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tim ferrell's avatar

this would be a fantastic piece if it were proofread. shame, really.

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Francis Turner's avatar

It's a fair cop, but society is to blame. I did a quick check and fixed a few typos

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tim ferrell's avatar

LOL - fair enough...

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David's avatar

Dunno if this is what you guys are talking about, but the newsletter version of the column has a lot of places where the text is cut off mid-sentence. I assume that's an artifact of the software, but you might want to figure out what's going on there.

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Francis Turner's avatar

That's what it was. I wrote this in the middle of doing something else and funky things happened which I didn't notice. I think I fixed it all in the online version

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Francis Turner's avatar

I had not realized that the court in question that was a creation of Hollande. Interesting

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John Oh's avatar

Thanks for the background. I'm very interested but I have trouble with French politics because I'm not French and don't speak French. Maybe the establishment will use censorship to save them? The EU is focused on censoring the internet. In the US the media environment has become so porous that the legacy media can no longer suppress a story completely (hence the blatant lies about some stories like doge cutting social security). Stories bubble through the alternative media and get through to people in some form even if they don't want to know anything beyond the NYT. If there is a sudden need to protect the people of France from the evil internet it will be much more difficult for RN to message, AfD as well. They already forced Rumble out of the market and it looks like they've decided to make Gab an Alex Jones like test case.

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David's avatar

"Interfering with air traffic another - though the French ATC unions are solidly lefty I believe so that might not happen."

I see two possible reasons the French Left might weigh in (implicitly) on Le Pen's side:

1. Tactical. Both the RN and "La France Insoumise" are anti-establishment parties. Thus it serves the Left's interests to throw more sand in the gears and more dirt in Macron's face...especially if the proximate cause would be the treatment of Le Pen.

2. Ideological. For the same reason, there is probably a significant overlap between RN voters and those of the Left. Surveys in the U.S. showed that when Bernie Sanders was actively campaigning for the Democratic nomination, many (not all, perhaps a quarter to a third) of his supporters ("the BernieBros") preferred Trump to any of the "mainstream" (Clinton, Obama, Biden) alternatives.

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Francis Turner's avatar

Given the general hating Parisien feeling, I can certainly see that happening for both reasons. The Gillets Jaunes protests were definitely a mix of political stripes.

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David's avatar

Heh. As Pierre Daninos observed in Un Certain Monsieur Blot, "The French see the world as divided into three concentric zones: Paris, the provinces, and abroad." ("...Paris, province, et l'etranger.")

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BehaviorForecastsProbablyHard's avatar

Hmm. Yeah, I dunno.

I can tell you that Americans, broadly, do not want to be on the hook for supplying troops to prop up Macron's regime. I do not think that Macron is planning for it to be that difficult, or for seeking to adopt that contingency. I think American comments on involvement with European regimes may be based in calculations about what elite school trained judges, bureaucrats, and establishment politicians are choosing to do, and guesses about consequences. We Americans have cause to know that our own 'professional class' has screwed itself over a bit with the university groupthink, and that ordinary Americans can just shoot us if we make peace too expensive for them.

In some ways, France seems to be understandable in terms of strictly parallel mistakes.

In other ways, the French calculations seem to be their own thing entirely.

Gripping hand, I do not know enough about the finances to follow whether USAID could not have bought Macron's government. Though, obviously, the EU also has some money for spending on politics of constituent regimes.

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