Qu'est-ce Qui Se Passe Avec Les Parisiens Et Leur Autos Flambees?

by Robert Farago

Published: January 29th, 2009

qu est ce qui se passe avec les parisiens et leur autos flambees

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Ronnie Schreiber on Jan 30, 2009
The simple fact is that they are poor because of their own behaviors and attitudes. Geeber, while in general I agree with you, many people are born into poverty. I would amend your statement to say that people stay poor because of their own behaviors and attitudes. Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by Adam W. Shepard shows how economic mobility is eminently possible in the US. As for investing $2000 in a business. I'm sure many people will say "that's hardly enough capital to invest in a business". Still, I just checked on eBay and $2000 will buy you maybe 4 industrial sewing machines. So that $2000 may actually represent much more economic growth because they'll have to hire 4 people to operate those machines. Poverty certainly breeds crime in the sense that moral concerns will be put aside in the face of making money. Gangs, in a sense, are an economic opportunity. Still, poverty is not deterministic. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the only real differences between people are the values they aspire to and how well they meet those values. As long as there is such a thing as free will, in a society with as much political and economic freedom as their is in the US (want to start a business with $2,000? Buy a beat up truck and some lawnmowers) poverty will not be an insurmountable barrier. Getting out of poverty is a relatively simple thing. Don't have babies you can't support and don't waste the money you earn. Even if a family remains impoverished, the right values, the right culture will see that it shouldn't last more than one generation. People indeed scrubbed floors and dug ditches so their kids could go to college. This is a rich country and nearly 100% of the people here waste money on something. If you're serious about getting out of poverty, you eat oatmeal and tuna fish, not McDonalds.

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Theswedishtiger on Jan 30, 2009
Going back to France and burning cars The average age of a Muslim in France is way, way, lower than the average white Frenchman/woman. The French have a very closed system when it comes to being white. I interviewed for jobs in Lyon and Grenoble, I am had at the time great qualifications, qualifications that should have got me into Hewlett Packard or Global SA. However the apprenticeship, qualification, unemployment restrictions etc etc are so weighted against the employer taking a risk that they will not employ a person of color, foreigner or anyone that is not the norm. The French system can break this barrier. Then the French education starves the poor quartier ecoles of cash and good teachers, and it is almost impossible to be a muslim and get into the National School of Administration. So France says to its fastest growing population, we wont educate you to get a job, we will not risk giving you a job and we will castigate you for not having one. All the talk of Muslims not wanting to integrate, or that it is a 'poor' problem is missing the point. The French are in denial. And also hogwash is buying sewing machines and setting up a business. Cloud cuckoo land. Setting up your own business is a huge, I mean, huge bureaucratic nightmare. Not only that the French system is so anti-small business you have to wonder why they exist in the first place. Add that to the fact that you educated poorly and the idea is a non-starter. It really gets my back up when an American tells a Cuban or a French Muslim, that all they need to make it in their country is hard work. Maybe if they lived there they could speak with a little more authority.

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Psarhjinian on Jan 31, 2009
We are all individuals, not easily categorized groups. Yes and no. People are easily categorized into groups. If they weren't, things like "religion", "sociology" and "marketing" wouldn't work. People are social animals, and certain aspects of the way we work can be extrapolated to a macrosocial level. The trick is understanding that "people" and "the person" are different entities, and can only be influenced in different ways. There are patterns of behaviour that can be changed easily at the "people" level but are extremely difficult to do at the level of "person", or vice-versa. For example, it's all well and good to cite anecdotal evidence, or talk of bootstraps and personal responsibility and such (because it makes good copy) but you cannot scale that up to a societal level. This is what libertarians fail to understand. Socialists, by the way, have the same problem, but in a different direction: thinking that rules effective on the macroscopic level can be scaled down, which doesn't work. A great deal of the ideological divide happens for this reason.

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DeanMTL on Jan 31, 2009

What a useless, futile exercise this discussion has been. You can argue what you like, and at the end of the day the problem is a young group of Muslims in France that is riddled with anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, and a lack of real hardships that makes them think they're "suffering" somehow. I wonder what the men who fought in the World Wars would say to this bunch of f-ing losers.

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