Anonymous #2 19h

Like holy fuck you guys are stupid. Yes, people are more important than property. That doesn’t justify the destruction of property that has no connection to your purported cause? How is destroying grandmas pastry business going to improve education? Like holy shit it’s just an excuse to loot and riot.

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Anonymous #2 19h

What I’m saying is that we need to shift our priorities. Yes, of course there are going to be some people who use this as an excuse to loot. But our focus should be why these riots are happening, and why so many people are upset. If you want to fix something, you have to get to the root of the problem. MLK said a riot is the language of the unheard, and he was absolutely right

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Anonymous OP 18h

Shifting priorities? Sure. People are most important. That does not mean that property, art, and culture can be destroyed at the whim of rioters. France has a standard of living and quality of life that ranks above the US, the UK, and almost all of the EU. It has universal health care and a strong progressive tax system. A person of average income can support themselves. Maybe riots should be reserved for where they’re actually necessary?

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Anonymous #2 18h

All rioting like this does is (1) waste taxpayer resources and (2) get people who otherwise supported the cause to now oppose it. How do you think the owners and runners of the countless small businesses which were destroyed and who were all but certainly anti-corporate feel now? I mean look man, this is horrendous optics. It just is. Full stop.

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Anonymous #2 18h

Never said they should be destroying stuff on a whim. I’m saying that it being the center of the conversation is a framing that is not one that is focused on what should be the main issue It’s more than just that. Sure, France may have a better quality of life, but that doesn’t mean the rich still aren’t getting richer. And it doesn’t mean that there still aren’t people in France who are nevertheless struggling

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Anonymous OP 18h

Also a massive chunk of the rationale behind the protests was the funding of schools, not just inequality

7

Anonymous OP 18h

Okay, but by any metric, France is top 20 in the world and as high as in 3rd in the world in education. France spends more per capita and more in terms of % of GDP than most countries in the EU, the US, and the UK. The ONLY spot where education can even be argued as lacking funding is primary schooling in certain immigrant communities, where they are still barely below EU median. Maybe the exceptional quality of everything else leads them to believe they have it bad? I’m not sure.

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Anonymous OP 18h

It would probably be easier to make centerpiece of discussion if people weren’t destroying shit. France has some room to prove in terms of quality of investment between high quality secondary schooling and primary schooling, but they are both objectively in better spots than the majority of the world. “The rich are getting richer” so we should destroy the street level businesses? I don’t get it. Small businesses can’t bear that cost. They won’t survive. Corporations will.

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Anonymous OP 18h

At the end of the day, these rioters have lost the plot. OECD had already been drawing attention to disparate investment in France prior to these riots. All this did was make a certain population look barbaric and play into the hands of policymakers who want to exclude them.

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Anonymous #2 18h

If they have room to improve and aren’t, then the protesters have a valid reason to be protesting. Going “oh you have it so much better than others” is irrelevant in that case. They clearly have issues and people are fed up with it. That doesn’t make the looting morally correct, but this is all coming from a group of people who clearly are fed up. This type of rioting doesn’t just come out of nowhere

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Anonymous OP 18h

See the problem you get to with the fallacy that rioting and protesting is acceptable just because the people have a problem with it is where’s the cutoff? You can’t consider the legitimacy of a protest without considering whether that protest is something that’s empirically reflected as a problem. I’m sorry, you just can’t. And even when protesting, there some be some minimum nexus between the cause sought and the method of protest. There’s not here.

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Anonymous #2 17h

But there is empirical reasons. Their currency is getting weaker, fuel costs are rising, and now they’re cutting funding for schools. Cutting funding rather than raising taxes is the definition of austerity politics. If you don’t stop it now, you end up with a country like fucking Greece. These are legitimate problems, and you need to stop it before it continues to spiral out of control

3

Anonymous OP 17h

The funding is still well above global medians as a % of GDP. But beyond that, what’s the nexus here between the protests (riots) and the cause? All they’ve doing is destroyed the livelihood of many small business owners and necessitated a disposition of mass amounts of public funds for cleanup. Ya know, the same public funds that are becoming more finite but that they want diverted to them?

1

Anonymous #2 17h

Hmm I wonder why the funds are only becoming more finite? Maybe there’s some sort of policy they’re pushing back against. Something that focuses on cutting public services rather than raising taxes on the wealthy

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Anonymous OP 17h

You’re once again dodging the crux of the issue. What is the nexus. If public funds are getting more finite, what the fuck is necessitating a mass disposition of funds to cleanup and repair buildings and public property that was perfectly find beforehand do other than waste public resources and make them even more finite? And also, France has exceptionally high social spending and their wealth inequality when considering income is below OECD median.

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Anonymous #2 17h

Wdym perfectly fine beforehand? You still have to pay teachers. Many schools there still don’t even have air conditioning systems. The cutting of that is the austerity. Having the wealth taken out of the programs for the people only serves to siphon the wealth to the wealthy and to the banks. We see this through government contracts towards stuff such as military or corporate payouts

5

Anonymous OP 16h

You are addressing a point I did not make. There’s a reason I split it into two paragraphs. The buildings that were burned, the streets, and the businesses were fine before the rioting. Now, a massive investment is required just to get streets, artifacts, and buildings back to the status quo. Those are resources that could be better used elsewhere. Just a massive waste of taxpayer dollars. Those buildings aren’t the only thing the rioters will burn.

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Anonymous #2 16h

Yeah, I don’t think rioting is necessarily the best way to go about it because it will cost money, but I think that it is an inevitable consequence of the situation that the French in particular have been placed under. And I think hyperfocusing on the damage being caused rather than what the future holds if the country continues down its current path is what’s dangerous I honestly don’t know how to make what I’m saying anymore clear to you

1

Anonymous OP 16h

But see that’s the problem. You can’t just not get citizens of a country to not “hyperfocus” on the damage when said damage is the destruction of historical buildings, artifacts, and businesses of the citizens. That shit is just a no go. Imagine that rioters blew up the Washington monument, destroyed the natural history museum, and looted every business on street level. Would that fly?

1