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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I saw a clip the other day of an American comedian doing crowd work in Paris. He asked the audience what America should do, and the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.

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.

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I don't know how effective the French protests are, since I haven't lived in Europe for a while. But even as a Swiss, at least judging from TV, protests in the U.S. generally seem very tame.

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.

American police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate.

And if there isn't violence, the police tend to escalate things and make it violent. I suspect this works to prevent/neuter any serious protests so long as the potential protestors still have something to lose, and in America there is very little in the way of a safety net, so living conditions would have to (continue to?) deteriorate quite a bit before protests started heading in a French direction.

I don't know if you know, but quite a few European countries are known to send police or "state" confederates into protests to give authorities an excuse to Escalate. You also see lots more water cannons being used over there.

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/...

So your "evidence" is the transcript of an interview that references an indictment containing information that hasn't been publicly substantiated.

There was also testimony to the Congress by its CEO which wasn't very convincing. There is a dude running for congress in Maine who has a troubling political background due to his past associations and this guy could not call him out. I'm pretty sure if the congress hopeful were running as an IND or repub he'd be treated differently by this organization in question.

If the things stop happening then the non profit will have to shut down destroying jobs

Yep, and even when the majority of protests don’t turn violent, the media does an amazingly good job of making it seem like they did. I remember multiple family members posting about, and even talking about in our group chat, how multiple US cities were on fire and essentially war zones in 2020.

Only because the people don't fight back. If they know that folks would fight back, they would behave themselves in the most polite and proper ways you won't believe.

It's rarely acknowledged but a big reason why ATF and FBI toned things down after Waco is because McVeigh (he was there watching) directly retaliated causing nearly 1000 casualties of government employees. At that point they went to the current plan of just divide and conquer a single person at a time via surveillance of the targeted group after things quiet down rather than try to take on groups head on.

Yep, you can see it in the way ICE operates. 10 agents jump out of several cars, they grab one helpless person and they all drive away. Like a pack of hyenas picking off a young calf.

I’m sure that fear of retaliation had some impact, but I’d say it pales in comparison to their fear of the optics of another Waco. Post Waco, favorable opinion of the FBI dropped from 70% to below 40%.

Haha have you never watched COPS? I’ve seen tamer UFC fights than some COPS episodes.

Is this supposed to be sarcasm? As far as I know, America is the only nominally democratic country where cops routinely shoot people, and their number one excuse is that they thought they could be shot.

Nothing makes cops more trigger-itchy than the thought that a random stranger could "fight back" any moment.

> American police are much more inclined to escalate any violence instead of trying to de-escalate.

American police inclined to do nothing, because it is locally hired and not paid/controlled by government.

Are you just being intentionally ignorant here? What are you even trying to convey?

There are people with cardboard signs, and there are BLM protests or occupy Wall Street. Can't remember when the last disruptive protests were in Switzerland, but in Germany I'd say tame protests are the norm and disruptions are an exception

99% of BLM protests were just people with cardboard signs. There's always the occasional anonymous asshole who might throw a rock at a window and run off, but that's the nature of any gathering of 100,000+ people. There will always be a turd.

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.

There was a lot of arson at BLM protests, and plenty of people beaten in the street, some of whom were in no way asking for it. The majority of the violence probably was the cops though.

Watch any random sampling of body cam footage and you won't think the majority of violence was the cops. I'm amazed at the restraint honestly.

Now when I was a kid...getting thrown into a paddywagon while hammered after mouthing off to a cop was a right of passage.

Do you think the selection of what body cam footage cops make available is without bias?

Still I can't think of an event where Swiss cops would be able to collect similar footage.

Maybe a football game?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Basel_hooligan_incident

Americans don't even protest on weekdays, they wait for a weekend to do it. So it is easy to say that they aren't serious but on the other hand, they're a lot closer to the knife's edge of stability and missing a day of work can get them fired (especially in at-will employment states), Europe is not like this as much.

Do you think perhaps the two are related

Oof, could never be the case.

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...

And if they lose the job they lose their insurance, thus their medication.

This increases stakes to protest quite a lot, compared to European worker protection and social security.

Well maybe you can get some worker protection and social security by protest... oh, wait.

Yes, they've wound up having their whole lives very effectively taken hostage. Also criminals lose the right to vote don't they? Seems like the perfect incentive to criminalize any political movements that are contrary to the ruling class.

But in latin America and poor countries don't have these benefits and still people protest way worse

That's somewhat understandable, what I find more interesting is that people around me won't show up unless it's between 70-80 degrees out.

In the US if you're with a group of people and there is some leader or group planning unlawful property destruction or violence, there is a very very good chance it is a fed or confidential informant operation and you are the mark/patsy to which all the blame will be assigned when you're staring at a sheet of paper that says US v [your name].

Are you trying to say the US are snitches? Or in any case, more snitches than the Europeans? More snitches than the ex-communists from the Eastern Europe?

Not snitches but paid government workers trying to get you to commit crimes and then you get arrested.

Not really a "very very good chance", but the few instances of this happening have accomplished the intended effect of making everyone terrified of the possibility and thus never doing it.

I agree. people should be shutting down all commerce, but people are so overworked or living from paycheck to pay check its probably hard to do the kind of protesting that needs to happen. Seems like UK is bad.

I think it’s important that the ultra powerful never feel they’re unreachable by guillotine.

> the French said - something like - they should punch the police more and light things on fire.

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?

Maybe in their eyes those are the less-violent alternatives than their other options.

> god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion - Thomas Jefferson

No, it should be illegal, otherwise everything would get destroyed whenever someone is slightly destroyed. Illegality serves as a kind of filter so that when enough people risk jail or death for a cause, that's because they really had enough.

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.

I think you've misunderstood. Such things are also illegal in France. But there are times you need to be prepared to break the law to bring about political change, eg if a government repeatedly demonstrates indifference to public concern.

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?

France is a much smaller country. When there is a mass protest in the US, it ends of being a bunch of smaller protests all over the country, which lacks the power of a single concentrated protest. These various satellite protests just end up being a minor nuisance, which don’t amount to much.

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.

Democracy needs real journalism to function. Having all the rich people own all the journalists isn't going to end well. We need to find a working business model for journalism that doesn't rely on rich folks.

I think news outlets need to be run as a non-profit to remove the types of people with aspirations of wealth, instead of aspirations to report and inform the public, from the sector.

Usually rich folks buy newsrooms not to make a profit, but to control the narrative.

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.

Is the French government more responsive than those of neighbouring countries?

Probably because we have a well established history of regularly changing regimes. Since we overthrew royalty in 1789 we've had five republics, two empires, three monarchies and a bunch of short-lived totalitarian regimes, coups and other major political events.

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.

How well did they turn out for people each time?

Health insurance, unions, paid vacation... al in all I'd say not that bad.

Plenty of other countries have those things as well. And plenty of countries that have even more frequent political upheaval don’t have those things.

I don’t know that regular political violence is positively correlated with worker protections.

> 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...

also

>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

I'm only pointing out that ever since the French revolution, we have a rich history of regime change (and also of strikes and demonstrations). Some were due to external factors (like the Vichy régime during WW2) and some were bloodless (like the end of the Fourth Republic).

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.

I don’t think that addresses my question.

I know that "French strikes" and "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that. If that were the case France would be a much better place than other European countries, and it really is not.

> "French setting fire to things" is a popular American trope, but things really don't work like that.

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.

Only if you believe that always caving in to a violent mob burning random (private citizen-owned, non-government) cars in Paris leads to better outcomes for the country.

That only works for the French because they're afraid to disappear their own citizens. US has been doing it for the last year and a half.

>US has been doing it for the last year and a half.

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...

You are basically admitting that the US is already past the point of no return on the road to full-blown oppression: too many government workers not accountable to the people.

Those two things are contradictory. Obviously the government isn't very responsive if they are constantly protesting.

It’s not contradictory, protesting doesn’t make sense as a one time thing, you have to continuously put pressure and show you have power as a group

Only if you have a government that isn't responsive or accountable to you.

I feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side?

It is much more than that, egalitarianism is fundamental to French culture.

That's alot less risky in France where the police have more than an 8th grade education, no guns, and aren't jacked up on right-wing hate propaganda 24/7. You punch a cop in the US and there's more than a 50% chance, that a given cop has been dreaming of "protecting himself" by any means necessary. In other words, you are going to get shot in the chest.

Or a shot in the back.

In Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, he reviewed Roman records and compared provinces with heavily fortified seats of power to ones that weren't as fortified. The ones that were more fortified tended to be governed in a way that was more callous, less efficient, and less popular. He concluded that it was good for governors to have a reasonable fear of those they governed.

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.

By what measure does it work for the French?

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.

Well gee, to start France has higher healthcare quality/access, higher life expectancy, much lower treatable mortality, better work-life balance (less hours worked, more guaranteed leave), lower wealth inequality, higher voter turnout (indicative of less apathy or less efforts to disenfranchise), among others.

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?

Many Americans have a strong bias for measuring everything in money. If you've lived there, it can be shocking how pervasive the thinking is in EVERY decision.

To quote de Tocqueville:

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men…”

Also France scores hugely better on the international cheese index

All these things become meaningless when you cross the ~50th income percentile.

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.

Median US income is $45k. Almost 18% of US household income goes to healthcare costs. So you’re saying healthcare access/quality, time off, and mortality are moot once you make $23/hr? Color me skeptical.

I mean, you're on the cusp there but $23/hr is around where "full benefits" jobs become the norm.

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).

Benefits are paid based on hours worked not on rate. You also seem to confuse marginal and effective tax rates because you don’t factor in the other tax structures in the US like FICA/state/local taxes. On the US healthcare side, you have to factor in deductibles; my annual family HSA deductible is $8k. And on and on. As a general rule, I try not to spend much time debating with new accounts that miss basic facts/principles.

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.

When was the last time you lived on $23/hour?

> That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US.

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.

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