With regard to point 3, 'today's technology' is very much a double edged sword. Yes, you can communicate instantly but surveillance has modernized just as much.

As reductive as it sounds, I think part of the issue is it happens all the time in other countries because it happens all the time in other countries. The connections to each other already exist. The networks already exist. All the instant communication in the world doesn't make a lick of difference if you have no idea who else to call. At this point, I feel like that's the real benefit of protests. You gotta meet like minded people somewhere to get any real momentum and third spaces are pretty fucking dead.

I don't think the issue is necessarily a lack of will to organize now, I think the issue was a lack of will to do so years ago. Hell, decades ago for that matter. So now the people that genuinely do care have to build their entire network from the ground up while under heavy surveillance which yes, is going to be fucking slower.

I don't know the exact name but it's these large streets

Edit: I mean boulevards

Here in Minnesota we've still been protesting every week....

according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Étienne_tramway there is at least one tram network in France with 1000 mm gauge, so maybe they have grills for that gauge there too?

The French have been refining protesting since 1790.

Middle aged American here, and when I was a kid the culture around me regarding france was basically "lol they surrender." And that whole stupid thing probably peaked in 2003 with Freedom Fries.

But now?

I honestly wonder if any other nation's population has their heads on straight as much as the French. The only place in Europe where I have spent much time though is up in Sweden, and the nords seem pretty good at life-ing too.

They've been flirting with far-right government like most everyone else, but their protesting game is on point. The whole country being smaller than Texas helps, too.

You can't do that in USA. You don't have the public transport infrastructure.

It does seem they're suffering from the same rightward-slide that many other countries are facing though, unfortunately.

Originally, the yellow vests protested because of an increase onfuel tax, to finance environmental measures. They got that tax increase to be halted.
Also, agricultors regularly protest and get the reintroduction of harmful pesticides.
Basically, the only trade-off the government is ready to accept is giving up on ecological progress.

For what. To utilize all the rail lines in my city to grill.

Middle aged American here, and when I was a kid the culture around me regarding france was basically “lol they surrender.”

Copied from my earlier comment elsewhere:

Have an extensive history of military might, from rampaging barbarian hordes, to a continent-conquering emperor, to a foreign legion famed as being one of the most badass fighting forces in the world, and nobody bats an eye. But get embarrassingly outflanked one time, and you never hear the end of it!

French language is the original lingua franca, it's no wonder that if you admit that you don't speak well yet, they will simply ask "Why not?" It's probably not as far as we'd expect from the hauteur of English-speaking tourists, we just get our way more often I think. When I took my family to Paris last year I expected to get some of that high-handed treatment, but even out as far as Calais they were almost unfailingly forgiving of my decidedly mediocre attempts. I hope to go back soon, armed with a little more of the language.

This comment prompted me to check the gauge of my city's streetcar, and I am happy to report that it is standard gauge as well. Too bad it only goes down two streets so it's relatively unlikely that a protest would march along it.

(I kinda need a new barbecue anyway, so it's still a design criterion to keep in mind, just in case.)

Yeah, you stop believing in the first part when you see what they vote for.

Yeah, the average population density of the US is a lot lower than many people realize. Protests are seen as city-based things, both geographically and culturally.

And then you have eu-nation-sized red states that can hold many many trumpers who are unable to play nice with others because they don't have to have neighbors.

Registering a protest in advance is standard practice in the US and Canada, too. Cities can and do enforce basic rules for crowd control, rerouting traffic, etc. For example, you might be allowed to organize a protest in a public park during daylight hours, but if you do it at 2am in the streets of a residential area the cops are going to arrive and shut you down.

https://www.aclu-wa.org/know-your-rights/know-your-rights-guide-protests/

https://theccf.ca/learn/know-your-rights/

Historically, the French really only surrendered once, unfortunately evocative of the "but you fuck a goat one time ..." joke. It didn't help that they surrendered to one of the biggest monsters in history, at a time where they arguably didn't need to surrender. TBF, the main reason their biggest ally (Britain) didn't surrender at the same time was the fact that they were able to run away.

In Holland everyone would switch to English immediately after I butchered the greeting in Dutch.

It made it super hard to learn the language

I just thought of how that would look on the San Francisco cable car tracks. Fast sausages.

How on earth the fact that your country also has wast swats of empty land stops you from doing effective protesting? Or any, actually.

“But, but, but the us country is huge. We can’t be expected to protest about something all the way over there…”

Oh, is all of Europe protesting in unity when protests are happening in Paris? i must have missed that.

If you are wealthy in the US then calling the police is a positive because they actually do what you want and ignore all the petty shit they normally make a big deal out of. It all comes down to money and influence.

Freedom Fries

As an European, I still can't believe you guys did that

Let them eat sausage.

Ahhh but many cities and towns have some sort of rails in the streets, and bonus: they're not being used!

And yet i've never seen a french protest where they had decent sound system. Not that important when the goal is to make noise, but they sure got their priorities

If you’re gonna protest, might as well eat good while doing it.

One post that I read somewhere else on fedi was in the lines of, you can't reasonably think French are cowards, they made snails into fine cuisine.

It's only one factor. The bigger factor is that our police are insanely militarized. If my black ass tried to barbecue at a protest, I'd get gunned the fuck down, then I'd be unnamed in the news stories (if there were any), and the cop would get a medal for killing a "terrorist".

Boulevards? Grand boulevards?

I'm confused because "rue" in French is literally "street" in English 😁.

Yeah those

Absolutely fantastic. Once you get over the initial chuckle at how novel a concept it is, its a god damn power play.

An army marches on its stomach.

I didn't really finish my thought there. Apologies.

It was starting to get at why we don't really see "the americans" protested like we might "the french." And our media doesn't help in how they report it. It enables the republican populace as well as the entire government to more easily ignore it. It's always "protests broke out in cities across america in response to X.

The physical separation is also part of it. it all helps feed into this "divide" where the republican voters can seemingly give no shits about human suffering or the rise of fascism because it's all happening to "other" people far away. It might as well be the middle east.

People without neighbors are also less clued into to how policy changes affect entire societies of people, rather than just the price of gas for their truck.

And like the other reply said, this is just one contributing factor.

"Rue" is just french for "street", so, I don't know what this is supposed to be saying.

There was the loss in WWII, but there was also the loss of all their colonies after WWII. Some of them they fought for and lost like Vietnam and Algeria. The reputation of the French for losing wasn't accurate, but it also wasn't based on nothing.

You seem to be right. I was wrong. I really thought they won that one!

The showing was amazing and inspiring, but if they didn't win the thing they were fighting for, then we need to learn a lesson from that too. Thanks for pushing back.

What's funny that if you're a French Canadian, you spend most of your life resentful that English is everywhere. Quebec has laws doing everything possible to try to prevent English from becoming a major language in Quebec. But, as soon as someone from Quebec goes travelling, they're probably grateful that they know English because it's the common language of the world these days.

I grew up primarily speaking English. But, I don't think I'm too arrogant about expecting everyone else to speak it. I'm always pleasantly surprised when there are signs in English in places where there can't be that many tourists.

What I did kind-of take for granted wasn't necessarily English, but it was the Roman character set. When I went travelling in East Asia, I came across Thai script, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. Previously when I'd travelled in other places, if I didn't know the language, I at least knew the letters. So, I might not have known how to pronounce the name of a place, but I could still read it and match it to the place I was looking for. But, when I was in Japan, I had to try to remember that the stop I wanted was the one where the first symbol sort of looked like a box with some scribbles inside and a lid on top, then the next one looked like a T but with two bars at the top instead of one.

"we just get our way more often I think."

Exactly! That's why I find it so refreshing.

Whenever the French are protesting something they all seem to end up setting their own cars on fire.

"I'm unhappy about the retirement age being raised by one year, here let me set the fire to this random persons fiat, that will show the government"

The other thing to remember is that when they surrendered they surrendered their entire naval fleet to the Nazis which was really irksome because why did they do that? So then the British had to launch a mission to sink the French naval fleet. All of which was a giant waste of resources, those ships could have come over to the UK.

Obviously it's all water under the bridge now but it was a tactically stupid decision.

Aspirational goals. Canada did not pick up enough Francais.

Glad to hear - we don’t hear about it as much up in Canada lately. The news cycle is always desperate to keep up with whatever the orange buffoon is fucking up next

Yeah but they're all filled in and broken.

Whenever the governments of the US and Canada do anything we can’t even be fucked to do much of anything, so I think shutting the hell up and letting the French do what they do is probably better than trying to mock them for at least trying.

when they surrendered they surrendered their entire naval fleet to the Nazis

This is absolutely not correct. The Nazis didn't try to seize (what was left of) the French fleet until the end of 1942 (more than two years later) in response to the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. The French fleet remained under Vichy France's control and the French admiral had promised to scuttle the fleet if the Germans attempted to seize it. Churchill did not consider this assurance adequate for the security of his country and ordered the attack. It's worth noting that France did scuttle most of their remaining vessels when the Germans attempted to take them in 1942.

Should the French fleet have continued fighting? As I mentioned in my comment, the entire country could have and probably should have continued fighting. But once France surrendered, there's no particularly logical reason why just one part of their military should have gone on.

I learned a little Japanese in high school, and it's a surprisingly easy alphabet to pick up... The actual language is another matter!

Not at the moment. But that's mainly because other countries shouldn't really be invading each other over domestic issues!

However there was a huge 'protest' about 90 years ago when a useless dictator tried to overtake a massive part of the world. You really should look up history about it and see how they tackled that dictator, they didn't have today's technology and that 'protest' spanned a huge area.
It'd be very helpful, though that does require you putting a bit of effort in...

Yeah, but it just hasnt been as good since "Kill'em all".

Well, you ever got stuck on a drifting shrinking ice sheet drifting into the ocean? Id sheet myself as well.