They found a gasoline bomb-making factory south of Paris.
I don’t think this is just about disaffected youths anymore. I think the electrocuted boys were just an excuse. Refresh my memory…how long did the Rodney King riots last?
I don’t see why not. Poor neighborhood with local street gangs and abandoned buildings and us vs. them feelings, it’s not hard to get 5 or 6 people together to prepare for the evening’s havoc.
And the King riots lasted 6 days, but were more intense.
But spreading to 300 towns? I think that’s more than five or six people making mischief.
I may have misinterpreted your remark. I thought you were using the “factory” as evidence of some sort of larger organized conspiracy by Muslim fundamentalists. I was just pointing out that the “factory” wouldn’t take much organization or effort to organize. I certainly wasn’t trying to degrade the sscope of the situation in Paris.
Havent’ heard or read anything about Charenton (the one just south of the Bois de Vincennes right ?) - I’ve just checked the local paper which had a check list of last night’s violence. She’s fine.
No, not yet. But it is a disturbing sign, and makes me wonder if the immigrants were just waiting for an excuse to get the ball rolling, as it were.
HELL YES!
Those kids were electrocuted, hiding inside a power sub-station.
If the French don’t stop this now, hard, this will happen every month!
Small French towns will look like Beiruit.
Maybe they could go around one night and smash the glass in all the Muslim shops.
If you want to call me a Nazi, come out & say it.
It ain’t true, of course, but when did reality ever trouble you, sunshine? :dubious:
BTW–the Muslims have already broken all the glass.
Most of the time, I’m afraid. 
Yah, right. The army should be called out to machine-gun those rioting negroes ravaging US cities and ship their Communist-inspired sympathisers back to west africa. Otherwise small mid-west towns will look like Guernica.
Jeez, can you maybe stop for 10 seconds and apply a little rational thought before you start foaming at your keyboard? You sound like a cross between McCarthy and Wallace who has been reprogrammed with 21st century terminology.
This is just the same old same old that has happened time and again in every country which has a substantial minority cut off from economic advancement. Watts, Notting Hill, French Suburbs, whatever. It’s not The Downfall of Western Civilization™.
I need some clarification on some information I heard.
Is it true that legal immigrants to France are forced to live in public housing? That the adults are forbidden to seek jobs for 2-3 years, and the family is forced onto welfare? That the immigrants are even forbidden to clean their housing unit, as a French cleaning union comes in to clean? Is this all immigrants, or just the ones from Muslim countries and North Africa?
That does not seem to me to be a very welcoming atmosphere. It discourages blending into the population and encourages dependence on the taxpayers. Is it any wonder that the children of the immigrants, seeing their parents weak and dependent, may feel inferior and angry at the lack of opportunity in their new country?
No idea if it is factually true, but it sounds like a slight exaggeration of circumstances common to many poor immigrants.
Can’t afford private-sector housing, so have to join a long queue for (terrible) public housing, meanwhile being put in crappy ‘short-term’ accommodation for a few years. Can’t get a legal job (of ANY kind) until all the bureaucracy is done and you have proper papers (Don’t want people just coming in and taking jobs from citizens!).
Same old same old, happens everywhere, because most rules about immigration are designed to DISCOURAGE it and therefore have the effect of making people’s lives miserable - otherwise several hundred million people would up sticks and head for the EU and North America tomorrow.
I’m sure if you asked the average poor Guatemalan or Mexican or whatever family in some nasty neighbourhood of a big US city you would get a similar picture, ditto for poor Cambodians in Australia, Somalis in the UK or any other random example - you don’t get the big warm smiley welcome unless you come with a shedload of cash, throw dinner parties for all your new neighbours and laugh (in the right places) at all their jokes. Where do you live that has a ‘welcoming atmosphere’ for poor third-worlders and their offspring?
I have not suggested deportation of anybody, and stop your damn straw-man arguments.
It’s not The Downfall of Western Civilization™, true.
But I do have a keen recollection of the history of Chicago, though, and a city can burn. Stop the rioters, at any & all costs. Now.
Why? A bunch of poor people are trashing their own neighbourhoods and generally acting out like the pissed-off teenagers they probably are. Providing you can keep them reasonably well contained they are only hurting themselves, their fellow ghetto-dwellers and anyone foolish enough to invest money there.
Why on earth would the bosses of the Police, Army or whatever want to get themselves involved in all the paperwork and heightened emotions resulting from hundreds of hospitalizations and a bunch of deaths? It’s not as if any many middle-class taxpaying types are very much affected. Let them get it out of their system and enjoy their newly devastated ghetto afterwards.
I suspect that’s pretty much the chain of reasoning that normally occurs in these situations - they seem to follow pretty much the same pattern. I’ll bet you a dollar that if there are major riots in Chicago again, the authorities will do the exact same thing.
Fair cop - I saw your posts as part of a string of idiocies from suezeekay, BwanaBob and so on. Apologies if I misunderstood, but really, what do you expect if you call for the government to ‘break out the live ammunition’? The French police carry pistols and have tear gas, baton rounds, shotguns, submachine guns, sniper and assault rifles in the deparmental armoury if they feel they need them, just like most other police forces.
The fact they aren’t blowing people’s heads off suggests they don’t feel it’s appropriate, just like the LAPD haven’t ever feelt it appropriate to issue ‘fire at will’ orders during any of their many riots. Sheesh.
Here is what I expect-civility. I also expect people to realize what forum they are posting in and act apropriately. In IMHO I expect people to realize that others have a right to form opinions that are different from their own.
I expect that from now on this petty arguing is going to cease.
But – It’s been reported that many of the rioters are actually French-born; the offspring of immigrants. Are there laws preventing such folks from getting jobs? 
I think the rioters are teenagers, not old enough to get full-time jobs. If the information I heard was correct, their parents were forbidden to look for work and were forced into welfare.
Apologies to all for the semi-hysterical hissy fit and general lack of politeness. I blame cognitive dissonance due to me accidentally arguing on behalf of the French - won’t happen again.
I doubt it very much. Clairobscur would probably be able to give you a better answer, however I would guess it’s more down to there being are all sorts of obscure regulations as to what qualifications you need to do particuar types of jobs, generalised racism and prejudice, plus France has a particular problem with unemployment amongst the young and the low-skilled due to various rigidities in the labour market (something like 10% overall and almost double among under-25s). On top of that France is still run by a very narrow clique of people who all went to the right universities, which doesn’t help social inclusiveness.
So in a job shortage, if you are young, poor, educated at a ‘wrong’ school, have the wrong skin colour, an accent, a funny name, and are stuck in a gigantic isolated housing estate full of other unemployed people, your chances of getting a half-decent job are pretty poor.
the hierarchy
the environment.
You can compare this to what went on in the US and the UK decades ago - poverty or discrimination will make people angry and frustrated, but combine the two and you’ll get social explosions fairly regularly. I’m sure that if most of these people had jobs that generated some kind of income and hope of betterment they’d still be hacked off at the way they are treated, but they wouldn’t be out wrecking their own neighbourhoods.
Ah well. Plus ca change, etc.