A 15-year-old student has had their hand blown off after picking up a stun grenade being used by police as mass school protests continue across France, local authorities said.
The incident comes as nearly 500 schools are expected to be completely or partially closed following student protests across the country over dilapidated schools and classrooms, overcrowding and teacher shortages preceding a nationwide day of demonstrations on Tuesday.
I felt so optimistic during the Occupy protests. For a second it felt like we were going to make meaningful change.
To be fair, those who took part in Occupy are also part of many modern movements. It didn’t solve the problems but it started a lot of movements that are still alive today that, hopefully, will make some real changes.
God damn, me too. In my lifetime, that was the movement that resonated with me the most. They beat the shit out of those people.
They seized power by violent means and they aren’t going to cede power peacefully.
please read the book If We Burn.
We need to learn from Occupy and why it failed, so the next time (which is likely coming soon) it won’t.
Can you provide a few key points?
Leaderless horizontal movements, while historically understandable, are unable to move forward as needed to effect change and hold power.
How do you avoid the problem of leaders with concentrated power in such upheavals historically getting pretty murder-happy or at least very corrupt though? Horizontal organisation isn’t an affectation but a response to a real problem historically speaking.
Name one societal change brought by protests that did not require being
For it to happen.
I can’t.
People who salivate at the thought of another Terror scare me on a human level frankly. Some people are far too keen to play the hangman, unaware of what that does to your humanity.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
I genuinely hope we don’t live to see your blood-drenched dream become a reality, people like you are exactly how atrocities against innocent civilians happen. For everyone who deserved the guillotine (and don’t get me wrong some were lucky that’s all they got) dozens more were merely the victims of interpersonal disputes or insufficient doctrinal purity. People you’d dismiss as collateral damage to your grand dream have lives worth no less than yours, and you have no moral right to them whatsoever.
Even once your creepy enthusiasm for blood is eventually quenched, you end up with extremely unstable and traumatised polity that gives rise to something worse. People who fetishise death and suffering for its own sake (especially those who quiver with joy at being the one who gets to dish it out) are themselves damaged individuals who have no business being anywhere near the leadership of a political movement.