OT: En Attendant les Barbares (Long Rant from Paris)

[The Wogster]

Jim Ley wrote:
> On 8 Nov 2005 11:56:49 -0800, [email protected] wrote:
>
>
>>The UK has the most unequal distribution of wealth in Europe and is one
>>of the least equitable countries in the developed world. The UK is the
>>4th richest nation on earth and yet almost 20% of it's population live
>>below the official poverty line
>
>
> The poverty line is defined relative to incomes though, so unless
> everyone has the same income you will always have people below the
> poverty line, large numbers below the poverty don't actually mean all
> that much in itself, the other distributions are important.
>
> As you note later, it's having a few very wealthy people at the top
> which make the difference, and the fact that the UK has very rich
> immigrants choosing to live here says very little about the actual
> opportunities available to people.

Mostly you need to remember that this is the 80/20 rule, 80% of the
money will be held by 20% of the people, the obverse side of that is
that 80% of the people have 20% of the money.

The poverty line, has little to do with actual income, it has a lot more
to do with what portion of income is needed to meet basic expenses. The
standard saying is that rent (or mortgage costs) should be 1/3 of
income, food, clothing, transportation should be another 1/3 leaving 1/3
for other stuff. However if rent is 60% and food, clothing and
transportation take up another 60% then your in trouble.

W

 

[Bart Bailey]

In Message-ID:<[email protected]>
posted on 8 Nov 2005 05:19:06 -0800, sothach wrote: Begin

>OnTopic: On the plus side, that's abount 1700 less cars on the roads...

They haven't started burning bicycles yet, have they?

--

Bart

 

[Roger Houston]

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> If they are lucky enough to have good leaders it
> becomes a "peaceful civil rights protest", if not then a riot.

If you have a leader like Saddam Hussein with a butt-boy nicknamed Chemical
Ali, it becomes a Halabja. Fine with most of the world, I guess...

 

[Mark Thompson]

>>Yup, there is definately plenty of such poverty in the UK...
>
> No there's not, we're all human, and everyone in the UK has, unless
> through their own choice standards of all of the above considerably
> higher the human norm.

Aye. It's a case of if you can't splash your cash *****-nilly you're
regarded as being in poverty.

 

[James Annan]

[email protected] wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
>
> > Ooh thats a good idea - send the buggers back - and the English to
> > England,
>
> I don't want any of that. If I run out of cash before becoming properly
> settled here I am thinking of applying for asylum!
>
> Seriously, that was one of the things that really annoyed me about the
> UK, the papers filled with hate stories about 'economic migrants' and
> 'asylum seekers' whilst at the same time every other TV program seemed
> to be about people getting out of the UK in order to find a better life
> elsewhere. Typical British hypocrisy!

And the more I read about life back "home", the less sorry I am. My
parents just suffered a pitiful attempt at a car theft - result one
broken windscreen and the car pushed across the road - and my sister
had her bike nicked when she left it leaning outside a shop for a few
minutes.

I may have originally been an economic migrant (and the pay is indeed
much better for scientists in Japan, at least it is for us) but it's
not the only reason I'm happy to be here.

James

 

[Bill Sornson]

Frank Saboley wrote:
> it's a shame they let the dirty ****ers pour into the country. Now
> Paris will be like Harlem

Top-posting moron says, "What?"

Bill "sorry, Neil" S.

 

[Mark Hickey]

"John_Kane" <[email protected]> wrote:

>Let's keep those cars burning!

Zoot, is that you?

Mark Hickey
Habanero Cycles
http://www.habcycles.com
Home of the $695 ti frame

 

[Clive George]

"James Annan" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...

> And the more I read about life back "home", the less sorry I am. My
> parents just suffered a pitiful attempt at a car theft - result one
> broken windscreen and the car pushed across the road - and my sister
> had her bike nicked when she left it leaning outside a shop for a few
> minutes.
>
> I may have originally been an economic migrant (and the pay is indeed
> much better for scientists in Japan, at least it is for us) but it's
> not the only reason I'm happy to be here.

It's raining here too!

Friends in Liverpool are a bit ****** off a.t.m - 3 break-ins in 6 weeks,
after none for a few years.

However I'm pleased to buck the trend by declaring that I'm actually rather
happy living in the bit of the UK where I do

cheers,
clive

 

[David L. Johnson]

On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:58:40 +0100, Elisa Francesca Roselli wrote:

> So there you have it.
>
> EFR
>
> Embattled in Ile de France

Elisa: It is difficult trying to deal with disaffected and frustrated
people. But there are some things to think about. Why is it that these
young men are hanging around outside your apartment building? Why don't
they have jobs? It's not just police protection that will fix such a
situation, but a change in their lives. Until they have some hope for
their own future, they won't give a **** about yours.

We have the same issues here in the US. Maybe we haven't dealt with it
any better than the French have, but the French certainly have an
opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

I don't think the solution is to just try to lock them all up. Yes,
violence can't be tolerated, but longer-term solutions involve something
more substantial than just locking people up. Sarkozy's simple solutions
may seem attractive, but will they resolve the underlying problems? Do
you want a France that demonizes immigrants to the extent that the US now
does?

You seem to know that you do not want religious fundamentalism to control
the government. Perhaps there too we in the US can provide an object
lesson. Keep it in mind, along with other lessons from France's own
checkered past.

Bonne chance.

--

David L. Johnson

__o | You will say Christ saith this and the apostles say this; but
_`\(,_ | what canst thou say? -- George Fox.
(_)/ (_) |

 

[[email protected]]

Roger Houston wrote:
> <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> > If they are lucky enough to have good leaders it
> > becomes a "peaceful civil rights protest", if not then a riot.
>
> If you have a leader like Saddam Hussein with a butt-boy nicknamed Chemical
> Ali, it becomes a Halabja. Fine with most of the world, I guess...

Indeed. For instance, it was fine with the US and Britain when it
happened.

R

 

[Rich]

Excellent post. Thanks for the info.

Rich

 

[Frank Saboley]

it's a shame they let the dirty ****ers pour into the country. Now Paris
will be like Harlem

"Elisa Francesca Roselli" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Apologies for OT but posting because it seems some people here enjoy my
> writing.
>
>
>
> As my fellow list-members know, I live in a suburb of Paris. Although
> the rioters have not yet reached full stride on this side of town, it is
> only a matter of time.
>
> We certainly have our share of riff-raff in this neighborhood. I live in
> what used to be a pleasant and gracious apartment complex around a
> leafy, well-kept garden courtyard, with a bench and flower-beds in the
> middle. A band of about 10 thugs, aged between 15 and 20, has taken up
> residence in that yard, because it is a convenient place to do their
> drug deals out of sight of the police (although the nearest prefecture
> is only about 300 yards away). They like to hang out there in the early
> hours of the morning, laughing, fighting, blaring their thugly music.
> They are so dim-witted, they haven’t even figured out that carrying on
> like this, in a reverberant amphitheater of 50 apartments full of
> hard-working people whose sleep they are interrupting, is a good way to
> get themselves noticed. So I call the police on them, every time they
> wake me up. I consider it a civic duty. Sleep is very important to me: I
> rise at 5:30 and have an hour’s trip to work by bike, requiring full use
> of my faculties.
>
> But those of us who have protested this incivility are targets, so in
> essence, the thugs are winning, and the neighborhood is going to seed.
> They know my name and have repeatedly threatened to pay a “visit” to my
> apartment. I get harassed by phone. Whenever I cross them in the street,
> at least weekly, I get insults and threats. Once as I was coming into my
> garage with my bike they tried to follow me in, with shouts of “Sale
> pute”, filthy *****. They like to line up in front of the entry to my
> apartment block and others, so that anyone who goes in or comes out has
> to deal with them. They are constantly trying to get in, ringing the
> doorbells, and sooner or later some inattentive neighbor will let them
> into the stair-well. They fraternize with the resident kids, who think
> they are “cool” as well as a convenient source of pot. They have so
> terrified an 80-year-old woman, suffering from cancer, that she will not
> even testify against them to the police. She told me she has too few
> years to live to be willing to shorten them further. In fact, only a few
> other neighbors and myself have had the balls to take this issue up with
> the local authorities. The majority are too scared. They also claim,
> absurdly, that they do not wish to “Collaborate” with the forces of
> order, paid for by our own taxes. The mayor of our town, a Socialist, is
> of the opinion that these youths (one of whom is the lilly-white son of
> the owner of a restaurant gastronomique, just around the corner), are
> poor and misunderstood and in need of love and dialogue, and that
> uptight bourgeois *****es like me, who benefit unjustly from a habit of
> hard work and suffer from “cultural prejudice” against rap music at 4:00
> am, should stop making their lives so haaard.
>
> As you have probably been reading in your papers, two such charmers
> Darwinized themselves two weeks ago, by trying to hide in a restricted
> area, labelled all over with large signs saying “NO ENTRY: DANGER OF
> ELECTROCUTION”. Perhaps they couldn’t read, or mistook the skull and
> crossbones for the insignia of an allied gang.
>
> Their friends then took to the streets, burning schools and creches,
> torching public libraries, sacking and destroying the frail local
> businesses that are their neighbors’ life work, and their own best hope
> of a future. They boarded public transport systems with cans of
> gasoline, dousing the passengers, in one case a handicapped woman who
> couldn’t walk, and then setting them alight. Three of them ganged up on
> a man who was photographing lamp-posts for an urban development project.
> They smashed his skull open with clubs while his wife and daughter
> looked on from a parked car. It seems they liked the guy’s camera and
> thought they should have it rather than him.
>
> Currently at the top of our government, we have one very short and two
> very tall men who are all allegedly of the same party, but whose primary
> goal is to make political mileage at the expense of each other. The
> President is a lame duck. After 75 years of insolent chain-smoking good
> health and decades of unending corruption scandals in the halls of
> power, he was finally maimed by his only two acts of true and dignified
> statesmanship, standing up to a religious fundamentalist cretin who was
> leading the world to war on a trumped up pretext, and striving for a
> European Union that could offer an alternative to a world whose only
> remaining superpower was running amok. The Prime Minister is a very
> handsome creature, given to lounging about in exquisitely cut suits,
> polishing his silver hair for the photographers. Only the Minister of
> the Interior, a feisty midget with an ethnic name, shows any sign of
> commitment, passion, and ideological coherence.
>
> So Nicolas Sarkozy went right in there, fierce as the Queen’s corgis. He
> called things by their proper names: and if these Neanderthals are not
> riff-raff, racaille, what meaning could this word possibly have? And he
> tried to reassure the peaceful, the creative, the constructive, that he
> would stand up for them. He has always made the point, and is far too
> rarely credited for it, that the ethnic and religious minorities who
> inhabit the banlieue are the FIRST victims of this senseless violence,
> and it is precisely because they ARE French that they must benefit from
> the most fundamental function of the State, to protect their lives and
> property.
>
> Now the whole of the government, not only the two tall ones but all of
> the Opposition, are at war - not with the thugs - but with Sarkozy. It
> is a great opportunity to look good by pandering and inaction, while
> he’s the only one to stick out his neck and make a clear statement,
> sending in the despised, enfeebled police where, in reality, the army is
> needed. Oh, this is racism, this is repression, this is the Police State.
>
> I lived in the USA, the UK, Italy and Switzerland before coming to
> France, and I can honestly say that of all the societies I have
> inhabited, this is the one that goes farthest to equalize opportunities
> and offers the greatest possibility of integration to its minorities. It
> starts with such obvious things as free health care for all and free,
> quality education for anyone who can benefit from it, to whatever level
> they can achieve. Indeed, if there is a totalitarian tendency, it is in
> the direction of equalization. It undermines individual responsibility,
> saps entrepreneurial drive, despises the work ethic and trains people to
> wait passively for everything to come from the government.
>
> The statistic of unemployment as high as 30% in the rioting communities
> has been advanced. It seems that people who refuse education, speak
> French badly, hang around in gangs all night, force women to wear veils,
> keep their eyes lowered and stay at home on threat of turnstile rape,
> should be attractive to employers. It seems that people who take
> responsibility for their actions, excel at their studies, have
> initiative and ideas, bust their guts to get their businesses off the
> ground, attempt to improve the grace and liveability of their
> communities, are traitors and sell-outs whose life work deserves to be
> torched.
>
> (I am far more shocked by another statistic: across the whole of French
> society, among people aged 55 to 64, less than 37% ARE EMPLOYED. Why?
> Because we are routinely fired as we reach our fifties to “make room”
> for the younger, cheaper and more malleable. Maturity, experience, a
> clean employment track record are no compensation for the terror
> employers feel at the prospect of being left with the bill for our
> retirement.)
>
> What we are seeing here is the breakdown of a certain “Angelist”,
> politically correct, generally Socialist idea of what a state should be.
> Unfortunately, we are learning that there are limits to integration,
> that religious fundamentalism is incompatible with the secular
> Democratic ideal inherited from the Enlightenment (at least in France,
> the fundies are the mob behind the barricades; in the US, they are your
> government), that you can bend too far over backwards to help those who
> will not help themselves, and that you cannot get away from labor as the
> source of value.
>
> So I’m going to say it once and for all: Hurrah Sarko! I admire and
> uphold the Minister of the Interior, and to hell with the rest of them.
> If I had a French vote, I would vote for him . Which means that I am now
> officially on the Right, at least in France. All my current
> acquaintanceship here will disown me for this. I dare not speak to
> anyone because the topic of the riots will inevitably come out.
>
> (NB: Sarkozy’s great role model in world politics is Tony Blair, minus
> the Iraq idiocy, and in the US spectrum he would be a tad to the Left of
> Hilary Clinton. He upholds reproductive rights and advanced “sexual
> equality” as one of the defining principles of the European civilization
> he had hoped to see enshrined in the Constitution. His quip on the
> admission of Turkey to the Union, on the other hand, was “If Turkey were
> part of Europe, people would know”. I’m afraid, once again, I concur.)
>
> So there you have it.
>
> EFR
>
> Embattled in Ile de France
>
>

 

[James Annan]

Clive George wrote:


> It's raining here too!

Bright sun here


>
> Friends in Liverpool are a bit ****** off a.t.m - 3 break-ins in 6 weeks,
> after none for a few years.
>
> However I'm pleased to buck the trend by declaring that I'm actually rather
> happy living in the bit of the UK where I do

Sure, but you're one of the 10 people living in a nice place
Actually I guess many parts of Japan would be a bit less pleasant than
where we are, too.

James

 

[Peewiglet]

On Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:58:40 +0100, Elisa Francesca Roselli
<[email protected]> wrote:

[...]

Very interesting stuff! Thanks for posting


Wet fishes,
--
,,
(**)PeeWiglet~~
/ \ / \ pee AT [guessthisbit].co.uk

 

[Mike Kruger]

"Elisa Francesca Roselli" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Apologies for OT but posting because it seems some people here enjoy my
> writing.
>
Apology accepted (although there was a bit of bicycling content in there).

I very much appreciated reading your first-person report, although I hope
for your sake that this not have to be a long series of reports.

The American experience with the race riots in the 1960's would suggest that
the rioting areas will become even more economically depressed. Many
businesses which are there will suffer losses, and many businessmen will be
reluctant to move in to replace them because of the added risk. This
results in fewer jobs in the community.

 

[Tony Raven]

James Annan wrote:
>
> And the more I read about life back "home", the less sorry I am. My
> parents just suffered a pitiful attempt at a car theft - result one
> broken windscreen and the car pushed across the road - and my sister
> had her bike nicked when she left it leaning outside a shop for a few
> minutes.
>


I had my car broken into in Japan. They wrecked the door locks trying
to get in but didn't actually succeed in gaining access.


--
Tony

"The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the
right."
- Lord Hailsham

 

[Brendan Halpin]

[email protected] writes:

> The UK is the
> 4th richest nation on earth

Where do you get this notion? Looking at recent OECD figures,
Luxembourg, Norway, the US, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark,
the Netherlands, Canada and Iceland had higher GDP per capita in
2002 <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/62/34256773.pdf>.

Brendan
--
Brendan Halpin, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:[email protected] http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html

 

[Mike Kruger]

"nobody760" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
> I am going to stick my neck out here - but it does occur to me that if
> Algerians lived in Algeria, Moroccans lived in Morocco, Pakistanis
> lived in Pakistan and Indians lived in India that some of these
> problems simply would not exist.
>
Incomplete cultural mixing clearly complicates societies.

I'm not sure where my children would be, though. They certainly wouldn't be
in America. We'd have to scatter half of them in Germany, a quarter in
Norway, an eighth in Sweden, about 3/32nd in various parts of Great
Britain -- Ireland should be part of that, right? -- about a sixty-fourth
would be wherever we decide the semi-nomadic Mohawks "should" live, and it's
anybody's guess about the rest. This would be hard to carry out with only
two children. And my ancestors left these places for the same reason many
Muslims came to Europe -- better prospects there than back at home. And
they were allowed in because they fit some need of the country they
joined -- often the need for cheap labor.

The fact of life is that human populations move. The Franks didn't come to
France until the late Roman empire. The Huns didn't make it to Hungary
until hundreds of years after that. The Hebrews moved to Palestine either
with Abraham about 1800 BC, with Joshua about 1200 BC, during the Persian
empire about 600 BC or during the 20th century, depending on which version
one would prefer to emphasize. It's not that the migration of human
populations is such a great and wonderful thing, but it's unlikely to be
easy to stop.

 

[Brendan Halpin]

[email protected] (Jim Ley) writes:

> The poverty line is defined relative to incomes though, so unless
> everyone has the same income you will always have people below the
> poverty line

Strictly not true: for one of the most commonly used poverty lines
(50% of the median household income) you'll have no-one in poverty
as long as the poorest household has at least half the income
(controlling for household size) of the household ranked half-way
(richer than half and poorer than half).

> As you note later, it's having a few very wealthy people at the top
> which make the difference

Not at all true with regard to povert, particularly when measured
according to median income and not mean income.

> Yet the French unemployment rate is double the UK rate, that's hardly
> something to aspire too.

You're not wrong there!

Brendan
--
Brendan Halpin, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:[email protected] http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html

 

[sothach]

Mike Kruger wrote:
> I'm not sure where my children would be, though. They certainly wouldn't be
> in America. We'd have to scatter half of them in Germany

I know a Mike Kruger down in Munich - is he a cousin?

> The fact of life is that human populations move.

That was my point, we'd all have to move back to Africa to set things
right:

Right now man say repatriate repatriate
I and I patience have now long time gone
Father's mothers sons daughters every one
Four hundred million strong
Ethiopia stretch forth her hand
Closer to God we Africans