Calling Macron and Le Pen, respectively, "center" and "right", is a very .world moment indeed

We can just hang them and take their money.

They won‘t leave. They never do. Maybe a hand full of them but they contributed nothing to society anyway but en large the rich never leave in droves over taxes. Their businesses are in this country and they simply can‘t just move it someplace else without huge upfront costs. Even the centrists know this. They‘re just afraid to not be welcomed at lavish events anymore I guess. And some of them are straight up bought I assume. But yeah, tax the rich god damnit. They‘re all bark and no bite.

They cannot take their factories, mines, shops, etc with them. They may take their money, but their money is usually tied to their business. If their business is nationalized, because they left it behind, their wealth suddenly is backed by nothing.

for one, i don't think that they actually mean "wealthy individuals" but "big companies", like adidas producing shoes or sth. basically there is absolutely not a single reason why such a big company would be located in country X and not country Y besides economic incentives. realistically, they could produce equally well everywhere in the world, they're just gonna go wherever labor costs and taxes are lowest. these jobs would be lost if the company leaves.

then again, these companies probably already moved to china 30 years ago. and who's left probably has a hard time leaving.

also it should be noted that this kind of analysis lacks vision. sure, jobs would be lost. so what, we're gonna have mass unemployment one way or another. better to accept that and deal with that, instead of clinging to an old economic system that is doomed to fail anyways.

anyways to solve problems, one needs to patiently think about them. since being patient is not spectacular, few are inclined towards it, and even fewer succeed. so we're not gonna get good answers to any of the world's problems until somebody who (1) cares and (2) has a good understanding of the world bothers to actually make up meaningful solutions, i figure.

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.

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?

Available to read or download in multiple formats, for free, here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-berkman-what-is-communist-anarchism

Just like at every single protest in France. People protest legitimately, a few assholes come in to just break stuff and throw punches, media and politics focus on these.

That's what I was thinking... This article at least twice alludes to it being gangs of migrants or something doing this....

Seems a bit too convenient of an excuse if you ask me...

It's due to the cult of individualism and a media-ecosystem that re-enforces the "only a single strong man can save the world" idea with endless superhero movies, TV shows, and the like. Doesn't even have to be superheroes, honestly. Anything where magically problems are solved by the actions of one person.

It has everyone in this mode where they won't organize not only because they don't know how but because the lone-hero narrative is so deeply ingrained in the culture (going as far back as The Lone Ranger) that Americans struggle to think outside that narrative. "Organizing" is literally a foreign concept to 99% of us.

Source: Am American. I try to talk about parallel systems and building new governance from the bottom up but literally all anyone wants to do is "buy guns" like that solves anything. Organizing just to take care of each other is too big of an ask apparently, let alone organizing to risk your life for the betterment of society. We can't even get organized when there isn't a functional risk to society.

EDIT: Also my personal pet conspiracy theory is that "group projects" in elementary and high school are designed to make people think working in groups is pointless since it's a group grade and one person can just bail on doing anything... Yeah, because we incentivize bailing as a culture. I wonder why kids are so primed to do it.