As an Ontarian I appreciate the BQ. All I’m saying is Quebecois don’t burn nearly as much shit as the French. And the rets of us aren’t doing anything. Having a less capital-compliant part of Canada would be good for all of us.

Yeah but they’re all filled in and broken.

Yeah, the average population density of the US is a lot lower than many people realize. Protests are seen as city-based things, both geographically and culturally.

And then you have eu-nation-sized red states that can hold many many trumpers who are unable to play nice with others because they don’t have to have neighbors.

Well actually…

The french kind of didn’t, the french administration did. The french army had many problems, for the most part because it was not a standing army. These were more or less I’ll equipped military, which where basically overrun by German tanks. However the french army also was in no small part responsible for holding off the germans at Dunkirk and nearly broke down the supply lines of the German Blitzkrieg. They mostly didn’t flee.

On d day the first waves of troops where also a lot of french exile troops stormy into machine gun fire. Also on d day the french resistance sabotaged the railway network and infrastructure in general so good, that the railway system only worked on 30% capacity, some balloons where running out on puncture repair kits and German tank divisions where delayed by up to 2 weeks.

The other thing to remember is that when they surrendered they surrendered their entire naval fleet to the Nazis which was really irksome because why did they do that? So then the British had to launch a mission to sink the French naval fleet. All of which was a giant waste of resources, those ships could have come over to the UK.

Obviously it’s all water under the bridge now but it was a tactically stupid decision.

Clearly you’ve never seen a marketer and a politician in a room together.

One post that I read somewhere else on fedi was in the lines of, you can’t reasonably think French are cowards, they made snails into fine cuisine.

There was the loss in WWII, but there was also the loss of all their colonies after WWII. Some of them they fought for and lost like Vietnam and Algeria. The reputation of the French for losing wasn’t accurate, but it also wasn’t based on nothing.

As if they were one homogenous voting block? The reason the French government is in a stalemate is because the people vote for so many different things that no coalition can form a governing majority.

Trying to describe that as “they all hate freedom because of the way they vote” is kinda weird, and quite ignorant.

I don’t think any country can be described so singularly as “what the people vote for”. There’s always a diversity of opinions. Some countries suppress dissension, censor opposition, and only allow certain voting choices (e.g., Russia, China, Belarus, etc.); but even those countries have dissention, the dissention is just kept quiet by the repression and censorship.

But the French? Dissention is part of their culture. Political opposition is alive and well there. So try understanding what you’re talking about before posting something ignorant next time.

Here in Minnesota we’ve still been protesting every week…

With regard to point 3, ‘today’s technology’ is very much a double edged sword. Yes, you can communicate instantly but surveillance has modernized just as much.

As reductive as it sounds, I think part of the issue is it happens all the time in other countries because it happens all the time in other countries. The connections to each other already exist. The networks already exist. All the instant communication in the world doesn’t make a lick of difference if you have no idea who else to call. At this point, I feel like that’s the real benefit of protests. You gotta meet like minded people somewhere to get any real momentum and third spaces are pretty fucking dead.

I don’t think the issue is necessarily a lack of will to organize now, I think the issue was a lack of will to do so years ago. Hell, decades ago for that matter. So now the people that genuinely do care have to build their entire network from the ground up while under heavy surveillance which yes, is going to be fucking slower.

I mean in a certain sense they are a bit true, the French protested for so long that Paris has created the Rue in order to have some control over the crowds

You really get involved in France, if you want it or not. Great for democracy IMO.

True…

“But, but, but the us country is huge. We can’t be expected to protest about something all the way over there…”

Oh, is all of Europe protesting in unity when protests are happening in Paris? i must have missed that.

But we need to know what were the bears doing!

Hero, thank you

What’s funny that if you’re a French Canadian, you spend most of your life resentful that English is everywhere. Quebec has laws doing everything possible to try to prevent English from becoming a major language in Quebec. But, as soon as someone from Quebec goes travelling, they’re probably grateful that they know English because it’s the common language of the world these days.

I grew up primarily speaking English. But, I don’t think I’m too arrogant about expecting everyone else to speak it. I’m always pleasantly surprised when there are signs in English in places where there can’t be that many tourists.

What I did kind-of take for granted wasn’t necessarily English, but it was the Roman character set. When I went travelling in East Asia, I came across Thai script, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. Previously when I’d travelled in other places, if I didn’t know the language, I at least knew the letters. So, I might not have known how to pronounce the name of a place, but I could still read it and match it to the place I was looking for. But, when I was in Japan, I had to try to remember that the stop I wanted was the one where the first symbol sort of looked like a box with some scribbles inside and a lid on top, then the next one looked like a T but with two bars at the top instead of one.

French language is the original lingua franca, it’s no wonder that if you admit that you don’t speak well yet, they will simply ask “Why not?” It’s probably not as far as we’d expect from the hauteur of English-speaking tourists, we just get our way more often I think. When I took my family to Paris last year I expected to get some of that high-handed treatment, but even out as far as Calais they were almost unfailingly forgiving of my decidedly mediocre attempts. I hope to go back soon, armed with a little more of the language.

In Holland everyone would switch to English immediately after I butchered the greeting in Dutch.

It made it super hard to learn the language