[foxdemon]

That made me laugh. Macron will sit it out and become a lame duck like Hollande.

Yes, he will sit it out as long as the people don’t overthrow the ancient regime. Then he will use his gendarmes to crush the hardcore protestors once the masses have returned home.

Typical response from an absolutist monarch. Well, his ilk certain have that mindset.

The people need to understand the absolutist elites won’t go quietly. They have to be forcefully removed from power. The yellow jackets should storm the institutions.

[Zionist Nationalist]

Why don't you move?

maybe Ill move to Canada or the US but it will take time until then Im here also I need to finish some business here

[Hindsite]

maybe Ill move to Canada or the US but it will take time until then Im here also I need to finish some business here

I guess it is not that easy to just pack up and move to another country. I've never been in your situation. I hope it get's better for you.

[skinster]

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[Igor Antunov]

Protests were particularly violent this weekend. Most of MSM has stopped covering them entirely as expected.

[skinster]

Yep, they're completely censored this weekend.

Similar protests have been taking place elsewhere.

[foxdemon]

I think this guy nailed it.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/12/gilets-jaunes-exposes-fake-left/

Gilets Jaunes exposes the Fake Left

By Houses and Holes in Australian Politicsat 12:12 am on December 17, 2018 | 79 comments

Via The UNZ Review:

So it appears the privatization of France isn’t going quite as smoothly as planned. As I assume you are aware, for over a month now, the gilets jaunes (or “yellow vests”), a multiplicitous, leaderless, extremely pissed off, confederation of working class persons, have been conducting a series of lively protests in cities and towns throughout the country to express their displeasure with Emmanuel Macron and his efforts to transform their society into an American-style neo-feudal dystopia. Highways have been blocked, toll booths commandeered, luxury automobiles set on fire, and shopping on the Champs-Élysées disrupted. What began as a suburban tax revolt has morphed into a bona fide working class uprising.

It took a while for “the Golden Boy of Europe” to fully appreciate what was happening. In the tradition of his predecessor, Louis XVI, Macron initially responded to the gilets jaunes by inviting a delegation of Le Monde reporters to laud his renovation of the Elysée Palace, making the occasional condescending comment, and otherwise completely ignoring them. That was back in late November. Last Saturday, he locked down central Paris, mobilized a literal army of riot cops, “preventatively arrested” hundreds of citizens, including suspected “extremist students,” and sent in the armored military vehicles.

The English-language corporate media, after doing their best not to cover these protests (and, instead, to keep the American and British publics focused on imaginary Russians), have been forced to now begin the delicate process of delegitimizing the gilets jaunes without infuriating the the entire population of France and inciting the British and American proletariats to go out and start setting cars on fire. They got off to a bit of an awkward start.

For example, this piece by Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian‘s Paris Bureau Chief, and her Twitter feed from the protests last Saturday. Somehow (probably a cock-up at headquarters), The Guardian honchos allowed Chrisafis to do some actual propaganda-free reporting (and some interviews with actual protesters) before they caught themselves and replaced her with Kim Willsher, who resumed The Guardian‘s usual neoliberal establishment-friendly narrative, which, in this case, entailed dividing the protesters into “real” gilets jaunes and “fake” gilet jaunes, and referring to the latter fictional group as “thuggish, extremist political agitators.”

By Sunday, the corporate media were insinuating that diabolical Russian Facebook bots had brainwashed the French into running amok, because who else could possibly be responsible? Certainly not the French people themselves! The French, as every American knows, are by nature a cowardly, cheese-eating people, who have never overthrown their rightful rulers, or publicly beheaded the aristocracy. No, the French were just sitting there, smoking like chimneys, and otherwise enjoying their debt-enslavement and the privatization of their social democracy, until they unsuspectingly logged onto Facebook and … BLAMMO, the Russian hackers got them!

Bloomberg is reporting that French authorities have opened a probe into Russian interference (in the middle of which report, for no apparent reason, a gigantic photo of Le Pen is featured, presumably just to give it that “Nazi” flavor). According to “analysis seen by The Times,” Russia-linked social media accounts have been “amplifying” the “chaos” and “violence” by tweeting photos of gilets jaunes who the French police have savagely beaten or gratuitiously shot with “less-than-lethal projectiles.” “Are nationalists infiltrating the yellow vests?” the BBC Newsnight producers are wondering. According to Buzzfeed’s Ryan Broderick, “a beast born almost entirely from Facebook” is slouching toward … well, I’m not quite sure, the UK or even, God help us, America! And then there’s Max Boot, who is convinced he is being personally persecuted by Russian agents like Katie Hopkins, James Woods, Glenn Greenwald, and other high-ranking members of a worldwide conspiracy Boot refers to as the “Illiberal International” (but which regular readers of my column will recognize as the “Putin-Nazis“).

And, see, this is the problem the corporate media (and other staunch defenders of global neoliberalism) are facing with these gilets jaunes protests. They can’t get away with simply claiming that what is happening is not a working class uprising, so they have been forced to resort to these blatant absurdities. They know they need to delegitimize the gilets jaunes as soon as possible — the movement is already starting to spread — but the “Putin-Nazi” narrative they’ve been using on Trump, Corbyn, and other “populists” is just not working.

No one believes the Russians are behind this, not even the hacks who are paid to pretend they do. And the “fascism” hysteria is also bombing. Attempts to portray the gilets jaunes as Le Pen-sponsored fascists blew up in their faces. Obviously, the far-Right are part of these protests, as they would be in any broad working class uprising, but there are far too many socialists and anarchists (and just regular pissed-off working class people) involved for the media to paint them all as “Nazis.”

Which is not to say that the corporate media and prominent public intellectuals like Bernard-Henri Lévy will not continue to hammer away at the “fascism” hysteria, and demand that the “good” and “real” gilets jaunes suspend their protests against Macron until they have completely purged their movement of “fascists,” and “extremists,” and other dangerous elements, and have splintered it into a number of smaller, antagonistic ideological factions that can be more easily neutralized by the French authorities … because that’s what establishment intellectuals do.

We can expect to hear this line of reasoning, not just from establishment intellectuals like Lévy, but also from members of the Identity Politics Left, who are determined to prevent the working classes from rising up against global neoliberalism until they have cleansed their ranks of every last vestige of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and so on. These leftist gatekeepers have been struggling a bit to come up with a response to the gilets jaunes … a response that doesn’t make them sound like hypocrites. See, as leftists, they kind of need to express their support for a bona fide working class uprising. At the same time, they need to delegitimize it, because their primary adversaries are fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and assorted other isms and phobias, not the neoliberal ruling classes.

Nothing scares the Identity Politics Left quite like an actual working class uprising. Witnessing the furious unwashed masses operating out there on their own, with no decent human restraint whatsoever, Identity Politics Leftists feel a sudden overwhelming urge to analyze, categorize, organize, sanitize, and otherwise correct and control them. They can’t accept the fact that the actual, living, breathing working classes are messy, multiplicitous, inconsistent, and irreducible to any one ideology. Some of them are racists. Some are fascists. Others are communists, socialists, and anarchists. Many have no idea what they are, and don’t particularly care for any of these labels. This is what the actual working classes are … a big, contradictory collection of people who, in spite of all their differences, share one thing in common, that they are being screwed over by the ruling classes. I don’t know about you, but I consider myself one of them.

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. According to The Guardian, as I am sitting here writing this, the whole of Europe is holding its breath in anticipation of the gilets jaunes’ response to Macron’s most recent attempt to appease them, this time with an extra hundred Euros a month, some minor tax concessions, and a Christmas bonus. Something tells me it’s not going to work, but even if it does, and the gilets jaunes uprising ends, this messy, Western “populist” insurgency against global neoliberalism has clearly entered a new phase. Count on the global capitalist ruling classes to intensify their ongoing War on Dissent and their demonization of anyone opposing them (or contradicting their official narrative) as an “extremist,” a “fascist,” a “Russian agent,” and so on. I’m certainly looking forward to that, personally.

Oh … yeah, and I almost forgot, if you were wondering what you could get me for Christmas, I did some checking, and there appears to be a wide selection of yellow safety vests online for just a couple Euros.



C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

[Steve_American]

@skinster,
Straus and Howe predicted something like this would happen about now in the early 90s.
The books are "The Fourth Turning" and "Generations". The theory is that every 80 to 100 years (4 generations) the power elite get so greedy that the people have to set them straight. The last time started in 1929 when everyone thought "I've got mine, and if you don't have yours then tough luck"; and peaked on D-Day (6-6-'44). When the war was over the new mind set was, "If we all work together we can do anything." And we went to the Moon thinking that. Then the elites started getting greedy and little by little we got to where we came in with the same old mind set of "I've got mine, and if you don't, it is *all* your fault."

When this is over it will again be, "If we all work together, we can do anything." "Look how we solved AGW just in time."

The yellow vests are just the trigger, just like the stock market crash of '29 was then. Sometime in the next several years will come the crisis. The peak. I really will not live to see the final result. Will it take another "Reign of Terror"? Or will we make the same mistake Lincoln intended to make and America did make and let the leaders of the elite live to establish a new Jim Crow over all the world? [The Civil War being the previous 4th Turning.] Or will it be something in the middle?
. . My congestive heart failure will kill me soon, so I will never know.
. . And, will AGW kill us all anyway?

[skinster]

[0]=68.ARC1hIKcgf2BiOEwIQW-BwBischMkacCt5hnx5EyPISzgX3bGJei2QWRFH88jPYlslS-mi5eTtWc6SRxJ-Z4SYP3AinhzQie5zf_A_lZtRynbRqsxEjftBH6Cb43rRaH7j7R-Rmzv92CIhyxUeASaA5Aab8yRcii7UQS8aDHn1wycDHBleiYHU2tyYgpgGZ9pVrkGfj1otGsfGRPQFqPgy9bNxnOTsFMNaiMqN5QQjdT9pG1W_MkGXNvdhdfWuDgyEbeLB1i8lUccZBuwQCQX2Km9hfa0mpbLSqxIT6SoPPPj8FFwiI4mVcnaLHXTr9CAqSZ36jfnmJduBWe4nWi5a2FZ9Tiz_T7ps4HhzHuPbRuBxkl6QHbm72bDUW3JoQ9MQ&__tn__=-R

[skinster]

[Steve_American]

Great video, thanks.
This is a little more violent than I think Americans need to do, but I have called repeatedly for Progressives
to meet in the streets to show their numbers to the world.

[Steve_American]

delete

[One Degree]

Great video, thanks.
This is a little more violent than I think Americans need to do, but I have called repeatedly for Progressives
to meet in the streets to show their numbers to the world.

The so called ‘progressives’ today are puppets supporting the elite through globalism. I agree with the theory of the repetition of rebelling against the elites, but it is conservatives doing this today, not progressives. Actually, I would argue it is always conservatives because they want a return to decentralization. In other words, using ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ as dividing lines is an elite strategy of confusion. The true dividing line is centralized versus decentralized. This is how it should be addressed to avoid the confusion created by elite propaganda.

[skinster]

Great video, thanks.
This is a little more violent than I think Americans need to do, but I have called repeatedly for Progressives
to meet in the streets to show their numbers to the world.

Which city do you live in? My experience of yanks coming out in NYC was mainly from a few orgs like PSL, WWP, some anarchist groups and BLM activists. Liberals only came out for very white activity like the women's march.

There was also a ton of various groups I wasn't familiar with out on May 1st, which was nice to see.

[Steve_American]

Which city do you [Steve_American] live in? My experience of yanks coming out in NYC was mainly from a few orgs like PSL, WWP, some anarchist groups and BLM activists. Liberals only came out for very white activity like the women's march.

There was also a ton of various groups I wasn't familiar with out on May 1st, which was nice to see.

I have retired to SE Asia.
In America I lived in Kansas City, until age 16, then Chicago area until age 28, then Boulder, CO (near Denver) until I moved here.
Because of AGW I intend to never fly again. It is immoral, like pouring poison into the river. Flying is adding too much 'poison' to the air.

By progressive I mean "I want an active Gov. of the people, by the people, and for the people."
. . . Like Pres. Lincoln who was for the Homestead Act instead of selling the land to speculators to resell to settlers at a profit, for the Gov. doing 'Internal Improvements', for civil rights in the form of keeping slavery from spreading and later ending it, for building the Trans-continental RR, for creating the Land Grant Colleges/Universities, etc.
. . . Also, like FDR who gave us labor rights, minimum wages, the 40 hr work week, and Social Security, etc.

Elsewhere I have set out my current goals for Progressives to aim for --- restore democracy by getting money out of campaigns and letting all citizens vote easily, have the House be elected using 2nd choice voting, from multi-member districts, and increase its size to 2.5 times its current size, smash economic inequality by somehow making it impossible for a couple to earn more than 1000 times the poverty level (indexed to rise with inflation) and having more wealth than 30,000 times the poverty level, tax corporations progressively to make it impossible for them to get too big because the top tax rate is 99%, set certain lessons "in concrete" in the Constitution (Soc. Sec., national health insurance, the above voting and economic rules, etc.).
. . . All Progressives must fight to stop AGW before it is too late.

So, One Degree, I am in favor of what you call centralized Gov. I think the original Federalism was fine in the mid-1800s, but transportation and communication have improved so much that America must be more uniform than it was originally. It makes no sense for some states (or example) to treat Black citizens as scum when they are driving through their state (make them piss in the bushes behind the gas station).

[One Degree]

So, One Degree, I am in favor of what you call centralized Gov. I think the original Federalism was fine in the mid-1800s, but transportation and communication have improved so much that America must be more uniform than it was originally. It makes no sense for some states (or example) to treat Black citizens as scum when they are driving through their state (make them piss in the bushes behind the gas station).

@Steve_American , this is a very dishonest argument. No one is advocating this. Arguing past history as current beliefs is nonsense. Why do you think it is so important we be uniform? Just to make it easier for big business? You are arguing both for greater freedom and control by the people and greater centralized control. They are contradictory goals. Freedom is the ability to make choices. Centralization reduces the choices available to you. It is a mathematical certainty which you should appreciate.
You simply want to make certain people can’t make choices you disagree with. The problem with this is you end up with the government we have now that fills everyone’s life with uncertainty. Half the people don’t get the choice they want. 150 million people denied their choice. Why would anyone want to do this to so many people?

[Steve_American]

Steve_American wrote:
"So, One Degree, I am in favor of what you call centralized Gov. I think the original Federalism was fine in the mid-1800s, but transportation and communication have improved so much that America must be more uniform than it was originally. It makes no sense for some states (for example) to treat Black citizens as scum when they are driving through their state (make them piss in the bushes behind the gas station)."

@Steve_American , this is a very dishonest argument. No one is advocating this. Arguing past history as current beliefs is nonsense. Why do you think it is so important we be uniform? Just to make it easier for big business? You are arguing both for greater freedom and control by the people and greater centralized control. They are contradictory goals. Freedom is the ability to make choices. Centralization reduces the choices available to you. It is a mathematical certainty which you should appreciate.
You simply want to make certain people can’t make choices you disagree with. The problem with this is you end up with the government we have now that fills everyone’s life with uncertainty. Half the people don’t get the choice they want. 150 million people denied their choice. Why would anyone want to do this to so many people?

So, you either ignored my example or you think it is OK to make Black tourists pee in the bushes.
Either way I'm not impressed with you attitude.
Someone ought to impress you (in your gut) with how it feels to lose your white privilege and have it replaced with Black scorn. I'm sure you would enjoy being shot and wounded while driving simply for being what you are.
I'm sure you would whistle a different tune if it was you who might be shot by a cop at anytime for the color of your skin.

[One Degree]

Steve_American wrote:
"So, One Degree, I am in favor of what you call centralized Gov. I think the original Federalism was fine in the mid-1800s, but transportation and communication have improved so much that America must be more uniform than it was originally. It makes no sense for some states (for example) to treat Black citizens as scum when they are driving through their state (make them piss in the bushes behind the gas station)."



So, you either ignored my example or you think it is OK to make Black tourists pee in the bushes.
Either way I'm not impressed with you attitude.
Someone ought to impress you (in your gut) with how it feels to lose your white privilege and have it replaced with Black scorn. I'm sure you would enjoy being shot and wounded while driving simply for being what you are.
I'm sure you would whistle a different tune if it was you who might be shot by a cop at anytime for the color of your skin.

I didn’t ignore your example. I specifically pointed it out as dishonest debate. No one is forcing Black people to pee in the bushes. No one is shooting at them for driving through white neighborhoods. Using how different people acted in the past is not a valid argument. No one is clubbing women and dragging them by their hair either because people and society have changed. Your refusal to admit these changes is dishonest. The only reason to do it is because admitting the improvement of race relations loses Democrats votes. They prefer we pretend it is still 1950 so they can get votes out of our animosity that they sensationalize. Without creating hatred and division, the Democrats have nothing to offer.

[Steve_American]

OneDegree, on another site I watch. A very liberal (in the sold out Dem sense) site BTW. There have been a series of 'Driving while Black" and got shot dead by a cop, or shot dead in his own apartment/condo by a cop for 'being in his own house while Black", or "Bar-B-Qing" while Black" and got reported by a white bitch, or "Cashing your pay check while Black" and got almost arrested by the cop the bank called, and I could go on, and on and on. See also Black lives matter. So, don't tell me that all that is in the past.
. . Yes, it is against the law to ask Blacks to not use the whites only bathroom and use the bushes instead. Given the above current problems I listed I think it if it were legal there would be whites who would do that again.
. . So, forgive me for disagreeing with your rosy picture.

I could also mention Jews. We watched the marchers chanting "Jews will not replace me!" in Charlottville, VA. Etc.

And the LGTrans people.

So, you make me want to use profanity. That is all I can say to _____ like you.

[One Degree]

OneDegree, on another site I watch. A very liberal (in the sold out Dem sense) site BTW. There have been a series of 'Driving while Black" and got shot dead by a cop, or shot dead in his own apartment/condo by a cop for 'being in his own house while Black", or "Bar-B-Qing" while Black" and got reported by a white bitch, or "Cashing your pay check while Black" and got almost arrested by the cop the bank called, and I could go on, and on and on. See also Black lives matter. So, don't tell me that all that is in the past.
. . Yes, it is against the law to ask Blacks to not use the whites only bathroom and use the bushes instead. Given the above current problems I listed I think it if it were legal there would be whites who would do that again.
. . So, forgive me for disagreeing with your rosy picture.

I could also mention Jews. We watched the marchers chanting "Jews will not replace me!" in Charlottville, VA. Etc.

And the LGTrans people.

So, you make me want to use profanity. That is all I can say to _____ like you.

You don’t understand that in a world of over 7 billion and a country of over 300 million, you can find examples to demonstrate any point. This is called sensationalism.
What really matters is that on the same day of each of the incidents you mentioned, over 300 million people did not do that. To judge an entire society by the actions of a miniscule few is absurd. This is demanding that nothing has changed until not a single incident remains. There is nothing good to be gained from such unreasonable expectations. It just encourages people to give up trying, which is what you are seeing happening now. If you insist upon judging every white person in America by the actions of any one of them, then a backlash is inevitable. You are creating the very division you claim to be against. It is the exact same thing as judging every Black by the actions of the worse.
Continually accusing people of racism, who are not racist, can have no result except resentment and backlash.