Pigdogfucker

Insane right-wing Americans, who’ve almost certainly never been to France and hate the French for their cheese consumption and lack of redneck stupidity (side note: they should meet my friend’s girlfriend’s rural French family, who are apparently an easy match for any Appalachian in Hickness Quotient), believe France is subject to an intifada (link broadly representative of wingnut opinion).

No, a few thuggish low-income low-prospects French people are rioting a bit. It happens. Get a fucking grip, you Arab-hating buffoons…

This article’s headline would have been better used two-and-a-half years ago.

Or something like that. I’m glad it first happened in France, whatever.

Sarkozy’s approval rating is running at 57%. This is silly: he’s not only nominally responsible (as Interior Minister) for some of the worst riots ever seen in Europe, he’s also actually responsible for them, after going on TV when everything was dying down to fan the flames by claiming that Arabs were scum.

Mind, the French coppers, who are far worse thugs than you’d find even in the Met, haven’t helped either. It all goes to show that zero-tolerance-thug-smiting policing is a Bloody Stupid Idea; that if you support it you’re not just a bloodthirsty callous maniac but also a bloodthirsty callous maniac who doesn’t care about outcomes; and that The People should be kept as far away as possible from the making of criminal law.

Obviously, all of these were known before…

What the hell is going on in France? Whatever, I’m reasonably sure that it’s Sarkozy’s fault – a displaced Blunkett if I ever saw one…