Hey Look, France Is In The News...

[guigsy]

what the fuck? FRANCE???

[Lazlo]

I guess even the French hate the French.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Many of them also blame the tough-talking interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, for making matters worse. He has described the rioters as "scum" and threatened to "hose down" the estates to get rid of them.

"He's disrespected us, which is a declaration of war," one young man told the Sunday Telegraph as he surveyed one of Clichy's housing estates that was dotted with piles of ash and broken glass. "Those guys, our friends, died for nothing and we're being dissed. Someone has to say sorry."

Shitty scenario flies off the rails, innocents vanish off the radar, the most obnoxious voices get the most press, and the ultra-right picks up more credibility. Wouldn't it be great if this didn't go that way.

The fact that this is spreading around the country is pretty disturbing.

[AdamH]

Just fantastic. It's not as if France is innocent, but the roots of this are just as dangerous.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

French sociologists must be going into overdrive with all this. It does raise all sorts of questions around the hard line that the gov't has been taking around public expressions of religiosity, blowback from French colonialism, ghettoisation, the selectiveness of the media, disenfranchisement of youth, piggybacking of ultraconservative religiosity, etc.

The way people exploit things like this always astounds me. I found an article in the Times of India that seemed as desperate as Fox to find the Islamic connection here.

(Warning - Times of India horrible for popups)

Paris riots: Islamic militants unmasked

[timouse]

LONDON/PARIS: In the first disturbing assertion that a European country and its capital can be brought to a halt by the massed forces of Islamist militants both within and outside its borders, French police warned there was evidence they had played a role in inciting vandals, albeit "not on the front lines."

but it's terrorists.

really.

we don't have any proof that it's them, but we just "feel it."

didn't the US take the same stance after 911??

Meanwhile, Yves Bot, Paris chief prosecutor, said the hit-and-run arson attacks were an insidious "form of action that is organised. It responds to a strategy.

is Yves Bot any relation to Don Bot?

Edited November 6, 2005 by Guest

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I remember being - well, I still am - disturbed when my thesis supervisor suggested I start reading Carl Schmitt, a German sociologist who hit his stride in the 1920s/30s working around a binary sort of schema where all things political were carved into an "us vs. them" dichotomy - "friends and enemies", in his words. He ended up a card-carrying Nazi, where those ideas went down just great - especially the part where liberals were just to be swept away as getting in the line of fire between those people who didn't have so much trouble identifying themselves as belonging to one camp over against the other. Anyway, I never quite understood why he wanted me reading this guy, until I ran into this massive wall of current sociological lit (e.g. Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, even Niklas Luhmann) that followed roughly the same lines.

Are we as a species/culture so committed to avoiding dealing with the regular, routine violences we see every day that we'll go to any distance to mount wars just to deflect attention away from them?

(Semi-rhetorical question.)

[Davey Boy 2.0]

one of the most troubling laws in france is that, legally, you're supposed to always be carrying identity cards- no big deal right? But the fact is that the police can arbitrarily ask you for your ID without needing any reason to be talking to you at all- this has led to accusations of police using it as an instrument for racial profiling and in fact it was what sparked all hte rioting in the first place, the two (black) kids who got electrocuted were running from cops who'd asked them to see their ID cards

anyway it's certainly a sign of the times and i wonder if we'll look back on the riots as being a signpost in the 'trend' (FLOBW, for lack of a better word) of alienated immigrants taking extreme measures in their transplanted countries (like the london bombers)

crazy world

[bradm]

From The Notebooks of Lazarus Long by the venerable Robert A. Heinlein:

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

On the first part, I fear he was right; on the second part, I'm saddened that he was right.

Aloha,

Brad

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Weird thing is that if you're hit with a traffic violation in France and you don't have your driver's license, registration, or insurance with you, they give you a day to get down to a police station with it.

I haven't heard, mind you, what happens if you fail to show (or just don't have that ID in the first place). And in an information/surveillance society, it does always come back on you to prove how you weren't in the wrong, against information people may or may not have collected on you.

Third rambling thing I find myself thinking about - wasn't it World War I that saw the introduction of passports? What is the next level after that?

I'm trying hard not to think about The Handmaid's Tale, and how easy it may be some day, once everything is set to run off of a credit/id system, just to completely cut people off and out of society.