It’s shit like this that opens the door for fascists like Le Pen to get into positions of power by rightly criticizing the incumbent government for censoring speech. Macron is a fool, but he’s a necessary barrier to keep fascism out of France and idiotic ideas like this only hand more kindling to those fascists. The free speech ideals of left or centrist candidates tend to be one of the more important appeals that pull voters away from authoritarian fascism. Remove that incentive by implementing authoritarian policies and suddenly there are a whole lot of people far more entranced by fascist arguments.
You’ve already long missed the boat for keeping fascism out of France if the sitting head of state is calling for measures like these.
This is why people on the left are so exasperated with centrists - they’re so much more willing to take heavy-handed actions against democratic issues like “hey maybe police shouldn’t be executing people” and are so much more reticent to even speak out against extremist views that have gained a solid foothold in France like “the progressive Islamisation of our country is calling into question the survival of our civilisation”.
For some reason, they see the latter as much more “valuable discussion” than the former.
For all his flaws I don’t believe Macron is fundamentally a fascist. I think he’s a corporate stooge appealing to the wealthy, the old, and the business types. France has indeed had fascism creeping in, especially with the likes of Le Pen. But France also has a long history of leftist movements and protests. So the pendulum could really swing either way at this point for them. Macron is shitty, but he’s not Le Pen. Hopefully at the next election, people vote leftwards and don’t fall for the typical fascist tactics of convincing people that immigrants and LGBT people are the real problem. Le Pen particularly scares me because she’s very cozy with Putin and has isolationist, anti-NATO tendencies. The west is already struggling to maintain a united front in support of democracy and in opposition to global authoritarianism. If France elected Le Pen, pandora’s box may be opened and there may be no coming back for France.
He almost certainly isn’t, in his heart, a fascist. But if he increases state power and wields against the left in a time of crisis, what difference do his personal values make?
“This is why people on the left are so exasperated with centrists”
Are you suggesting that Macron is a centrist? Because I don’t follow.
Is he not a centrist?
He says he’s centre but he’s not.
What is he in your opinion?
Well solid right. I don’t think there is true centrism in France anymore (was there ever? I don’t know). There is no centre left, only centre right.
Centrism in France was always a lighter right, the only chance of real centrism was with Macron for his 1st election and we have seen how it went
Right of center corpofinancial stooge.
IDK, I’m pretty far center and I am absolutely opposed to abuse of power and execution by cop and definitely open to heavy handed actions to get shit done…
How do evil stay in power? By having an even worse evil as the only alternative.
Same for the Imperium in Warhammer 40k.
Same for Macron in France.
Might be a bad idea to mention “cutting off” anything to rioting French
Huge gap in the market for guillotines rn if you ask me.
I hear KitchenAid is looking to expand its cutlery department anyways
Macron trying to go full fascist I see.
The scary thing is that he seemed more reasonable than Le Pen.
well, he is, but it’s like saying spastic colon is less awful than leprosy
well, it is, but it’s like saying EA is less awful than Monsanto
Well they are, but that’s like saying Kanye is less awful than Lost Prophets.
Well, he is, but that’s saying Macron is less seagull than Le Pen. Wait…
At least it’s straight out of Erdogans playbook
“When (social media) becomes a tool for organising or for attempting to kill, it’s a real problem,” Macron said.
One of these things is not like the other.
By that argument, the police should be banned from using radio.
Indeed Macron is most definitely not a tool.
Honestly, this is “danger to the people” territory. He needs to be deposed.
Unfortunately all the possible candidates that can come next will be worse
shit like this is why the Fediverse and Tor are necessary
Also true peer to peer social networks that don’t even need the internet to run. Each phone can become a node wirelessly communicating with nearby nodes. It would have to be implemented well to handle the volume of people who could be in range during protests, but people with physical access to each other shouldn’t need social media websites to communicate.
It’s just a matter of whether that infrastructure needs to be created, disseminated, or enabled. I’m guessing France would probably need step 2 since this kind of thing has likely already been written after similar tactics were used in other areas, like Hong Kong.
HK’ers were using an Open Garden app called Firechat which by some coincidence has been discontinued and not updated since 2018.
There’s always walkie-talkies
Isn’t Element (Matrix) something like that?
Matrix uses federated servers
Another example of the capitalism -> fascism pipeline
By the end of Macron’s term, the fascists of RN will be ready to take over. France is in a very dangerous situation.
I expect the far right will take over by the next election or the one after. The left is so out of touch that they will not win, they gave their voters to the far right…
Now days, people are not ashamed to tell you they are racist. RN and other far-right views are considered normal, and presented as such in most media. The left needs to fight on so many fronts, not only gaining back voters and militants, internal pressure, but also fight against an unfair media balance/coverage.
Okay, maybe, but just maybe François Ruffin will get an ok party running. I mean one can dream, right?
I am still highly skeptical that the left will make it (Ruffin or any other). Time will tell us. Even if we get a president from he left in 2027, we all know what happened last time we had a “socialist” president.
Let someone dream ;-)
And what do you mean with the last time we had a socialist president? I mean it might have been underwhelming(?) but all the scare about it went nil. So seriously interested in why you seems to think it will be better with someone from the right (who?) or the extreme right. Or you think the (IMO stupid) two turns election will be the burrow of all the small leftwing parties?
Sorry if I come off as offensive, I’m high on Côtes de Rhône (villages) and I’m off on holidays tomorrow :-)
Cheers
Oh, no. I never implied it would be better if the next president is from the right. I just meant Holland was from the socialist party, but as you said his term as president was underwhelming. If the next president is from the left, I hope he/she makes a real effort to help this country and it’s people (education, public services, ecology and tax the rich !).
Oh! We`re going the third world warlord route here I see!
Genius idea. Give people more reason to be outside.
The intent is to make it harder for people to organize effectively in real time, not worry about people getting off the couch.
And if you suddenly take away one of the social opiates, what do you expect to happen? Especially if you see the official channels say that it was due to the protests.
They get mad at the protestors?
Lol, only if they are bootlickers.
He doesn’t think people will be able to find the protest sites without Facebook 😂
Oh? Whatever happened to freedom of speech and “protecting it at any cost”? What a bunch of fucking hypocrites.
Freedom when it suits them.
Hey they never promised liberty. Just liberté, whatever that is.
Sounds very not totalitarian
Holy crap. Macron was never my favorite politician, but he’s sure been speedrunning authoritarian talking points lately, hasn’t he?
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He takes Erdogan as an example. We have seen in Turkey that this method has reduced the number of protests. This behavior makes it habit . It leads to a shift to an authoritarian rule. The consequences may be more severe than the protests in the long run. You need to think a lot.
Yeah, anything except dealing with the problems seems the way it goes.
Wow, this is exactly what was done in Hong Kong. The situation there was a little more serious though.
10 years ago the west was criticizing authoritarian regimes for censoring online content and blocking internet services. In the last few years, some of that has started to creep in here as well.
On one end of the spectrum, a government can refrain from any interference and allow disinformation to destabilize our society. On the other end, a government has absolute power over what you can and can’t do or say online. Where’s the happy middle ground, and how do we codify that into law in a way that can’t be abused? I feel like that’s a question we’re currently dealing with as a society.
I think the middle ground would be people thinking critically and not blindly trusting anything. It’s the mindset of ‘accept as truth what comes from this authority’, be the authority Alex Jones or Obama, that mindset needs to go.
That sounds great in theory, but people generally don’t have the time and qualifications to check every statement that gets made on news sites. This is exactly why fact checking sites like Snopes.com exist. People look to trusted authorities to examine political/scientific claims because they don’t have the means to.
The people writing the stories certainly have the time and should have the qualifications…
Or someone could be a content farm making a quick buck off fake headlines that trigger people. If not the government, who will stop them?
I agree there should be legislation in place to be able to take actions against those kinds of people, but at the same time the government isn’t the internet police.
Yep they’re blaming everything from bank failures to riots on social media. They’re framing it as dangerous for people in supposed democracies to communicate with each other. Really don’t like the road this goes down
