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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
On July 19 2017 09:42 Nyxisto wrote:
related to anti-semitism, what's going on with Macron's statement about the Vel d'Hiv crimes and the rejection of responsibility from Mélenchon and the far-right? This is again one of these things where the far-left and the far-right start to sound alike.
1) Mélenchon isn't far-left. He had actually blamed Le Pen when she had said the same thing in April, but either he contradicted himself or changed his mind since then (or expressed himself in an imprecise way).
2) The question is the debated status of the Vichy regime. In the French constitutional right, Vichy is considered an anticonstitutional, illegal, illegitimate government run by traitors, which stems from a coup (the Constitution of the IIIrd Republic did not allow the Assemblées to grant full powers to Pétain); therefore, it cannot claim to be "France" (which was no longer free and sovereign at this time anyway, because of the nazi occupation). De Gaulle cancelled/voided all constitutional acts from the Vichy regime in 1944, in an ordinance "restoring the republican legality on continental soil" which claims that "The form of the French government is and remains the Republic. In right it never ceased to exist" (i. e. it is considered that during that time, France was Free France, not Vichy).
3) This position was the official one (De Gaulle, Mitterrand, etc.) until Chirac 1995, in which he recognized the responsibility of the "French State" (which was the official name of the Vichy regime) but also talked about "France": at some point of his speech, he says that "France, that day, committed the irreparable"; later, he says that "Admittedly, there are mistakes made, there are faults, there is a collective fault. But there is also France, a certain idea of France, honest, generous, faithful to its traditions, to its genius. This France was never in Vichy." There was some ambiguity in his position, but it was interpreted that he recognized France's responsibility as a whole.
Anyway it's a complicated historical French/French debate. It has nothing to do with "extremism" or antisemitism. No one is disputing what happened. There is a moral, political, semantic, historical and juridical debate/controversy about who exactly can be held responsible.
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On July 19 2017 19:19 TheDwf wrote:Show nested quote +On July 19 2017 09:42 Nyxisto wrote:
related to anti-semitism, what's going on with Macron's statement about the Vel d'Hiv crimes and the rejection of responsibility from Mélenchon and the far-right? This is again one of these things where the far-left and the far-right start to sound alike. 1) Mélenchon isn't far-left. He had actually blamed Le Pen when she had said the same thing in April, but either he contradicted himself or changed his mind since then (or expressed himself in an imprecise way).
The statement (in French) is written, clear and precise.
The main change : his april statement in response to Le Pen was "the french Republic is not responsible, but France is", this time he states "France is the french Republic" (and since the french Republic is not responsible, France cannot be).
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On July 15 2017 01:21 TheDwf wrote:
An austerity plan was announced for this year with 4.5 billions of cuts distributed between all ministries. Highest contributor is the Ministry of Defence with 850 millions of euros in cuts, announced the very day before the 14 juillet, when the army parades in Paris… The Chief of the Defense Staff got mad and protested, saying he would not accept to be “screwed” [or “fucked”—he used a sexual word]. Macron publicly blamed protest voices within the army in a fairly rough way, basically saying “I am your chief, shut up”. Macron has promised to rise the Defence budget to 2% of the GDP by 2025. The army protests against underfunding for years, especially as Hollande played the war chief a bit everywhere and overextended.
The Chieff of the Defense Staff resigned today (unprecedented situation). From the radical left to the far-right, Macron was heavily criticized for the way he handled this. This is considered like a crisis.
Some poll about Macron's economic/fiscal policy:
The questions were:
Would you say that the following sentences apply rather well or bad to Macron's economic and fiscal policy?
For each of the following categories, tell me if you think they will be rather advantaged or rather disadvantaged by Macron's economic and fiscal policy?
+ Show Spoiler +
Sadly this poll company doesn't make the distinction between the radical left and social-democrats, so the "left" category is too large and loses some pertinence.
Overall Macron's policy is mostly seen as pro-business and socially unfair, with people being split on its efficiency.
Two days ago, the government announced 13 billions of budget cuts for territorial collectivities during the whole term. They will also progressively (in the span of 3 years) lose the income of the housing tax, since Macron had promised that 80% of the households would no longer pay it. As you can imagine, local elected representatives are not particularly happy.
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It sounds like the problem of this discussion regarding France, Vichy and the holocaust isn't about anti-semitism, but about semantics.
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German authorities are investigating whether a suspected Islamic State fighter seized by Iraqi forces in the war-torn city of Mosul is a 16-year-old German schoolgirl who disappeared from her parents’ home in Saxony a year ago after apparently being groomed by jihadist groups online.
The parents of Linda Wenzel have been searching in vain for their daughter since she vanished from her home in the village of Pulsnitz on 1 July last year after converting to Islam in secret.
Video footage which appeared over the weekend seems to match images of Linda. Pictures show an exhausted, dust-covered girl who was arrested by Iraqi forces as part of a group of 20 female Isis supporters from Russia, Turkey, Canada, Libya and Syria who had barricaded themselves with guns and explosives in a tunnel underneath the ruins of Mosul’s Old City.
An Iraqi commander in Mosul confirmed to the Guardian that all the arrested women had since been transferred to Baghdad.
On Tuesday, an unofficial Iraqi special forces Facebook page posted a photograph of the arrested girl, along with the caption: “It transpires that she was a German Inghimasi [suicide bomber] who worked for the police bureaus of Daesh and not a Yazidi girl … she was a teenager from Germany who travelled from Germany to Turkey and then to Syria and Iraq.”
The state prosecutor of Saxony said on Tuesday that he was urgently investigating the new evidence. “Communications with Iraq are proving difficult, but we are doing everything necessary to establish whether the girl arrested is Linda W,” a spokesperson, Lorenz Haase, told the Guardian.
Linda used to share a house with her mother and stepfather in Pulsnitz, a town of about 7,500 inhabitants between Dresden and the Polish border. Having moved to Pulsnitz following the divorce of her parents, she had soon established herself at the local Ernst-Rietschel comprehensive school as a talented student with a particular interest in maths, chemistry and physics.
But about half a year before her disappearance, classmates noticed a change in Linda’s behaviour, with the teenager swapping rap for Arab music and asking the headmaster if she could wear a headscarf at school.
In spring 2016 Linda told her parents of her growing interest in Islam, but hid the fact that she had converted to the religion. During Ramadan, she told the family she was on a diet. “We didn’t think anything of it, and even bought her a copy of the Qur’an,” her mother, Katharina, told German media.
On 1 July last year, Linda texted her mother “I’ll be back at 4 o’clock on Sunday” after having agreed to spend the weekend sleeping over at her friend’s house. But when the Wenzels called Linda’s friend on Sunday afternoon, she knew nothing of the teenager’s whereabouts.
Hidden under the mattress in Linda’s room, police later found receipts for two plane tickets, from Dresden to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt to Istanbul, which she had purchased with a faked bank authorisation and her mother’s passport.
According to sources cited by the newspaper Bild, Linda is likely to have travelled from Istanbul to the Bab al-Hawa crossing on the Syrian border, in the rebel-held Idlib province. In mid-August, she was reportedly picked up at the border crossing by members of Jund al-Aqsa (JAA), an approximately 1,000-strong jihadist group with links to Isis, who are believed to have smuggled her into Mosul, which had been held by Isis since June 2014.
At Linda’s home in Saxony investigators also discovered a prayer rug, a tablet with hundreds of photographs and the login for a Facebook account which Linda had used exclusively for keeping in touch with profiles in Arabic and sharing content such as: “Pray, the end is nigh.”
Authorities estimate that up to 930 people have made their way from Germany to Syria since the start of the war in the region. Linda is one of three who are believed to have joined jihadist groups from Saxony, a state where an estimated 0.1% of the population is Muslim.
If the arrested teenager is confirmed as Linda, she would have defied the odds to survive in a city that has been at the heart of a major military operation since last November.
One soldier described dramatic scenes at the arrest of a female sniper last Thursday: “She fought to the last bullet and she was arrested when she ran out of ammunition. She was a sniper and she was from south Russia. She had a wound on top of her head and her face has turned blue as she was beaten by the soldiers. She was taken to a field clinic to treat her and then they attached a drip to her arm to build up strength in her body. She looked very weak.”
Source
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WARSAW — Step by step, the Polish government has moved against democratic norms: It increased government control over the news media, cracked down on public gatherings and restricted the activities of nongovernmental organizations.
Now the party in power is moving aggressively to take control of the last major independent government institution, the courts, drawing crowds into the streets and possible condemnation by the European Union.
The party is pushing to jam several bills into law; one would force all the nation’s top judges to resign, except those it appointed. Another bill, already approved by Parliament, would ultimately give the government control over who can even be considered for a judgeship.
In Brussels on Wednesday, a top European Union official said that if the changes were made, Poland might slip outside the bloc’s definition of a democracy.
“Each individual law, if adopted, would seriously erode the independence of the Polish judiciary,” said Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission. “Collectively, they would abolish any remaining judicial independence and put the judiciary under full political control of the government.”
Full article
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I'm going to wait with commenting on this until the president signs or vetos the final versions of the bills.
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Polish President Andrzej Duda to veto controversial court lawsPolish President Andrzej Duda said Monday he will veto a controversial legislative package that would have given the government more control over the judiciary, in a surprise move that appears to have caught his own allies in the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party off guard. The legislation, already approved by parliament, would have forced all judges on the Supreme Court into retirement, with the justice minister deciding whether any of them would be re-appointed. The reform package would also have dissolved a body that nominates judges, with parliament choosing the members of its successor.
I'll just say what I think about the government and the opposition without getting too much into the details.
Government:
They're extremely incompetent in legal matters, which, considering they named their party "Law and Justice", is kind of ironic. For some, it's enough to consider them terrible, others thought it's not a huge deal, as long as they reform the system in the right direction and fix their legislative fuck-ups with amendments later. I think that second group should shrink noticeably soon, because the whole process of enacting those soon-to-be-vetoed-bills showed that the goverment has no idea how to fix the court system.
Firstly, they started with stating that they want to replace the judges in the Supreme Court + Show Spoiler +Please note that our Supreme Court isn't as important as the American one. Replacing judges there is a big deal, but not as big as it would be in America
Secondly, the proposed reforms give the normal (50%+1) parliamentary majority too much power over the judiciary. The current goverment seems to be digging their own grave, not realizing that if they lose the next election, the current opposition will use their stupid bills against them. Earlier I thought that all those shitty bills are just a temporary solution intended to neutralize the post-communist institutions until we'll get a new Constitution, but now I'm starting to think they really see nothing wrong with those bills. Both options are terrible, they either don't care or understand how a modern democracy is supposed to work.
Opposition
I said that the support for the goverment should shrink noticeably in the near future, but I think it won't be enough to make them lose the next parliamentary elections. Our liberal opposition is so unlikeable that I can't imagine them winning elections without serious personal changes in their leadership, even if PiS (the ruling party) continues to be as bad as it is now. I wanted to list examples of them being terrible at everything they do, but adding such details would make my post unnecessarily long. Let's just say they're focusing too much on mobilizing the people who already support them and not enough on convincing the people on the fence.
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+ Show Spoiler +https://twitter.com/WashingtonPoint/status/890325461380849664
(answering false claims on his denial of Gulenist involvement in the failed turkish coup)
UK ambassador to TR Richard Moore: It's a fake discussion. A failed coup attempt that caused 250 people to die is worse than any other terrorist attack.
Question: Sir, will you be granting residence permit to the alleged coup plotters?
Richard Moore: Of course we won't.
Question: So you're saying those Gulenists are worse than terrorists.
Richard Moore: Indeed.
UK is somehow trying to strengthen ties with the Turks via the Ambassador on Turkish media. They know how to play and when to play...
Question of the day:
EU: No accession until Turkey halts authoritarian trend http://p.dw.com/p/2h8TK?tw
But when you go authoritarian after becoming an EU member like Poland, that's a very different story?
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On July 27 2017 06:49 lastpuritan wrote:(answering false claims on his denial of Gulenist involvement in the failed turkish coup) Show nested quote +UK ambassador to TR Richard Moore: It's a fake discussion. A failed coup attempt that caused 250 people to die is worse than any other terrorist attack.
Question: Sir, will you be granting residence permit to the alleged coup plotters?
Richard Moore: Of course we won't.
Question: So you're saying those Gulenists are worse than terrorists.
Richard Moore: Indeed.
UK is somehow trying to strengthen ties with the Turks via the Ambassador on Turkish media. They know how to play and when to play... https://twitter.com/UKAmbRichard/status/890312726853111808Question of the day: EU: No accession until Turkey halts authoritarian trend http://p.dw.com/p/2h8TK?tw But when you go authoritarian after becoming an EU member like Poland, that's a very different story?
I mean, you could have simply read the recent news about EU vs Poland and you would have noticed your remark doesn't make any sense... But hey... Making sense isn't your goal anyway, is it?
And given the usual "reaction lag" of the EU, and the head start Turkey has in its authoritarian development over Poland... I would understand if the Poles would complain the other way around.
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Every new thing Macron does makes me hate him even more. The joke with the lybians was already pathetic and now he wants to nationalize stx shipyards? Italy should grow a spine and tell him to fuck off - but right, Italy does not have a spine...
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Can you at least post an article next time? It's very difficult to understand what you're talking about without any context.
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Wow, an actually good decision from Macron... What Libyan joke are you referring to, by the way?
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On July 27 2017 17:48 SoSexy wrote:
Every new thing Macron does makes me hate him even more. The joke with the lybians was already pathetic and now he wants to nationalize stx shipyards? Italy should grow a spine and tell him to fuck off - but right, Italy does not have a spine...
Lol. Since reading the article you posted I actually 100% agree with the French government. Not that it's at all surprising that I completely disagree with you. In fact, it should probably just be my default position if I know nothing about the subject 
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What's the context here? Seems like a reasonable move but I just don't know enough to comment on it.
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On July 27 2017 19:27 LegalLord wrote:
What's the context here? Seems like a reasonable move but I just don't know enough to comment on it.
Preventing the possible loss of a strategic asset.
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Yeah, for once that actually sounds like a good idea.
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First, minutes before Macron's declaration, the speaker Christophe Castaner said that 'to nationalize is not an option'. Second, Italy had a deal with Hollande and that deal is now being thrown into the dumpster. This is just a provocation: you can't make a deal and then change it as you wish because you're the super-cool Macron. That makes you lose respect. Italy should answer by nationalizing Telecom and showing the middle finger to Vivendi. Disgusting show.
On one side you have all this rhetoric, especially used during the French elections - we have to stay together, fuck the evil Le Pen, we're all brothers, startup government, go Europe, etc. Then, at the first occasion, closed borders for immigrants coming from Italy and shitting on past deals. Really classy. That is something I could have expected from Le Pen, not from the milf lover.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/lgcpqs0.jpg)
