Posted on 04/04/2023 7:01:55 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The collapse of freedom in the Western world proceeds apace.
Misinformation boards. Government backdoors into social media companies. Bogus “fact checks” that promote outright falsehoods.
And now an arrest for being mean to Emmanuel Macron on Facebook. An actual arrest for calling him “filth.”
You are likely aware of the raging protests in France over pension reforms. As much as I hate to admit it, I am with Macron on this issue. Raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 is hardly draconian given the increase in lifespans and the fiscal crises all pension programs face.
The protests have been “fiery but mostly peaceful,” as they say. Not a single person has died by guillotine yet, although it is early in the process. That took a while to get going during the French Revolution. The French love their escalating violence in protests.
Yet the arrest of which I am writing has nothing to do with being fiery or mostly peaceful. Or even encouraging anybody else to be mostly peaceful.
Rather, a woman was arrested for insulting President Macron on Facebook:
The complaint focused on a post on her Facebook page made on March 21, the day before Macron gave a lunchtime interview to TF1 television to defend his controversial pension reforms that have sparked nationwide protests.
“This piece of filth is going to address you at 1:00 pm… it’s always on television that we see this filth,” she wrote.
The woman, in her 50s, had been a supporter of the 2018-2019 “Yellow Vest” protests that shook Macron during his first mandate.
She stands accused of “insulting the president of the republic” and will stand trial on June 20 in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said.
We can’t have anybody insulting a politician, can we?
Similar arrests have taken place in Great Britain, including a man who shouted “who elected him?” about King Charles.
A man arrested in England after shouting “who elected him?” about King Charles III said he was left “shaken” and concerned about freedom of speech.
At least three other people have been arrested or cautioned for acts of peaceful anti-monarchy protests across the UK during the days of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, as legal experts and activists raise concerns about their treatment.
Symon Hill, 45, told Insider that he commented while watching an event proclaiming the new monarch in Oxford, UK, on Sunday, following the death of Queen Elizabeth last week.
The first part of the proclamation was about the death of the Queen, which Hill said he remained silent during out of respect for those grieving.
“But when it got to proclaiming that Charles was now ‘our only rightful liege lord and king’ and that we owed him allegiance, that isn’t something I felt we should all listen to and passively accept as if we were still in the Middle Ages,” he said.
At that point, Hill said he called out: “Who elected him?” and “A head of state is being imposed without our consent.”
He said security guards tried to remove him from the crowd, and police officers grabbed hold of him and dragged him away despite protestations from people around him.
“They handcuffed my hands behind my back, told me I was being arrested, and forced me into the back of a police van,” he said.
Twitter users in the United States have been getting notices that people in Germany are complaining about their posts and that they have been investigated for hateful conduct.
It’s all part of the growing censorship industrial complex, which is growing by leaps and bounds.
The Left has been admiring China government tactics for quite a while now. Remember Tom Friedman’s lament that we couldn’t be “China for a day,” decrying the West’s inability to just do things without consent?
Well, the Left has given up on giving up. They ARE just going to do stuff whether it is legal or not. Consent of the governed only matters if you let it.
So here we are, a couple hundred years into the Western experiment in liberal democracy.
And the powers-that-be have decided: that was a bad idea.
If you don’t agree with them on the desireability of liberty, they have an answer: shut up, peasant.
I can’t go to france. I called macaroni a granny fkr.
Just last week a guy here in the U.S. was sentenced to ten years in prison for a joke meme about Hillary.
France has got nothing on is
My FR posting history pretty much rules out international travel for me.
Oh, and Macron is a filthy pervert.
(-;
“My FR posting history pretty much rules out international travel for me.”
You may have meant that comment as a joke, but very soon it may well be true. Everyone, for their personal safety, should NEVER post on an online political forum using any identifiablel information. And your PC, cell phone, or whatever posting device, should be locked tighter than a mini-dress in a Mexican cantina!
President Elder Abuse
I thought Macron was tougher than that.
That whole teacher thing may be a normal sexual fantasy young boys have, but it’s not something a 24 year older teacher should actually do with an under age kid (I think he was 15 when they started having sex).
Of course some in the press are actually writing about how cool or romantic this is: https://nypost.com/2018/01/20/how-emmanuel-macron-wooed-his-former-high-school-teacher/
But it’s no different here. We have a stumble bum as a President that does the one legged lift to let one rip in front of a English royal (https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/joe-biden-camilla-parker-bowles-cop26-summit-glasgow-fart-4417781.html), poops his pants at the Vatican, gets lost on stage repeatedly, shakes the hands of ghosts, falls up the stairs repeatedly, and has a hard time speaking in coherent sentences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXepkdJHko (At minute 3 it gets really creepy) But no big deal!
It is very scary to see what sort of folks are at the top. It is obvious what the true qualifications are: play along and give the billionaires, globalist firms and financial institutions what they want. Do that and the media will like you and you’ll get the money for your campaign.
You can be a clown like Zelinsky, brain dead like Biden, in a weird and perverted relationship like Macron, and you’ll get re-elected even if the economy is sliding down, inflation is on the rise, as is crime, you lead a nation into a senseless and needless war, infrastructure is decaying... All of these men are backed by the big corporate and financial interests, the oligarchs running things in reality. They are there because they are a rubber stamp for those interests.
Germans LOVE group think.
They think it’s a virtue.
Seems like UK, Germany and France finally agree on something, internet censorship. Bravo.
In rough and inaccurate astronomical terms. In case sheldon’s out there reading. Betelgeuse the big red star in the upper left corner of the Orion constellation is demonstrating evidence of stress. Flashing bright colors and Dimming suddenly ejecting clouds of dark dust obscuring it’s light... then flashing again turning colors.
The remains of the hydrogen powering the nuclear engine of the star is collapsing exponentially thru the periodic table into iron and exploding out. Shortly the nuclear process will no longer be able to withstand the pull of gravity it will collapse and detonate. Then for several months on earth night will turn to day as it explodes into a huge supernova. Perhaps leaving behind some other astronomical phenomena and a big red nebula expanding at half the speed of light.
A pretty good allegory for the condition of the western world which our grandchildren will inherit.
Maybe sooner.
We’re getting overrun by stupid little dictators.
“Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered...” Thomas Paine
Macron’s wife is a pedophile like Biden. She was his teacher in school. He was 15 at the time.
In 1993, at the age of 40, she met the 15-year-old Emmanuel Macron in La Providence High School where she was a teacher and he was a student and a classmate of her daughter Laurence. She divorced Auzière in January 2006 and married Macron in October 2007.
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