What the hell is wrong with the French?

France

Population:

60,180,529 (July 2003 est.)

Age structure:

0-14 years: 18.6% (male 5,725,170; female 5,449,991)
15-64 years: 65.1% (male 19,619,994; female 19,583,850)
65 years and over: 16.3% (male 4,006,857; female 5,794,667) (2003 est.)

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Economy - overview:

France is in the midst of transition, from a well-to-do modern economy that featured extensive government ownership and intervention to one that relies more on market mechanisms. The Socialist-led government has partially or fully privatized many large companies, banks, and insurers, but still retains controlling stakes in several leading firms, including Air France, France Telecom, Renault, and Thales, and remains dominant in some sectors, particularly power, public transport, and defense industries. The telecommunications sector is gradually being opened to competition. France's leaders remain committed to a capitalism in which they maintain social equity by means of laws, tax policies, and social spending that reduce income disparity and the impact of free markets on public health and welfare. The current government has lowered income taxes and introduced measures to boost employment. At the end of 2002 the government was focusing on the problems of the high cost of labor and labor market inflexibility resulting from the 35-hour workweek and restrictions on lay-offs. The government was also pushing for pension reforms and simplification of administrative procedures. The tax burden remains one of the highest in Europe. The current economic slowdown and inflexible budget items have thrown the government's goal of balancing the budget by 2004 off track.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/fr.html
 
Quote from super-ego:


Unlike Europe, the U.S. is a free market, with prices pegged to supply/demand.
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Lol.


What planet do you guys live on?


Maverick, 70% of French employed by the government? Where did you get this number from?


As resinate said, a social safety net doesn't mean that the entire system of government is socialist, that's ridiculous.

The American right can kick and scream as much as it wants, but the simple facts are that Western European governments provide a better quality of life for a much greater proportion of their population than does America.
 
Aug. 18 issue — An unnamed 15-year-old girl is assaulted by 18 boys, most of them not much older than she is. Sonia, also 15, is raped by seven of her supposed friends in the basement of her apartment building. Sheherezade, 11, is beaten and raped repeatedly over the course of a year by 12 different boys.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/950453.asp

GRIM AS SUCH crimes may be, they’re becoming commonplace in the police ledgers of Paris, Lyons or Toulouse. The scene is almost always the same: the housing projects called cites on the outskirts of France’s major cities. Built by socially progressive governments in the 1960s, they’ve since been taken over by a generation of mostly Arab immigrants—impoverished, cut off from their native lands and culture, ghettoized. Here, young men try to rule their families and neighbors under a macho code drawn partly from Muslim tradition, partly from the violence and porn in the media. Women submit to men, they say. Good girls, good sisters, cover themselves and stay home. Otherwise they are putes, whores, who can be used and abused even if they say no.
 
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Is violence against women all that common?

Violence against women is, unfortunately, common in America. Consider the following facts from national surveys:

One out of four American women report having been raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, live-in partner, or date at some time in their life.

About 1 million women are stalked each year in the U.S.

While men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, women are between 5 to 8 times more likely to be victimized by an intimate partner.

An estimated 4 million American women are physically abused by their spouses or live-in partners each year.

Another estimated 1.9 million American women are physically assaulted each year.

One out of every six American women has experienced some form of sexual assault or abuse during her lifetime. Of these women, 76% of them over the age of 18 report that they have been raped by someone they know.


http://www.4woman.gov/faq/violence.htm
 
French diss

Don't believe all you read about America's loathing of France - there's no divorce on the cards just yet

Stuart Jeffries
Monday September 15, 2003


Even before Jacques Chirac's unwillingness to countenance war in Iraq, the Americans dreamed of blowing France off the map. In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, for instance, the evil megalomaniac Hank Scorpio, his blackmailer's finger poised over a button that will destroy a major European country, consults Homer Simpson. "Homer, what's your least favourite country: Italy or France?" Homer shrugs: "France." Scorpio chuckles, and then adds: "Nobody ever says Italy."

The Simpsons codifies US francophobia better than anything else. The French are unhygienic - when Marge throws Homer out, he protests that he is incapable of looking after himself and that after only a day he's become "as dirty as a Frenchman". The French are mean and cruel - two repulsive Frenchmen who put antifreeze in their wine force Bart into slave labour. The French are cowardly - groundskeeper Willie (a Scotsman, but no matter) describes them as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. And this is a far from comprehensive list.

Simpsonite francophobia suggests a great deal about what France represents for Americans. The Simpsons has always had its dubious targets (the British royal family and their terrible teeth; the duplicitous Italian chef; the grasping Indian storekeeper) but the sustained contempt for the French is symptomatic of deeper American feeling. Arguably, it is the mark of an intense attachment, one which shows that if there's a thin line between love and hate, there's a thinner one between francophobia and francophilia.

The French get under Americans' skin. The US can't bear the exasperating insistence on l'exception francaise and the cultural swagger from a country that's barely the size of Texas. At a political level, of course, this irritationality stems from a sense that the French are insufficiently grateful for having their worthless asses saved from Nazi domination. Hence groundskeeper Willie's oft-repeated jibe, and hence the thinking that the French should have backed Bush over Iraq because they owe America big time.

But the irritation goes beyond mere politics. What France represents to the US is dramatised in a mess of a film called Le Divorce, out in Britain this week. It's a Merchant-Ivory adaptation of a US novel about contrary French and American standards over marriage and adultery. The divorce of the title is demanded by a Frenchman because he has found the love of his life, and his American wife must understand his romantic appetites and release him from his bonds. To be French in this film is to be appetite-driven, since duty and marital commitment are not issues that trouble you unduly. The film only works through exaggerating the two countries' characteristics into absurdity.

But, oddly enough, that kind of absurdity governs the national rhetoric between the two. Americans can only see the French through absurd stereotypes; and often see themselves as absurd vulgarians who fail to measure up to the French norm. The French, for their part, often see themselves as the incarnation of everything that Americans dream of being but fear they are not. Hence, no doubt, the unbearably treacly tenor of American books about France, in such works as Mort Rosenblum's A Goose in Toulouse, Edmund White's Le Flneur and Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon. Hence, too, the often intolerably smug nature of French anti-Americanism.

Like these books, Le Divorce implicitly accepts the ideology that it is only the French who truly know how to love, eat, drink; and more, that le monde anglo-saxon (the presumptuous moniker that the French foist on nations as ethnically various as the US and the UK) is unaccomplished when it comes to savoir vivre - a notion that is always assumed, hardly ever argued for. It's an ideology which effectively means that, in aesthetic matters, the French wield a kind of dictatorship of pleasure - that the French way of living is the only worthwhile one. No matter that one might want to revolt against such a dictatorship, and suggest that there are other aesthetic norms, other attractive ways to live.

The ideology is particularly potent because it gnaws at the insecurities of Americans, who are vulnerable to hostile judgments about their putatively repressed sexual mores, about la malbouffe americaine (rubbish Yank food), about their consummate lack of taste. It's one that is less potent for Britons because we don't care as much about the French as Americans do, perhaps because their proximity makes them less exotic. For Americans, though, France is the Other, a boudoir of pleasures to which they dream of being admitted.

It's a dictatorship to which, for all the Simpsons' jibes and US anti-French rhetoric this year, the Americans are still bending the knee. It's one, what's more, which suggests that - while the Franco-American relationship may have been soured by war in Iraq and its consequences - a divorce isn't really on the cards, and that France will be seducing and tormenting the US for many years to come.
 
Quote from Maverick74:

I am absolutely amazed by this. Over 10,000 French people have died during this latest heatwave that has swept through Europe. That's 10,000! That's more people that died in the Iraq war many times over. What is going on here. I understand it's hot. But this is unreal. For all the bragging they do about their so called great healthcare system over there this is really embarrassing. Plus I like how everyone in this country blames Bush for the economy. France and Germany have twice the unemployment we have and GDP growth is now been negative two quarters in a row compared to plus 2.4% for us. Also the funny thing about France is they are suppose to be one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world and yet they have one of the worst pollutions problems in the world. It's so bad that the speed limit in Paris has been reduced to 15 mph. That's 15 mph! Somehow this must all be Bush's fault. Either that or maybe things aren't as bad around here as liberals say they are.
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How typically American! Overlook your own faults, and focus on others.

Somehow I fail to see any compassion for the 10,00 elderly who died in an unusual heat wave in France.

BTW - as for the high unemployment in France, it might interest you to know that un unemployed person in France is actually counted as unemployed. In America, if an unemployed Brain Surgeon works a part-time shift at the 7-11, he is counted as being employed.

Your childish rant, going so far as to cite the speed limit in Paris is embarrassing. The French were right - there was no rush for going into Iraq. They were right again about the end result. And now they are less than enthusiastic about paying for our folly, or supplying their young men to serve as targets in place of our young men.

Our leader said that we didn't need them, or most anyone else in this war. Why do you now disagree with W?

Instead of pointing your finger at the French, you should do the honorable American thing. Sign up to do your tour of duty in Iraq, and dig deep into your own pocket to pay for it.

But as we have already established, you don't care about the elderly dying in France, you don't care about our own boys dying in Iraq, you don't want to pay for the folly. You only want someone else to clean up your mess. You speak without thinking, and are a disgrace - you are so typical of what we have become. I am ashamed of you, and fear for the future of what was once a great nation, but is now one spiraling into the depths of arrogance and ignorance.
 
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