French protesting underway.........

not that shocking in and of itself, but I heard on the TV news that some of the protesters are throwing firecrackers at the police! Seriously, how fucking stupid can you be? Nahhh.....I'm sure the cops won't think they might be getting shot at.
No possible way an actual terrorist would use the protests as "cover" and take advantage of the chaos & mayhem as an opportunity to cause harm.

Granted the Iraqis who engaged in traditional "celebratory gunfire" for weddings (here comes the brrraaap!
brrrraaap!) while driving down the highway next to our armed military convoys were not the best & brightest either.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46328439

The French aren't ruled by fear and paranoia like Americans are.

I'd be surprised if French police respond to this with gunfire.

fantasizing about foreigners being shot in the face again. do I sense a pattern with you?

They don't need to. The Gendarmierie Nationale may be a police force, but they're an arm of the military, and have a few units that, when they appear, informs the protesters that the fun over, and anyone not scarpering is getting batoned into unconsciousness - the French police are not inclined to fuck about.

It's kind of interesting what's going on, a lot of people see Paris and view France as this wonderfully metropolitan place, forgetting there's quite a lot of France that isn't Paris.

What are they protesting, 35 hour work week is too long?

Taxes

I've never been to France, so maybe I am assuming too much when I think the cops are armed. Thus throwing firecrackers at armed cops might be a stupid move - but that's just me.

no I'm not interested in shooting anyone in the face. I'm just thinking when I was armed in a chaotic situation I didn't appreciate anything that goes "pop" or "boom" in my general direction.
Your work experiences may differ.

Korean riot police are like that too. They will beat the dog shit out of protesters - in their culture "respect my authority" means just that - no wiggle room. Occasionally the protesters in Seoul (nearly always college students) would throw things over the wall of Hannam Village, an "off post" secure & guarded US military housing area. Sometimes they would get over the wall and I think pulled down the US flag one time. Anyway one time a protest was getting really out of hand and the Army had to send soldiers from our unit there to help the riot police, since it was our area in which they were directing their anger. Each soldier had something the riot police didn't have - a softball bat and about 25 pounds more muscle to swing it! Yeah, the protesters stood down with a quickness when they did that college level physics & math reasoning.

yep...universally you can't escape death & taxes - not much use protesting death I guess.

This I do understand.

I have certain triggers that relate to things I've witnessed and experienced professionally (you have an idea of the sort of things based on a pm I sent you a while ago, that was one example amongst literally hundreds) and whilst I've never been in a military conflict I've more than enough experience of severe violence and it's consequences to empathise with how it affects people and their perceptions.

Happily the French police aren't routinely armed,as others have pointed out, and by and large have had much less exposure to being on the receiving end of firearms than their US counterparts (although in recent years they've had their share)

Gas tax.

Gallon of diesel is about $6, they recently had a 30 cent/gallon tax increase, and another 25 cent tax hike is due soon. They actually use liters and euros but my nums are roughly converted to US gallon and USD. And diesel is what they use for cars. As is always the case with things like gas or sales tax, the poorest get hit the hardest, and in this case the rural population are also hit harder because they drive more miles and don't have an underground/metro.

If one were of optimistic mindset, they might be pleased by the absence of gas taxes here - we pay around half the cost paid throughout much of euroland for gas/petrol, and most of that difference is attributable to gas taxes.

I remember about eight or ten years ago when gas was about double what it is today for a brief period. I don't remember the reason. I can't imagine dealing with that shit forever, especially where there is zero public transportation like in much of Georgia for example.

Which is why Europe enacted high fuel taxes. Demand was generated for efficient cars. France had less tax on diesel to promote use of these engines as they historically got better efficiency and (historically) polluted less. Changes in fuel cost are a smaller percentage of the price of fuel so the market won't affect end users as much as here.

And they can afford nice roads and public transportation.

Fuel's much more expensive over here for that reason, which is a double edged sword.

The tax money does go a long way towards providing improved public services but it also makes us a hellishly expensive nation to drive in, to the point where many on low incomes are effectively priced out. A case could be made in favour of that situation on ecological grounds but I'd rather make progress on that front in more equitable terms without the implicit social inequality to be honest, without damaging the livelihoods of professional drivers and making driving the domain of the moderately well off.

It's unlikely that a terrorist would jump in during a situation like this because they would likely get smacked down quicksmart. Terrorist attacks generally turn out best from the terrorists perspective when authorities don't see it coming.

As for why firecrackers don't immediately make the police open fire, that's one of the benefits of a society where you don't assume that every man and his dog is carrying.

That method does have an effect. Years ago when fuel prices were a good dollar or so more the SUV, sports car, and pickup truck market took a hit. People were bailing on large engine vehicles and the used market was flooded with cars which had a hard time selling. Even in those markets the people were looking for smaller engines if they did not need the 8. It did not make all the difference, but gas mileage became a huge thing. I would guess one of the reasons ford and GM are cutting back their car lines was because they simply don't get compatible mileage with foreign brands. I remember being in a low gas price area back then and watching for pickup drivers looking at over a hundred dollars to fill their surrogate penises up. It would have been cheaper to get a penis enlargement operation than drive to work for a week, but far be it from the bush lovers to grow their own.

I'm not sure there's a correlation between penis size or even having one and driving an SUV. Maybe F250s. It also seems to know no ideological boundaries. I think it's just a 'merican thang. Maybe everyone would if fuel were as cheap as it is here.

I think this is an area where taxes on fuel should be used as a means to alter behavior. The externalities of operating 2 ton trucks to schlep a 110lb soccer mom around are not being accounted for.

That said I could not convince my wife to get an electric. We live less than 2 miles from where she works. Leafs off of lease are a dime-a-dozen. ICEs are so 19th century. Well, so are electrics, but their time has come back.

As for pricing fuel making it unaffordable for low incomes, this is where they would benefit: the F250 drivers paying high fuel taxes would be subsidizing public transportation.

I'm not sure I would exempt commercial or farm use, but that's an area I haven't thought a lot about.

French President Macron caved following escalating violence over the weekend that left 4 dead along with many injuries and arrests.

Voters said 'non' to more global warming taxes. [As they also did in green locations from Washington state to Ontario.] Macron said ok.

Socialist-lite systems are unravelling all over the place.

Yep, totally different to the Nazi lite system which is doing just splendid in the US.....

Fake news.
We haven't had a pogrom here in days.
And haven't seen busses full of Jews or Poles or Czechs since election night.

In fact seriously, our last Nazi rally celebrating the 1-year anniversary of the biggest Nazi event of this century, Charlottesville, boasted an amazing number of Nazi marchers that might have topped 17.

Alternatively, despite claims of fear of attack by Trump supporters, when was the last time nova provided a case of actual infringement on the personal space of a member of the trans community?

Which is nice, because everyone's protesting against the Nazi lite government.

17? Yea-haw......they reached the rarely achieved "double digit" mark! The sky's the limit for those plucky youngsters!
BTW not to nit-pick but of course you won't see buses with Jews & so forth......they are silently marched to the camps under cover of darkness (duh).

Which is rather the point, they've got nothing to protest against....much like you won't see all that many people in France arguing in favour of Gulags despite their collapsing "socialist lite" system (TM), it's almost as if we have an impasse here where the whole world is going to shit and it doesn't much care who's right or left.

maybe the world is going to shit (politically anyway) on your side of the pond but 17 people attending a Nazi event pretty much says at this point and I would venture to say in the near future as well. Not saying the US doesn't have problems but it takes a lot to bring down a giant - nothing we can't weather.
But hey, it's easy for me to feel confidant because.....you know the drill.....I live in the greatest country on the planet. I guess when you don't life would seem discouraging at times.

You seem to have missed the point here, Tuttle claimed all the "socialist lite" governments were going down the pan because....reasons. I responded by pointing out the Nazi lite government you have over there hardly seems to be faring any better.

No one mentioned Nazi rallies, why would they need to have one when they're already in power?

Your post would have made more sense in the flow of the conversation if you'd talked about left wing protest groups in the US, of which you have a great many

^Some of the bills are now coming due. It was inevitable that it would happen according to conservative writers for decades.


Anyway, the world ain't going to shit or anywhere even close to that. A lot of it's just in the head.

Some folks simply need to cut their discretionary time spent on politics by half or 3/4, and try to stop the self-inflicted wounds from watching all this cable or internet garbage (and I don't mean porn) that just feeds on exaggeration and hyperbole and discord. Shock-jocks with the methods of e.g. Howard Stern have become mainstream anchors dressed up as grown-ups.

I agree, Alex Jones being a prime example. However I live in a, ahem, "socialist lite" system and seem to not be facing the apocalypse you imagine. When we do start unravelling though I'll let you know so you can legitimately make those claims without all that hyperbole.

Jones is painted as a conservative, but all of the conservatives I've ever talked to or read or listened to quickly repudiate him and his hatefulness.

From what very little I've read about him, Jones strikes me more as a conspiratorist with some conservative traits. But he's not infecting nearly as many minds with garbage as cable news/entertainment.