlin, etc. etc. It is a naked move to appropriate the working class movement of the yellow jackets on behalf of the European extreme right in communitarian drag. Shameful!

.

[Sounder]

OK fine, we will skip the discussion, keep with casting aspersions and wait to see how things play out.

Forget about making me uncomfortable or feeling unwelcome. I will be gone working on Bach's Partita II, where my discomfort can produce positive results while learning to hit the notes properly as I shift positions. (I'm a fiddler, so a bit handicapped in that department.)

I will compose one last (apparently) missive around the theme of potentials for universalism and localism to together create a brighter future, contrasted with the potential for dystopia if the current crop of techno-humanist dreamers posing as progressives sell their version of universalism so as to maintain and extend the current system.

Have a great month.

[JackRiddler]

I am not "casting aspersions" and you do not get to play a victim here. The item you posted is flat-out racist propaganda containing false and absurd claims, such as that a "majority" of people in Germany now consist of Bavarians and such who want to secede from Berlin plus brown invaders who want to destroy European culture. There is no "engaging" with such views as they are either dishonest or delusional regarding current events in Europe. One can no more "engage" with this than with the flat-earth material, which by the way is either delusion or trolling, as opposed to racist propaganda about what is happening in Europe.

You are fronting a familiar defense of racism, to pretend that it does not exist even when stated explicitly. No statement is ever racist, the only possible sin is to identify racism.

You do not get to create a false dichotomy in which this kind of racism is counterposed to the Davos ideology, as though these are the only alternatives.

This kind of propaganda reinforces the attempts by the fascists and extreme right-wing parties to exploit neoliberal conditions by scapegoating brown people and blaming the most helpless minority in Europe.

Don't you present this as some kind of anti-capitalist resistance, it is exactly opposite. This propaganda is no different in kind from Tomi Lahren's "rapefugees" or Trump's bogus crisis at the border. It is an ideology of hatred with no bearing on the actual issues. It is used frequently by capitalists to distract from capitalism. It is FAKE OPPOSITION.

Attributing racism to the French yellow jackets and other European protests as a whole is a defamation of those protesters and justifies and reinforces the neoliberal and state reaction. It is not a blow against "Davos," it is a FAVOR to "Davos."

This is exactly how those who would destroy the working-class protests wish to frame them. It is entirely possible your re-posted author is working for them.

Shame on you for trying to frame this here as some kind of debate among alternative views and to pretend you've somehow presented something harmless.

One of the fellows points would be taken as racist by folk around here, but he does make other points that might well be considered by folk that really do need to expand their range of possibilities for consideration.

Sophistry. One of the points, stated at length, shoots the reader in the head with a Big Lie. But hey the other ones, each very briefly stated, telegraph extremely common boilerplate wisdoms about local control that anyone could agree with.

You know, like a cute little harmless child's toy boobytrapped with a bomb. What is all the commotion about, liberals -- it's just a CHILD'S TOY?!

YOU DON'T GET TO PRETEND YOU ARE THIS STUPID.

Now I must unburden my beautiful mind from all this liberal mean spirit by retiring to record every part of Coltrane's Favorite Things for my one-man album while riding a unicycle and juggling knives.

.

[Sounder]

Is considering the following an expression of 'Islamophobia', or an observation on the duplicitous actions of 'opinion makers? Is it hateful to resist the sanctioning of a regressive social influence? At any rate, I will not answer to trigger happy hysterical globalist screamers.


https://sputniknews.com/viral/201901171 ... irl-islam/

The story of Rahaf Mohammed, an 18-year-old Saudi girl who has become an international media darling for her flight to the West from "persecution", aired by Swedish national broadcaster SVT has made Swedes see red.

In their piece on Rahaf Mohammad, the Saudi refugee girl who claimed to have suffered "abuse" back home due to her non-conformist behaviour, SVT omitted the reference to Islam, triggering many Swedes' ire.

In the interview aired by SVT Aktuellt, Rahaf Mohammed said that she was kept locked up for six months after getting a short haircut and suffered abuse from her brother and her mother. The reason for it, she claimed, is that short haircuts for women are forbidden in Islam, because it makes women look like men.

However, SVT's translation left out the Islam reference completely, with words "Islam" and "haram" ("forbidden" in Arabic) conspicuously absent from the subtitles, despite clearly being uttered by the teen.

[JackRiddler]

I heard that the US is 'missing' 21 trillion dollars. Don't know how much is missing, but in any case, for those large sums to be moved around, there must be large scale fraud committed by very large banks or even the fed itself. Who knows?

So, you hear about something, you have no idea what it signifies, you do not look up even the rudimentary details, you take an uninformed guess about what it means, and then repeat that on the Internet as though it confirms some unrelated racist propaganda you posted. And you insult us by selling this as an argument.

[DrEvil]

Is considering the following an expression of 'Islamophobia', or an observation on the duplicitous actions of 'opinion makers? Is it hateful to resist the sanctioning of a regressive social influence? At any rate, I will not answer to trigger happy hysterical globalist screamers.


https://sputniknews.com/viral/201901171 ... irl-islam/

The story of Rahaf Mohammed, an 18-year-old Saudi girl who has become an international media darling for her flight to the West from "persecution", aired by Swedish national broadcaster SVT has made Swedes see red.

In their piece on Rahaf Mohammad, the Saudi refugee girl who claimed to have suffered "abuse" back home due to her non-conformist behaviour, SVT omitted the reference to Islam, triggering many Swedes' ire.

In the interview aired by SVT Aktuellt, Rahaf Mohammed said that she was kept locked up for six months after getting a short haircut and suffered abuse from her brother and her mother. The reason for it, she claimed, is that short haircuts for women are forbidden in Islam, because it makes women look like men.

However, SVT's translation left out the Islam reference completely, with words "Islam" and "haram" ("forbidden" in Arabic) conspicuously absent from the subtitles, despite clearly being uttered by the teen.

Triggering many far right Swede's ire.

SVT has published an explanation here (in Swedish):
https://kontakt.svt.se/guide/varfor-ute ... rdet-islam

The main points:

- They have rules for texting that says that anyone reading at normal speed should be able to read the subtitle three times before it changes. This is to ensure that people who for whatever reason reads slower can keep up. They're the national broadcaster, so they're bound by law to include as many people as possible. This is one of the ways they do it.

- For the above reason they often don't subtitle everything word for word and edit to keep the gist of what is being said without it being the exact thing being spoken (NRK, the Norwegian state broadcaster does the same thing).

- It's pretty damn obvious from context that conservative Islam is one of the underlying issues without it having to be spelled out explicitly, so that's one of the things that ended up on the cutting floor.

So, fake outrage by a bunch of right wing tools who already despise SVT, seeing it as the champion of SJWs, snowflakes and NPCs everywhere, and who will jump at any opportunity to bash them. Here helpfully spread to gullible fools like yourself by your friends at Sputnik.