Interestingly enough, Libya did in fact bomb France two decades before France bombed Libya, via the multiple terrorist proxy Gaddafi financed.

please don't threaten people with a good time

There are multiple videos from France showing undercover police instigating and breaking things.

Then, the government is pushing cities to denounce the most popular Left party as the instigator of the riots.

They are preparing to ban them next elections for this. It's pretty clear it's all a political maneuver to ensure it's once again Macron's party versus Marine's far right party, hoping it ensures their win against her

yeah all the looters are actually secret police agents

They normally have to ask for dates, permits, are normally driven by groups that have been around for long, they have websites, they have a list of asks, etc etc.

Compare that with violent ones that see the opportunity coming with 3-4d heads-up (because peaceful protests are normally covered with a little advance - 3-4d - by mainstream press), create an Instagram/TikTok/Whatsapp/Snapchat group, spread it aggressively thanks to zero cost of social/IM, and their only objective is to smash everything in their path (and if they manage, steal some loot to resell).

> The best way for governments to deal with protests is to have policies in place that fulfill what We The People want.

We The People's desires are mutually exclusive.

We want lots of benefits, low taxes; high government spending/services, a stable currency; economic growth, low inflation; security, freedom; etc.

Representative democratic government is the reconciliation between those wants.

So no, the answer isn't as simple as giving the people what they want.

Presumably, because the people who want to change things do have in-system ways to do so: joining into a new Party, preaching their views, getting elected, growing, until they convince enough people to give them the power they need to change things.

In practice there may be many roadblocks in that, so this isn't absolute. But if that's the case, it's still on the people who notice the roadblocks to convince most everyone these are real. Without that any protest will lack widespread support and be suppressed regardless.

political movements that pose a threat to the regime's interests are suppressed much more aggressively and in much earlier stages, debanking etc.

there are many NGOs aligned with the current protests, and they receive substantial government funding, because they are in symbiosis. the regime doesn't provide funding for ideologies that actually threaten its interests.

public opinion has now reached a tipping point, any further vandalism/arson/violence will not provide a net benefit to the regime. that's why now they finally try to stop it.

I know nothing about the present situation in France, but in the past, in many other European countries, more often than not what drove people to burn shops down during protests were covert police/government agents, taking advantage of the weaker minded between protestants, in order to enable an intervention in force by the police against the others.

This governmental tactic of using "agents provocateurs" against protests had been invented by the French themselves, a very long time ago, but now it is universally used by all governments.

> The rioters are causing damage they themselves will have to pay for in taxpayer dollars. So their cost of living will go up.

Pensions cost 400+ billions a year, it's not the couple of millions of euros of damage that will change anything.

How much damage happened during the 1789 revolution? What about he US civil war?

If that's how you read the situation you're a complete tool

The _rioters_ aren't concerned with anything other than looting.

"I’m sure the Russians have agents on the ground inciting violence."

the "russian bot" thing made sense. this is just conspiritardation.

> The way French people protest is mental

I mean yes, but then france is on the 5th republic now, so unlike the USA where they just sit and take it, they riot until something happens.

> What drives people to burn shops

Simple:it's "If society doesn't work for me, then it's better that it works for no one"

When the people in charge care more about property than people, this is what happens.

The people who destroy stuff in protests in France are people coming from the bad neighborhoods that don't work legal jobs (mostly dealers) and therefore don't pay taxes. They go there to break for fun and to loot stores for profit.

The looting is done by the police.

Edit: instead of having my comments instantly shadowbanned by a coin clip, I've now been told that I'm posting too fast. That means a moderator is actively looking at my account and changing which punishment I'm subject to, but I've never received any feedback explaining why I am to be punished.

Some of the demands are well-intentioned but poorly thought through.

Example: many believe the rich ought to be taxed more; but the problem is the Laffer curve: when they're taxed too much, they work less or leave France. So tax receipts go down (not up). End result: more "fairness" on paper but the people who actually depend on government funding have less of it (e.g. for education).

So the change harms the very people who are protesting for the change.

Great for you but that's not how it works in France. They have been revolting on and off for decades/centuries, and the government know how to stifle it.

The police gas and break up most peaceful protests until there is no avenue left but to clash with the police. They regularly attack, maim, and kill people (either protesters or even bystanders, like the woman who was watching from her window and was targeted by a police explosive (confirmed not an accident but intentional police violence))

Agents provocateur instigate violence and looting, but the police never interrupt them like they do the peaceful kids. The images of riots play directly into the media and government hand who play the law and order angle. As evidenced by these news which only see it as rioting and not the government preventing any kind of protest.

They are using the unrest to try and ban the most popular leftist party in France. They are destroying what's left of democracy in the country.

The word “government” is the group that governs. People like Musk and Zuck govern their fiefdoms with absolute power, or at best the level of power medieval kings had.

The type of power the wield would be beyond imagination for the most ruthless Roman Emperor

And when the police needs a reason to put you away for a while, everyone and their dog can get arrested for illicit internet traffic.

Trivial bypasses only fuel further government abuse. Your VPN is about as strong as your kneecaps in an authoritarian regime.

And rest assured, the party has a list of people and their dogs, and will use it at a moment of convenience. Public facing VPNs are quite trivial to detect, even if you don't own your country telecom infra.

Only Chinese people know about it because they have to. French people have no idea what's the capabilities of SOTA DPI because why would they?

Yes, they spy on you to see if you pirate movies, so most users already use a VPN to download their pirated medias. Thanks to Hadopi, the french already know how to bypass censorship and surveillance

France has been blocking a lot of websites, some quite popular, since at least the Nappster wars and has expanded and expanded and expanded. Recent victims are Z-library, Anna's archive, a lot of satellite TV viewing websites, illegal streaming websites, ...

Of course reasons to block websites has expanded dramatically, especially into the political realm. For political examples, websites collecting video evidence police actions during protests "Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F", a lot of extreme-right websites (some arguably not very extreme, or should I say, every year that passes the bar of what means extreme-right for blocking purposes is lowered), VPNs, oh and "right-to-be-forgotten" stuff (blocking a number of groups who published details on important French and EU political figures, generally failing to achieve their goal. For a high profile example, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy used internet censorship to hide evidence of fraud, but got convicted anyway. There's also the example of ... I don't like to agree with the extreme right on anything, BUT, it is sadly absolutely true that LFI (a far left political party, or whatever you want to call leftists that, while absolutely not tankies, are not particularly opposed to using violence to achieve their aims. I think that's fair to say about them) is using internet censorship laws for everything from protecting their members against the police to silencing even internal criticism. Of course it is ALSO true RN commits far more problematic violence)

(obviously the reason LFI wants its members protected from the police, and school administrations and ... is the organizing violence thing they do. A lot of people agree at least with the aims of the protests, and it's not like these people commit murder or anything. But they certainly do cause a lot of destruction of property)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_France

They'll just ban VPNs from existing

You can install an app like 1.1.1.1 to use Cloudflare and there are many apps that will do it for generic DNS. Or manually but you will need to create DNS Profile and install it. It is not hard to generate one, but it is usually used for encrypted DNS which you should be using anyway.

There’s no setting for mobile data, but for WiFi you can go into the network settings and override DNS.

> I know how to do that with a computer but not iPhones. Androids are probably easier to set up.

I don’t understand this type of comment which is so prevalent on HN. If you don’t know, why do you assume something else is easier or harder? It takes less time to do this web search than to reply to a comment. Here’s how to change it on both iOS and Android, from the same website:

https://www.howtogeek.com/261701/how-to-change-the-dns-serve...

https://www.howtogeek.com/787039/how-to-change-your-dns-serv...

Doesn’t seem meaningfully different to me.

Not if the government is for, by, and of the people.

Lol

The far left: more free healthcare, fix heating in schools

The far right: expel immigrants

I can't tell any difference between these. They both seem like equally invalid opinions.