https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1958_crisis_in_France

It amazes me that the constitution that was put in place then is largely unchanged today, insofar as the French president is still incredibly powerful, parliament is subservient, and the electoral system is deeply majoritarian.

I don't know exactly what it says about a society that it keeps a constitution that was imposed this way, but it isn't anything good. The frank craziness in this article (F-Droid, lol) is in keeping with that.

Governments would be wise, so long as I'm not doing anything to hurt anyone else, to mind their own business and fuck off.

Don't make me get out my AR-15 with its standard rapacity 45rd mag

I mean, we all know that president dissolving the parliment/congress/house is an unworkable mechanism for a sustainable government.

A government that is afraid of its citizens is the right kind of governance: it keeps them within their expected functions: "expected" is the operative word.

I do not support the protests that destroy public and private property.

Someone who supports such violence should have their house destroyed and looted and then affirm "well done!". Somehow this does not happen.

Neither the leaders who support squatting do not advertise their house address and when they go for vacation to incite the squatters to take their house and make it a trashbin.

There are different ways to protest but when you go for violence do not be surprised you get violence back (including non physical).

This is not talked to any political wing - as someone said the extremes usually meet.

…automobiles, rental-vans…

But they didn't.

That's the red flag.

to quote professor farnsworth: I don't want to live on this planet anymore

There won't be The Day™ when the system goes authoritarian. It's a slope and one must panic at every step. If you wait for The Day, it will be too late.

We’re discussing politics.

> Like what is your benefit from saying this out of context?

What does that even mean? Are you insinuating they’re being paid to say that? How do we know you’re not paid to counter them?

> If signing this paper and being stricter helped the hospitals not being saturated and saved x thousands lives do you still think it was a bad thing?

The problem is you and no one else could prove now or then that giving up my human rights would save lives. Because its all pointless lip service to take power away from the people under the guise of “protection”. Just like with encryption, personal weapons, and everything else that governments don’t want us to have.

> I'm just saying you don't seem to take that possibility into account at all

And I’m saying you haven’t taken into account that you’re an Authoritarian apologist.

If banning encryption and helping police stop terrorism saved x thousand lives do you blah blah blah blah

Do programmers hang out here? The aversion to reasoning from first principle is palpable.

If patriot act helped US intelligence agencies prevent the next 9/11, do you still think it was a bad thing?

The mean could be a 5$ wrench, hacking into your devices or plain old surveillance

Nothing personal, I'm talking about the interests of all the voters who freely elected the current president and parliament.

If you are not happy, it's our duty as a society to provide you a way to express your point. But the right to express your point does not involve the violence to get our attention. Most people just want to go on with their daily life, and putting obstacles to them will not gather any sympathy around you.

I have yet to met a protester who can explain to me how burning cars and picketing is going to magically move down the median age of the population which is slowly but surely drifting towards 50. Considering most French also don’t want to rely on immigration (not that the country is attractive anyway), I guess they are either planning to force people to make kids at gunpoint or are strongly in denial.

Don’t hesitate to explain who is this mysterious "they" who are apparently responsible of everything wrong in the country.

Nope. It depends on countries (and mood of the year).

Some countries allow to become mercenaries and forbid voluntary fighting for a foreign nation. Some countries allow to voluntary fight for a foreign nation and forbid to become mercenaries. And so on.

France even has the French Foreign Legion...

The problem is that government us terrorism scaremongering to justify erasing citizens rights. It's completely valid to be anti-terrorist and prefer alternative choices to fight it.

For example, in my country, both polices and tribunals are severely under provisioned. I'd start with imroofijg those budgets before passing surveillance laws.

They have not been any evidence of criminal activities by those people. So far, all what they have against them is "they are protective about their privacy".

That's a terrible reason to arrest and maintain people in jail.

I don't care if "quite 100%" of unionized people are in unions that were against the pension law, it doesn't tell anything reliable about their support. They mainly followed what the union told them. Same with polls, I don't care what they say as they are easily oriented, interpreted, ignored or promoted depending on opaque support from influential actors.

If only there was a reliable way for people to express their support and have some influence on who gets to rule... Hmmm, like votes and elections, maybe?Maybe we could call that democracy. We would equip it with super-rules, aka a constitution, that would define "democracy" with actual laws. Using the laws from the constitution isn't "twisting it". The ones doing some twisting are those who provoke massive outrage about something perfectly constitutional. There was a vote ultimately (actually several votes), called motion de censure, and the deputies against the reform couldn't form a majority. And I don't care it was only missing 9 votes, all the rules were followed. If you don't consider the rules should be the decider, then rules are meaningless. Then why bother with a constitution?

It's nice trying to think about how the constitution could define democracy differently that in the current one, but if you think that polls and unions should be part of the definition, it just doesn't make sense. The 5th republic was a response to the political instabilities that plagued France in the wake of the 2nd war, probably not helping France get a consistent stance against Nazi Germany. I don't see why it's attacked today, apart from some opportunistic reasons from actors with questionable and vague alternatives.

You are bundling many weak points together to make up for an actual strong one. "Many people are afraid to protest in France now.". Really? That's somewhat funny because according to unions, millions of people recently protested in France, for weeks. Are you sure you're not confusing with Russia? Protesting in France is not going anywhere, and outside of some twitter disinformation campaigns, people are more afraid of bad and violent actors mixing with the protesters, breaking and burning stuff, provoking police, than the police itself. Of course police is also guilty, their response can be completely inappropriate. But even then, is that because Macron is president? Do you think he personally orders the police to be violent? Why? I don't think he has anything to gain from increased police violence, as it's used against him by his political opponents. Attempts at forming a police brigade specialized against violent actors is possibly counter-productive. But what are you supposed to do when hundreds of people determined to burn something down for whatever political reasons are exercising power from violence and intimidation? And completely free from consequences? Are a few hundreds of radicalized people going to dictate what is allowed in a whole country? I don't know what the response should be, but it can't be giving up or blaming police every time.

Finally, I'm not sure where you heard about pressure against journalists from Macron, spying laws against them, or "terrorist" laws, but I'd be curious to know.

To appease the Turks I assume?

You need wider range, more chaos, but mainly consistent spoofed behaviour.

France is big enough. Having to avoid a few square kilometres around the president will leave you plenty of space to organize your protest.

he increased the pension age because people are getting older and the state will not be able to afford it? wow what a crazy dictator

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Nine EU countries made similar rules, though I don't know how many still have it in effect. Any citizen/resident of Denmark is still prohibited from going to the conflict zones of Syria and Iraq.

Like, this is paradox of tolerance stuff. How do you prevent bad actors from taking advantage of your permissiveness and liberal laws? I'm not saying france is in the right to detain someone for using a simple app, because they aren't, but that this action is on a spectrum, and everyone from governments to your local forum admin is desperately trying to find the right point on that spectrum. So what do you suggest?

If your answer is "don't try to stop the terrorists", then you should understand that human society really hates random violence that isn't "normal", so unless you have some way to make innocents dying for no reason "normal", people will give up any freedom to fix that. Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't good science but people's desire for "safety" is a very very strong desire.

Like joining the Taliban ?

Those in favour went from 70 to 50% over the course of 5 months, opposition tripled, strong support went from 50% to 20%.

The only polls that matter are elections. Apart from elections, people have the right to avoid any poll without risking any policy change.

There is more to democracy than a vote every 5 years.

Consent of the governed: "Government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is justified and lawful only when consented to by the people or society over which that political power is exercised."

The founders of the United States believed that the government of Great Britain should rest on the principle that government depended on the consent of the governed and that any government not based on that consent could be justifiably overthrown and replaced.

Pretty sure revolutionary France abides by the same principles.

Many current problems stem from the fact that post-war mechanisms written into the governmental system are abused by the president and elected leaders. E.g. presidential overruling of parlamental votes.

unless we are talking about handling a national crisis, or avoiding a US-style shutdown, then avoiding a vote may be legitimate under specific circumstances.

but I doubt pension reforms fall under national emergencies

The largest jurisdiction like the Federal judiciary, for example, have the Federal Sentencing Guidelines which have a strict point system for criminal sentencing where judges have little discretion due to a Federal “tough on crime” wave.

It really depends on the subfield of law and the vagueness of past legislation.

Which really makes me wonder, how the hell to even professionals keep track of that? For regular stuff you literally can have thousands of relevant cases going back centuries as "precedent" to build on.

But you cannot blame them for the violence in the protest they co-organized. People are free to attend the protest, and they cannot control them. They never called for violence against police. And most protest now in France have some people fighting with the police.

The same way you can see firefighters throwing stuff (including petanque ball) to police during firefighers protest. But you cannot blame the firefigheter union for this.

While I won't argue with the fact that these are indeed formidable missiles, it does make for a unique French touch.

The total value of items destroyed has been estimated to be about 8 million by the French state. While not a small number, I haven't seen the antiterrorist police be sent to the FNSEA's headquarters for their history of violence and destruction ever since 1960. It is part of their methods ever since their inception, but greasing some palms high up in the government certainly helps.

>And given the sort of stuff they brought to their protests: swords, machettes, baseball bats, jerrycan, bricks, fireworks, petanque balls, Molotov cocktails, fire bombs, etc, it is particularly disingenuous to pretend they have been dissolved for not talking to the police when arrested.

Violence. Is. Caused. By. The. Police. None of these, not a single one of these items were used until the police started indiscriminately tear gassing thousands of protesters, the vast majority of them peaceful. Five thousand grenades and weapons classified as war weapons used on protesters. Half of the items you mention were taken by the police with roadblocks more than twenty kilometers away. Sorry for driving with petanque balls in my trunk, I guess.

>You can read the actual decret in French: https://twitter.com/GDarmanin/status/1671450289298198528

Sure, let's read the sexual abuser, the national-socialist-journal-writing sack of shit's declaration. One part in particular is very interesting:

Considérant d'autre part que le groupement SLT diffuse a ses membres et sympathisants, via ses réseaux sociaux, des modes opératoires directement inspirés de ceux des <<Black Blocks>>; que parmi ces préconisations figurent le port de tenues interdisant leur identification par les forces de l'ordre, en contradiction avec les habitudes des militants écologistes de manifester a visage découvert, le fair de laisser son téléphone mobile allumé a son domicile ou de le mettre en <<mode avtion>> en arrivant sur les lieux de la manifestation pour éviter le bornage, le fait de ne pas communiquer les codes dévérrouillage de l'appareil ou de ne pas répondre aux forces de l'ordre en cas d'interpellation; qu'y figurent également des consignes d'ordre médical <<en cas de nécessité d'hospitalisation, dans la mesure du possible, se rendre dans un hôpital éloigné de l'action, rester flou, ne pas donner son identité, prévoir de l'argent liquide>>; que par ailleurs est préconisé le port du masque FFP3; de lunettes de protection contre les gaz; ...

For the HNers that to not have the privilege to read the beautiful language of the country of Human Rights, where protesters get arbitrarily arrested in the hospital and in their homes, this is a translation of how they justify being a single step below "declaring ecologist protestors an actual terrorist group":

Considering that the SLT group spreads to its members and sympathizers through social networks, operative modes directly inspired from those of <<Black Blocks>>; that amongst those suggestions include wearing outfits preventing their identification by the police forces; in contradiction with the habit of protesting with their face out usually had by ecologist protestors; the fact of leaving their mobile phones turned on in their homes or to put them in airplane mode when arriving at the protest to avoid triangulation; to refuse to communicate their passwords or to refuse to respond to the police when being arrested; that also contains medical related orders: <<in case of hospitalization, as much as possible, go to a hospital far away from the action, stay quiet, do not give your identity, have some cash>>; that wearing FFP3 masks and gas protection glasses is recommended...

Want to add some more ? Sure. They arrested an EELV member that was not present at any of the protests. Why ? Because he left his phone at home and used it in airplane mode. https://twitter.com/marinetondelier/status/16714362394494935...?

Couldn't find any source online except for this comment. Might be because of tranalation though.

The French Revolution paved the way for just about every pro-worker reform in the modern world.

to be fair, the emperor climbed on the throne pretty much on his own; I think he had support across broad parts of the population, but it's not as if he was elected (and he didn't even start as an emperor, that came a few years after his coup)

Oh, come on, as if that were a thing so common that there had been a specific word for it for nearly 200 years.

You're absolutely right that there are definitely some people who want a 6th republic but do not vote or agree with LFI, but for the sake of generalized conversation like we're having now they're mostly irrelevant. If it were to happen, it would be through him and his "vision", and as such I maintain my critics.

Beware of what you want for you might just get it.

Citing Slavery Project did an analysis and found 18% of all current cases in courts either quote slavery rulings or are less than 2 steps removed (quote a ruling that quotes the slavery ruling).

And on top of that you have a window for sentencing. So if murder is lets say 4-20 years in jail. And you were drunk, that makes it worse, but it was not premeditated, and this and that it all adds up and you might 6 years or you might get 18 depending on the circumstances.

This also allows the law to be rewritten from scratch instead of being based on whatever higher court thought in the 1800s.

Citation needed of self-defence killings im France being prosecuted passionately and unfairly.

David Runciman has an excellent explanation of this in the "Talking Politics" podcast which I recommend unreservedly: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>

(Specific segment occurs ~15 minutes in.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_the_Rwandan_genocid...

No better than the gang laws we have here in the US. It seems Jefferson's rule about 200 years or so between revolutions was right after all.

I think arguing about the accuracy of labels like "nazi" or "fascist" is a bit beside the point. You and I both know the people calling the AfD fascist or nazi won't suddenly like it better if you can convince them they don't meet the exact definition of fascism or are identical to the historical National Socialist Democratic Workers Party. It's clearly more about a vibe, but that is also true for the AfD's own political ideology (and yours, apparently, if you think "identity kamikaze" is 1) a thing that is happening and 2) something to be seriously concerned about). Incidentally the NSDAP also had different factions including Strasserites, who imagined a more proletarian-led economy and people who thought having homosexuals like Röhm around was acceptable, at least for utilitarian purposes. Incidentally, most of those were murdered by the rest once the NSDAP actually got into power. Such is the reward for being progressive in the far-right.

There is a large undercurrent of reactionary hateful views in German politics that usually hides behind the fig leaf of "conservatism" but has become more visible thanks to parties like CSU openly copying AfD talking points and "liberal" media being unequipped to handle them in any other way than giving them a platform and hoping that the "marketplace of ideas" saves the day. Of course as we now know from experience, "rational debate" is impotent in a "post-truth" environment.

It's a widespread misconception that Germany got rid of all the Nazis and Nazi ideology during the so-called "Denazification" (Entnazifizierung).

While there were formal reviews of the innumerable former NSDAP members to determine their ideology and behavior under Nazi rule, only the most blatant offenders faced any consequences and it was demonstrably easy to "cheat" (i.e. we now know based on a better understanding of historical records that some people were able to hide very incriminating evidence of their involvement in e.g. forced labor and Jewish persecution) and any undesirable rulings could be appealed to offer another opportunity to "correct the record" so to say. As a consequence, many Nazis saw no real consequences and even ended up in the same positions of power because their job experience made them the most qualified (and "innocent until proven guilty", right?).

Additionally, many former NSDAP members went on to continue working in politics. Of the parties still relevant today, the conservative CDU/CSU received the lions share of them, in addition to those formerly associated with the likewise Christian "center party" which while ostensibly "politically moderate" was one of the driving forces in the rise of the NSDAP and the passing of the Enabling Act dissolving the democracy.

In East Germany, likewise many former NSDAP members ended up in the equivalent of the CDU/CSU (known as CDU in East Germany at the time and CDUD or Ost-CDU in West Germany), the NDPD and the LDPD (the East Germany equivalents of the market liberal West German FDP, the NDPD explicitly being created to target "unimpacted" ex-NSDAP members and siphon off conservative voters who would otherwise have supported the CDU or LPDP), all of which continued to exist as an executive organ[1] of the ruling unity party until 1989.

It's also worth pointing out the East Germany was even less rigurous in its "Denazification" (Stalin ended the program in 1948 insisting that it was time to stop distinguishing between ex-NSDAP and non-NSDAP and instead focus on growing democracy) and the SED was uniquely ill-equipped to deal with neo-Nazis when they arose, previously already having viewed "unimpacted" NSDAP members as politically confused rather than genuinely dangerous. For some it was literally impossible to imagine neo-Nazis could exist in East Germany because they saw the rise of the Nazis as a response to capitalism and East Germany was supposed to be non-capitalist[2]. For this reason, East Germany was however (like the USSR) quite successful at fighting other leftist currents, which were seen as misguided or even "capitalist" (as the only valid form of anti-capitalism was clearly that practiced by the government and opposing it therefore must be capitalist).

So in essence Germany has never weaned itself off fascism, really. While Germany has become generally more progressive compared to the 1930s, in some ways it is also still less progressive than it was during the Weimar era. A lot of leftist politics also died even before the suppression under the Nazis, the suppression under the SED or the suppression under the Cold War era anti-communist West Germany: while many know about the in-fighting between the SPD and the USPD after WW1, culminating in a massacre at the hands of monarchist paramilitaries, there were also numerous other leftist mass deaths such as the two(!) socialist republics in Bavaria, which eventually also fell victim to the monarchists.

In other words, it shouldn't be surprising that we still have monarchist terrorist groups (Reichsbürger) treated with more bewilderment than horror, whereas the closest we have to leftist activism is moderates gluing themselves to public roads to demand incremental climate protection legislation, and two so-called leftist parties that hate each others guts and one of which has almost fully embraced neoliberalism (the SPD implemented the neoliberal reforms of weakening labor protections, social welfare and medical care some 20 years ago).

The AfD is a protest vote in as much as Trump is a protest vote. They're not something you usually bring up in polite conversation but they have easy answers and push all the right (wing) faux-populist buttons.

[1]: Point of pedantry: East Germany quickly established a system with a single ruling party, the SED or "socialist unity party". However the CDU, NDPD and LDPD continued to exist as "block parties" and began increasingly aligning themselves with the ruling SED. The "block parties" were infamously nepotistic and provided a relatively easy path to political power and privileges compared to the dominant SED.

[2]: Point of pedantry: East Germany was not "communist" although it was at times framed as "Stalinist". East Germany instead eventually used the label "real existing socialism" (along with some other Eastern block countries) which was intended to frame anyone left of the ruling party as "utopian" and unserious. This "it's already as good as it gets" position is distinct from other so-called "communist" countries which often used the term aspirationally, claiming they would eventually achieve the communist ideal after reaching a tipping point (allowing the state to "wither away"). Both are distinct from anarcho-communists who would argue that if you try to build a state to achieve communism, "real existing socialism" really is the best you can hope for because states don't wither away voluntarily and you can only grow communism from the ground up (cf. prefigurativism).

1. We had a convention citoyenne pour le climat. Macron then mostly ignored it.

2. We have elected representatives who can vote on the laws for us. Macron then used article 49.3 to mostly ignore them.

3. Vote? For which candidate? None of them would cover all of the GJs' demands.

If you disqualify protests as a valid form of democratic expression, you also disqualify our famous revolution, the feminist protests that earned women the right to vote, the union strikes that earned us many worker rights, etc.

> I'll never trust people who think that violence is justifiable

Ah, that explains it. You only see violence in protesters who break windows, not in governments who enact laws on their people. Am I correct in assuming that you're ok with making people work 20 hours/week for the RSA as well?

In France the only way firefighter got heard the last few times, after month of peaceful protestation, is by doing violent protest, including throwing heavy thing on the policeman. Then the government accepted to negociate with them. If you don't use violence in France, in many case you don't get heard at all.

Gilets Jaunes, aslo because of their violence did manage to get the government to made some concession.

Millions of French people (more than Gilets Jaunes at their peak) marched several times peacefully against the recent Pension Law, supported by all the trade union democratically elected, supported by more than 70% of the population and more than 90% of the workers. Nothing happen. No concession. Not even a vote in the parliament.

For sure sometimes violence is efficient, sometimes violence in counter-productive. Justifiable ? that is something else...

This is increasingly the case as far as UK criminal law is concerned, I think; also to an increasing extent in matters of marriage and children.

But in family law, there isn't much room for talking about precedent, because for many decades Family Court proceedings have been strictly secret. It's now opening up, slowly.

Contract and property law are rooted in custom, i.e. common law; it seems to me that it would be impossible to write down a contract law that didn't have an infinite number of cracks and corner-cases. Do judiciaries that don't have precedent have to re-litigate all those corner-cases from scratch every time?

> This seems objectively reductive and represents ideological beliefs as objective facts.

No, you just didn't liked that thing you like got attacked for the thing they did and are making up excuses.

Sarkozy, his most alike predecessor, used to wear a t-shirt that said "NYPD" while jogging, as he was president of France; and later renamed his party "Les Républicains" as an hommage to US Republicans (!!?!)

This was 9 years ago, so right before Trump happened. At the time, 53% of party members thought it was "too American" but they accepted the change nonetheless.

Macron pushes through "liberal" reforms (liberal in Europe means the opposite as in the US: liberals here are free-market proponents) because he thinks it will make France great again, I guess.

>> Interesting. Right-leaning governement (if not "far-right" according to some), but has no control over illegal migrants routinely roaming around committing crimes. I thought a key marker of "the right" was being (too) strict on order and ruthless implementation of the law.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...