The real reason they got rid of trams in this country
If I can have a sausage sizzle as I’m protesting, I would go out more often.
StoryTime
I once got called out to protest for ‘personal freedoms’. They didn’t explain much further. I get there and its full on anti vaxx. They want their freedom to work without a vaccine. Wish I had the balls to walk away, but I stood there for an hour or 2. (Oh yeah. I’m in Australia, but the guy who invited me posted sympathy for Charlie Kirk. So I’m glad we not talking anymore)
Will never forget that fireman, who probably come back from saving someone’s life (or at least, coming back from saving someone’s property) giving a thumbs down to the protest.
100%, it wasn’t at me directaly, but now 4-5 years on, I still remember him.
can I do a story time WITHIN a story time?
Whenever Violet08 posts, there will be a tonne of comments along the lines of “oh. This account again”.am I recognised here too? I always post a lot after a few drinks, so maybe 1-2 people will recognise a spam post, look up and see ‘oh. Midsized is drinking again’
:::
am I recognised here too?
You don’t ask NSFW questions while posing as an 18yo girl, a bit less memorable
But now you are tagged and I shall remember you
Aspirational goals. Canada did not pick up enough Francais.
We have a whole Quebec political party that’s about not voting for federal elections… Want to protest against the libs or the cons? Vote for the Block!
As an Ontarian I appreciate the BQ. All I’m saying is Quebecois don’t burn nearly as much shit as the French. And the rets of us aren’t doing anything. Having a less capital-compliant part of Canada would be good for all of us.
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”
Yeah but we burn the richs’ restaurants too.
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.
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.
If you’re gonna protest, might as well eat good while doing it.
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
Let them eat sausage.
You can’t do that in USA. You don’t have the public transport infrastructure.
Ahhh but many cities and towns have some sort of rails in the streets, and bonus: they’re not being used!
Yeah but they’re all filled in and broken.
I just thought of how that would look on the San Francisco cable car tracks. Fast sausages.
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.
Freedom Fries
As an European, I still can’t believe you guys did that
Clearly you’ve never seen a marketer and a politician in a room together.
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.
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.
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.
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!
explanation since the comm isn't History Memes this time
- “rampaging barbarian hordes” – the Gauls
- “continent-conquering emperor” – Napoleon
- “foreign legion” – the French Foreign Legion
- “embarrasingly outflanked” – the failure of the Maginot Line in WWII
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 does seem they’re suffering from the same rightward-slide that many other countries are facing though, unfortunately.
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.
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.
How on earth the fact that your country also has was swats of empty land stops you from doing effective protesting? Or any, actually.
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.
Protesting in the bumfuck nowhere gives no results. 10 people protested in village of 200 isn’t news. 2k people protested in 200 villages isn’t news.
Disagree… It’s not “reported” as news, but if 5% of a town showed up to a protest, that’s a big fkn deal to the people who see it, and makes them aware that the protest exists.
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”.
That’s more like it. Americans (just like Russians) like to automatically dismiss all the critique and calls to action with this knee-jerk “country big” reaction, and since you can’t actually do anything with a country being big, it’s a bit of a thought terminating cliché. Meanwhile, the size of a country rarely has anything to do with anything
The French have been refining protesting since 1790.
Easily the most genius thing I have seen in my entire life.
But is it Standard-gauge?
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.)
Yes, actually.
Guys, take lessons, take lessons!
For what. To utilize all the rail lines in my city to grill.
Excuses incoming in 3, 2, 1…
“But, but, but the us country is huge. We can’t be expected to protest about something all the way over there…”
“But, but, but, wait for the midterms. We’ll sort it then.”
“But, but, but, the protests are gaining steam now. It’s not easy to coordinate these things and we need time…{also we’ll conveniently ignore you when you point out that we live in a world of instant communication and that protests and strikes were coordinated decades ago when we didn’t have today’s technology}”
“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.
I mean… What is a shitty little protest in Madrid gonna do to Brussels? You are comparing apples to oranges.
Protesting local matters, like French people being pissed about French shit makes sense. The French understand their power structure well.
Protesting continental matters is considerably more tricky, because of the distance involved.
Comparing all of the US to all of Europe is an apples to apples comparison.
And you see how well the anti isreal genocide protests are going… So appreciate you making my point for me.
Protesting in Houston does fuckall to Washington in the immediate.
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…
Here in Minnesota we’ve still been protesting every week…
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
Oh yeah. That’s true. The news really dropped off once the federal government “pulled back” ICE. But they’re still doing the same shit. Still kidnapping. We’re still documenting and doing our stuff.
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.
You really get involved in France, if you want it or not. Great for democracy IMO.
True…
I mean in a certain sense they are a bit true, the French protested for so long that Paris has created the Rue in order to have some control over the crowds
The rue?
I don’t know the exact name but it’s these large streets
Boulevards? Grand boulevards?
I’m confused because “rue” in French is literally “street” in English 😁.
Yeah those
It’s a sauce used for thickening, but that’s not important right now
I wonder how the terroir affects the barbecue
