You know printers exist, right?

And the other guy was a woman. Can you imagine?

Ever heard of EU veto/unanimity rules? Look what Hungary did.

I literally cannot even

Yes: god and guberment lol. Solid 800+ years of it last I checked.

A laughing woman at that. Killing children ain’t funny. We demand a dignified male troll.

As a Brit I have to stand up for us.

A very small minority are obsessed with illegal immigrants coming over on boats, and the rest of us hate them. They are called Gammons.

Secondly I don't know anyone who cares about a persons gender. If there is, its a very small minority headed by JK Rowling, who we all also hate.

But of the government said they were starting to ration oxygen, it would be terribly inconvenient, what what.

Protesting is a valid form of active citizenship. A protest should be pressuring the government to do its job, or else it’s just a gathering. So yes, most of us especially Americans should agree that protesting is good regardless of if you agree with the people protesting or not.

That's not forcing rules on France now is it?

Let me expand on that: unanimity is required for stuff like EU foreign policy and some other sensitive areas, but many things require a qualified majority, not unanimity.

The US goes about it very differently, they wildly misrepresent the Senate, and this spills into other areas like the electoral college or judge appointments, subverting the whole thing.

What the "fixed map with less Frances" aims to show is exactly this, that the US gives small states disproportionate power over everyone, since a minority of the population can control the Senate and, through it, federal legislation and judicial appointments, let alone the presidency.

100%. It makes more sense when you understand that the only intended outcome of Americans’ protests is to reassure the do-nothing cowards participating that they’re “the good ones.” Protesting isn’t a means to an end- protesting is an end in itself, if you’re a fuckin’ clown.

France is doing great?

True, but that came mostly from being in a beggar's shoes and not so much from how the EU political system is structured, though it's not like there isn't any overlap....

Populations filled with bootlickers come in all shapes and sizes, though.

This is a load of bollocks, I mean, look at the historical US protests like the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, suffrage campaigns - all of them changed policies.

What changes nothing is sitting on your ass making up reasons to stay inside.

most importantly though, how much stuff did you destroy? it really makes the commies here jealous

Social media is definitely harming minors, just like it is harming everyone else.

But government isn't able to do every single thing in its remit, so effective protest also sets government priorities amongst multiple valid things it could be doing. That means that a protest for something that is a job of government could be encouraging the government to do something less important. It could be encouraging the government to adopt measures that are harmful to the country even though they achieve something.

I consider it part of the government's job to secure the country's borders and prevent illegal immigration... but I think it's pretty far down the list of priorities compared to other stuff. So protests against immigration, aimed at getting the government to reduce it, are dumb in my opinion. Yet it seems to me that your rule gives it the thumbs up because it's "pressuring the government to do its job" and "a valid from of active citizenship."

I suspect you don't really want to see more anti-immigrant protests, so I think it's more complicated than that.

Their political activity is remarkable. It is the kind of activity every country needs. Only problem i see is that french activists put the most effort into protests instead of more effective ways of spreading their ideas.

They really do. 3 years ago my daughter was getting ready to take a school trip to France when protests broke out over something. I was worried about the trip and ended up learning a lot about how France protests. Here are some things I learned:

Protesting is considered important and this is taught to kids in school.

It's often a family affair, grab the whole family and go protest.

Protests are a happy, party-like environment with music and vendors selling food to protestors.

Leaders actually listen to some.extent.

… wrote someone on a social media site.

Well, humans have always been a mess in crowd

I mean, right now there are students protests in France.

One student had his hand blown off by a police grenade launcher, and something like 50 officers were injured.

They don't fuck around

Bring back social networks. No more algorithms. Only feed from people your personnaly add to your network, in the order they were posted.

Ah yes, the "gotcha" everyone loves to trot out. Except Lemmy is quite obviously not what anyone is talking about when they talk about the issues of social media.

The British far right are blaming the French protests on immigrants. You know, what with so many of them being school age and all...

American version:

Protesting is a right, taught in school.

Grab family, go to protest.

Protest turns violent because of hidden cops. Mom gets shot. Dad loses job. Family loses house.

Die.

Corporate social media with algorithms designed to make addicts out of users and force propaganda down their throats is different than decentralized social media where people have control of what they consume while they are on it.

It is definitely a sign that humanity likes to kick itself in the nuts when even a country known for protesting still has a government that keeps doing shit that leads to protest and police still harm protestors.

We keep putting shitty people in power and then getting upset when they do shitty stuff.

My US experience:

Protesting it taught in school.

Peaceful protesting at school results in being expelled.

A quick glance at uprisings and riots in British history might surprise you. I frequently-ish pass two buildings in Wales where the British Army shot and killed British people.

You have to subjugate your own people before you can subjugate foreign people.

Leaders actually listen to some.extent.

Do they? I haven't seem a lot of meaningful changes in France due to protests in the last 10-20 years. Perhaps you have a list of them that a directly due to protests? It seems like the ruling class, leadership and in general regular people just ignore protests as 'part of life'.

It's not taught to kids in school. It's taught from pair to pair during each struggle

They do listen to some extent. Not always, obviously, but saying protests are basically useless is just wrong. The CPE was scrapped after protests in 2006, the écotaxe was abandoned after the Bonnets Rouges protests, the fuel tax increase was cancelled after the Yellow Vests, and the government backed down on several measures after the 2024 farmers' protests. You can argue protests do not always succeed, but pretending they achieve nothing just ignores what actually happened.

His hand was because he picked up a flash grenade to try and throw it back. But yeah, the current protests are rough. A few thousand people detained and a few hundred officers injured last I heard iirc.

"Protesting is a right and everything great we have comes from it, but you will be tear gassed and condemned if you try"

Everyone else in Europe stands up and starts clapping.

I work for Brits. No mate, I can't agree with you. Cost of living and the fcking smallboats with Arabs are the only things that they smalltalk about

And yet, the French government did try to ban it for young people too.

Yeah. Until the British need something that brown/black/yellow people don't want to give them for free, then they fucking Hulk the way to it. They are affable only to their oppressors, they love their royals.

Yeah there are 5 states with less people than Columbus, Ohio, the city, not the metro area. There are 24 states with less people than the Detroit metro area, which is entirely located in Michigan. These aren't places people associate with huge numbers of people, it's not like the NYC metro area that's more populated than 47 states including New York and contains geographically large portions of Connecticut and New Jersey.

And yeah part of the issue is that some of the tiny states are among the originals. Vermont (49 in population, with less people than the city of Washington DC), while not in the original 13 fought in the American revolution and was the 14th state. Delaware and Rhode Island are between the Dakotas and Montana in population. And while some states could comfortably be broken up into more reasonable chunks, like California, Texas, and Ohio, others like Illinois and New York have a massive population solely because they have one massive city.

Macron cancelled a tax hike right before the pandemic, IIRC. I can't think of anything else particularly substantial from the last 10-20

Holy shit we are docile. How have we not had a fascist takeover yet? The other thing that amazes me about Brits is their priorities. They will riot over things like pedos and immigrants but when their government takes them into illegal wars, destroys their healthcare, public transit and education they do not give a fuck. The public outpouring of grief following the death of billionaire Diana Spencer was equally baffling and grotesque. It is weird to live amongst these people.

EU austerity was enforced though. That's no different from federal law

So? What was a flash grenade doing on the ground for him to pick up in the first place?

It's almost as if there is something else at play, someone else to blame, than "the people" who just everywhere all the time seem to "accidentally platform" leaders who don't have their best interests at heart.

So you think the system works great, it's just that the French waste all their energy protesting instead of more constructively, like in the electoral system?

It's almost like you actually have to fight for your rights or something.

Well I am all for digitalization, but the problem with it is the digital copy is treated as the authority.

We have this in belgium where energy companies treat their internal (corrupt, literally fabricated records) as ground truth and you can't do anything about it using the paper they send you.

When the Russian war started and oil & gas prices skyrocketed, Mega, a belgian energy cartel, lied to our faces and said that we used >99% of our energy from the moment prices skyrocketed to the end of the year. Complete lie, but their bullshit "database" was what they used to try to charge us almost 3500€ extra for the year. They said we took the equivalent of 1, 30 minute shower through the entire rest of the year. Their own monthly documents be damned.

Luckily, Belgium also has an independent company that handles all of the meters, Fluvius, that keeps their own records of water, gas, and electric meters (that they also allow you to locally access and pull data from the P1 port). We were able to get an official report that lowered our end of year bill to only 1200€ or so.

But for countries where there is no independent auditor, companies just lie, cheat, and steal their way to record profits, modifying, doctoring, and bullshitting digital records as "reality".

My girlfriend got caught up in an illegal firing when she was on sick leave. There is a 3rd party company SDWorx that handles pay slips, but this is a software service, not a 3rd party auditor/government service.

She needed access to payslips and the software promises to keep 7 years of records (a lie). The company that fired her for being sick removed her access to the payslips and since they don't come via mail or email, she didn't have the ones she didn't already download and she was refused her legal right to see them. They could now faslify the payslips all they wanted and re-upload them as official records.

THAT is what France was fighting against, what is literally being used as a corporate weapon in other countries.

It is.

Better just keep switching PMs every 18 months or so to make sure that the leader is almost perpetually someone who wasn't voted in, that should sort it.