I love how the article seems to equate “failure of the state” with police running out of ammo and not ending the violence quickly enough. Not the decades of policies that led to thousands of people feeling like they need to destroy infrastructure.
I worked in local television news media for a decade in the early 2000’s.
It’s worse than that: we just don’t even teach these people how to be actual journalists.
I remember working in production, catching a new, state-level important story, with court documents proving as much. I printed it and put it on the desk of several reporters. The producer refused to run the story because they “didn’t see the story on the AP Newswire.” In other words they refused to run the story until a major network ran it first. Three weeks later they ran the story after someone else ran it first.
Recall, I worked in production. I wasn’t a newsie. I had better news instincts than these fucking clowns who went to school for it.
It’s just rubes saying “yes daddy I’ll do whatever you tell me” all the way down.
journalists don’t get paid very much AFAIK, so it’s not a position who is attracting talent. that’s why we see a whole fucking lot of mediocre news articles who fail to comprehend what’s actually important.
that and because it’s not a very “respectable” position in the eyes of the public. have you ever met a child who said “i want to be a journalist” and their parents were joyous? i haven’t. if anything at all, you can expect your parents to give you a lecture of how it’s not a “good” job, you won’t “earn any bread” with it.
The state views inability to control it’s populace as a “failure” because the states we have enabled to become our modern governance have stopped actually giving a shit about their actual constituents and consistently roll out the red carpet for the rich and corrupt. Loss of control is a failure, real democracy is a failure. The real issue is they clearly (and the media as well) don’t have the same goals as the people they lord over.
They have never had the same goals nor given a shit. This is nothing new. This piece of writing is almost 100 years old now:
What is it that every one wants most in life? What do you want most?
After all, we are all the same under our skins. Whoever you be — man or woman, rich or poor, aristocrat or tramp, white, yellow, red or black, of whatever land, nationality, or religion — we are all alike in feeling cold and hunger, love and hate; we all fear disaster and disease, and try to keep away from harm and death.
What you most want out of life, what you fear most, that also is true, in the main, of your neighbor.
Learned men have written big books, many of them, on sociology, psychology, and many other ‘ologies’, to tell you what you want, but no two of those books ever agree. And yet I think that you know very well without them what you want.
They have studied and written and speculated so much about this, for them so difficult a question, that you, the individual, have become entirely lost in their philosophies. And they have at last come to the conclusion that you, my friend, don’t count at all. What’s important, they say, is not you, but ‘the whole’, all the people together. This ‘whole’ they call ‘society’, ‘the commonwealth’, or ‘the State’, and the wiseacres have actually decided that it makes no difference if you, the individual, are miserable so long as ‘society’ is all right. Somehow they forget to explain how ‘society’ or ‘the whole’ can be all right if the single members of it are wretched.
So they go on spinning their philosophic webs and producing thick volumes to find out where you really enter in the scheme of things called life, and what you really want.
But you yourself know very well what you want, and so does your neighbor.
You want to be well and healthy; you want to be free, to serve no master, to crawl and humiliate yourself before no man; you want to have well-being for yourself, your family, and those near and dear to you. And not to be harassed and worried by the fear of to-morrow.
You may feel sure that every one else wants the same. So the whole matter seems to stand this way:
You want health, liberty, and well-being. Every one is like yourself in this respect.
Therefore we all seek the same thing in life.
Then why should we not all seek it together, by joint effort, helping each other in it?
Why should we cheat and rob, kill and murder each other, if we all seek the same thing? Aren’t you entitled to the things you want as well as the next man?
Or is it that we can secure our health, liberty, and well-being better by fighting and slaughtering each other?
Or because there is no other way?
Let us look into this.
Does it not stand to reason that if we all want the same thing in life, if we have the same aim, then our interests must also be the same? In that case we should live like brothers, in peace and friendship; we should be good to each other, and help each other all we can.
But you know that it is not at all that way in life. You know that we do not live like brothers. You know that the world is full of strife and war, of misery, injustice, and wrong, of crime, poverty, and oppression.
Why is it that way then?
It is because, though we all have the same aim in life, our interests are different. It is this that makes all the trouble in the world.
Just think it over yourself.
Suppose you want to get a pair of shoes or a hat. You go into the store and you try to buy what you need as reasonably and cheaply as you can. That is your interest. But the store-keeper’s interest is to sell it to you as dearly as he can, because then his profit will be greater. That is because everything in the life we live is built on making a profit, one way or another. We live in a system of profit-making.
Now, it is plain that if we have to make profits out of each other, then our interests cannot be the same. They must be different and often even opposed to each other.
In every country you will find people who live by making a profit out of others. Those who make the biggest profits are rich. Those who cannot make profits are poor. The only people who cannot make any profits are the workers. You can therefore understand that the interests of the workers cannot be the same as the interests of the other people. That is why you will find in every country several classes of people with entirely different interests.
From Now and After by Alexander Berkman. Chapter 1: What Do You Want Out Of Life?
How do police shooting rubber bullets and chemical weapons at protesters make things better?
Protests start peaceful and the violence always starts with the repressive state apparatus trying to quash the protests, and then this provokes rioting and looting from opportunists that want to use the chaos to have fun or get revenge or make some cash.
But the blame lays squarely at the feet of the police.
Because they’re French. It worked for them in the past. They’ve learned that after just protesting fails, you have to escalate and getting rabidly angry is a classic French stereotype for a reason.
I guess not everyone in the protests is for burning down things. However the signal is: we dont need fancy buildings if we got no future. Also one view was school runs so long (with very low time ROI for the pupils) it feels like prison. So i can understand why official buildings may b a valid target.
I love how the article seems to equate “failure of the state” with police running out of ammo and not ending the violence quickly enough. Not the decades of policies that led to thousands of people feeling like they need to destroy infrastructure.
They’re citing a mayor whose town hall got burned down
Media is complicit with Epstein class
I worked in local television news media for a decade in the early 2000’s.
It’s worse than that: we just don’t even teach these people how to be actual journalists.
I remember working in production, catching a new, state-level important story, with court documents proving as much. I printed it and put it on the desk of several reporters. The producer refused to run the story because they “didn’t see the story on the AP Newswire.” In other words they refused to run the story until a major network ran it first. Three weeks later they ran the story after someone else ran it first.
Recall, I worked in production. I wasn’t a newsie. I had better news instincts than these fucking clowns who went to school for it.
It’s just rubes saying “yes daddy I’ll do whatever you tell me” all the way down.
journalists don’t get paid very much AFAIK, so it’s not a position who is attracting talent. that’s why we see a whole fucking lot of mediocre news articles who fail to comprehend what’s actually important.
that and because it’s not a very “respectable” position in the eyes of the public. have you ever met a child who said “i want to be a journalist” and their parents were joyous? i haven’t. if anything at all, you can expect your parents to give you a lecture of how it’s not a “good” job, you won’t “earn any bread” with it.
The state views inability to control it’s populace as a “failure” because the states we have enabled to become our modern governance have stopped actually giving a shit about their actual constituents and consistently roll out the red carpet for the rich and corrupt. Loss of control is a failure, real democracy is a failure. The real issue is they clearly (and the media as well) don’t have the same goals as the people they lord over.
They have never had the same goals nor given a shit. This is nothing new. This piece of writing is almost 100 years old now:
From Now and After by Alexander Berkman. Chapter 1: What Do You Want Out Of Life?
Available to read or download in multiple formats, for free, here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-berkman-what-is-communist-anarchism
I would love to know how those people think destroying infrastructure will make things better for them. Especially with presidential elections in May.
How do police shooting rubber bullets and chemical weapons at protesters make things better?
Protests start peaceful and the violence always starts with the repressive state apparatus trying to quash the protests, and then this provokes rioting and looting from opportunists that want to use the chaos to have fun or get revenge or make some cash.
But the blame lays squarely at the feet of the police.
Because they’re French. It worked for them in the past. They’ve learned that after just protesting fails, you have to escalate and getting rabidly angry is a classic French stereotype for a reason.
The teens that are looting and starting fires dgaf about making things better
The implication is that the violence will extend to the people in charge if things don’t change.
If people are willing to destroy things that benefit them to enact change, what will they do to the people who are harming them with their policies?
To Macron? Who will no longer be president in May? Yeah, I’m sure he will fix everything in his lame duck period because he’s scared.
nah dude, read between the lines. it’s obviously a warning to macron and whoever comes after to better do a good job.
Yeah, that’s a nice fantasy.
I guess not everyone in the protests is for burning down things. However the signal is: we dont need fancy buildings if we got no future. Also one view was school runs so long (with very low time ROI for the pupils) it feels like prison. So i can understand why official buildings may b a valid target.
Can’t make any waves now, best just get along… /s