2012/12/01

Est-il donc vraiment interdit de penser que la lutte anti homme est aussi détestable que le mépris des femmes ?

Roucaute Yves
A en croire certains journalistes, qui n'ont guère apprécié la réaction de Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, si vous n'êtes pas féministe, vous êtes du côté des oppresseurs, de l'inégalité, voire des violeurs....

Est-il donc interdit de refuser une idéologie sexiste anti-mec sous prétexte de se voir menacer de défendre une idéologie sexiste anti-femme? Est-il donc vraiment interdit de penser que la lutte anti homme est aussi détestable que le mépris des femmes ? Et que la Constitution devrait conduire à interdire tout groupement qui fait l'apologie du sexisme ?

Ceux qui croient en l'égalité des droits simplement parce que l'égalité des droits est naturelle, comme le pensent tous les défenseurs des droits naturels, devraient-ils courber la tête pour laisser passer ces discours obscènes et archaïques de la lutte des femmes contre les hommes ? Est-il interdit de rappeler que le droit de vote des femmes a été obtenu par le général Charles de Gaulle et non par les féministes? Est-il interdit de rappeler que les hommes loin d'avoir été des exploiteurs invétérés, ont dû durant des millénaires faire le travail dur lié au monde agricole puis industriel et que 90% des ouvriers sont des hommes... sans que nul ne songe à proclamer la nécessité d'une égalité ? Est-il vraiment insensé de rappeler que les cimetières des villages sont remplis de ces "machos-violeurs" qui sont allés mourir pour leur famille, à la façon de ces marins qui proclament les femmes et les enfants d'abord"?

Allons, battons nous pour l'égalité des droits et contre les discours de haine, femmes et hommes réunis. Battons nous contre les féministes et leurs compères phallocrates, dénonçons les manipulations de chiffres, de statuts dont sont friands quelques féministes qui cherchent à obtenir du pouvoir et non à avancer vers l'harmonie entre femmes et hommes. Bref, soyons fermes face à ces idéologues féministes qui défendaient naguère la révolution culturelle chinoise et proclamaient la destruction de la famille, et qui aujourd'hui encore tentent de relancer la guerre des sexes.

Contre les sexistes, ce n'est qu'un début le combat continue ! :-))

2012/11/29

How the French Use the Word "Extremist" and the Prefix "Ultra-" to Demonize Everything Conservative


More demonizing of the Tea Party in France, as Le Monde's Christian Salmon mentions the dangers of the " 'no worries' right nourished with the neo-conservative milk which flirts at times with the extremism of the ultra-conservative Tea Party".
Loin d'en faire l'analyse, l'UMP a mis en scène un conflit d'ambitions, un débat entre deux styles ou deux tempéraments, occultant le profond clivage qui existe entre une droite "décomplexée", nourrie au lait néoconservateur qui flirte parfois avec l'extrémisme du mouvement ultraconservateur Tea Party, et un gaullisme social désormais hors sol.
As Jeff Belmont has written, people in France are always throwing around the word "ultra" for the simple reason that the newspaper
reader must be frightened at all costs and [that America's] Republicans must be demonized at all costs
As Corentin de Salle has put it (merci à David A) — tongue-in-cheek:
Trucs & Astuces.

Aujourd'hui: l'ultralibéralisme.

Quand vous entendez l'expression "ultralibéralisme", il y a quatre hypothèses.

• Primo, celui qui prononce ce mot est "ultra-stupide" (exemple: "la politique ultralibérale de l'Union Europénne"; "la politique ultra-libérale du gouvernement Sarkozy). 

• Deuxio, celui qui parle est "ultra-ignorant" et n'a aucune idée de la manière dont se structure le champ des idées et doctrines politiques.

• Tertio, celui qui parle est "ultra-intolérant". Le préfixe péjoratif "ultra" a évidemment pour but de disqualifier d'emblée une personne qui intervient dans un débat, raison pour laquelle la gauche médiatique se sert abondamment de ce terme.
Par contre, on ne parlera jamais "d'ultrasocialisme" ou "d'ultraécologisme".

• Quatro, celui qui dit cela est "ultra-conforrmiste" et, faute de disposer du goût ou des capacités pour réfléchir par lui-même, il se contente de répéter, par un réflexe moutonnier, cette expression utilisée par les trois premières catégories.

2012/11/27

Undermining journalistic impartiality: The line between politicians and the news media can be blurry in France

The nation’s leading conservative newspaper ousted its top editor, apparently hoping to ingratiate itself with the new government. A cultural magazine brought in a new editor as well, opting for the partner of a newly minted government minister.
Thus reports Scott Sayare from Paris, in an article the New York Times entitled Where ‘In Bed With Media’ Can Be Taken More Literally.
The man she replaced took a job working for the new president. The springtime election of François Hollande, the first French president from the left in 17 years, has brought about a shuffling of the news media ranks, along with a host of potential conflicts of interest.

Coverage has shifted too. Much of the news media, which largely lean left, used to revel in denouncing Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, but now many journalists are feeling bereft of material because of the new president’s less dramatic governing style. Mr. Hollande has proved confoundedly boring, they say, especially for news outlets that sometimes cover the government as if nothing else matters, relying on Paris politics to drive the news. 

The line between politicians and the news media can be blurry in France, where the fates of some journalists have long been hitched to those in the government they pester or please. Mr. Sarkozy’s close ties to media executives were considered something of a scandal, and his presidency drew greater scrutiny to the incestuous relationships. 

Mr. Hollande campaigned on a pledge to be “exemplary.” But in a country where much of the Paris elite share a common background, attended the same schools and go to the same parties, the traditional commingling of journalists and politicians has endured. Daniel Carton, a former reporter in France, blames the news media for not doing more to resist such close ties.

“They know exactly what they need to do to avoid things getting out of hand, but they won’t do it,” said Mr. Carton, an outspoken critic of conflicts of interest in French journalism.

For decades, newspapers have relied heavily on state subsidies. The public media, which account for perhaps half of mainstream television and radio news, are still run by political appointees. Private media outlets belong to companies or investors with demonstrated political leanings or business connections to the state, undermining journalistic impartiality. 

Perhaps most striking this election cycle was the situation of Étienne Mougeotte, whose run as top editor at the rightist daily Le Figaro began and ended with the presidency of Mr. Sarkozy, the politician he championed and whom he was said to advise. 

“We’re a newspaper of the center and the right, and we support Nicolas Sarkozy,” Mr. Mougeotte told the center-left Le Monde last year. Under Mr. Mougeotte, Le Figaro was routinely criticized, sometimes by its own reporters, as being a mouthpiece for the government. 

Mr. Hollande was said to have requested Mr. Mougeotte’s dismissal, according to French media reports, and it came in July.

The publisher, Serge Dassault, is a senator from Mr. Sarkozy’s political party. But Mr. Dassault also heads a major military contractor, and there was widespread speculation that Mr. Mougeotte’s ouster was meant to put the Daussault group in good stead with the new president. 

The news and culture magazine Les inRockuptibles hired as its new top editor Audrey Pulvar, a radio and television personality who was also the partner of Arnaud Montebourg, a government minister and a prominent member of the Socialist Party. 

Mr. Pulvar recently announced the end of her relationship with Mr. Montebourg, but other such relationships have continued. Valérie Trierweiler, Mr. Hollande’s current partner, began an affair with him while reporting on him in the early 2000s, when he was a member of the National Assembly. She grudgingly passed on a television news job this fall and stayed at the magazine Paris Match as a critic. 

Ms. Pulvar replaced David Kessler, who left to join Mr. Hollande as an adviser. Also, a legal affairs reporter at Europe 1 radio became the spokesman for the justice ministry. A political reporter at Les Échos, a leading French financial newspaper, joined the prime minister’s press office. 

The public media have gone through postelection changes too. In October, Mr. Hollande named a new director for the country’s international radio and television news networks, RFI and France 24. He has pledged to reform the law that allowed him to make that appointment, but not until next year. The directors of Radio France and France Télévisions, both appointed by Mr. Sarkozy, are expected to be replaced. The current law, which makes the naming of public media chiefs a presidential prerogative, was introduced by Mr. Sarkozy in 2009. At the time, commentators called the measure a power grab. Mr. Sarkozy said it was meant to remove a layer of “hypocrisy” from the appointment process, which was controlled by a handpicked government council. 

The public media no longer serve as state propagandists, as they effectively were until at least the late 1960s, but remain under government “oversight,” said Jean-Marie Charon, a sociologist who studies the news media. 

Private publications are also beholden to the state, at least financially. The government provided $1.5 billion in subsidies to them last year. 

Publications on the left are struggling to “find the right distance” from the government, Mr. Charon said. The jubilation that dominated political coverage last summer in Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde has since given way to acrimony. Whichever way the French news media lean, the departure of Mr. Sarkozy has left many outlets yearning for more excitement. 

“We had five years that were pretty exceptional; we had a man who was the center of everything,” said Pierre Haski, co-founder and editor of Rue89, a news Web site. “All of a sudden, we’ve gone from an overload to an underload.” 

“Sarkozy was good for sales,” Mr. Haski added. “Hollande is not good for sales.”

2012/11/26

Paralyzed by Fear: One of the most criminal regions in Europe

Gilbert Thiel has been investigating Corsica’s vicious feuds for 16 years 
reports Celestine Bohlen.

As a member of France’s team of anti-terrorism magistrates, he knows how hard — read impossible — it is to penetrate the island’s tightknit criminal world, where nationalism and banditry have blended into a combustible mix.

Mr. Thiel has been giving a lot of interviews recently, ever since a well-known Corsican lawyer was shot and killed in his car Oct. 16. That murder shocked France, coming as an unwanted reminder that Corsica, an island of 305,000 people about 175 kilometers, or 110 miles, off the French coast, is still under the thrall of an old legacy of vengeance and death

“You think if it’s small, it should be easy, but no,” said Mr. Thiel, speaking Nov. 15 in his high-security office in the Palace of Justice in Paris. “Everyone is connected. You can’t infiltrate, even if you have the right accent and the right complexion.” 

“The first question they’ll ask is which village are you from, and that’s it,” Mr. Thiel said. “It’s over. There were two attempts to infiltrate informants, and it didn’t take long for both to turn updead.” 

On the morning of Nov. 15, the number of assassinations in Corsica this year stood at 16. By that evening, it had ticked up to 17, with the murder of Jacques Nacer, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry, shot and killed as he was closing up his men’s clothing shop in Ajaccio, the island’s capital. 

“These are assassinations,” Mr. Thiel said that morning. “We’re not talking about some guy who kills his wife, or a wife who kills her husband. These are settlement of scores among rival bands of organized crime, or fratricidal struggles between nationalist groups.” 

By one count, there have been 100 assassinations on Corsica since 2008, making the island, per capita, one of the most criminal regions in Europe

As Mr. Thiel likes to put it, Corsica is a mountain in the middle of the sea, where isolated villages hold onto an ancient culture of vendetta and resist the authority of the French government.

… Since mid-October, he has spoken out against the French government’s lack of a consistent response to the violence in Corsica. He has cited a series of amnesties in the 1980s that were followed by other halting initiatives. He has criticized a flawed reform of intelligence-gathering that he said had led to confusion, and few results. 

It is no wonder that Corsican society today is paralyzed by fear, he said. “How can a population rebel against this kind of violence when the state apparatus is seen to be underperforming?” 

That “code of silence” was vividly confirmed last week by France’s top security official, Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who said on national television that he had been stunned by the reticence of people on the streets of Ajaccio. “I saw fear on their faces,” he said. “Some didn’t dare talk to the minister of the interior.” 

Crime in Corsica has evolved since 1998, when, in a stunning act of political terrorism, France’s top government official in Corsica — the prefect Claude Érignac — was gunned down. Mr. Thiel was the investigating magistrate in the case, in which Yvan Colonna was eventually convicted of the murder. 

… Mr. Thiel’s last big Corsican case involved a number of young thugs, arrested for a series of violent acts committed in 2007 and 2008, including the tossing of a grenade into a police station. 

He compared the defendants, who were convicted and sentenced last July, to “children soldiers,” who turned to crime as much for the money and the thrill as for the politics. “If you ask them, they’ll say they’re doing it for Corsica, but they can’t say much beyond that,” he said.