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    They sure are keen on referendums… (they're not so keen on grammar...)



    Photo taken in Le Puy en Velay, from this site (serious incidents there 10 days ago): https://www.lamontagne.fr/puy-en-vel..._13070487.html

    Some Gilets Jaunes burnt down the Préfecture there (below), with some people trapped inside while a group of Gilets Jaunes were blocking the access of the building to the fire brigade, these people were eventually rescued. Could be the farmers, the more radical of them I mean, them and the fishermen are not adverse to vandalising and/or setting ablaze official buildings, particularly tax offices, about 10 have been "done" since the GJ movement started. In Poitiers, police had to evacuate the whole tax office building (250 employees) as the GJ were threatening to storm it or set it on fire even, they were shouting: "Fascists! Collaborators!" (however, they just usually put a few tyres on piles of manure outside a town hall or préfecture/sous-préfecture and have a giant bonfire - they do like to set on fire motorway toll booths too). They are used to setting ablaze official buildings on France and would have found the perfect opportunity to do that in Le Puy-en-Velay, a small quiet town in central France with most probably a low police presence that day.

    https://twitter.com/Limportant_fr/status/1068957984766738432
    Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 12-12-2018, 00:29.

    Comment


      The death toll in the Strasbourg attack is now three.

      The suspect, who is still at large, has a long police record (23 arrests and multiple stints in jail during which he is thought to have been "radicalised") in France, Germany and Switzerland. The French police attempted to arrest him for burglary and attempted murder yesterday morning, but he was not at home (it is unclear if that was what triggered the attack). He was (unsurprisingly) on the radar of the security services and in particular was the subject of an order that allowed for on-going surveillance of his movements (though it doesn't appear that such surveillance was under way recently).

      His father and two brothers have been taken into custody. Strasbourg is in an official state of mourning; the Christmas Market is closed and all demonstrations have been cancelled. The people who were ordered to shelter in place last night were allowed to leave starting at 1h30 this morning.

      A number of right wing personalities have already taken advantage of the attack to bash Macron and the security services.

      Comment


        The rebranded FN in the lead for the European elections

        https://twitter.com/europeelects/status/1073622912324812802?s=21

        If you think that is bad, wait for the results from 18-34 year olds

        https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1073709432985530368
        Last edited by ursus arctos; 14-12-2018, 22:58.

        Comment


          No change then since the September poll (chart in my post # 943) for the Front National. The FN recorded 25% in the 2014 Euros, and 21% last year in the Presidentials’ 1st round, and only about 10% in last year’s GE.

          What’s more worrying maybe is the rise of Debout La France (DLF), 8% (4% in the 2014 Euros; 5% in the 1st round of last yr’s Presidentials). They’re not as vile as the FN but not that far off. Maverick leader Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, ex UMP (mainstream right), has really drifted to the far right in recent years and is now close to Marine Le Pen, since last year’s Presidentials (he endorsed her in the 2nd round, for the first time ever). DLF is small (only 1 MP, Dupont-Aignan and 1 Euro MP, 1 mayor and 5 Dpt/County councillors for the whole country) but have been gaining traction these last 2 years. DLF aren't much politically but because Dupont-Aignan is an oddball and puts himself about, the media courts him and he receives significant media exposure.

          If there's a Gilets Jaunes list, it could eat into Le Pen’s votes but who knows, their 35,789 leaders say they will run one but they need to stop squabbling and get their act together first. Macron's concessions on Monday will have weakened them anyway but they could still get 5% voting intention maybe if they manage to unify, pick media-savvy clever leaders and put together a coherent manifesto.

          Incidentally, Debout La France is the party of Farage’s new-ish girlfriend, Frenchwoman Laure Ferrari (Farage has been estranged from his German wife for a year or so I think), she met him in in Strasbourg when she was a waitress there, he hired her as his assistant (so going to Strasbourg a few days a month wasn’t that bad Nigel, was it? We didn’t hear you moan about that one). She had a murky role during the Brexit campaign and was involved in the campaign via an obscure think thank called the "Institut de réflexion pour la démocratie directe en Europe" (IDDE) but not much trace of it now.

          https://www.standard.co.uk/news/poli...-a3458646.html

          Last November the Electoral Commission announced it was opening an investigation into whether Ukip had accepted "impermissible donations" from IDDE and the Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe (ADDE), the political party it is affiliated to. It followed an audit by the European Parliament which concluded that ADDE and IDDE used EU grant funding for the benefit of Ukip in breach of its rules.

          Comment


            La France Insoumise’s (LFI) big freefall continues then. I pointed out a few weeks ago how Mélenchon has really cocked up since last year’s elections. Mélenchon is an astute politician and should really have capitalised on both the current discontent, frustration and on the big current void on the left. I think that not being able to rely anymore on controversial-but-effective PR guru Sophia Chikirou as communication adviser (the woman who "made him" - without her: 11%; with her: 19.5%, she pacified and "civilised" him shall we say) has been negative for him, he’s been back to his publicly unpleasant self since last year (he's much pleasanter in private by all accounts). Officially anyway as apparently, they are now very close, in private.

            Time for Méluche to go really, the future of La France Insoumise looks grim with him. The party lost a very winnable by-election about 3 weeks ago in the Évry two-round by-election (south of Paris, by-election held to replace Catalunya-bound Manuel Valls who'd been an MP there for a good while). This Évry constituency, mostly a left/centre left area, was eminently winnable for LFI and the main man himself said that it would be a good test for the party as the LFI candidate, Farida Amrani, only lost the constituency by 139 votes vs Manuel Valls in last year’s General Elections (Valls narrowly won the seat: 51.7% for Valls vs 48.3% for Amrani). This time, Amrani only scored 41%, reflecting LFI’s falling support.

            Mélenchon has done very well to create LFI from scratch (as a continuation of the Parti de Gauche that he founded in 2009 after leaving the Socialist Party) and to nearly take it to the 2nd round of the Presidentials last year (just short of 600,000 votes), but he is far too autocratic and increasingly contested within his own movement (internal crisis about 10 days ago, a few France Insoumise big guns flounced off). Time for him to take a step back and focus on the Marseille mayorship (Municipals in 2020), plenty to do over there, he can build on his local knowledge and grassroots support as a current MP for one of Marseille’s constituencies.

            If they played their cards cleverly, La France Insoumise could be the main opposition force for years to come, that may mean forming alliances with other left-wing movements such as the Greens and Benoît Hamon's Génération.s party, not ideal but that’s the only way they can progressively get right to the top. La France Insoumise, the Greens and Hamon could coalesce around an alternative Left project for instance. It shouldn’t be too difficult to tap into the current frustration and disenchantment, harness all that anger and take it from there. There is a real vacuum on the left atm, the Socialists have gone AWOL, but generally speaking there is a big vacuum in the opposition and a powerful left coalition could do well, the mainstream right is non-existent at the minute too. LFI can capitalise on this mess but if they soften their rhetoric a bit and become less Eurosceptic.

            The future for La France Insoumise is possibly someone like Manon Aubry (Tax Justice & Inequalities Senior Advocacy Officer at Oxfam France and a lecturer in human rights at Sciences Po) who will be heading the LFI list next May. Young, Europhile, green, hot on tax evasion etc. She and others could really regenerate the party. La France Insoumise has entered a dead-end phase and has been stuck in a rut since May 2017, they’ve lost over 3 million sympathisers, time to stop the rot and I think her being nominated to head the LFI list is a very good move.

            https://twitter.com/M_Aubry_/status/1071393605003198464

            Comment


              The number of Gilets Jaunes willing to come out continues to fall.

              As of mid-afternoon, the country-wide estimate is half of that last week at the same time, which was itself a fraction of earlier turnouts. Numbers in Paris look to have fallen even more sharply.

              PF, I’m partial to Aubry in part because we hold the same degree. Mélenchon has to go (or at least step way back) if LFI is going to have a relevant future.

              Comment


                Paris.

                December 15, 2018.

                I was eating my evening ramen noodles in Japantown. It was dark, and it was raining. The only light was that of the weak neon glow of the shop displays, only just about permeating through the incessant rain. Without warning, 1000 men clad in flourescent yellow marched down our narrow street, squeezing and burrowing their way, as if they were one, around a topography of vehicles, post boxes and protuding restaurant extensions, the latter of which had been hastily tacked on to the cityscape over the years. A yellow smoke bomb was set off, imparting the wet air with a burning smell. Damp burning, mixed with the flavourful steam of boiling noodles. Who knows what these men wanted. All we knew was that this whole thing started due to the latest planetary climate tax imposed by the President of the Republic. The men continued, shouting angrily about the police, some with their faces covered. The Japanese man running the ramen store, jaded from years in this city, stoically continued to go about his business, barking out orders to his army in the kitchen, "Kare udon futatsu onegaishimasu!" I continued to slurp my noodles. It would pass. It always passed. Just another day in the city. I chewed pensively on the noodles I had just slurped. Next week I must carry out more Anderson-Darling tests. Testing populations for normality. But what's normal in this mixed up world?
                Last edited by anton pulisov; 16-12-2018, 12:27.

                Comment


                  Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                  The Japanese man running the ramen store
                  He wasn’t Japanese but most probably Chinese (the Japanese run the 80 or so posh Japanese restaurants - and even there, a good 40% are actually Chinese-run or predominantly employ Chinese staff), https://www.caminteresse.fr/economie...hinois-117161/

                  You were in the Rue Sainte-Anne area so the man really shouldn’t be jaded, a few demos occasionally go through there but not that many or they are very small. He wants to live round République or Bastille then he can moan.

                  400 Gilets Jaunes congregated outside of the nearby Opéra yesterday, and their 3,101 leaders gave a series of mini speeches there:

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqPlOyD7gU&t=132s


                  Un homme déguisé en roi se tient devant l'Opéra Garnier où des centaines de Gilets jaunes se sont rassemblés dans la matinée du samedi 15 décembre 2018, à Paris


                  https://twitter.com/LPLdirect/status/1073868216324247553

                  Comment


                    He was Japanese. They were all Japanese in this one. It's on Rue d'Argenteuil

                    Comment


                      Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                      He was Japanese. They were all Japanese in this one. It's on Rue d'Argenteuil
                      Fair enough, not many Japanese restos run by actual Japanese people in the Rue St-Anne area but there are a few indeed.

                      Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                      The number of Gilets Jaunes willing to come out continues to fall.

                      As of mid-afternoon, the country-wide estimate is half of that last week at the same time, which was itself a fraction of earlier turnouts. Numbers in Paris look to have fallen even more sharply.

                      PF, I’m partial to Aubry in part because we hold the same degree. Mélenchon has to go (or at least step way back) if LFI is going to have a relevant future.
                      Manon Aubry is new to politics so we obviously need to know more about her but she could embody the new direction taken by La France Insoumise who needs to be more inclusive and far less Eurosceptic to stop the rot and start making headway. (Mélenchon only met her 3 months ago in September in a Paris café where he and Manuel Bompard, his campaign director in the 2017 Presidentials, grilled her for 6 hours. She must have impressed as Mélenchon has given her the huge responsibility of leading the European LFI list (Bompard, 32, is Number 2 on the list).

                      Mélenchon must have sensed that LFI is going nowhere and needs regenerating and rejuvenating. For a political novice, Aubry certainly is popular on the left, she was courted by Benoît Hamon too, for her expertise on subjects such as tax evasion and inequality, but she's well aware that Hamon is a lame duck so there's no point backing the wrong horse. If she ever becomes an LFI leader, I hope she sets about widening the party’s appeal and its positioning, LFI needs to make alliances with other left-wing parties, they need to be more consensual (a dirty word but this is France, multi-party two-round system and all that, pacts are necessary, it's only way the French Left will manage to get back in power reasonably quickly). She will therefore have go down the painful route of trying to unite the Lefts. She’s probably too young though for 2022 (she’ll be 32 only), but who knows, everyone said that about Macron too and that Sebastian Kurz is young too. She’ll have the more radical LFI older guard to fight off, particularly high profile people like Clémentine Autain, François Ruffin and Alexis Corbière.

                      I just hope for LFI’s sake that when the issue of Mélenchon’s succession comes (probably at least 1 year before the 2022 Presidentials), they don’t go for Alexis Corbière, the party’s spokesperson and Mélenchon’s main lieutenant, he’s very divisive and the same sort of firebrand as Mélenchon. I’m sure he’ll try to rebrand himself as a sensible, open-minded politician friend of the media etc. as Mélenchon did for the 2017 Presidentials but not sure that’ll be enough to fool people. Below in the clip is the unhinged Corbière during the police search of La France Insoumise's HQs 2 months ago: (he’s the bearded nutter in the melee who’s screaming like a banshee at the black police officer as the La France Insoumise crew tried, and managed, to stop the police from searching the place, the police duly left without finishing their job. I’m not sure though that these revolutionary methods – there have been other unsavoury episodes - have gone down well with La France Insoumise’s more moderate voters and sympathisers, probably not judging by their slump - down to 9-10% from 20% in the Presidentials, it’s rather pathetic considering they should be on 20-25% as Macron’s weak).

                      https://twitter.com/Qofficiel/status/1052262279998255105
                      Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 16-12-2018, 15:39.

                      Comment


                        The "Mariannes" were a piece of performance art by Deborah de Robertis, who has previously disrobed at the Orsay, Louvre, Lourdes, etc.

                        PF, I tend to think of LFI as a Mélenchon personality cult. Does it really need to have a future after he steps aside? Or would it be a mistake to have to rebuild party structures and the like?

                        There is a general trend in French politics for "parties" to become vehicles for a single charismatic leader, which I find disturbing, in part because I experienced something very similar first hand in Italy.

                        Somewhat interestingly, the ownership of Japanese restaurants in New York has the same dynamic as that in Paris. Neighbourhood joints are almost all Chinese-operated (though sushi chefs are generally Japanese), and increasingly Chinese-owned (the NYT did an interesting piece in the last two years about the relative margins in Chinese and Japanese neighbourhood restaurants (those at the Japanese places being much higher)). High end restaurants (which can run more than USD 400 a head for dinner) are all Japanese-owned and operated.

                        Comment


                          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                          The "Mariannes" were a piece of performance art by Deborah de Robertis, who has previously disrobed at the Orsay, Louvre, Lourdes, etc.

                          PF, I tend to think of LFI as a Mélenchon personality cult. Does it really need to have a future after he steps aside? Or would it be a mistake to have to rebuild party structures and the like?

                          There is a general trend in French politics for "parties" to become vehicles for a single charismatic leader, which I find disturbing, in part because I experienced something very similar first hand in Italy.
                          Never heard of performance artist Deborah de Robertis, she seems to enjoy going round Paris (and Lourdes) starkers, can't see much wrong with that mind, especially Lourdes.

                          https://twitter.com/D_derobertis/status/1039126577035071489

                          Yep, LFI is Mélenchon's baby. There is indeed a personality cult but it's fleeting, it only lasted 6 months really, the time it took Sophia Chikirou to rebrand him, so between Dec. 2016 and the April-May 2017 presidential elections. He started on ~11% (his score at the 2012 Presidentials) at the beginning of the campaign in Sept. 2016 and finished in April on 19.5%. His rise mirrored Corbyn's in a way, like when Momentum started for Corbyn and he shot up in the polls. It also coincided with T. May massively cocking up with the pensioners in May 2017, when she came out with her "social care revolution" for pensioners & the elderly, measures to make wealthier people pay more for their care (the so-called dementia tax) and the ditching of the sacrosanct triple lock. Cue huge backlash. She massively pissed off the pensioners and slumped in the polls. The strong and Stable lady is not for turning but she quickly caved in there and immediately axed her plans. A month later, she recorded the highest Tory score since Thatcher in 1983. Simples.

                          Does it really need to have a future after he steps aside? Or would it be a mistake to have to rebuild party structures and the like?

                          I think the Left's many parties need to fuse and take the fight to the right, whether it's with La France Insoumise or another major left-wing party, it doesn't matter, it needs to happen. I think that if LFI manages to tone down their misplaced and counter-productive anti-EU stance, they have a future. I mean, Mélenchon's not terribly popular and he came within a whisker of making it to the 2nd round last year, so with a better all-round leader, I do think they have a future but they'll need to make a pact with the Socialists (about 5%) and Hamon (also about 5%), or one of the 2, otherwise the Left could be left in the wilderness for a good while, it took the French left 27 years to be back in charge before Mitterrand managed to be elected (so, from 1954 to 1981), and he only achieved that by forming a coalition with the main three left-wing parties, especially with the Communists. LFI has a good electoral base to build on, between 4-7 million voters, I think they can capitalise on it if they pick the right leader, i.e not firebrands like Corbière. It's a very young party (not even 3 yrs' old) with no local presence, too young, just a few MPs (17) so there wouldn't be much to rebuild, on the contrary it needs building. The direction would need tweaking though, it can't carry on being anti-EU, it's just not viable for a French left-wing party, outside of the hard right there's no real appetite in France for leaving the EU (yeah, maybe a couple of million people on the hard left but it's comparatively low), Frexiters only manage 30% at best in polls.

                          There is a general trend in French politics for "parties" to become vehicles for a single charismatic leader, which I find disturbing, in part because I experienced something very similar first hand in Italy.

                          It's the elevation of the presidential function and pomp to ridiculous heights that does that, it was wanted thus by De Gaulle after the omnishambles of the 4th Republic (huge instability, country was ungovernable, hence 5th Republic in 1958), https://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...h-republic.htm
                          Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 16-12-2018, 16:31.

                          Comment


                            What proportion of this Gilet Jaunes bullshit is angry Communardism, what proportion is sneaky Tea-partyism , and what proportion is just good old fashioned French Bollocksology?

                            Comment


                              Those aren’t exclusive categories.

                              Meanwhile,

                              https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1074416522746097664?s=21

                              Comment


                                Not sure it’ll cost the state that much. Macron's currently meeting France’s biggest companies (the process started Wednesday, he saw 100 CEOs, another 200 to see I think, via the Prime minister this time I believe) to get them to pay part of, or all of, the €12bn or so the package of measures he announced on Monday will cost, he’s putting pressure on them to do their bit and cough up, and rightly so, which was the point I made in my ranty post #1038. (He did sthg similar last year just as he arrived when there was a €5bn hole to fill, caused by some Hollande cock-up or other, can’t remember exactly what these €5bn were about but the companies did cough up).

                                https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/emman...t-1586849.html

                                Emmanuel Macron a réuni mercredi soir à l'Élysée une centaine de chefs d'entreprises pour les mobiliser en faveur du pouvoir d'achat. Aucune annonce de mesure spécifique favorable aux salariés n'est issue de la réunion.
                                The big CAC40 companies owe the gvt, essentially for this reason: the CICE (cf my posts on this CICE, this one and this one). Carrefour alone for instance has received nearly €3bn in 5 years in CICE payments but instead of recruiting (which was the point of the CICE), they’re laying off thousands of people (ditto Sanofi, the big banks etc.):

                                https://www.ft.com/content/10904142-...0-9c0ad2d7c5b5

                                Carrefour will cut thousands of jobs in its home market of France and launch a new partnership with Chinese groups Tencent and Yonghui, as part of an overhaul designed to boost growth under new chief executive Alexandre Bompard. Shares in the company rose 4.7 per cent on Tuesday morning, after Mr Bompard said the group plans €2bn in cost savings by 2020.

                                It will cut 2,400 jobs in France, and close 273 stores it bought from Spanish discounter Dia in 2014. The company said some of the stores “are experiencing great difficulties because they have not adapted to their catchment area since their conversion to Carrefour banners”. Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer by revenues, said it wants to become the global leader in food ecommerce, and is targeting €5bn in annual online food sales by 2022.

                                To do this it will invest €2.8bn in digital offerings and will roll out a single ecommerce platform in France, Carrefour.fr. It also announced the “potential acquisition” of a stake in Carrefour China by Tencent — the Chinese tech giant — and Yonghui, a retailer that specialises in fresh food and is part-owned by Tencent. Carrefour also wants to improve the quality of its food and is targeting €5bn in sales of organic products by 2022.
                                Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 16-12-2018, 22:38.

                                Comment


                                  John "by my reckoning" Lichfield (Twitter handle: "Veteran correspondent on all things French and European") may finally have got it, just as the protests are petering out and the Gilets Jaunes packing up. Alle-fucking-luia, seems like a little light bulb has pinged on over his head.

                                  https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1073900784956440582

                                  but violence started in early afternoon last week when ultra-left and ultra-right groups piled in.

                                  Yup John, just like on Nov. 24th, on Dec. 1st and on Dec. 8th despite what you repeatedly wrote and tweeted (although, it slowly started to dawn on you last weekend that the GJ may not have initiated and caused that much violence in Paris overall, I’ll give you that). You’ve only got "3 métros de retard" as they say in Paris where you’ve only been living for 22 years.

                                  Comment


                                    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                    Those aren’t exclusive categories.

                                    Meanwhile,

                                    https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1074416522746097664?s=21
                                    Holy shit. France is so fucked in the next recession. This will get very messy.

                                    Comment


                                      There seem to be hundreds of Japanese restaurants in the Paris region, but none of them are very good or authentic.

                                      There are one or two decently priced ones run by Japanese (most of the other Japanese run places are expensive). Otherwise, the best noodles are the Pho places in the 13th run by the Vietnamese.

                                      Comment


                                        Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                                        There seem to be hundreds of Japanese restaurants in the Paris region, but none of them are very good or authentic.

                                        There are one or two decently priced ones run by Japanese (most of the other Japanese run places are expensive). Otherwise, the best noodles are the Pho places in the 13th run by the Vietnamese.
                                        Indeed, that bit - hundreds of Japanese restaurants - is mentioned in the link I put in my post #1059 (the vast majority aren’t run by Japanese people).

                                        https://www.caminteresse.fr/economie...hinois-117161/

                                        Depuis près d’une dizaine d’années, les restaurants japonais font fureur dans la capitale. Selon l’ambassade du Japon, ils sont près de 700 à Paris. Pourtant, seulement 10% d’entre eux seraient réellement tenus par des cuisiniers japonais.
                                        I don’t know about "none of them being very good" (you seem to have found a good one on Rue d’Argenteuil) but there are plenty of fakes and dodgy ones. It’s due to the "sushi mania" of the 2000s that swept France (far more than the UK), high margins and easy food to order from the big food wholesalers and suppliers (Metro, Davigel etc.) so before you could say "Kare udon futatsu onegaishimasu!", you had a rash of cheap "Japanese" places opening all over Paris and France, many of them substandard or tourist traps and as central Paris is very touristic, there’s no shortage of dubious restos of all types. It’s like anywhere touristic, as a rule of thumb it’s best to pick untouristic neighbourhoods to eat or if you eat in a touristic area, make sure you do your homework beforehand (or ask the locals).

                                        For good value and informal, often offbeat restos in Paris, the site https://www.lespetitestables.com/ is good, ("Le guide des (vrais) bons restos parisiens autour de 10 €"). This page https://www.lespetitestables.com/tous-nos-restos/ lets you choose your area (choisir ton coin), or your style (choisir ton camp).

                                        Since you are a fan of Japanese food, what about trying that Japanese crêperie (at 2’33 in the clip below) in the Rue Sainte-Anne area? The "Tuna and pork pancake" crêpe looks particularly yummy… Why don’t you go there anton, order a sample of their subtle crêpes and report back to us?!!!

                                        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TxY...youtu.be&t=152

                                        Comment


                                          Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
                                          Holy shit. France is so fucked in the next recession. This will get very messy.
                                          When you read the article in French and find out about this 2019 budget, it’s a little less dramatic than "France will be so fucked": https://www.lesechos.fr/politique-so...at-2230398.php

                                          I’ve heard that "France is fucked" antienne all my life, in France and abroad even when I was a teenager I remember hearing that (it’s not just a foreign thing of course, plenty of homegrown career declinists in France, they’ve turned it into a mini industry, I’d say it started for good in the late 1990s with the 24/7 media, the Internet etc. I remember writing a long post on this on OFT in a discussion on the main French declinists, Éric Zemmour, Renaud Camus etc.).

                                          How the next recession would finish France, how high unemployment since the 1980s would eventually take its toll and be France’s downfall, how industrial action and protests would fuck the country, how the chienlit would propel the Front National into power, how a Frexit was inevitable and was happening anytime soon, how France was now the sick man of Europe etc. (eg the Daily Telegraph in 2014: Eight charts showing where it all went wrong for France. From chronic unemployment, to the mess in its public finances, here are the numbers illustrating how France became the "sick man" of Europe)... It’s asinine babbling for the most part. Propaganda too, popular with Brexiters and Frexiters alike, plenty of vested interest in there.

                                          When you live there and/or know the country well, you quickly learn to take that self-interested strain of declinism with a pinch of salt while acknowledging that there’s a degree of truth in that, obvs. (high gvt debt, high ratios etc. we all know the key indicators). But then again, you could change a few words and names in the above paragraph, replace France with a comparable country/economy and nobody would notice the difference.
                                          Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 17-12-2018, 21:57.

                                          Comment


                                            PF, are you somehow unfamiliar with Berbaslug's oeuvre?

                                            Or Anton's, for that matter.
                                            Last edited by ursus arctos; 17-12-2018, 22:16.

                                            Comment


                                              I've yet to go to a crap Japanese restaurant in Paris. I've managed to avoid them all so far. They have fairly obvious warning signs. Similarly to shit Irish pubs, they usually have obviously made-up names like, "Osaka Kyoto Sushi" or "Fukushima Lamen". Spelling ramen with an L is a dead giveaway.

                                              Of course, one should never eat in the touristy areas, as in any city. I was once accosted by random tourists in downtown Paris who demanded I tell them where they could buy crepes. I told them that they were out of season.

                                              Comment


                                                Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                                PF, are you somehow unfamiliar with Berbaslug's oeuvre?.
                                                I tend to get mixed up with his periods, he was in his Blue one last time he made sense IIRC.

                                                Comment


                                                  Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                                                  I've yet to go to a crap Japanese restaurant in Paris. I've managed to avoid them all so far. They have fairly obvious warning signs. Similarly to shit Irish pubs, they usually have obviously made-up names like, "Osaka Kyoto Sushi" or "Fukushima Lamen". Spelling ramen with an L is a dead giveaway.
                                                  I'm disappointed that you don't seem prepared to take up my challenge in post #1070, you flocon de neige. It looks like such a lovely Japanese crêperie, go on, give it a go.

                                                  Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                                                  I was once accosted by random tourists in downtown Paris who demanded I tell them where they could buy crepes. I told them that they were out of season.
                                                  You cruel thing, fobbing off kind innocent tourists, especially the Japanese and their Paris Syndrome, poor things. You're so callous, you're defo a right Parigot now. I bet you go to bed with a Parisian smirk on your satisfied face and dream of the tourists you've pissed off in the métro, and instead of counting sheep, you tot up the number of tourists you've been rude to and have sent on their way in totally the wrong direction, preferably towards the no-go areas.

                                                  FFS we need those tourists, even the foul ones, France is fucked without them, don't scare them away, be kind and welcoming to them, entertain them even, I don't know, wear a béret, a string of onions on a marinière, do something positive bon sang.

                                                  Rowan Atkinson was right about the French and their crêpes though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dy-...=youtu.be&t=93
                                                  Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 17-12-2018, 23:13.

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                                                    There was a funny Gilets Jaunes leader (for Brittany) in the French news tonight, one Jacline Mouraud, weird and wonderful. Mind, she plays the accordion like a diva, I'm dead jealous (at 28 seconds here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pXT...re=youtu.be&t=), she's a hypnotherapist and ectoplasm expert, this YT bit is WTFish. She is one of the Sensibles too. Her Facebook clips have been viewed millions of times, the first one – this rant – over 10m times. I do hope they keep her.

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