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French Riots Lead to Crackdown on Blogs
Browncoat writes "Wired reports that because of the recent riots in France, authorities have shut down a blog called Hardcore, whose participants have allegedly violating a French law concerning violent speech. Many bloggers fear there will be consequences for them if they are outspoken, even if it is in a nonviolent way. From the article: 'Ahmed Meguinia, a political activist who saw some of the Paris region's hardest-hit areas during the past week, said many bloggers feared prosecution for publishing even nonviolent content. While not condoning blogs that incited violence, he said that there was a lack of media coverage explaining why ethnically segregated inhabitants of some of France's poorest cities have been driven to riot. Instead, the world repeatedly sees CNN images of burning cars and shops, he said.'"
France may be a worker's paradise, but only if you if have a job.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A French War of the Worlds
The author has lived in France for several decades and this is what he says:
In a nation that insists immigrants accept the monolithic secular French culture, a great divide has grown. Part of it is the insular nature of Islamic North African culture. But much of it is that "French" France still rejects its North African countrymen.
They don't get good jobs or decent financial opportunities. Their unemployment rate is often as high as 50%. There isn't a single Frenchman or Frenchwoman of North African origin (or black, for that matter) in the cabinet, and only a handful hold any position of rank in the civil and commercial bureaucracy. There are virtually no black or Arab anchors on French TV, or North African cultural presence in the theater or cinema.
This has further angered the Muslim population, driving it deeper into its own ghetto mentality and to communal violence. When I first came to France 50 years ago, North African immigrants spoke Maghreb Arabic, but their French-born children proudly spoke French. Today, the beurs, the young French-born generation of North Africans, talk to each other in Arabic.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
"Driven to riot" implies a lack of accountability on the part of the people looting and burning one of history's great civilizations. I find the argument that inflammatory statements from the French government are the direct cause of the riots offensively absurd, esp. in light of France's reputation for pandering to the multicultural tolerance dogma. The sad truth is that it is this so-called "tolerance" that fueled the fire in the first place. Blogs are not sanctified absolutely by virtue of free speech (esp. if those blogs are being used to incite and coordinate violent attacks on the public). Does anyone really believe that freedom of speech extends to tactical communications in promotion of mayhem? And if the police don't stop the riots, the same people protesting the violation of personal freedom are going to protest the inefficacy of the police. It's all so depressingly predictable and pathetic.
Most of these youth's, while poorly integrated into French society, are second generation French citizens, who speak French as their first (and largely only) language.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
You are correct. I've lived in Europe before moving to US and I can tell you that racial relations in the US are decades ahead of those in Europe. Again, most of the problem is in educating the people and making them sensitive to racial issues.
My most shocking moment was when I went back home for a summer and I was sitting down chatting with my mother's neighbor, half watching some kind of Spanish soap opera. In any case, the show portrayed some African slaves to which the neighbor commented how the slave features resembled those of monkeys. I was shocked. You'd never hear something like in US (at least I hope not).
The neighbor never had any contact with anyone of remotely African descent and had only media supplied notions of race. Since there are virtually no positively portrayed dark skinned people in the media (outside of US movies) it is easy to dehumanize them and peg them as antisocial.
TANSTAAFL
Beverly Hills is 'ethnically segregated' too.
Actually, it's not. Plenty of rich African Americans there. I can't tell their religion from merely looking at them, of course, but I see no reason to believe why there is no higher or lower percentage of Muslims among them. I think having Cosby or Denzel as your neighbor _raises_ your property value there.
Upper West Side of Manhattan, different story. If the entire first string of the Knicks announced they were moving into the apartment upstairs your Co-op board would suddenly pass a law forbidding anyone taller than 6'3" from owning an apartment there due to "Post 9/11 fire safety issues."
... would seem to be a no-brainer, in terms of making the distinction. But France (and Germany) has a pretty long post-WWII history of making very strange distinctions (or not) between those things. The mess they're in now is shining a pretty bright light on some of their culture's built-in legal and philosophical oddities. Much is being made about France's supposed inability to integrate immigrants into their wider society, but there's more to it than that.
I spent some time yesterday talking to my neighbor who is from Cameroon, in Africa. Their culture was impacted considerably by German colonialism, and then lurched into Frenchness when the French were handed that German turf after WWII. As a result, many people from his generation head to France for higher education, and indeed, he has relatives there. He fondly recalled traveling there (and across Europe) as a younger man 15 years ago, and says that he hates it now because "it's no longer France."
He's appalled by the unwillingness of many people that move there to even learn French or fully grasp how the country works. He says that some people there do wish that it was easier to snap their fingers and "be" French - with all of the social niceties and better paying work that might suggest - but that the problem is more in the objectives of the immigrants. His personal take on it is that, indeed, it's not Moroccans (as an example) wanting to move to France, it's Morrocans wanting to move Morroco to France.
At any rate, he came here (to the US), and is working his ass off in two different businesses (wireless networking and carpet cleaning!). He came here with very little, and now has a decent house (luxurious, he says, by any standard he would otherwise have enjoyed in Cameroon or in France) and just bought his equally hard working wife a nice Mercedes.
He uses the internet for VoIP chats with his friends in France and Africa, haunts many message boards and blogs in both places, and encourages his relations in France to do the same. His take on it is that the French have become completely schizoid on this entire bundle of issues. They preach a culture/color-blind take on all things governmental (which he applauds), and seem to let into the country pretty much anyone who feels like being there (which he thinks is crazy). But his main observation was that the socialist aspects of the French government/economy are chiefly to blame for everything that's happening. He has a bird feeder out behind his house and laughs when the squirrels fight over the sunflower seeds - but he says that's pretty much what's happening in the immigrant-heavy French suburbs right now... people moving there for the welfare-ish resources, and now erupting into a frenzy over the ramifications of living like that (in contrast to the country's better-off people, but - according to my neighbor - still better off than they would be where they came from). I asked him if his perceptions are typical, and he said that he wishes they were (in the French 'burbs), but that they are among the extended Cameroonian ex-pat community in the DC area. He's shaking his head over the whole thing, and says he wishes that France would lighten up on the whole free speech thing, but that it would tighten up on immigration. The biggest thing, though, is the complete fear (on the part of law enforcement) of even entering some neighborhoods. The police there are completely powerless to deal with the thuggier elements in the public housing ghettos, and have pretty much thrown up their hands.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Destroying property Correct, thousands of cars and tens of buildings were set afire
Raping None reported. And god knows that if there were only rumors, far-right would cry it out loud
killing people Zero rioters killed. Zero policemen killed. One (and probably two soon) innocent bystanders killed (which is in the average criminality for a quiet week)
Number of shots fired during the first week : 4. (I didn't followed the events during the second week where I knew there has been shotgun shots in one suburb, without killing people btw)
I believe that what is called "riots" here would be called "life as usual" in America. The only spectacular events are the arsons, which are inacceptables, I agree.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
"Yes, the real cause of unemployment is in the mirror, the color of what it reflects."
Yes , obviously its their colour. Though all those indians doing well in
france obviously must have painted themselves white and used false names
when they went for job interviews, right? Or perhaps you're just dishing out
the usual racism rant because you're as dumb as the rioters and think all
their problems are caused by Nasty White People. Moron.
It sure is. Turkey is very keen to join the EU as soon as it possibly can. The existing membership is split on the issue, but France is probably the strongest opponent. It's in Turkey's interest to portray the French government as anti-Muslim, because then the other nations in the EU will come to perceive France's opposition to Turkish membership of the EU as a product of an anti-Muslim mindset, and will be less likely to support France in that matter.
What the French are actually against, of course, is the accession to the EU of a country with a population bigger than theirs. The Turks would quite naturally have more seats in the European Parliament than either the French or the Germans, and would tend to vote for policies benefiting the poorer countries of the East who have recently joined. In order to defeat such policies, the French and Germans might actually have to come to agreements with the British... Clearly this is inconceivable if you happen to be French :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Read it more closely.
"Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
His conviction was overturned because hate speech is still protected, and the assembly was peaceful.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
How exactly does government spending "crowd out" private spending?
Um, because when government spends a dollar, it must take that dollar from a taxpayer, preventing him from spending the dollar himself. You can argue that the government will spend the dollar in a more beneficial manner than the taxpayer would have, but that government spending crowds out the private sector is practically a tautology.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.