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As you probably assumed already, I'm back in the Gallic quagmire.While I was breathing a fresher, cleaner and healthier air in the Anglosphere, some students in this country were (still are/damn if I know) apparently on strike again.
I already mentioned that I've never set a foot in a French university and although I feel frequentely bolstered in my conviction that this is definitely a reason to rejoice, I still contemplate with awe and irony the utter stupidity of these would-be childish 'social strugglers' and their washed-up post 1968 'revolution' postures, who set up 'general assemblies' and declare themselves 'on strike' even though their productivity is broadly inferior to that of my left toes - Sorry guys and gals, but anything a student can offer is the promise of a potential, certainly not the assurance of a production - while on the very contrary, they are playing Little Lenin in Wonderland without ever pondering on the fact that the state offers them a playground with the patrimony it steals from the working classes.
It's all right to be young, selfish and have opinions, how self contradictory they could be, but before they begin to ape the workers who, unlike them, can't generally afford the privilege of doing nothing for the sake of it at the unwitting expense of others, I would suggest they take the course in the right direction and start by, well, working, first.
It's much easier than it looks, as seen from the National
Look at it from any angle but there is nothing less than absolute infamy in forcibly and collectively depriving any workman, artisan, merchant, employee or entrepreneur from a single penny of the money they earned by their work to finance studies for the sole benefit of other individuals.
Unless, of course, you happen to have such a peculiar definition of "equality" and "solidarity" that it implies forcing the 'masses' to pay for the promises of the potential of an 'elite'.
Anyway, the great thing this time, which adds to the comic of the situation, is that our Subsidized Revolutionaries in Short Trousers were not quite sure about what they were protesting against. There was a vague word about a vague reform and all the
'Course not I mean Dude. Change is bad, while general assemblies and free rides with the workers' money are so cool, I mean c'mon Dude. Why in the name of any napalm drinking hell raising bad m* from death would they accept to have to learn and get results, like in those stinking American universities, corrupted with stinking private money from stinking voluntary sponsors?
Dude?
Their pointless rhetoric getting really boring for anybody who passed the age of 16 without staying a Socialist Simpleton or becoming one, I'd rather point you to the testimony of a teacher at the university of Perpignan.
The text is in French only I'm afraid, and relates a trivial but rather brutal intrusion of the studionists (that would be "student unionists" or something. Yep, it's a new word for an old idea) in a classroom - where most students were actually refusing to go on strike.
Trivial event for us maybe, yet this teacher on the field sees things from a different point of view:
I already alerted my dean and authorities last spring, to tell them that they were underestimating the gravity of this kind of "contest" that is in fact an insidious variant not of the expression of discontent, but of the organized, financed and professionalized practice of destabilization of our institutions.Indeed, that's how it looks as seen from the Real World. We'd love to know where the organization, financing and professionalism come from by the way. Who wishes to take a guess?
And then:
(...) if all the unions, or those who think they defend a right cause, use the same means, then it's a permanent civil war... (...) The trade unions taking the control of the streets and paralyzing the government's action, it reminds me of the "popular democracies" of which the sorrowful outcome is well known.Guess what? You're teaching me nothing new here, prof . But your conclusion summarize my thoughts quite neatly:
The nightmare this country is living is not an excess of liberalism (DF note: that's classical liberalism here: laissez-faire, faith in the individuals' value and all the good 'stuff') ; it's sinking into welfare, penury, business' bankruptcy, flight of the talents, discouragement of the wills and a larvate civil war through chronic social conflicts...Sinking. Heh.
Told you it was a quagmire, Dude.
Or more precisely, who shouldn't.
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