Revolution, not 'instant gratification'

When it was put to Youssef that part of Egypt is ruled by a government that many would say came into power through a coup, he responded with the kind of heavy irony that got him into trouble in the first place.

"Oh no, come on, they came in totally democratically," he said.

"We are a democratic country, I will not accept the fact that you're telling me that it's not democratic ... yes, moving on."

And yet, Youssef argues that people in the West should not be disappointed that the Arab Spring has not solved all of Egypt's problems.

Western administrations think that it's better off to deal with military dictatorships, to fend off extremism... but at a certain time when they meltdown, the people who take over are the extremists

"People in general right now, they want this instant gratification, 'hey, we've had a revolution for 18 days and everything is solved'," he said.

"These are military regimes that have been there for decades. Revolutions in Europe didn't take 18 days, right?"

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-05/satirist-bassem-youssef-on-egypt-versus-comedy/6896168

Satire has long been the only weapon of the educated poor against the rich ruthless thugs.

When the rich thugs take over the stage of stand-up comedy, we should realise that we're in deeper shit than we thought.

Here we have Donald Trump becoming the host of SNL for a night... The fellow steals our bread and butter as well as our cash? And he wants to be president of the USA? Clowns in the White House? Regular comedy show from the oval office used as PR to tell us Donald, the president, is a bible-reading rich real-estate agent despot with a funny bone? Are we going to be seduced by the cheap jokes?

Is Donald, the mirror image of what we've become? God and jokes to promote the religion of capitalism and extinguish the revolution forever? 

Donald Trump hosts NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' during which he performs a sketch where he mocks Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

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Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has hosted the sketch-comedy show Saturday Night Live, defying protesters to make the highly anticipated but controversial primetime television appearance.

Wearing a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, the bombastic Mr Trump stepped on stage to cheers and applause.

"I am a nice guy," he insisted in a nearly five-minute opening monologue that saw him flanked by two lookalikes.

"It's wonderful to be here. This is going to be something special," he said.

Mr Trump, a billionaire real estate developer who has never held elected office, leads the polls for the Republican nomination for the 2016 race to the White House and will be hoping that his appearance on the show will cement his status as frontrunner.

But the 69-year-old has courted controversy for his statements on immigration, promising if he becomes president he will expel immigrants who are in the United States illegally and build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

He has also alleged Mexico sends rapists and other criminals across the border.

His stance saw Latino community leaders hold a rally Friday in Los Angeles calling on NBC Universal to drop Mr Trump from Saturday Night Live.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-08/donald-trump-hosts-saturday-night-live/6922524

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See also: you can't beat a trump...

The name "Voltaire", which the author adopted in 1718, is an anagram of "AROVET LI," the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, and the initial letters of "le jeune" ("the young").[10] The name also echoes in reverse order the syllables of the name of a family château in the Poitou region: "Airvault". The adoption of the name "Voltaire" following his incarceration at the Bastille is seen by many to mark Voltaire's formal separation from his family and his past.

Richard Holmes[11] supports this derivation of the name, but adds that a writer such as Voltaire would have intended it to also convey its connotations of speed and daring. These come from associations with words such as "voltige" (acrobatics on a trapeze or horse), "volte-face" (a spinning about to face one's enemies), and "volatile" (originally, any winged creature). "Arouet" was not a noble name fit for his growing reputation, especially given that name's resonance with "à rouer" ("to be broken on the wheel" – a form of torture then still prevalent) and "roué" (a "débauché").

In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire concludes by asking that, if Rousseau wishes to send him a return letter, he do so by addressing it to Monsieur de Voltaire. A postscript explains: "J'ai été si malheureux sous le nom d'Arouet que j'en ai pris un autre surtout pour n'être plus confondu avec le poète Roi", (I was so unhappy under the name of Arouet that I have taken another, primarily so as to cease to be confused with the poet Roi.)[12] This probably refers to Adenes le Roi, and the 'oi' diphthong was then pronounced like modern 'ouai', so the similarity to 'Arouet' is clear, and thus, it could well have been part of his rationale. Indeed, Voltaire is known also to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime.[1

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

Only 169 names-di-ploom for Gus to go...

Meanwhile Voltaire was impressed by the constitutional monarchy in England as a step in the best direction against the absolute monarchy in France... Before him and the witty Madame de Pompadour, the French had the famous satirist Rabelais and the discreet poet Adenes Le Roi, who wrote about the big feet of Carolus Magus' mum, Berte, and about Ogier, a Dane, who fought the Muslims in Italy in the 11th Century...

Using the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais minus the cedille on the c), in 1532 he published his first book, Pantagruel, that would become the first of his Gargantua series. In this book, Rabelais sings the praises of the wines from his hometown of Chinon through vivid descriptions of the "eat, drink and be merry" lifestyle of the main character, Pantagruel, and of his friends. Despite the popularity of his book, both it and his prequel book (1534) on the life of Pantagruel's father Gargantua were condemned by the academics at the Sorbonne for their unorthodox ideas and by the Roman Catholic Church for their derision of certain religious practices. Rabelais's third book, published under his own name in 1546, was also banned.

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

http://www.openculture.com/2015/11/voltaire-those-who-can-make-you-believe-absurdities-can-make-you-commit-atrocities.html

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In regard to Eugene Sue, Flaubert had this to say:

I took Eugène Sue's Arthur from the reading room... It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christs of art to cure this leper...

Over the holidays, two developments in Europe’s immigration and multiculturalism battle stood out particularly. 

First to France, where there occurred what might be dubbed the Zineb El Rhazoui affair. El Rhazoui, 36, is a French-Moroccan journalist and a former reporter for Charlie Hebdo. Born in Casablanca, she came to Paris for college. She’s engaged in both France and Morocco in various forms of culturally left and secularist activism against the harassment of women in the street and the power of the patriarchy. Ni Putes ni Soumises and Mouvement alternative pour les libertés individuelles [nor whores, nor submissive and the alternative movement for individual freedom] (which organized a public picnic during Ramadan) are part of her biography. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack four years ago, she gained attention as a critic of Islamofascism and the larger part of the French elite that she called its collaborators. 

The affair erupted after she was a guest on the well-established internet TV station CNews. She appeared there in the aftermath of the attack on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, where five people were killed by a “lone wolf” Islamic militant. Islam, she exclaimed, must subject itself to criticism. Islam must subject itself to humor. Islam must subject itself to the rights of the Republic and to French law. She added that no one would ever get to the bottom of the ideology that drives terrorism by telling people that Islam is a religion of peace and love. 

Within hours, El Rhazoui was subjected to a barrage of rape and death threats on French social media. Undeterred, a few days later, she unapologetically reaffirmed her views. Several commentators took note of an absolute silence from the establishment Left, supposedly committed to freedom of expression, who would never hesitate to defend a critic of Christian fundamentalism. Her words, direct, to the point, coming from a French-Moroccan woman in a bright pink dress, struck a certain nerve in France where there is a center-left establishment consensus that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. As the new year arrived, she was under police protection, while her lawyer was seeking to bring charges against some of those who threatened her.

Across the channel in Great Britain, another personality of non-European ethnic origin was in the headlines. This was Sajid Javid, the 49-year-old rising star in Britain’s Conservative Party, currently home secretary in Theresa May’s government. Javid, one of five children of a Pakistani immigrant bus driver, won a seat in Parliament in 2010. He combines extreme intelligence with a drive that would be exceptional anywhere—the youngest ever vice president of Chase Manhattan at the age of 24, a managing director at Deutsche Bank, and head of their emerging markets desk 10 years after that. A politically active young Thatcherite (and a volunteer in Rudy Giuliani’s highly contentious and nationally important 1993 mayoral campaign), Javid was selected to be culture minister several years after his election to Parliament. Long before last month, he had achieved semi-legendary status in Tory circles. 

Then reports that dozens of migrants were setting off in small boats from the coast of France to reach Britain and claim asylum brought him back early from his Christmas vacation (a safari in South Africa). He was soon photographed aboard one the coast guard cutters he had summoned for migrant monitoring duty. 

Perhaps more important than anything the home secretary does or doesn’t do about migrant channel crossings is what he says. And Javid asked simply, “If you are a genuine asylum seeker, why have you not sought asylum in the first country you arrived in? Because France is not a country where anyone would argue it is not safe in any way whatsoever.” This straightforward and indisputable statement earned Javid harsh criticism from Labour’s shadow home secretary, who called it “a disgrace.” 

Javid has a history of remarks that trigger the multicultural left. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in 2015, he observed:

There is no getting away from the fact that the people carrying out these acts call themselves Muslims. The lazy answer would be to say that this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam and Muslims and that should be the end of that. That would be lazy and wrong. You can’t get away from the fact that these people are using Islam, taking a peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities.

In its full context, the statement is obviously not “Islamaphobic” and conforms to standard establishment multicultural discourse. But for a senior European politician from a mainstream party, it passes very close to actual truth telling. Earlier this summer, Javid ordered research into the ethnic origins of the child rape gangs uncovered in Rotherham and other British cities—gangs that are disproportionately of Pakistani origin—a fact that was shrouded by the British press, which invariably refers to them as “Asian.” 

Javid wrote that understanding their particular characteristics was essential to understanding the problem. Again, the actual statement was fairly banal—who could object to research?—except that in multicultural Britain there is more or less a taboo against probing too deeply into why Pakistani men form gangs to rape white British girls. And now a high-ranking Tory, not coincidentally of Pakistani origin, was asking precisely that. 

There is much from a quick perusal of Javid’s career that gives one a good deal of pause. He is exceedingly, and probably excessively, pro-Israel, and seems to reflexively take neoconservative positions on foreign intervention. But that is not the issue here. What does matter is that his Muslim immigrant background seems to have inoculated him from fear of transgressing the boundaries of multicultural political correctness, and allowed him to raise questions—about asylum seekers, Islam, Pakistani grooming gangs—that conservatives and all responsible politicians ought to be raising. Yet outside the “populist” Right, few have raised them. 

In this sense, Sajid Javid and Zineb El Rhazoui, though of different political statures, have a good deal in common. Both are figures who have been somewhat liberated by their ethnic backgrounds to speak more candidly than the vast majority of their countrymen. 

An important new book is coming out, Whiteshift by Canadian-British scholar Eric Kaufmann, that analyzes the politics of white demographic decline in the Western countries. Kauffman is somewhat more optimistic than I am that things will work out. But one of his major points is that a considerable portion of the new immigrant population identifies with the history, institutions, and values (which are, of course, white dominated) of their new countries. The roughly 30 percent of Asian Americans and Latinos who voted for Donald Trump presumably fall into that category, but the percentage is probably a good deal higher than that. 

Kaufmann is not claiming that these folks admire some anodyne civic nationalist version of Western pluralism, but that they at least to some extent identify with and embrace as their own the larger achievements of Western history, the good with the bad. They came to the West not in spite of our history, but to some degree because of it. Part of this immigrant cohort have intermarried with whites, or have children who will. Kauffman’s argument is that they comprise part of a sort of “whitish” dominant majority culture that will successively see the Western countries through a difficult transition. It’s obviously a far more appealing scenario than the one favored by white multiculturalists, whom Kaufmann calls left modernists, in which people of color, in alliance with progressive whites, demographically overwhelm the racist, colonialist, old world, rooting out and destroying the evil uniquely associated with it. 

I’ve certainly oversimplified a more complicated argument, but I think Kaufmann is largely correct about this. From my perspective, in different ways, El Rhazoui and Javid are playing a critical part in the defense and rejuvenation of the West. Their ethnicity gives them more license to speak freely than is permitted a typical beneficiary of “white privilege”—and perhaps, in subtle ways, more motivation. As such they are more than valuable; they are necessary. And we can hope that they and others like them play a big part in the battles ahead.

Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative and the author of Ex-Neocon: Dispatches From the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-immigrants-challenging-europes-code-of-silence-on-islam/

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Read also:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/18453 (more than 35,300 read).

see also:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/29625

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33229

Michel-angelo Flori will have to pay 32,000 euros to the BFMTV private media channel to have debased its "image" with a parodic poster in Toulon. Flori has invoked the right to satire which was dismissed by the high court tribunal of Marseille.

Michel-angelo Flori had posted, in the city of Toulon, an image taking a visual of May 68 on which had been added the sentence: "The police talks to you every day on BFMTV."

François Ruffin

I would like a crusade for beauty and champagne.

Against Publicis and against Decaux.

Take out the publicity in our lives and out of our brain.

They sell us their junk.

Then they take refuge in their paradise, Megève, Saint-Tropez, away from all their muck.

Catwoman

Incredible! Let me say that living without advertisement is an absolute happiness, we can extract the spirit to live life as it is.

I have experience this in Cuba, life without being harassed by publicity.

There were people, joy, the beauty of simplicity despite the difficulties and the often short life...

Read more:

https://francais.rt.com/france/62785-afficheur-condamne-verser-32-000-bf...

Adaptation by Jules Letambour

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Gus note in regard to "Cubans short life" above:

Cuban life expectancies of 79.5 years and infant mortality rates of 4.3 per 1,000 live births (2015) compare well with rich nations like the USA (78.7 years and 5.7 per 1,000 live births) yet its per capita income of 7602.3$ make it one of the poorest economies in the hemisphere.