We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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The Guardian has an article about France’s rearguard battle against the invasion of English:
“What is at stake is the survival of our culture. It is a life or death matter,” said Jacques Viot, head of the Alliance Française, which promotes French abroad, warned last month. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse of the Académie Française was equally apocalyptic: “The defence of our language must be the major national cause of the new century.”
Within France, the language benefits from a veritable battery of protective laws, decrees and directives. Radio stations must play mostly music with French lyrics, and advertisements in English are, with few exceptions, outlawed unless accompanied by a translation.
Most of the legislation stems from the 1994 “loi Toubon”, which briefly threatened jail for anyone using words like “le weekend” or “le parking”. Even today, companies are occasionally prosecuted – although not as often as organisations such as the Committee for the Defence of the French Language, one of a myriad of similar militant bodies, would like – for using anglicisms in ads and brochures.
“The time has come for concrete and targeted action,” said Michel Herbillon, a campaigning conservative MP who recently completed a report on France’s language problems within the EU. “The union recognises the principle of equality for all official languages, and that principle is manifestly being flouted. It is wholly unacceptable.”
The situation is serious enough for President Jacques Chirac – who speaks excellent English but avoids using it as a matter of principle – to intervene. Earlier this year, he asked France’s media companies to come up with plans for a French-language global news channel, a kind of “CNN à la française”, to ensure France’s voice continues to be heard in the world.
What can we say to that? C’est la vie…
The latest estimate of deaths from the French heat wave is up to 10,000 or so. This raises a number of issues.
- How reliable is this number, of course, and what does it really mean? Most of the dead appear to be elderly and infirm in any event, and many would likely have been carried off by the next stressful event in their lives. Nonetheless, the number appears to reflect “surplus mortality” over a comparable period, so lets take it at face value for now.
- What does this say about the state of the housing stock in France? We are told that apparently the French are unacquainted with modern air conditioning, apparently because their weather is so mild. I seem to recall during the recent Tour de France coverage a great deal of commentary about how the heat is always an issue during this event, so I wonder about this. I also lived in the American South for several years without air conditioning, so I can assure that it is possible, and that in fact lots of people have, and continue to do so, without dying.
Nonetheless, in the US central air conditioning, never mind window units that can cool a single room, is standard equipment on most new houses regardless of where they are located (leaving aside Alaska). I live in Wisconsin, in the northern tier of states, and I can assure you this is true, and that many older houses, including mine, are retrofitted for central air. It is true that Chicago suffered some excess deaths during a heat wave a few years ago, but those were confined entirely to the very poorest parts of the city.
Permit me to draw a connection here between the better condition of America’s housing stock, its stronger economy and higher GDP, and its relative lack of government interference in the economy.
- What does this say about the state of socialized medicine in France? This is a nation, after all, that prides itself on its socialized medicine and other social services, but it would appear that these are precisely what failed to prevent so many presumably preventable deaths. It turns out that the nursing homes were grossly understaffed during the August holiday period.
Allow me to suggest a connection between the chronic understaffing of nursing homes and other health facilities in France and incentives to not hire created by all the worker protection legislation there. Allow me to further suggest that the practice of allowing employees to take vacations during August is a reflection of a culture that is focussed more on the needs of the employees than the customers, a classic symptom of either government employment or suppressed competition. Allow me to suggest that the sluggish response to the changed conditions of the heatwave is typical of top-down government-run systems.
→ Continue reading: Heatwave
I have just cast my beady eyes over this Stratfor article which, alas, I cannot link to (hefty subscription fee required) but here is the opening paragraph:
France is threatening to veto the consensus that the United Nations Security Council finally should lift sanctions on Libya. In the end, the French position is bluster. France cannot afford the heavy price a veto would levy. While Paris’ anti-American policies are wildly popular at home, they are affecting France in meaningful ways that will continue to impact French prestige, power and the country’s bottom line for years to come.
What follows is a detailed analysis in the impeccably objective Stratfor tradition but I reckon the above is enough to fuel a good-sized helping of thoroughly malicious glee on the other side of the Atlantic.
Once again the xenophobic and unilateralist French government displays its arrogant and dismissive attitude towards the international community:
France is saying goodbye to “email” and hello to “courriel” – the term that the linguistically sensitive French government is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.
The culture ministry has announced a ban on the use of the word email in all government ministries, documents, publications or websites, in the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.
We should protest against this vulgar attempt to pursue their own narrow and selfish national interests. Let’s flood them with e-mails.
With the whole world apparently in a state of flux and a preponderance of gloomy prognoses, it gives me joy to be able to report just a smidgeon of good news:
Feminists and environmentalists, social pressure groups which usually see eye to eye, have clashed over a shock poster campaign on the streets of Paris and other French cities.
The poster shows a woman’s breast dribbling a dirty, oily fluid. There is no caption or explanation, other than the name of a private, ecological foundation, run by a celebrated television journalist and green campaigner, Nicolas Hulot.
No show-trials or North Korean-style denouncements yet but give it time.
More please and faster.
Image located via D Anghelone
A few days ago I wrote an article pointing to information indicating that the French government had not only agreed to not arrest General Ratko Mladic, the man who supervised the murder of 7,000 men and young boys in Srebrenica under the orders from Chetnik leader Radovan Karadzic, but were also giving the former Bosnian Serb leadership a safe haven from arrest to this day in sector of Bosnia under their military control.
So when a French serial commenter who leaves his remarks on Samizdata.net left a comments under that post saying:
VIVE LA FRANCE !
VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE !
VIVE L’EUROPE !
VIVE LA PLANETE !
VIVE LA LIBERTE !
I whish you all the merriest July 14 ever.
My first reaction was pure fury. This guy might as well have just pissed on the graves of these people, murdered just eight short years ago. In fact to remind us all of his horror which happened under the nose of humane and oh so moral ‘Europe’, and with the complicity of government officials who are still in office today in Paris, London and the UN in New York, just last Friday it was reported that more bodies had been found in Srebrenica, bringing the total up to about 8,000 murdered in cold blood.
I was on the verge of banning this guy and leaving an extremely hostile remark of my own. But then I thought about those remarks a bit longer and calmed down. In fact it started to dawn on me that those comments were a perfect adjunct to the article.
The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was an event more important in the mythology of the French Revolution than in the actually history of it (far from freeing imprisioned patriots, the inmates were four forgers, two lunatics, and the Marquis de Sade), but it was indeed a portent of the blood soaked egalitarian horror that was to follow.
So yes, that was the perfect comment to remind us that not only is France, like most countries, rooted in slaughter and horror in the distant historical past… but that recent outrages (giving aid and comfort to mass murderers) will just be forgotten in France and millions of French people will sing the national anthem and feel good about the people who lead them. The same people who gave Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic a free pass for slaughtering thousands in Srebrenica and tens of thousands elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vive la France.
And yet this same commenter, like so many French people, decries the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq. Vive La Liberte? Not for the people of Iraq it would seem and certainly not for the slaughtered people of Srebrenica.
There are hypocrites and then there are French hypocrites. Do not let anyone ever tell you that there is nothing at which the French are truly world class.
It has been claimed that French President Jacques Chirac negotiated de facto immunity from prosecution for the second greatest post-WWII war criminal in Europe west of the former Soviet border, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, in return for the Bosnian Serb military releasing two captured French pilots.
The claim, dismissed as “hearsay” by Paris, was contained in the transcripts of a telephone conversation between the former Yugoslav president, Zoran Lilic, and the head of the Yugoslav armed forces in Belgrade.
They described Mr Lilic explaining in December 1995 that Gen Mladic would be safe from extradition after the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian conflict, even though he had already been indicted for war crimes.
“He will not be delivered to anyone from the tribunal. He has got the guarantee by Chirac and Slobodan [Milosevic],” said the transcript. “Accordingly, he has to deliver these men to us, if he wants to, or he should come with us and place the men at the place of his choice.”
If this is true, then Chirac is nothing less than an accessory after the fact to mass murder. The fact that both General Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have both remained at large does rather suggest this report is true. Oh… and where are these two indicted mass murderers at large? In the French controlled sector of Bosnia, of course.
Britain has its own amoral creatures like Douglas Hurd who disgracefully equated murder victims with their murderers in the Balkans, so it would be fair to say that this particular shit sandwich is large enough for much of the political class on both sides of the English Channel to take a bite… but next time your hear a member of the French establishment lecture anyone about anything on ‘moral grounds’, tell them to drop dead, preferably in Srebrenica.
The usual practice here is to denounce France, and certainly (with only occasional and admirable exceptions) the French, as one of God’s more incomprehensible derelictions of His creative duty. But this device, the Trottoir Roulant Rapide – which means “fast rolling pavement”, is, I think, impressive.
Science fiction buffs have long been able to read about such gadgets. At Heathrow, as in many other places I’m sure, there’s a slow rolling pavement, which makes your journey a bit less wearisome from the tube station to one of the terminals. And I seem to recall something similar connecting a couple of bits of the London Underground somewhere in the City, although I could be imaging that. But this TRR is an altogether more serious creation, because it is fast. It is rapide.
“People have to learn how to use it and that takes time,” the trottoir’s inventor, Anselme Cote, told BBC News Online.
He added that escalators had presented travellers with a similar challenge when they were first introduced.
People stepping directly on to the TRR would be sure to lose their balance, so they first have to be accelerated – and then decelerated again at the other end.
“The problem lies in the transitions; one has to glide from one phase to the next; we ask people not to move, but they are not used to it,” says Mr Cote.
“One must keep one’s feet flat between the two phases, but people walk. There’s a technique to it. But people get used to it very quickly.”
Fair enough. → Continue reading: A nouveau kind of trottoir
Here’s some good news, in the form, for me, of an email from the newly launched Molinari Institute’s Director, Cécile Philippe:
I am delighted to announce the arrival a major new French-speaking free market think tank, the Molinari Institute, and the launch of its website www.institutmolinari.org
Named after the great nineteenth century French-speaking classical libertarian Gustave de Molinari, the institute aims to create an environment in which both individuals and businesses can thrive and be free without the ties of regulation and vested interest.
Through its website and conferences “Les soirées Molinari,” it will help the rediscovery of the work of Gustave de Molinari as well as other French and European liberal thinkers such as Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Coquelin and Bruno Leoni. It will focus on public policy issues such as competition, healthcare, retirement and education.
To launch the website today there is an interview with José Pinera, former secretary of labor and social security in Chile, who radically and successfully implemented in the market-oriented 80’s the pension reform.
The Molinari Institute is a non-profit organization. It accepts voluntary contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. No government funding or endowments are received.
I should say not. I know Cecile Philippe to be both a fearless and uncompromising libertarian activist, and a thoroughly charming and civilised person, two things which don’t always go together. The ideal combination of qualities for someone running an institute like this, in other words. I wish her every possible success, as will many others.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Does Cécile Philippe have a sister? Yes she does
Remember, France counts twice, at least. Whatever opinions, good or bad, sensible or stupid, those French intellectuals may happen to hold, they are, it must be admitted, totally brilliant at spreading them far and wide. Imagine the impact on mankind and its affairs if we could turn the bien pensants of France around, from statists and collectivists into the opposite. That might be a bit incroyable, but wouldn’t it be formidable?
The Dissident Frogman has returned from his trip to Normandy, where he visited, among other things, the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie (Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy) in Bayeux… He is, as always full of interesting observations and has a new game for his readers. It is called “Guess what’s missing at a museum dedicated to the Battle of Normandy, 1944?”
The game consists of three incredible pictures. My first reaction was – ‘surely, they could not go that far’. But alas, it is true. What’s more, he couldn’t get any lucid and convincing explanation for this “fortuitous” accrual.
Please go here to ‘play’ and perhaps engage in shooting off a few emails to the Mayor of Bayeux…
As part of my continuing vow to be as nice as humanly conceivable towards our neighbours in France, I refer the readers of this blog to the following news item, purely for the purposes of conveying information, and not out of any desire to gloat over, denigrate or otherwise annoy the French.
Harry Potter has cast such a spell over the French that they are snapping up JK Rowling’s latest book in English, rather than waiting for the translation.
[…]
“It’s not exactly going to please the anti-globalisation movement,” noted literary magazine Livres Hebdo, which compiles and publishes the bestseller charts.
Heh. 
The Telegraph continues to paddle in the murky waters of our Gallic neighbours with a further editorial devoted to Sabine Herold and what appears to be a growing movement for free market reform in France:
The French long for a Margaret Thatcher to tame the over-mighty public sector trade unions, but despair of ever finding one. In the cafes of Reims, speaker after speaker deplored the weakness of President Jacques Chirac in the face of union opposition, with many echoing the withering Thatcherite critique launched against him by the 21-year-old student Sabine Herold in Paris.
What really caught my eye though, in the sidebar next to the article, is the link to Merde in France.
En avant et vers le haut, nos amis.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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