To me that sounds crazy! But, I can see how it works for the French. They protest all the time, and the government is very responsive to the needs of the people. Much more so than the American government sees to be.
Not advocating punching the police as a default, but in my opinion, protests need to be disruptive if they're going to get anyone's attention at all. I don't really see what a few people standing on the sidewalk with cardboard signs are supposed to accomplish.
In Paris the burning and destruction typically happens in the outer "boroughs" of the city -usually by disaffected groups -sometimes they happen to be disenfranchised- though typically they harm the older generation's property and that generation typically frowns upon the destruction.
Of course, in the US, we've had organizations who on paper are for justice and redress being found to foment agitation. It's a total corruption of their mandate. We had an "anti-hate" group paying hate groups to "do things"[1].
[1]https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119311/witnesses/...
Nothing makes cops more trigger-itchy than the thought that a random stranger could "fight back" any moment.
American police inclined to do nothing, because it is locally hired and not paid/controlled by government.
This increases stakes to protest quite a lot, compared to European worker protection and social security.
Guys, I feel like we should get another anti-union thread here soon. It’s getting a little too hot for comfort. I’ll start. Whew While I do like unions in theory, I was really peeved when I was getting my start in the working forces as a banana picker and this guy Bob took midday naps...
In the other 1%, the police decided on a policy of always picking a fight with crowd, every fucking day, until they ran out of gas.
Now when I was a kid...getting thrown into a paddywagon while hammered after mouthing off to a cop was a right of passage.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this as well. Do these people want "punching the police and lighting things on fire" to be a freely permitted form of free speech?
If so, should anyone be legally allowed to destroy any amount of stuff, for any reason they feel unhappy about? Or is this a case of "blowing stuff up should only be permitted for causes I like, not for causes I dislike"?
If not, do they see the irony in endorsing behaviors that they simultaneously believe should not be legalized?
I haven't given that a lot of thought, and it feels weird to say, but maybe the opinion that an act should be done and should be illegal can be true at the same time.
When a citizen commits a crime, they messed up. When ten commit a crime, they messed up. When half the village destroys the chief's home, the chief messed up.
Suppose you are living under very corrupt or autocratic governance, and you protest in the conventional way (marching, waving signs and banners and so on) bu the government simply ignores it, or slanders the protestors for having a different opinion. What do you do then?
The media in the US often ignores the protests they (or their owners) don’t agree with. This also weakens them significantly. I remember having to go to Twitter to see what was going on with a lot of the Occupy Wall Street stuff, because the news was acting like it wasn’t going on. Without attention, and fractured across the country, it faded out. The protest area where I was living at the time slowly shifted into a homeless encampment, before they eventually cleared them out.
No journalist joins a newsroom to become rich. Famous, maybe, but not rich.
The business model used to be advertising, but the internet destroyed that model. And we don't have a replacement, while democracy doesn't work without someone holding the politicians to account.
If anything, the longevity of the Fifth Republic is starting to become unusual (only the Third Republic and the Ancien Régime have lasted longer). Maybe we're overdue to flip the table again as per tradition.
I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections.
In fact, it's quite easy to find examples of political violence being used to reduce worker protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
>two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events.
Do you think you'd still have the Health insurance, unions, and paid vacation after another roll of the dice
Us rolling the dice whenever we have a major political crisis is a meme at this point, for better or for worse we're just not the kind of people to keep the same constitution around for 250 years.
They worked like that when I was in Paris ~3 years ago! At the time, people were rioting over the retirement age changes. I walked around the city the day after the protests. The city smelled like burned plastic. There were burned out rubbish bins and the husks of melted lime bikes & scooters all over the place.
I've never seen anything like it.
Individual jurisdictions have been doing that for much longer than a year and half.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...
The U.S.'s institutions of power are heavily fortified. Political leaders of most countries travel about with a security detail of a few cars at most. The U.S. president has a gargantuan motorcade that's only rivaled in size by those of third world dictators. Arguably, the U.S. president doesn't hold power so much as wield it in the interest of oligarchs, who are even more insulated from the public.
If Americans want better government, what they really need to do is make oligarchs and politicians feel like they might actually be made to feel the consequences of their actions. That doesn't necessarily have to mean violence though, if people are creative enough.
e.g. Elon Musk wants so much to control what the world thinks of him that he bought Twitter and had Grokipedia made in an attempt to kill Wikipedia, since they have honestly reported on his misadventures with the same standards of rigor applied to other public figures. If you want to make Elon Musk feel consequences, just never let up on him. The dude made Nazi salutes during Trump's inauguration twice. His DOGE idiocy is why Texas livestock is being banned in other countries because of screwworms. Keep talking about that and don't stop.
They have 8% unemployment, 30% less GDP per capita than the US, and many other problems.
Government by caving in to riots is not in general being responsive to the needs of the people.
One of the problems with just using economic metrics is it seems to confuse the fact that the economy is supposed to serve society, not the other way around. So it leads one to wonder: with those better economic measures, what is it buying for US citizens?
“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men…”
Besides work/life balance, the US gets much better as you earn more, and frankly high earners are generally less concerned with time off work too. Also why the US enjoyed ~30 years of European brain drain, those benefits are much less enticing when you are the one paying more and getting less.
Also keep in mind that French pay a lot for healthcare too, except it's called taxes. That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US.
This only gets more dramatic as you climb the income scale, which inevitably means (in France) you are paying way more taxes (41% at $100k) while using those social services the least.
Compare to the US where you are paying 22% on $100k and likely getting high tier health insurance for ~$200/mo from such a job.
The takeaway is that America sucks if you are poor, but gets much better if you can make it out of the bottom half, and way better if you can get to the top 25%.
P.S. there is a reason the media only talks about the bottom 50% and the top 1%. Talking about the 50-99% would reveal where the real money in the country is (and offend/call out half the country too).
So, since you're full of shit, let's do the math. I'll even be kind, I'll go 1$ = 1€. 23€ per hour, 35h/week, 4 weeks per month (broadly). 3220€ gross, which, to cut things short and not even get into gross -> net, let's assume 100% of your gross is now net, is 38640€ / year. The 30% tax BRACKET starts at 29316€. 25% gets taxed at 30%, 60% gets taxed at 11%.
Anyways, you're full of shit, I just needed people reading you to know it.
But this all digresses from the point: simple economic indicators like GDP without fuller context are a lazy and misleading metric for evaluating the health of a society.
I think politicians have completely lost the plot in their job and who they represent. Instead, they seem all ideologically or financially motivated, and largely seem to get their marching orders from select wealthy CEOs. It's a very bad look that will get worse since trust in govern being so low goes hand in hand with voted apathy. And voted apathy means we get more of the same.
It's a bad cycle and I think we'll land on a civil esque war sooner or later.
I, too, worry that they're going to rediscover this the hard way at some point.
I always assumed that this was the end goal of the AI. It's not for normal people, it's for the super wealthy to magnify their power, both economically and physically.
Was there ever a deed restriction? The government says no, but they say there was something else which I don’t understand.
> In the notes about the grantee, the cash warranty deed states that the property was to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas. This was not a deed restriction.
The rest of the page doesn’t display properly on iOS. https://taylortx.gov/1293/Blueprint-Projects-Data-Center
I don't know enough about texas real estate law to know if the restriction would tend to follow or not. I also don't know if the city would have done title research to have seen the restriction, so they may not have knowingly violated it (which may or may not matter; and maybe they should have known).
Also, fwiw, the 'one month later' sale reported in the article was more like a few months later, in case you date restrict deed searches.
We all know that you are, and that that's fine, and you're just hedging because you're scared of the list you'll be placed on. Do not worry, you're on it already.
You would never have mentioned it if you weren't.
but if somebody else wants to organize I will 100% show up
So consider me first on the list of people ready to do whatever it takes to fix this shit
This argument you make is fine for spur of the moment violence, but for acts resulting from the structure violence of the super wealthy. Dunno.
Its calling for "Law and Order". Its violence against the 'correct group'.
You absolutely can call for violence (now) against protestors, ANTIFA, anti-surveillance (DEFLOCK), unionists, homeless, drug users, and other deemed by federal, state, and local officials as undesirable.
You cant directly call for violence to black people by name, but eupamisms are still fine to allude to. "Those people", "ghetto", etc.
And the violence BY police and government way exceed the violence by the public they target.
Also, thou shalt NEVER advocate for violence against CEOs, business leaders, politicians, and the like. Their lives are worth like 1M of us plebes. So those who come to their defense will do so crazily and way over-respond, like cops do routinely.
Thats why the feds threw threw the book at Luigi Mangione. Cause if he did it, his way is illegal but tremendously effective. And the elites have little defense against this.
(Case in point. In my local area, a person took $100 from a cash register, and got arrested for a class A misdemeanor and 2 other charges. Whereas the same restaurant had their owner committed mass wage theft of 27 people to the tune of $72000, and only had to pay a fine.
There absolutely hypocrisy who can advocate and not for violence.)
The American War of Independence, French Revolution and English Civil War were acts of terrorism.
Were those acts justified? Not if you're the ones who were initially holding the power.
Systematic use of terror as a policy to induce fear in the general public to push them to coerce their government's policy was not widely used.
[1] https://signalscv.com/2025/03/fbi-launches-task-force-to-inv...
Here's a very recent example of public authorities describing activism against data centers as a possible vector of 'anti-tech extremism': https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
Likewise, the proponent of a huge data center project in Utah and the Secretary of the Interior are both arguing that opposition to data centers is the result of Chinese communist propaganda: https://fortune.com/2026/06/10/kevin-oleary-trump-administra...
As far as I'm aware there have been zero acts of violence related to data center construction, or even threats of same.
I will be happy to steer you to work by philosophers and legal researchers on the construction of 'terrorism' as a political concept and the difficulty of cleanly differentiating it from 'legitimate' forms of violent political action.
You're edging on support of a terrorist state. The entire goal of groups like ICE is to instill terror. It doesn't get more terrorist than that.
Only if what those people want is something I agree with otherwise I think the state holds the monopoly on violence and we need to mobilize it against the wrong thinker.
Then the government will listen. Because businesses, not people, are what governments really listen to.
In India, Gandhiji made it work like 5 decades back in India against the British, where the whole country rejected consumption of foreign goods on his call.
Farmer gives land to city.
City goes "We can have 10 million dollars AND a brand new data center, hot diggity"
City is enriched in both money AND services.
Thanks Mr Farmer.
Farmer SELLS land (for $10) with a deed restriction that it is to be used for a public park.
Hand wavey timey wimey...
Deed restriction 'magically' goes away.
Gets sold for $10M.
Tired of paying property tax? Gift your house to the city with a deed that says they have to rent it back to you forever for $1 a year?
Lets be clear, this wouldnt even be news if it wasnt for "Datacentre"
What if I write a note saying that you need to pay me $10,000? That's not a contract, that's just a fever dream. But if you shake my hand and sign that piece of paper, that's a different story.
The same applies here. If you get the city to agree (and they don't get raided by the FBI after that), then sure, they should be bound by the deal they made.
Note that this works both ways. If you own nice rural acreage, the federal or state government will often be happy to pay you some token amount and give you a tax break for a conservation easement that prevents not only you, but all future owners, from using the land in certain ways. It's still yours, but it's now a scenic corridor and you can't build there anymore. There's plenty of such easements in California and other Western states. If I'm bound by such a perpetual, deed-attached restriction, why can't the government be?
If the farmer deeded it to someone else, like a neighbor, and said they could only use it to build a park, no one would expect that to apply once the government had yoinked it by eminent domain.
It follows then, that government entities really aren't bound by deeded restrictions. If you made them jump through some hoop, where they had to gift the land and then eminent domain it back, that would probably be more wasteful than just letting them do whatever they think is best.
The oddest outcome I can imagine is the government being able to compulsorily acquire other peoples property, but being permanently stuck with a fixed use asset that they cant do anything with that they actually own. Thats bonkers.
Its like a pet bear that is allowed to eat from the floor but not when the meat is dangled over its nose.
Imagine a scenario where the government is building a rail line from A to B, and compulsorily acquires every piece of land on the route, but right smack dab in the middle is land they already own. You expect them to say "Well gosh dern we cant break that contract we signed guaranteeing that this would be a public urinal for the next 1000 years, after forcibly acquiring 10000 other parcels of land at gunpoint, cancel the project". Its entirely unrealistic to expect an entity that is designed to use its land to facilitate society, and can get whatever land it wants to think in terms of some random contract it can break completely legally in any other scenario.
The real problem seems to be one city gave the land to a parks nonprofit who then sold it to another city, but the original park intent did not follow those sales.
If you are my friend and I gift you a nice item … I would be majorly pissed at you and would not talk to you ever again if you would sell it online.
I would expect you give it back or pass for free to someone who is also close to you.
This story is different though, the farmer sold the land for cheap in exchange for some conditions. This situation is more like going back on a contract.
That seems like a pretty normal thing to do.
I don't understand what type of cope you are trying to achieve by excusing this as an okay thing to do.