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French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

bbc.com

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Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#441

Post by selimthegrim »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #347
h1fra wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, france is always just 5-10 years behind US craziness.

US is 5-10 years ahead of Europe. MAGA is coming to France and the UK unless things change. In the UK the Conservatives and Starmer have seen to it. There are literally 2 things people in the UK want to see and both parties are stubbornly ignoring it, while failing to enact any policies that can actually help people. Meanwhile Starmer is becoming more authoritarian by the day. Trump didn't happen in a vacuum, ignore…

Pray tell which two things do they want to see?

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#442

Post by hollerith »

derektank wrote: post #403
seszett wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarkozy is not a political prisoner though. He's a politician that committed fraud by taking foreign money to finance his electoral campaign. Once elected he then proceeded to declare war to the dictator who gave him that money and eventually got him killed. That last point is sadly not in the scope of the judgement.

Are we crying tears over Muammar Gaddafi here? The man was a butcher and NATO was completely justified in imposing a no fly zone and supporting the National Transition Council in Libya. There was a UN Security Council resolution authorizing it. Lots of things to criticize Sarkozy for but his support for the intervention is not one of them.

>Are we crying tears over Muammar Gaddafi here?

Yes, because removing Gaddafi from power after he yielded to international pressure to give up his nuclear-weapons ambitions makes it less likely that leaders will agree to give up nuclear ambitions in the future.

All leaders of countries know that no one would do to the leader of North Korea what France, Britain and the US did to Gaddafi -- because North Korea has nukes.

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#443

Post by FridayoLeary »

malnourish wrote: post #366
FridayoLeary wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the BBC. I think it's part an unofficial mouthpiece of the foreign office and the most outstanding example in the world of how to push an agenda subtly through a combination of selective reporting, misrepresentation, false equivalances (an area where the BBC leads the world), combined with a very high quality editorial and reporting staff. But that recipe has an almost inherent left leaning stance. Oh also…

Interesting that you conclude with left leaning, when, as I understand it, the BBC is considered to lean right by many, too. I recall a number of journalists remanding BBC leadership over their alleged pro-Israel and right wing bias.

Is that satire? Like i said they're a punching bag for everyone.

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#444

Post by FridayoLeary »

selimthegrim wrote: post #441
FridayoLeary wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is 5-10 years ahead of Europe. MAGA is coming to France and the UK unless things change. In the UK the Conservatives and Starmer have seen to it. There are literally 2 things people in the UK want to see and both parties are stubbornly ignoring it, while failing to enact any policies that can actually help people. Meanwhile Starmer is becoming more authoritarian by the day. Trump didn't happen in a vacuum, ignore…

Pray tell which two things do they want to see?

Getting control of immigration, which includes deporting them and massively overhauling the asylum system and seriously addressing and investigating the grooming gang scandal, which is probably the biggest scandal in recent history. I would actually now add a third thing which is to reign in the out of control police who are arresting people for causing offence. By the way these aren't even the biggest problems facing Britain, just serious ones which are recieving the most attention and for good reason, because they should be simple to fix and they are throwing away our sovreignty for terrible reasons.

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#445

Post by cjfd »

ctrlp wrote: post #410
stenl wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.

That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrad…

This is not correct. Very many laws live much longer than the term of a politician. They are as much upstream to politics as downstream to it. A correct way of talking about this is as co-equal branches of government. Also 'politics' lumps together the executive and the legislative branch.

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#446

Post by mbivert »

neves wrote: post #423
kakwa_ wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not some kind of clickbait strategy to drive views. Driving an agenda is. Most of French media, specially newspapers, are money sinks only surviving because they are useful to push the rent-seeking business or ideological agenda of their owners (Dassault, Bouygues, Lagardere, Arnault, Bettencourt, Saade, Pinault, Niel). Also, just for context, Martin Bouygues, Bernard Arnault and Vincent Bollore, the respect…

What about Le Monde Diplomatique?

"It's complicated" I guess.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde_diplomatique offers a few first insights. Note how the page quickly emphasizes the redaction's independence.

Yet, it might be reasonably true: as stated in the Wikipedia page, Le Monde Diplomatique is read mostly by educated people, who probably are 1/ less susceptible to/more aware of coarse manipulation 2/ much less numerous.

That's to say, influencing (too much) the redaction might have too low of a costs/benefits ratio.

Personal anecdote: I've read it a few times about a decade ago. At that time, I perceived some of the articles to be more emotionally grounded than rationally, and the prose to be at time needlessly heavy, "sophisticated".

Those are the main reasons why I didn't kept reading it more often.

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#447

Post by [deleted] »

DFHippie wrote: post #437
FridayoLeary wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is 5-10 years ahead of Europe. MAGA is coming to France and the UK unless things change. In the UK the Conservatives and Starmer have seen to it. There are literally 2 things people in the UK want to see and both parties are stubbornly ignoring it, while failing to enact any policies that can actually help people. Meanwhile Starmer is becoming more authoritarian by the day. Trump didn't happen in a vacuum, ignore…

> The incredible successes of Trumps second term so far will encourage and empower populists everywhere. Successes? He's succeeded at consolidating power because his own party and his partisans on the Supreme Court allow it. Also, destroying stuff is easy. What are these successes of which you speak?

[deleted]

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#448

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ctrlp wrote: post #410
stenl wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.

That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrad…

> Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way

This is untrue anywhere that has the rule of law. (One can run a system where the law is secondary to politics. But it doesn't have the benefits of rule of law.)

> To preserve the law for the common stock, we can't use law against political figures without debasing the currency of law

The entire history of the rule of law runs in the opposite direction. Prosecuting current and former politicians strengthens the rule of law. What it weakens, temporarily, is stability. You need strong institutions to take on and survive prosecuting a former politican, particularly a former head of state.

> If the will of the people can be overruled by the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a juristocracy, not a democracy

You have a republic. Pure democracy doesn't work.

> legal system can and will be abused when it is used politically

Which is exactly what shielding politicians from prosecution causes.

The Roman Republic had this flaw. One of the perks of magistracy was immunity from prosecution. This not only encouraged corruption, it incentivised lawbreaking during office for politcal advantage and ultimately led to the downfall of the Republic when expiring politicians chose violence over losing immunity.

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#449

Post by 12_throw_away »

franze wrote: post #49

Fyi: Austria had a "tough on crime" minister of the interior who ended up in a jail he ceremoniously inaugurated himself.

Sounds about right tbh - any politician claiming they want to be "tough on crime" invariably (and ironically) means "I'm going to break some laws that apply to me in order to punish some out-group".

Re: French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

#450

Post by GrinningFool »

ctrlp wrote: post #410
stenl wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.

That matters little. It's a category error. People say things like "no one is above the law" but that isn't true. Not because of corruption, but because of the nature of politics. Law is downstream from politics and therefore in a very real sense subservient to it. To apply the law to political figures can never be done in a clean or unambiguous way, since it will always support the suspicion of lawfare, which degrad…

This is either clever satire or seems to be saying a politician should be able to shoot somebody on 5th avenue without legal consequence.
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