I thought the unrest’s initial trigger was fuel taxes going up substantially? Inequality isn’t at the core of it?
I could totally be wrong here. I don’t follow French politics very closely at all and I haven’t really read anything about it in months.
And absolutely no offense taken. I’m barely to not at all qualified to hold an opinion here. I just filed it away in my brain under ‘one of those’.
My theoretical framework right now has ‘make absolutely sure you don’t make things any worse for the bottom 60% because they’ve got absolutely nothing left to give’ a high priority must have for any climate change initiative. It’s why I want a huge carbon tax… that immediately kicks all its revenue out as UBI.
Wasn’t being not nice. I just don’t know what you do when the problem is there are a lot of Nazis in your country and it’s not just a matter of a single Nazi elected to office.
Stream of my thoughts reading your post: I’m busy rigging my walrus game so I always win → Iowa caucus → one could imagine a fun “Iowa caucus” game.
I’ve not read it, but the wiki on the biggest (though by no means only) issue currently causing unrest is probably decent.
But the point is, when faced with opposition Macron chose violence. Pol Pot and the rest chose similarly, and they didn’t go from nothing to mass murder on day one. I’m not saying I expect that will happen here, I’m just arguing that this is the real comparison, not one about communism and centrism.
The US could have easily gone that way from the beginning. I vaguely recall learning that many people wanted Washington to continue as President and he voluntarily stepped down. Probably many scenarios where he stays and consolidates power and sets us on a much different path.
Lol please delete the part where you compare what Macron is doing to Pol fucking Pot. Very hard to take you seriously with those two names in the same paragraph. Don’t use that example again. You’ll see why if you actually read up on the Khmer Rouge. No offense.
I dunno, I don’t want to get in to a competition about knowledge of something like that, and usually I’m a believer in Godwin’s rule, so feel free to just substitute someone else.
I’ll try again with the point. Political violence exists in most systems, and it’s for the same reason, and that reason isn’t to do with ideology—it’s to deal with the issue “these people don’t agree with me and they aren’t dispersing”.
Macron, the most boring leader you can imagine, is choosing the amount of violence he needs to do what he wants (and that’s a decent amount of violence for a supposed free democracy, quite frankly). When he needs more violence, what might he do? I dunno, but he won’t decide by looking it up in a book, any more than [insert name here] did.
(Apologies for short, edited posts, I am ‘looking after’ my kid)
That’s non-responsive. Pyat understands all that and your condescension was unwarranted and unjustifiable. I guarantee he knows more about Macron, Pol Pot and the events of contemporary France and 1970s Cambodia than you do.
Look I’m not trying to defend Macron here… I just generally don’t think comparing pretty much anything that isn’t super super extreme (or doesn’t beg the comparison like Nazis and Trump does since he’s literally running and ruling as a fascist) to maoists or Nazis is bad. I think Godwin’s rule is by and large true, but that’s because people tend to be pretty uneducated about the actual details of stuff like the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis. They just recognize them as ‘bad stuff’ so they seek to link the other side to them through some super weak slippery slope argument that is generally wildly incorrect.
And yes when someone makes one of these arguments it tilts me lol.
Contemporary France yes absolutely… I get the sense he’s from there or lives there now. Cambodia though? The comparison he just made makes it seem very unlikely tbh.
If he’s from Cambodia and currently living in France they are doing a pretty good job of keeping what’s going on in France quiet. Must be going straight up Mad Max.
BS, whether you’re right or wrong about Pol Pot, your insistence on putting an apostrophe in the plural form of Nazi is clearly incorrect and it’s putting me on tilt.
