Ever relevant excerpt from a very important speech:
"But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard."
Oh please. Spoiled French kids cosplaying oppression is a tradition as old as time. They did it 68, they did it in 18 and they did it today. It is what is. But watching American Leftists turn into simpering puddles of emotion over it is rather funny.
If I was a young person today I would be terrified. They are a transitional generation but facing a transition that is possibly unprecedented in the history of the human race. They're walking into a world where cognition itself is something you can buy, if you have enough money, without the messy steps of employing people to get it.
What kind of skills make sense in a world like that? What does a young person invest their time in, hoping to live a life with some kind of basic human dignity?
I feel like maybe the basic social contract is breaking in a way that it hasn't in quite a while and the young people today are going to have to be the ones to write a new one.
AI is a problem, but... the climate is evermore increasingly fucked. France just experienced unprecedented drought and wildfires -- and the planet is only getting hotter. If you listen closely to the complaints of the students about "insufficient infrastructure" you'll repeatedly hear about the lack of air conditioning in crowded rooms. That wouldn't be such an issue if it weren't for climate change.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in".
The old men today would rather spit in the eye of a child than see a dollar go to caring for them.
The Me generation is ruining the world and blaming the children for it. They absolve themselves of all culpability and will blame everyone else instead of realizing they created the world that children will be navigating long after they have passed on.
My latest dumb idea is that they will make gasoline with lead again because it would be cheaper and that is what they grew up with using.
Works of fiction show two worlds that could exist once work automated. There the Star Trek version. People prosper across the Federation, resources are shared and distributed equitably.
The there's all the capitalist distopia versions. They are way more plentiful. All of the work is done by computers and robots owned by the wealthy, so they claim all of those resources and profits for themselves because they don't need the poor people anymore.
We are at the point where this is starting to happen, and it's very clear that we are on the capitalist nightmare track. Already, designers, copywriters, translators and many other fields are going away. Look at the subreddits for any of those jobs and it is full of people saying they hate what their job has become, or they are telling stories about how all of their peers have left the field.
I have no idea what sort of options my kids will have even 5 years from now. Right now I am thinking a job that requires a license, or to physically do something to a person or on their property. Right now we don't license computers, a person with a professional license has some protection right now, but I know eventually everything will be one licensed person will be managing the work done by automated processes, but it's a stay of execution.
No dystopia or dictatorship lasts forever. It's not one or the other, it's one then the other. History never arrives anywhere, it doesn't conclude, it's a pendulum constantly swinging back and forth. It always has been and always will be a push and pull.
Perhaps, but I am not immortal, and I assume you aren't either. It's not even a back and forth, it's just a progression of time. There are issues today that will be irrelevant in 30 years and problems then that we cannot even fathom now. But the point is that the Star Trek version won't exist in anyone currently living's lifetime and it's very clear we are going to definitely go through the one where the rich control all aspects of production and keep all the profits for themselves. We are already close to it, but right now they still need us so they pay us to make the money for them. When they don't need us, they will stop paying us. Look at who's controlling all that stuff, I don't forsee those guys being the type that will share.
You don't know that. We won't know how close we are to changing things until well after it happens. There are multiple examples of seemingly impossible victories of the poor over the rich. They are not invulnerable. They can't govern without consent or stand up to a united majority, they will fall to the power of numbers and they know it. They invest a lot of money and effort into making us fight each other instead of fighting them- divide and conquer is the only way in history a minority has sustained control of a majority at scale. The worse things get, the harder it is to disguise the fact that the real fight is rich vs poor and we are almost all on the same team.
Yes but there are times where the pendulum “pauses” for a good long while. E.g., the dark ages lasted 500 years. It would be more accurate to say that history is a complex dynamical system in which strange attractors sometimes pull a culture into a period of relative stability. Just saying that history is a pendulum makes it sound like it’s all homogeneous change. It’s not
The Dark Ages was not a 500 year period where nothing happened and history didn't move forward. The pendulum doesn't stop, ever. You will not find any attempts at control anywhere in the context of human behavior without also finding attempts at resistance.
Where is this cognition for sale? As a somewhat power user of LLM services, it is absolutely baffling to me that any one can think these things are anywhere close to "awake."
Maybe it's because of the bizarre and colossal fuck ups I see them make every single day, or the fact that I'm learning a new language and experiencing the first hand truth that language is just a human abstraction of descriptions of observations and experiences within material reality, this tech is just not "intelligent" in any sense of the word.
It's not creative, it's not ambitious, it's not social, it doesn't have any experience of anything at all.
Direct action is no longer relevant when you can leverage the force of an army from your desktop.
People still carry on about demonstrations as if people in the street are paying attention to anything, and its worth the risk to your person of getting in a scrap with some armed band of thugs. Nah, pointless. When I can exert force behind the scenes, clean out every scrap of data held by the corrupt scum running a local polity, and use that to turn their happy little worlds upside down, now THAT is a demonstration of power.
And they sure as hell aren't going to shrug off that damage by spouting platitudes and some bullshit at a press conference they'll forget by the time they've finished the day. When billions of their dollars and otherwise are siphoned off, the IP they've stolen from hundreds of thousands of bit players is liberated, and every lawyer that racked up billable hours for them is fighting disbarment... That's gonna take decades off their lives to recover from, and THAT is the new form of revolution in an information age.
What struck me about these protests is how quickly the conversation turns to burning schools and clashes with police, while the reasons students are angry become almost secondary. This piece looks at the protests as part of a much bigger problem: an education system that still asks young people to prepare for a future that adults themselves increasingly struggle to describe. I found the tension between AI, insecure work, underfunded schools and the old idea of what education is supposed to achieve especially worth thinking about.
AI is a problem, but... the climate is evermore increasingly fucked. France just experienced unprecedented drought and wildfires -- and the planet is only getting hotter. If you listen closely to the complaints of the students about "insufficient infrastructure" you'll repeatedly hear about the lack of air conditioning in crowded rooms. That wouldn't be such an issue if it weren't for climate change.
It's a pity this uprising does not appear to be looking at the root of the issue. They request generically more investment and more expenditure, which is right and due, but appear unable to understand the budget is already beyond the maximum possible to keep the country growing, increase the debt is basically impossible as interest would start to snowball and the vast majority of expenditure is focused on supporting an unsustainable pension plan. I do hope to hear these guys say very explicitly: rebalance the intergenerational resource transfer, fix the pension plan and readjust the expenditure.
>the budget is already beyond the maximum possible to keep the country growing
The overwhelming majority of profits resulting from that growth are collected by a very small group of ultra rich people. I think it's perfectly logical to not value that as a priority, even if there are consequences. In theory it's extremely important, in practice very few actually share the benefits from it.
This might be technically true but it's largely not really relevant to the question of how to fund government programs. Go add up the total net worth of whoever you're thinking of, then compare it to what a western government spends in terms of its annual budget and unless your inumerate it shouldn't take you long to figure out why there's always been such an emphasis on the middle and upper middle class with respect to the tax base; it's a simple numbers game. That doesn't mean there's no merit in redistributive policies that aim to prevent or offset the kind of excessive wealth disparity that we see today; rather the arguments for that are better reflected in the neo-brandeisian school of thought than any particular budgetary concern. That is to say the goal of such policies are better understood through their effects on social cohesion, institutional stability, and national security instead of populist wishcasting.
>The French authorities have already reached for a familiar explanation. There is a violent minority, some of its members may not even be students, and the so-called "radical left" may be behind it all. Perhaps there really are organised groups taking advantage of the protests. Political parties rarely miss an opportunity to climb aboard someone else’s anger and then claim they invented it.
...
>The protesters’ demands are remarkably concrete: urgently filling vacant teaching posts and providing substitutes, reducing class sizes, renovating deteriorating school buildings, and investing more in teaching and support staff. They are also calling for more humane timetables, better conditions during periods of extreme heat, and equal educational opportunities for students from poorer suburbs and wealthier parts of the cities. Some student organisations are also demanding a fundamental reform, or outright abolition, of Parcoursup, the opaque university admissions system that adds another layer of uncertainty to students’ lives.
Is the author suggesting that these things are related?
> hoping to live a life with some kind of human dignity
I think we are grappling with two issues simultaneously. The first you noted.
The second is elite overproduction. This refers to the phenomenon of a society producing too many individuals with the aspiration of becoming elite that the economy cannot support them all. The stereotypical barista with a bachelors degree…
It turns out that these people are often more pissed off than your average generational poverty case who didn’t expect much more than hardship in life - and they have the education, networks, and skills that actually makes them excellent activists historically.
Eventually everyone looks at each other and realizes it's not ideology, or racism, or debt, it's not something outside ourselves that we can overcome, defeat, reform, or redeem. It's just people. People are cruel, selfish, vindictive creatures. Sucketh up and shitteth down, that is the Word and the Glory of the Law. But, if it's our design, it cannot be in error. Sift through it, and one will see the occasional unforced kindness, the rare but beautiful gesture that suggests a spark of something greater and more loving in us, if only a shard or splinter. Maybe, especially from afar, that makes it more beautiful.
France struggles with riots because it's own national story is a long series of riots and rebellions. But democracy should not be a struggle of "whoever burns the most buses wins". There are ways to protest in a nondestructive manner--look to the Serbian students, that have been leading nonviolent protests for years now. Their sustained protests led to the resignation of over a dozen senior leaders including the President and the Prime Minister of the nation.
This article is a pathetic, revolting apologia for anti-democratic (yes, against the very idea of democracy) riots--not protests. If France wants to reward rioters with more money, godspeed to their country; I am glad not to live in it.
Um, not sure where you got that, unless you just skimmed the article. It clearly states "A violent minority can rob them of legitimacy, just as the state can try to rob them of their voice by reducing the entire movement to that minority. Both should be rejected."
I think riots are media magnets, while protests get dissmised.
As for Serbia, there were outbursts of violence too, would be kinda strange if there weren't after years of struggle.
you call burning a school an "outburst of violence"? nothing remotely at that level happened in serbia. the difference is, serbians know that their parents earnings were taxed to build the things around them, whereas the migrants burning france contributed nothing to the world they live in and they know it too.
Violent riots are the only option when the government has a history of both not listening to peaceful protests and shutting them down hard by sending riot cops looking to break kneecaps.
The degree of violence from protesters is dictated by the degree of violence committed by the State. You can’t tell people to fuck off while blinding them repeatedly with riot grenades and expect them to stay nice and obedient.
There’s only one anti democratic side here and it’s Macron and his government
hiigaran | 13 days ago
Ever relevant excerpt from a very important speech:
"But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard."
-Martin Luther King Jr.
soozerain | 13 days ago
Oh please. Spoiled French kids cosplaying oppression is a tradition as old as time. They did it 68, they did it in 18 and they did it today. It is what is. But watching American Leftists turn into simpering puddles of emotion over it is rather funny.
idiotsecant | 13 days ago
If I was a young person today I would be terrified. They are a transitional generation but facing a transition that is possibly unprecedented in the history of the human race. They're walking into a world where cognition itself is something you can buy, if you have enough money, without the messy steps of employing people to get it.
What kind of skills make sense in a world like that? What does a young person invest their time in, hoping to live a life with some kind of basic human dignity?
I feel like maybe the basic social contract is breaking in a way that it hasn't in quite a while and the young people today are going to have to be the ones to write a new one.
NihiloZero | 13 days ago
AI is a problem, but... the climate is evermore increasingly fucked. France just experienced unprecedented drought and wildfires -- and the planet is only getting hotter. If you listen closely to the complaints of the students about "insufficient infrastructure" you'll repeatedly hear about the lack of air conditioning in crowded rooms. That wouldn't be such an issue if it weren't for climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4oM8Biu6N8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jiz4xUgMp1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PfBAGRzHcM
velvetacidchrist | 13 days ago
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in".
The old men today would rather spit in the eye of a child than see a dollar go to caring for them.
The Me generation is ruining the world and blaming the children for it. They absolve themselves of all culpability and will blame everyone else instead of realizing they created the world that children will be navigating long after they have passed on.
My latest dumb idea is that they will make gasoline with lead again because it would be cheaper and that is what they grew up with using.
Whitworth_73 | 13 days ago
Leaded fuel is a solid way to own the libs and their precious environment. I can see it.
joebleaux | 13 days ago
Works of fiction show two worlds that could exist once work automated. There the Star Trek version. People prosper across the Federation, resources are shared and distributed equitably.
The there's all the capitalist distopia versions. They are way more plentiful. All of the work is done by computers and robots owned by the wealthy, so they claim all of those resources and profits for themselves because they don't need the poor people anymore.
We are at the point where this is starting to happen, and it's very clear that we are on the capitalist nightmare track. Already, designers, copywriters, translators and many other fields are going away. Look at the subreddits for any of those jobs and it is full of people saying they hate what their job has become, or they are telling stories about how all of their peers have left the field.
I have no idea what sort of options my kids will have even 5 years from now. Right now I am thinking a job that requires a license, or to physically do something to a person or on their property. Right now we don't license computers, a person with a professional license has some protection right now, but I know eventually everything will be one licensed person will be managing the work done by automated processes, but it's a stay of execution.
sllewgh | 13 days ago
No dystopia or dictatorship lasts forever. It's not one or the other, it's one then the other. History never arrives anywhere, it doesn't conclude, it's a pendulum constantly swinging back and forth. It always has been and always will be a push and pull.
joebleaux | 13 days ago
Perhaps, but I am not immortal, and I assume you aren't either. It's not even a back and forth, it's just a progression of time. There are issues today that will be irrelevant in 30 years and problems then that we cannot even fathom now. But the point is that the Star Trek version won't exist in anyone currently living's lifetime and it's very clear we are going to definitely go through the one where the rich control all aspects of production and keep all the profits for themselves. We are already close to it, but right now they still need us so they pay us to make the money for them. When they don't need us, they will stop paying us. Look at who's controlling all that stuff, I don't forsee those guys being the type that will share.
[OP] Historical-Drag-8002 | 13 days ago
> Perhaps, but I am not immortal
This is probabbly the most important point. I've been thinking about it lately a lot. It "might" be better one day, but not in our lifetime.
sllewgh | 13 days ago
You don't know that. We won't know how close we are to changing things until well after it happens. There are multiple examples of seemingly impossible victories of the poor over the rich. They are not invulnerable. They can't govern without consent or stand up to a united majority, they will fall to the power of numbers and they know it. They invest a lot of money and effort into making us fight each other instead of fighting them- divide and conquer is the only way in history a minority has sustained control of a majority at scale. The worse things get, the harder it is to disguise the fact that the real fight is rich vs poor and we are almost all on the same team.
Past_Curve_9558 | 13 days ago
Yes but there are times where the pendulum “pauses” for a good long while. E.g., the dark ages lasted 500 years. It would be more accurate to say that history is a complex dynamical system in which strange attractors sometimes pull a culture into a period of relative stability. Just saying that history is a pendulum makes it sound like it’s all homogeneous change. It’s not
sllewgh | 13 days ago
The Dark Ages was not a 500 year period where nothing happened and history didn't move forward. The pendulum doesn't stop, ever. You will not find any attempts at control anywhere in the context of human behavior without also finding attempts at resistance.
thatgibbyguy | 13 days ago
Where is this cognition for sale? As a somewhat power user of LLM services, it is absolutely baffling to me that any one can think these things are anywhere close to "awake."
Maybe it's because of the bizarre and colossal fuck ups I see them make every single day, or the fact that I'm learning a new language and experiencing the first hand truth that language is just a human abstraction of descriptions of observations and experiences within material reality, this tech is just not "intelligent" in any sense of the word.
It's not creative, it's not ambitious, it's not social, it doesn't have any experience of anything at all.
And that's cognition? Je pense pas.
Aerospike_Ranger | 13 days ago
Direct action is no longer relevant when you can leverage the force of an army from your desktop.
People still carry on about demonstrations as if people in the street are paying attention to anything, and its worth the risk to your person of getting in a scrap with some armed band of thugs. Nah, pointless. When I can exert force behind the scenes, clean out every scrap of data held by the corrupt scum running a local polity, and use that to turn their happy little worlds upside down, now THAT is a demonstration of power.
And they sure as hell aren't going to shrug off that damage by spouting platitudes and some bullshit at a press conference they'll forget by the time they've finished the day. When billions of their dollars and otherwise are siphoned off, the IP they've stolen from hundreds of thousands of bit players is liberated, and every lawyer that racked up billable hours for them is fighting disbarment... That's gonna take decades off their lives to recover from, and THAT is the new form of revolution in an information age.
[OP] Historical-Drag-8002 | 13 days ago
What struck me about these protests is how quickly the conversation turns to burning schools and clashes with police, while the reasons students are angry become almost secondary. This piece looks at the protests as part of a much bigger problem: an education system that still asks young people to prepare for a future that adults themselves increasingly struggle to describe. I found the tension between AI, insecure work, underfunded schools and the old idea of what education is supposed to achieve especially worth thinking about.
NihiloZero | 13 days ago
AI is a problem, but... the climate is evermore increasingly fucked. France just experienced unprecedented drought and wildfires -- and the planet is only getting hotter. If you listen closely to the complaints of the students about "insufficient infrastructure" you'll repeatedly hear about the lack of air conditioning in crowded rooms. That wouldn't be such an issue if it weren't for climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4oM8Biu6N8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jiz4xUgMp1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PfBAGRzHcM
raptorlightning | 13 days ago
No one wants to think about why riots and protests happen. They just want to pearl clutch at the violence like scared little monkeys.
EatAssIsGold | 13 days ago
It's a pity this uprising does not appear to be looking at the root of the issue. They request generically more investment and more expenditure, which is right and due, but appear unable to understand the budget is already beyond the maximum possible to keep the country growing, increase the debt is basically impossible as interest would start to snowball and the vast majority of expenditure is focused on supporting an unsustainable pension plan. I do hope to hear these guys say very explicitly: rebalance the intergenerational resource transfer, fix the pension plan and readjust the expenditure.
But it won't happen
sllewgh | 13 days ago
>the budget is already beyond the maximum possible to keep the country growing
The overwhelming majority of profits resulting from that growth are collected by a very small group of ultra rich people. I think it's perfectly logical to not value that as a priority, even if there are consequences. In theory it's extremely important, in practice very few actually share the benefits from it.
jibij | 13 days ago
This might be technically true but it's largely not really relevant to the question of how to fund government programs. Go add up the total net worth of whoever you're thinking of, then compare it to what a western government spends in terms of its annual budget and unless your inumerate it shouldn't take you long to figure out why there's always been such an emphasis on the middle and upper middle class with respect to the tax base; it's a simple numbers game. That doesn't mean there's no merit in redistributive policies that aim to prevent or offset the kind of excessive wealth disparity that we see today; rather the arguments for that are better reflected in the neo-brandeisian school of thought than any particular budgetary concern. That is to say the goal of such policies are better understood through their effects on social cohesion, institutional stability, and national security instead of populist wishcasting.
skeptical-speculator | 13 days ago
>The French authorities have already reached for a familiar explanation. There is a violent minority, some of its members may not even be students, and the so-called "radical left" may be behind it all. Perhaps there really are organised groups taking advantage of the protests. Political parties rarely miss an opportunity to climb aboard someone else’s anger and then claim they invented it.
...
>The protesters’ demands are remarkably concrete: urgently filling vacant teaching posts and providing substitutes, reducing class sizes, renovating deteriorating school buildings, and investing more in teaching and support staff. They are also calling for more humane timetables, better conditions during periods of extreme heat, and equal educational opportunities for students from poorer suburbs and wealthier parts of the cities. Some student organisations are also demanding a fundamental reform, or outright abolition, of Parcoursup, the opaque university admissions system that adds another layer of uncertainty to students’ lives.
Is the author suggesting that these things are related?
Call_Me_Hurr1cane | 13 days ago
> hoping to live a life with some kind of human dignity
I think we are grappling with two issues simultaneously. The first you noted.
The second is elite overproduction. This refers to the phenomenon of a society producing too many individuals with the aspiration of becoming elite that the economy cannot support them all. The stereotypical barista with a bachelors degree…
It turns out that these people are often more pissed off than your average generational poverty case who didn’t expect much more than hardship in life - and they have the education, networks, and skills that actually makes them excellent activists historically.
MudJumpy1063 | 13 days ago
Eventually everyone looks at each other and realizes it's not ideology, or racism, or debt, it's not something outside ourselves that we can overcome, defeat, reform, or redeem. It's just people. People are cruel, selfish, vindictive creatures. Sucketh up and shitteth down, that is the Word and the Glory of the Law. But, if it's our design, it cannot be in error. Sift through it, and one will see the occasional unforced kindness, the rare but beautiful gesture that suggests a spark of something greater and more loving in us, if only a shard or splinter. Maybe, especially from afar, that makes it more beautiful.
1millionbucks | 13 days ago
France struggles with riots because it's own national story is a long series of riots and rebellions. But democracy should not be a struggle of "whoever burns the most buses wins". There are ways to protest in a nondestructive manner--look to the Serbian students, that have been leading nonviolent protests for years now. Their sustained protests led to the resignation of over a dozen senior leaders including the President and the Prime Minister of the nation.
This article is a pathetic, revolting apologia for anti-democratic (yes, against the very idea of democracy) riots--not protests. If France wants to reward rioters with more money, godspeed to their country; I am glad not to live in it.
[OP] Historical-Drag-8002 | 13 days ago
Um, not sure where you got that, unless you just skimmed the article. It clearly states "A violent minority can rob them of legitimacy, just as the state can try to rob them of their voice by reducing the entire movement to that minority. Both should be rejected."
I think riots are media magnets, while protests get dissmised.
As for Serbia, there were outbursts of violence too, would be kinda strange if there weren't after years of struggle.
1millionbucks | 13 days ago
you call burning a school an "outburst of violence"? nothing remotely at that level happened in serbia. the difference is, serbians know that their parents earnings were taxed to build the things around them, whereas the migrants burning france contributed nothing to the world they live in and they know it too.
xXRougailSaucisseXx | 13 days ago
Violent riots are the only option when the government has a history of both not listening to peaceful protests and shutting them down hard by sending riot cops looking to break kneecaps.
The degree of violence from protesters is dictated by the degree of violence committed by the State. You can’t tell people to fuck off while blinding them repeatedly with riot grenades and expect them to stay nice and obedient.
There’s only one anti democratic side here and it’s Macron and his government
1millionbucks | 13 days ago
that's wrong. the serbian students faced plenty of strong reactions from the state forces and continued anyway. burning buses is not democracy, sorry