If (as the FT suspects), Macron is gambling that the experience, for a time, of the extreme right in power may prompt voters to realise they need to (re)construct a concerted opposition to the far right, then really he's playing with the lives of those a far right Govt. will (immediately) target.... but, those people do not inhabit Macron's social circle & so are acceptable (if unfortunate) collateral damage.
Once again the political class is playing games with people's lives
@ChrisMayLA6 Look, a brilliant friend has disagreed with this opinion months ago with good arguments, but deep down I'm convinced that Hollande was a fascist from the day one and that Macron is here to finish the job. France has only ever led the charge with European mass surveillance under their presidencies, and I believe there's a willful continuity between 2015's law project on inside intelligence and this year's legalization of face scanning, creation of a file with trans people accessing to medical transition, and so on.
IMHO, fascism is going down in France, fast. I think that the best way foreign people can help is by giving to our local independent reporting and civil rights organizations; @LDH_Fr, @LaQuadrature, @blast_info, @lemediatv come to my mind.
Honestly, not to center the subject on my personal area of activism, but I also think giving money to the Nyxt developer would make a hell of a leverage – essentially Emacs but with a better onboarding, better ergonomics, multitasking, and the kind of rather unique, original, general vision on a given field that e.g. Aaron Swartz or Bernard Lahire have/d. A few core Emacs add-ons need to be ported but this software's a solid step closer to taking over the world.
@ChrisMayLA6@LDH_Fr@LaQuadrature@blast_info@lemediatv That may be my own bias but besides deliberate mediocrity, I'm sure many people are just poorly informed, not only about politics but also about how to basically make it through a day, leading them to a sort of political alienation, feeling of powerlessness, and the French media have been full of implicit, subconscious calls to give up, honestly since I watch TV, around 2005.
Giving people ways to publish online, to consume other people's publications, and to better communicate can actually be transforming. I've also witnessed illegal advertising for Twitter near 2012 – French media have been pinned down for it – which has basically willfully derailed us from the internet – and from the web as a read-only protocol – to social media. A similar trend, like the current trend for fascism, has been observed all over the world.
The problem is that this sadism relies on concurrence for each other's attention, and that now we've got about 5% of Northern countries' population that are basically social problem solvers with ADHD. What do we do? We make up controversies about online hate, that's what we're doing.
@ChrisMayLA6@LDH_Fr@LaQuadrature@blast_info@lemediatv An example of such a subconscious call to give up is a French journalistic experiment comparing how fast well-organized and messy people retrieve items at their homes, following a questionable methodology – a single attempt with a single participant for each testing group, and a ladder cutter with a stopwatch. The narrator said 'besides gains in productivity, the messy person actually has retrieved their item faster', which is fun and games until you need to cohabitate or to share a workspace.
There's a broader… err… scenery of ordinary people lacking respect to each other in the most boring, bad faith, creative ways they can. I think we've hit the bottom with '4 marriages for a honeymoon' – 4 couples rating each other's marriage, the winner getting a honeymoon. But there are several similar reality shows, like 'An (almost) perfect dinner', 'Love is in the field' (two city persons will meet a farmer, they're in concurrence to stay with him), etc.
And it's OK if it's an adult watching it while cooking or cleaning the house, but it's absolutely not OK when a 12-years old child has no other choice than being listening to this garbage, and I think that's the point.
@ChrisMayLA6@LDH_Fr@LaQuadrature@blast_info@lemediatv The first paragraph also reminds me of another journalistic 'experiment' (why can't they stay in their damn lane, I ask myself) consisting in comparing children's dream houses before and after showing early Dragon Ball episodes to them, which would be a sign of child neglect anyway (they're shown Dragon Ball Z, and more often than not they aren't shown anime at all, by an implicitly alleged ethnic minority), in a very clever attempt at degrading, well, French working class immigrants, i.e. Algerian families, and manga, which is basically art.
You've probably noticed that the bourgeois media consistently degrade popular art; rock'n'roll, then manga, video games, tattoo, etc.
Anyway, back to my point, people wouldn't only be more critical of corporate media if they had a better RSS ecosystem, they'd also be more critical toward their government, their local politics, and so on. There are so many French people who want to help e.g. migrants but don't know where to start; well they can just add their local réseau mutu's feed to their feeds reader and ask it to show them concrete local political events in the coming days for e.g. a detained undocumented immigrant with schizophrenia, or a march against fascism, or a drag show, or – lemme check – a map with companies collaborating with undocumented immigrants' detention; or more relaxing videos from Doctor Mike, Mastodon posts from Nina or French activists like Rama; Mobilizon events; and so forth.
People can read deep dives about virtually any situation, provided that someone is documenting it and writing about it. These are a few examples among others.
@ChrisMayLA6@LDH_Fr@LaQuadrature@blast_info@lemediatv Likewise, I've read a BS article in a French review of an otherwise good reputation about AI, claiming that it could ingest thousands of academic papers and give to the researcher specific results in a few seconds.
He then mentioned the Neuromatch Open Publishing group's work, which absolutely doesn't advocate for AI. Denote would fit perfectly to the job. To be honest, a flat database on any protocol (the web, gemini, whatever) of Org-mode files with Denote-formatted file names could be strapped to find(1) and grep(1) and you'd basically have your on-demand bite-sized research results, we just need to reach a consensus about it.
