Hey, I have a real live french term today; Les Flics.
That's, like, French for "The Cops", man. And let me tell you, the cops seem to be the same everywhere!
Even in France.
I have come a long way from my old neighborhood where the cops were constantly strangling people to death. Okay, not constantly, sometimes they shot people in their cars too. But either way, protests seemed to result, and in the end shattered shop windows along my local streets ended up covered in boards and an occasionally building was burned to the ground.
Just like where I am now!
Just exactly like where I fucking am now!
And I know to a distant viewer and to all the confidently confused people of, say, Reddit, or the Internet in general, or, like, The New York Times or Le Monde, there are a lot of different narratives flying around, all with very real accompanying video footage, and it seems really hard to suss out.
I am not here to suss it all out for you. I just want to point out the most absolutely obvious thing in the world:
The police, les flics, are not doing their job.
1. You have videos of les flics beating innocent people.
2. You have videos of les flics in great mobs facing off with protesters with things being hurled in both directions albeit with the things the police are hurling looking far more dangerous.
3. You have videos of people looting shops on extremely public main streets and there are no police around at all.
So, police beating innocent people. Not their job.
Police fighting protesters? How is this relevant? How is this a police job? They are in no way throwing their bodies on the line or standing desperately protecting anything but the street behind them. Why? It seems based on a theoretical prevention. But shouldn't someone commit a crime before the police start enforcing the law on them...
Like, maybe breaking into shops and wantonly stealing stuff?
I am pretty far on the left in any reasonable political spectrum, but even I could handle these two simple ostensibly conservative concepts:
1. People sitting, marching, even protesting? Not really that much of a police issue, but I can grudgingly accept their keeping an extremely tolerant eye on things.
2. People actually smashing shop windows, stealing from places, and burning things? Okay, reasonable for le flic, Monsieur Policier to intervene.
If only they would.
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