I’m envious of the way the French protest their government. They’re literally setting things on fire because their schools aren’t adequate. Because the government tried to raise the retirement age. Because their politicians are shitbags.
I think the biggest obstacle to organizing in the US is the sheer distance. It takes 40 solid hours of driving to get from one side to the other. That’s not counting any breaks. France takes about 14 hours. Doable in a day or so if you push it.
Anyway, I’d sign up for a Revolution if there was a serious contender.
French protesters have been putting even most other European protesters to shame, yet France is pretty far from being the most socialdemocratic European country.
Knowing little of the matter: French protest a lot but seem to achieve fairly little. The Yellow Jackets wreaked havoc of the country for a couple of months… got nothing. Current protests don’t have a real political agenda other than “this is not okay” and I haven’t heard of a political response other than wait-it-out.
this is completely wrong, institutions and companies respond most to protests, then they have to invest additional effort to pretend as if the protests did not work, so that people will not protest as much
French have more rights than Americans and institutions and corporations fear more taking them away from them.
I think France should rather compare itself to its less protest-happy peers, not some third-world shithole.
This is generally how it’s done here in Germany, too. Seems like the state understood at some point that protests don’t actually do anything, and the more radical activity that might actually make a difference is generally only a pretty low amount of people - this part seems to be bigger in France, but far from big enough.
But the have the lowest retirement age of Europe, that’s all worth it!
According to Wikipedia, that’s actually Ukraine at 60 years, 2-7 years lower than France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement_in_Europe.
As far as I understand, in France you can retire early (possibly as early as 62) if you worked for 43 years, otherwise you retire at up to 67 years. And nowadays it’s pretty common to lose your job in your 50s and spend the rest of your time before retirement underemployed, which is going to make it rather difficult for a lot of people to retire at 62.