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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.

Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.

What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.

I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.

Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.

I genuinely think the best solution is to just start shootin’. Muslim youths in France respect force, just like their prophet used and just like their rap idols extol in their music. If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.

The key missing topic in the discussions on the French riots is that these guys really want and enjoy to light things on fire and loot. I would too, if I hated the people in the country and could get away with it. There is fundamentally no way to counter that except with punishment, ie violent. The punishment has to come with no social approval — prison, while bad, comes with social approval among their culture. But pelting them with rubber bullets, going into their neighborhood and smashing their cars, going into their neighborhood with a helicopter filled with a gallons of durian juice to drop on their apartments… they very quickly realize that the benefit is no longer worth the cost. You essentially have to humiliate and subject them. Just like any of us would feel living in Singapore or Hong Kong, that we would be swiftly punished for malefaction.

I have a dog and one of the things most interesting to me is how reinforcement and punishment is so clearly on display in its most primal way. You have to think like a dog with her. I can’t chase her when she steals something, because she likes to be chased. Yelling is ineffectual, because she likes yelling (barking). Even slapping her paws would do little, because the way dogs play with each other is more aggressive than that. If I’m dealing with a creature that likes aggressive play, being chased, and risk, the punishment has to be very much not pleasant. So a good one is crate time, but if you can’t do that you can give a painful physical punishment — I don’t do the latter because I love my dog, but I think it’s fitting for people blowing up libraries and so on.

I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.

If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.

As far as Irish culture is from Islam, both have tended to make good use of martyrs. If we can learn from the wealth of experience the former has with rubber bullets the inevitable deaths that will result from large scale use will cause the more radical types to gain support amongst their own.

The Irish also made use of sympathetic Americans, but my guess is that present-day Americans have about as much or more sympathy for brown people being oppressed by police these days.

British policy during the Troubles was kind of the worst of both worlds. Oppressive enough that Northern Irish Republicans often had genuine experiences of police harassment, violence, discrimination, general hostility, but not brutal enough that they were actually scared. The Brits didn’t have it in them to go full auth, full Xinjiang, and why would they - the ethnoreligious conflict in Northern Ireland had zero salience to the rest of the UK where protestants and catholics had gotten along peacefully and with equal rights for a hundred years at least.

But Northern Ireland was always peripheral territory, not the metropole, despite it being part of the UK. English politicians, even on the right, usually supported unionism in Ireland only halfheartedly.

I'm sorry to go off on a tangent here, but in my experience yelling and scolding work perfectly fine on my two dogs. They certainly seem contrite about it from what I can tell!

It hasn’t been too successful for stopping mine from looting the closet for shoes. Although I think posture could factor in too (exerting a dominant position over dog)

I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.

The first riots in the banlieues were in 1981. In subsequent decades these regions were ethnically cleansed of their native and Jewish populations, as was widely documented in major movies, on TV and in the papers. Nothing about this is new. There have been some major stories. The French did nothing for 40 years, they're not going to start now.

as was widely documented in major movies

As of 2022, the movies were sending a slightly different message:

Abdel, an Algerian-French soldier, holds a press conference outside a police station after his 13-year-old brother Idir dies in hospital, the result of three apparent policemen beating and leaving him for dead. He appeals for calm, but a group of youth, led by Abdel’s brother Karim, disrupt the press conference by tossing a Molotov cocktail and raiding the police station. After stealing a weapons locker and a police van, the youth head back to their banlieue, Athena, where Abdel also grew up. They begin to barricade themselves - and the residents of Athena - inside the housing complex.

CRS riot police are sent to put down the uprising, while the youth respond by shooting fireworks and other improvised missiles at the police. In the middle of the chaos, a drug dealer named Moktar tries to move bags of contraband out of Athena. With the youth refusing to let him leave, Moktar and his gang take shelter in Athena’s shisha lounge, where they dig a hole to stash the contraband until the uprising has passed.

Abdel returns to Athena to attend a memorial service for Idir. He sees Karim and tries to speak to him, but the latter escapes where the memorial service is disrupted by the ongoing violence outside. Abdel then helps to organize an evacuation and shelter for Athena’s residents, including a former terrorist named Sebastien, whom Abdel shelters in Athena’s daycare center. While leading a group of residents past a group of riot police, an altercation begins, and Abdel and other residents of Athena are kettled and arrested.

On and on the tearjerker goes, until – rather endearingly– the whole thing is pinned on the truly agentic evil, The Chuds:

In the final scene of the movie, a man in a van is shown recording the beating of Idir, which is later posted on social media. The “policemen” are revealed to be far-right instigators in disguise; they enter the van, drive into the woods, and burn the uniforms they had worn, revealing that the beating was a deliberate attempt to incite racial unrest.

Looking into the director's background, I was surprised to find something rare in such cases in the US:

Costa-Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. His father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he settled in France, where he began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951.[1]

I was surprised to find something rare in such cases in the US

Greeks are quite overrepresented in Hollywood actually, given the tiny number of Greek-Americans.

On and on the tearjerker goes, until – rather endearingly– the whole thing is pinned on the truly agentic evil, The Chuds:

I'm not claiming the French movie industry of all things is secretly conservative, only that the French public are well aware of the issues with violence and crime in the banlieues.

I actually like French movies, both on the merits and due to appreciating this now-quixotic «existence of sovereign, living non-Anglo civilizations» idea. It's very much a shame that, as Zack M. Davis says about him somehow genuinely being a woman, is a scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.

Anyway, I wonder if the public – most of all the disproportionately aged, native public, like this woman – also believes the ongoing tumult to be some sappy melodrama downstream from a bit of entirely optional chud mischief, or maybe misunderstanding due to the insufficiently vigorous mandatory introduction to the State cult of Reason (that starts at 3 for the French).

Didn’t LePenne come in second in the most recent elections? With a serious chance as well? Seems like this just boosted her odds

Have you looked Le Pen's plans for the banlieues? They might surprise you with their relative modesty.

If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.

This is absolutely the way to stop the rioting animals, but unfortunately westerners are way too pussy to ever contemplate doing such a thing, and even if they were to do so the very next day there would be dozens of articles in newspapers deploring the "barbarity" of the state, conveniently ignoring that the rioters are the true uncivilized huns who would have run live bullets on the police without a second thought were the situations reversed.

They already have a martyr, so I don’t think adding 100 more will do them any good. France may get a terrorist attack in the future if they pushback on the North Africans, but the cost of these riots is already worse than the cost of the median terrorist attack in Western Europe. Right now, from any measure, it’s the lack of real pushback that is leading to increased rioting.

How do the Indians manage their public unrest, I wonder? Pussy or gigachad-like?

Burdensome is out for the count. @self_made_human, might you have any wisdom to share in his place?

Depends on who's rioting. If they're in the good graces of the government, they're usually allowed to rampage freely while the cops drink tea in the background.

If not, the police in India, while not nearly as militarized, are certainly not gentle. We can't afford actual riot gear for the most part, so expect the cops to wield bamboo shields and charge with batons, with tear gas and rubber bullets being a relative rarity. At least they don't shoot people particularly often, which is one of the few good things I can say about them.

And the media doesn't usually support rioters, most of the time. It's a big country so I can only speak generally.

This is absolutely the way to stop the rioting animals, but unfortunately westerners are way too pussy to ever contemplate doing such a thing

Normally I'd just say something about not using maximally inflammatory language - yes, you can advocate shooting rioters, yes, you can say you think Westerners are unwilling to use such harsh tactics even though they should, yes, rhetorical flourishes are allowed, but we'd prefer you not deliberately use pejoratives intended to provoke negative reactions and distract from your actual point.

However, you do this on purpose, and you do it for the explicit purpose of riling people. We know this, because you have a lengthy and terrible track record of posting comments like this just to giggle at how you stirred the ants' nest.

Last time you were banned for a week. This ban will be for two weeks. You are becoming burdensome and will probably not be here much longer unless you decide you'd like to start participating in good faith.

A charitable reading of @BurdensomeCount comment might find it less inflamitory than the police unions reference to the rioters as vermin, a specific class of animals. Or is the objection to the characterization of westerners as pussies?

Are mods susceptible to the 'othering' that can be seen in law enforcement that have repeated exposure to high crime cohorts? In those contexts it seems to result in uncharitable views.

We're not modding the French police union.

No. Obviously not. Nor is inflamitory a binary measure. An inflamitory scale could be vermin > animals > savages > barbarians (a notorious slur against the germanic people and other non greco-romans) > rioters > protesters > teenagers > joggers.

Reasonable people may disagree over the inflamitory nature of any particular word, as it relates to their specific linguistic or cultural context.

Modding for indelicate word choice and labeling as inflamitory when the 'inflamitory' word represents a necessarily small portion of the entire post, seems unnecessarily uncharitable to me. Especially when arguably more inflamitory nouns have already been deployed in the larger public discourse.

No. Obviously not. Nor is inflamitory a binary measure.

That's correct.

Modding for indelicate word choice and labeling as inflamitory when the 'inflamitory' word represents a necessarily small portion of the entire post, seems unnecessarily uncharitable to me.

Feel free to report my moderation as "uncharitable." As is always the case, when someone reports one of my posts, I will let another mod judge.

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