261–270 of 365 posts
> (...) tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful. Well. I mean... Joking aside, the text is amazingly blunt and honest, in a rather refreshing way. "The French don't bathe." The French don't bathe often enough. They can't.…
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I think you're conflating race with ethnicity and nationality, which makes all three concepts meaningless.
The connotations of the term race has changed. It was definitely common in the fairly recent past (WWI) for English people to speak of Germans as a different race, indeed using the term more like we would use ethnicity today. See also the English division of India into martial and non-martial "races". You are implying a use of the term which is more influenced by biology and some vague, folksy notion of genetic/darwi…
There is absolutely no scientific basis for the racial categories used today.
Apart from the fact that the genetic differences between all humans are tiny compared to different races in animals (which is I guess where the term comes from), there is also the fact that many ethnicities which are lumped under a common race differ more from each other than from many other "categories", e.g. Africa has more genetic diversity than all other continents combined. Therefore one "black" person might differ significantly more from another "black" than from a Caucasian or Asian person.
I mean the irony that there is the "racial" category of "African-American".
I think this is also not just semantics. The use of the term race associates much larger differences than there actually are, which makes it easier to justify discrimination/hate.
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It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday. My stepfather escaped nazi Germany, and moved to the us in the 40s. He grudgingly adapted to daily bathing (my mother's insistence), but remarked how very American that is. He was very 20th century European, for sure.
(European here) my grandparents bathed I think once per week, we often joked about this in the family. My uncle who is a commercial construction inspector/engineer arranged for a full bathroom model a couple years before they died. When we went to sell the house he complained the bathroom was unused and looked the same as the day he signed off on it. Despite this, they never smelled bad to me, they certainly had a re…
I need to bathe daily. If I don't I get a sore under my arm, and I can smell myself.
I had a girlfriend, well kinda, who didn't believe in showering, and she did smell. I never had the nerve to tell her.
My grandfather didn't bath, and didn't have an odor. He was small, and very skinny though.
My best friend didn't bath, and he did smell. I should have habituated to his smell since I saw him so much, but no. His smell was so bad, I needed to put down a towel before he sat on any chair.
I saw my grandfather once a year.
I kind of wonder why it's always acceptable to have general critics about the Frenchs, but take exactly the same discours and replace it replace it with Jews or Blacks, and sundenly, it becomes completely racist and unacceptable.
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Not sure if you are joking? > France is the country with the deepest, most sedimented reservoir of anti-American arguments. Its long genealogy has been well documented over the years, most recently by Philippe Roger, who argues that French anti- Americanism is older than the United States (Roger 2002). https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/meunierces...
Admittedly I'm not clicking on the link (2002 is peak antipathy both ways due to Iraq war build-up), but I've seen similar stuff that doesn't account for French people have a negative attitude towards everything compared to other countries. If you ask French people in a poll whether they approve of something they are much more likely to disapprove
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Except that taking someone's DNA without their consent (or the consent of their guardians) is nothing like making girls (and women) be accompanied by a chaperone. I always find it fascinating that many American people believe very strongly in individual freedoms, the same people often believe these freedoms do not apply to children (or teenagers) and parents should have unconditional ownership over their children.
But do you really need the consent of all the guardians?
So why should a paternaty test be different?
> (...) tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful. Well. I mean... Joking aside, the text is amazingly blunt and honest, in a rather refreshing way. "The French don't bathe." The French don't bathe often enough. They can't.…
> the text is amazingly blunt and honest It would likely have been written to be comprehensible to people with a fairly low reading level.
I like simple.
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Vichy did represent French sentiment at the beginning. Things changed with time.
> Vichy did represent French sentiment at the beginning. No, not really. The Vichy regime was the dictatorship puppet regime imposed onto the remaining french territory after the third republic was dissolved, and enacted policies imposed by Nazi germany such as rounding up Jews to hand them over to them. It grossly misrepresents the french sentiment of the time to even suggest that France suddenly had a change in hea…
The national sentiment in June 1940 when Pétain formed the last government of the 3rd Republic was _very_ pro-Pétain and the country as a whole was pro-armistice. The Vichy regime was formed on the basis of popular support to lead a policy that, if it didn't gather the unconditional support of everyone, didn't alarm many. You have to keep in mind the Parliamentarian 3rd Republic was seen as having failed miserably. All the while 1.8 French men were held as PoWs in Germany and the government was expected to gain them back.
Until mid-1941 pro-Vichy sentiment remained high and the Resistance movement was at best paltry, with people like de Gaulle seen as trouble makers.
Germany invaded the USSR on the on June 22, prompting the Communists in France to enter the Resistance. At the same time the systemic plunder of the French economy, with the help of Vichy, was coming into fruition and starting to be felt. Real antisemitic and repression policies started being implemented in the second half of 1941.
The Vel d'Hiv Roundup happened in mid-1942. In June 22 1942 French workers were incentivised to leave France to work in Germany. Two months later, on August 22 work conscription was instituted and accelerated in late 42 / early 43 while the Germans invaded Southern France, up 'til now nominally in the hands of the French government.
From _that_ moment national sentiment truly turned, Vichy lost all the good will it still had, the French lost all illusions that Pétain was anything more than a mop and large amounts of youths trying to dodge slave work in Germany entered the Resistance.
I think you « grossly misrepresent » French sentiment much more than I do.
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I'll use myself as an example: - Voters should show proof of citizenship when voting. - The US needs to take a serious look at implementing Universal Basic Income, and not just because of the automation of jobs. - Abortion should be legal up to the earliest that a fetus has survived out of the womb, roughly 3 months. - We should celebrate diversity, and, we should be able to talk about what makes us different. Withou…
> - Voters should show proof of citizenship when voting. You'll get no disagreement on this from any liberal. In fact the disagreement lies not in proving citizenship but in the methods to do so. If you have to show proof to register then why do you need to show proof to vote? In fact, if you have ID that proves you are a valid voter then registration shouldn't be necessary at all. Republicans not only want you to sh…
Maybe in France but in the US you will absolutely get disagreement from liberals.
>If you have to show proof to register then why do you need to show proof to vote?
If you showed proof to get your driver's license then why do you need to show proof to drive?
If you showed proof to purchase/register your vehicle why do you need to show proof of registration when you get pulled over?
>In fact, if you have ID that proves you are a valid voter then registration shouldn't be necessary at all.
In fact, if you have ID that proves you are over 21 then registration of your firearm purchase shouldn't be necessary at all.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
But seriously, left out from the list of great of Frenchmen Laplace, Lagrange, Galois, DeLambert etc. But I guess the list of mathematicians would have made the book too thick.