Miscellaneous News

Biscuits said:

How dare you insult these peaceful protesters by comparing them to animals?

I'd still advise Chinese to witness the peaceful demonstrations in France from the safety of their couches rather than being there in person. You know, the protesters are just peacefully protesting for freedom, but innocent bystanders can still get hurt, especially when the draconian French police becomes involved.

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Mass unrest over French teen’s killing spreads to Brussels, 64 arrested​

Knight Kien said:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1674982075987038208

Well, now actual animals are also running amok in the street of Paris, LOL.

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Overbom said:

View attachment 115288

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Strangelove said:

Riots spread to Brussels, home of EU & NATO.... LOL. Not a dull moment in the "garden".

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Mass unrest over French teen’s killing spreads to Brussels, 64 arrested​

Nights of violence triggered by the police shooting of a 17-year-old during a traffic stop has traversed an international border

© Getty Images / Dursun Aydemir

Nationwide riots triggered by the fatal shooting by French police of a 17-year-old boy spread to Belgium on Thursday, unleashing chaos that resulted in 64 arrests, Brussels police revealed on Friday.

The arrested included 47 minors and 16 adults who have been administratively detained, police said in a statement on Friday. Another minor, who was reportedly seen beating up a police officer, was arrested and questioned but released on Friday.

Crowds of young people gathered in Brussels on Thursday night, using social media meetups to evade the authorities and moving location when police got too close. As the rioters settled on the Anneessens neighborhood and nearby Midi Station as the targets of their rage, the Anneessens metro station was closed for the night and buses through the neighborhood were stopped or rerouted.

Video posted to social media shows rioters setting cars and even buildings on fire and strewing trash through the streets as rudimentary barricades. Local police told the Brussels Times that ten people were arrested for throwing paving stones at cops.

Tuesday’s point-blank shooting of Franco-Algerian teenager Nahel M. during a suburban traffic stop in Nanterre has ignited three nights of riots across France. Some 667 people were arrested across the country on Thursday night as police forces quadrupled their numbers in the streets, deploying 40,000 officers that included anti-terrorist and tactical units.

The unrest reportedly began as peaceful protests before turning violent at the hands of teens armed with fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and other improvised weapons. While the police officer who shot the 17-year-old has been charged with homicide, this announcement did not make a dent in the violence.

Many parts of France have already been in the grip of protest for months as residents denounced Macron’s pension reforms. France’s major unions have vowed not to back down until Macron capitulates.

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56860 said:

Animals, too, have a right to peaceful protest.

Upon news that animals have been freed from their concentration camps and are out for vengeance, we need an 'animals' faction too.

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Since there’s a lot of coverage of the unrest in France, here’s a short view from the ground (literally so, because there were riots and fires near me last night.) The situation is highly complex, but here’s a very brief guide to what’s going on.

First, there’s only an indirect link between the shooting of Nayeb and the riots. Everybody has been waiting for an explosion like this for years, and it’s just a surprise that it didn’t happen the time of the Gilet jaunes in 2018/19, for example. These are not riots, and it’s not really anarchy. It’s more of a blind, almost nihilist, lashing out at every aspect of these young peoples’ lives. Schools have been burned down, libraries destroyed, cars and lorries hijacked and randomly burnt, supermarkets wrecked and buses and trams set on fire. There is no central ideology, no coordination, no real objective other than destruction. There have been a few marches and protests, not to mention a minute of silence at the National Assembly, and the grifters have already begun to grift. But the causes and the effects go much deeper. How did we get here?

Well, the first thing to say is that there have been immigrants From France’s former colonies for a long time. Many came from Algeria after independence, escaping the FLN, and many more during the Civil War there. They integrated into society, and their children studied hard in school and university to take advantage of what the French call the “social elevator.” They are now heavily (even disproportionately) represented in the professions, in politics, business, the public service and the media. They then moved out of the poorer areas, making room for the next wave. This is how the system is supposed to work.

Then, several things happened in the 90s. With the advent of neoliberalism, doors were opened to effectively unrestricted immigration, with the right to bring your family with you. In addition, with Schengen and the “freedom of movement,” many immigrants from elsewhere came to France, attracted by the generous social security provisions. Now if this had been intelligently thought through and the problems identified and dealt with, it would not necessarily have been a problem. But literally nothing was done, and immigrants were simply dumped in poor areas with limited services and strained education systems. Many of the parents could not speak French, many were illiterate. No real effort was made to provide language-training, and today classes where half the children have trouble following the lessons are common in poor areas.

At the same time there was a change in education policies. The sociologist Pierre Bordieu, (beloved of NC, I know) produced a report saying that current school teaching was too hard, and could harm the self-esteem of children. Things needed to be made easier, and the traditional status of the teacher needed to change to a kind of “colleague” of the pupil. Examination standards were consequently lowered and the official government policy towards learning is today described as “benevolence” which is to say that mistakes are not corrected and students are not criticised and told to do better. The fall in standards has been catastrophic: according to the government’s own figures, one in five 11-year old pupils has difficulties reading and writing. That’s an average, so you can imagine what it must be in the poorer areas. (The middle-class is fine, since you ask, and is increasingly sending its children to private schools, run mostly- oh irony – by the Catholic Church). The result is that many of the teenagers in poorer areas are functionally illiterate and can’t get a job. Supermarket managers complain that they can’t find people to stack shelves, because you have to be able to read the labels. I don’t think this is quite what Bordieu had in mind.

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In 2005, resentment against the State, which was clearly doing nothing for these people, boiled over after two teenagers fleeing the police, ran onto a railway line and were electrocuted. Riots went on for weeks. The reaction of the government (Sarkozy was Interior Minister at the time) was to run away. The Police were withdrawn from the poor, rough areas, nothing expect a token effort was made to address the social problems and the banlieuex were just left to rot. Macron had no interest in them – his power-base was elsewhere – and any attempt to warn that there might be problems was dismissed because racism. Well, now it’s happened. The banlieuex were effectively handed over to organised crime, and full-scale battles with automatic weapons for control of the drugs trade are now quite common. The police cannot enter these areas now except fully-armed and protected, and usually in pursuit of drug traffickers, which doesn’t, to put it mildly, give them a good image. They are inevitably attacked, but then so are other services of the state: doctors, paramedics, the fire service, the local authorities, even the transport service.

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Finally, this generation of rioters are the first to have grown up since 2005. They have no hope, not much education, and few prospects other than entry-level jobs in drug cartels. The school, which was historically the way out of the problem, is visibly disintegrating. No-one wants to work in these areas, and so young and inexperienced teachers just out of training are sent there. They are verbally and sometimes physically assaulted by pupils and parents, and threatened unless they stop teaching the Theory of Evolution, for example. Most get out as soon as they can. Schools around the Paris area are desperately short of teachers, and the quality of applicants is falling sharply, as I also know from personal contacts. A report just last week said that in the area around Paris, in the latest recruitment programme, applicants were being accepted with a score of only 6/20 in the final examinations, after a university degree and two years’ professional training. These young people still live in hierarchical, patriarchal societies, where violence in the home is routine, women are hidden away and Imams tell you how to vote and what to think. The contrast between a regimented life of despair and the promises they see on their mobile phones must be unbearable.

These sort of shootings are very uncommon, and this incident has shocked the whole political system. But Macron, with his usual dissociation from reality, shows no signs of understanding even what the basic problem is, let lone how it might be addressed. And that would be a massive job, making up for thirty years of neglect and stupidity.,

Sorry about the length of this: believe it or not I’ve left a lot out.

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Fatty said:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1674076443607719943

Yes, yes, this definitely means something

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supercat said:

China will win the industrial and economic wars against the US. They don't have to fight a real war.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1674502253300838404

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