WTF is going on in France Svarty?

[Brian Peacock]

Hey there.

[JimC]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-19/ ... /107281138

About 2,400 people were arrested in France over the weekend as protests turned violent.
Hundreds of shops were looted in Paris and other cities, and losses are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of euros.
President Emmanuel Macron addressed the nation, saying there must be a distinction between protesters with legitimate demands and looters.

France is reeling from widespread damage caused by violent protests that saw 2,400 people arrested, a historic town hall torched and widespread looting.

Almost 1,000 police officers and gendarmes were injured, seven of them badly wounded, the interior ministry said on Sunday, local time.

The riots have placed pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, who is in his final months in power before elections to replace him in six months time.

[L'Emmerdeur]

There are always opportunists who jump at the chance to use the cover of protests to engage in mayhem, particularly when police escalate violence. Also opportunists who jump at the chance to blame the protesters (see Black Lives Matter).

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu accused “ultra-left groups” of inciting violence at the demonstrations.

“To those who clearly want to use these acts of violence as a ‘warm-up’ ahead of the presidential election, let me be clear: we will not be intimidated,” Lecornu wrote in a social media post. “No one will impose their political agenda through violence.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader the left-wing France Unbowed party, slammed the media for focusing too much on the isolated incidents of violence and not reporting on the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the demonstrations.

“Crowds of people everywhere, calm and joyful everywhere when the police aren’t around,” Mélenchon wrote in a social media post that featured photos of peaceful marches from across the country, which he described as “images you won’t see in the official media.”

[source]

[Brian Peacock]

I'm hoping Svarty is hunkered safely down, having found himself a rich widow with a generous nature and a weak heart.

[JimC]

[pErvinalia]

Where the bloody hell is he?

[L'Emmerdeur]

Yeah, two weeks plus. I'm holding out for computer problems, but the rich widow scenario sounds better.

[macdoc]

and in other news

[Brian Peacock]

It's very difficult for a nation to go bankrupt when it issues its own currency.

One also has to remember that if a nation is falling into debt then those liabilities are necessarily some else's credits. The greater a nation's debt the larger the amount of the money it's created 'out there' in the economy. Taxation can act as a graveyard for old money by returning it for public use, or tax can be seen as a kind of interest repayment on the multiplied value of issued money in the economy. Nonetheless, if the direction of national policy is toward ever-lower taxes then over time the value a nation creates shifts out of democratic/public control and into the hands of private concerns - private concerns that are then able lend their lowly-taxed gains back to the country which created that value in the first place.