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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • They actually hate the left more than the far right.
    During this springs legislative campaign, they spent more time criticizing the left for being dangerous, proto-fascist and antisemitic than they spent criticizing the far-right for the same things.
    Meanwhile a few far-right candidates were seen wearing nazi symbols or heard saying fascist stuff.

    When choosing a prime minister, Macron chose one that the far right would approve (our National Assembly can refuse a prime minister and it’s government) instead of one the left would approve.

    Macron and his cronies are just simps for our millionaire and billionaire overlords, and they know the far right in France is more than ok with economical neoliberalism.



  • The sex trafficker can absolutely be tracked by doing old-fashioned police work: you spend time, money and energy to infiltrate the network, gain their trust and eventually take them down. But this requires police funding and training.

    “if you’re doing nothing wrong, then why do you need to hide it?” An age-old dilemma.

    It’s not a dilemma, the answer has been given multiple times: under the rule of law, law enforcement has to prove (or at least demonstrate a strong suspiscion) that you’re involved in illegal activities before they can intrude in your privacy.
    But with the advent of mass data gathering and the exemple given by the NSA, all law enforcement agencies dream to change this paradigm.


  • As I see it, the biggest frustration from the left is that he makes right-wing changes.
    The right pretends to be frustrated by his policies because they need to disagree if they want to have a reason to exist - and they’ve been leaning towards the far right for years to find a place on the political spectrum because Macron took their place.

    A few examples, I hope I’ll be able to explain correctly.

    So in France we got something called the “prudhommes” which is a board that specializes in dealing with employee vs company legal matters. Usually, when you get fired and you think they didn’t do it right, you go to the prudhommes and you can sue them for money.
    The prudhommes are important for the workers because they can charge bug fines to the companies, and once one worker has won their case, it becomes easier for their colleagues to do so if they were wronged in the same way.
    It’s a powerful tool that kind of forces companies to follow the “code du travail” aka workers’ rights.
    When he changed (read: degraded) lots of stuff about workers’ rights just after his first election in 2017, Macron introduced an important change: there is now a maximum amount that the prudhommes can force a company to pay. This changes the balance of power because now companies can now how much breaking the law will cost them and decide that it’s the cost of doing business. Worst thing is, this amount can be changed by the government at any time without requiring a vote from the national assembly - this is read by many commenters as the start if the prudhommes’ dismantlement.

    In France, we’ve had (I believe since the eighties) a kind of universal basic income. It’s far from a livable income (it’s around 600€/month currently) but it’s still more than nothing. You need to be french (we wouldn’t want to share nice thingd with refugees, right?) and jump through a few hoops to claim it, but it exists. Until Macron, the only condition you had to fulfill was having no other income.
    This is used a lot by people who are unable to work but can’t apply for unemployment or sick pay mechanisms. It’s always been the last safety: when everything else fails, at least you get something.
    Since Macron, you now have to be actively looking for a job to qualify for it. Which means that if your unemployment office thinks you’re not looking hard enough, you can get excluded from this income and have absolutely nothing (which then leads to homelessness and a whole life of fun). And of course over the past 7 years of Macron, the unemployment offices are under an ever increasing pressure to find people who are not deserving enough.

    In terms of image, Macron took lessons from Trump: truth and facts don’t matter and you don’t even have to be coherent. Time and time again, he and his governement have lied, contradicted themselves… They are of course not the first to do it, but they are the first to not give a shit. Before Macron, they tried not to get caught lying, and when they got caught they tried to get out of it “that’s not what I meant”. Sometimes they even apologized. Macron and his government have had a different strategy: we don’t even care.
    When Macron visited the french carribean, he said in a public discourse “the chlordecone [a nasty pesticid wildly used by french companies in the carribean until y2k] is not cancerigen”. Right after the discourse, scientists and physicians were like “well yes it is, it’s been known for 30 years”. Macron didn’t even bother answering himself, but his services blantly told the press “he never said it was not cancerigen” even though he said it a few hours earlier in front of all tvs and radios. This is just one example of something that now happens weekly.

    These changes might seem small, not structural. But they change fundamental things in the balances of power, the way we treat people and the way we do politics. Especially since there are lots and lots of them in a lot of areas, when you take them together, french legislative and checks/balances landscapes have changed a lot in 7 years, much more so than they had since the nineties (Idk before that).

    Macron is from the bourgeoisie, is fighting the class war and has been waging and winning more battles than his predecessors by a lot. He is not interested in the status quo at all.

    I hope this makes sense and answers your question ;)











  • First, thanks for doing the work of checking sources for articles posted here, I believe you add value to the conversation.
    This being said, I happen to disagree with you - here’s why.

    There seems to be a common misconception about bias and trustability.

    The site you linked to has two ratings: factual reporting and bias.

    Factual reporting is determined by how they do their jobs: do they check their facts and sources before they publish?
    ABC news australia is voted 4/5 on that scale, which I’d say makes them pretty trustworthy - most of the time, they report accurate and verified information.

    Bias is the way you choose the informations you report and how you comment on them. For exemple, while reporting the same information “billionaires are now x% richer than last year”, a left biased paper could comment on how non billionaires are getting poorer and a right biased paper could list the billionaires and applaud their financial choices. As a strongly left biased person myself, I’ll ignore the right biased paper nit because I think they’re lying, but because I don’t find their commentary relevant.
    Everybody and every news source is biased, and it’s okay. There is usually no neutrality possible when you do journalistic work, because your job is to provide context and commentary around the facts that you report.

    IMO, bias is not a metric helpful to determine credibility, and I find it a little detrimental that the site you linked to has bias and fact checking displayed at the same place without providing a better differentation between the two.

    On a side note, the pursuit of a fictionnal “journalistic neutrality” supposedly devoid of any bias has been and still is weaponized in the french news, where women, muslils or people or color are told they can’t report on subjects that they know well because they are supposedly too close to the topic and wouldn’t be able to stay neutral. While of course cishet white privileged men can report on those subjects because they are more “objective”…





  • you’re projecting your own thought processes onto something that has the brain capacity of a plywood door

    Well, research begs to differ. Although I couldn’t find anything on the brain capacity of plywood doors, sheeps and cows definitely have some form of conscience and the ability to feel emotions and pain.
    A litterature review conducted and published by Lori Marino and Kristin Allen (The psychology of cows, 2017) concludes that cows:

    • are able to make sophisticated discriminations among not only objects but humans
    • possess not just simple emotions but several emotional capacities, such as cognitive judgement bias and emotional contagion
    • show an apparent emotionnal reaction to learning which may reflect a sense of self-agency similar to other mammals
    • have distinct personalities
    • exhibit several dimensions of social complexity, including social learning

    Do you know how much a fucking cow is worth? 😂 Farmers are the tightest gits on earth, they’re not out there torturing their profits mate

    Idk how much it’s worth, but I guess it’s a lot. I also know how financially difficult the situation of small-estate farmers is (several commit suicide every month in my country).
    I got a question for you: do you know how much milk a cow would produce for its farmer if it wasn’t repeatedly impregnated and separated from its offspring ? The answer is much less than currently. And that would put farmers in even greater jeopardy than they already are.
    I don’t believe that most farmers voluntarily hurt their animals and enjoy it. But in my experience, most of them come from a culture in which the intelligence and emotions of cattle is being negated and we collectively make sure it stays this way because we don’t want to face the incredible amount of suffering we inflict on hundreds of millions of sentient beings every year.

    If you Google “Un agriculteur accusé de maltraitance animale” you’ll find a lot of articles, which means that the laws against the abuse are working

    If you Google “L214 videos” you’ll see a lot of horrific things happening in farms and In slaughterhouses which are still in operation without any additional oversight. There are laws, and sure some stuff is illegal and frowned upon, but it’s leagues away from preventing cattle abuse.

    I’m from rural France btw, and I’ve lived where we produce this “cultural delicacy” called foie-gras, which is still very legal and celebrated as fuck.



  • Wow, this escalated towards cannibalism quickly.

    The original comment stated that France has good laws against animal abuse. That’s very partially true: a few animals have a priviledged status (cats and dogs for exemple) and are somewhat protected against abuse while others are abused, tortured and killed everyday without any kind of protection.

    I’m not commenting for any cause here, just pointing out stuff we collectively overlook.
    I don’t think we should pat ourselves on the shoulder saying “wow we’re so good at fighting animal abuse” while our food habits rely on unnecessary mass cruelty.
    And yes, it’s uncomfortable to look at - that’s why we’re used to ignoring it - but pretending it’s not real does not change the facts.