[HN Gopher] French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
___________________________________________________________________
French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
Author : begueradj
Score : 349 points
Date : 2025-10-22 05:49 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| rapsey wrote:
| So he used money from Libya to get elected and then later he
| bombed them?
| adev_ wrote:
| In short, yes.
|
| Additionally budget for political campaigns are strictly
| regulated in France. And getting bribes from foreign dictator
| is, of course, not allowed.
|
| The reason he did not get condemned also for that is that the
| judge could not proove the usage of the money.
| timeon wrote:
| > And getting bribes from foreign dictator is, of course, not
| allowed.
|
| Couldn't he setup some crypto fund instead? Or investment in
| ballroom? Or simply just receive present, let say plane,
| instead of money? Would that help him in this case?
| vkou wrote:
| In a country with a working judiciary, unlikely.
|
| In a banana republic, the optics don't really matter in
| these kinds of situations.
| adev_ wrote:
| > Couldn't he setup some crypto fund instead? Or investment
| in ballroom? Or simply just receive present, let say plane,
| instead of money? Would that help him in this case?
|
| An other French politician, Francois Fillon, tried that
| with bribes as gift including some luxury Suits. In
| addition of some public money redirection to his own
| family.
|
| And it did not play well for him either.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillon_affair
|
| Ironically, he was Sarkozy's Prime Minster.
|
| The party that they both come from (The republicans,
| previously UMP, previously RPR) has a long history of
| financial abuses and associated judgements.
|
| The only "new" thing here is that it explicitly condemned a
| previous President.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I'll have to read more into this, but it says he just
| "conspired" to do it, whatever that means.
|
| The solitary confinement part is quite harsh, I've never
| understood how that is supposed to rehabilitate someone.
|
| In France there's early release, parole, etc. so real time he
| spends behind bars might be as low as two years.
|
| Edit: The WP article is actually a very interesting read,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F...
| seszett wrote:
| > _The solitary confinement part is quite harsh, I 've never
| understood how that is supposed to rehabilitate someone._
|
| In this case it's for his own wellbeing, because it's
| probably difficult for a former president to go along well
| with the rest of the prison population. I also read a
| statement that it would help prevent other inmates taking and
| publicly sharing pictures of him (since some inmates do
| manage to have phones even if they are forbidden).
|
| Prison in general is one of the worst ways to rehabilitate
| someone though, I do agree with you.
| kergonath wrote:
| > it's probably difficult for a former president to go
| along well with the rest of the prison population
|
| Particularly for him who was _very_ keen to be seen as
| tough on crime to get votes from the far right.
| byroot wrote:
| > I'll have to read more into this, but it says he just
| "conspired" to do it, whatever that means.
|
| The court couldn't prove beyond reasonable doubt that the
| money was used for his campaign.
|
| However they were able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that
| he knew what his subordinates were planing and that he did
| nothing to stop it.
|
| In France conspiring to commit a crime is punishable,
| regardless of whether the crime actually happened or not.
| That's a law that has been crafted by Sarkozy's own party.
|
| > The solitary confinement part is quite harsh
|
| The solitary part isn't a punishment, but to ensure his
| safety. They even went as far as to allocated another cell
| for the two full time police officers of his security
| detail...
|
| Also the upside is that he has a cell for himself, something
| a lot of prisoners would love to have given the over prison
| occupancy in France is 137% (and up to 200% in some specific
| prisons).
| kergonath wrote:
| > The solitary confinement part is quite harsh, I've never
| understood how that is supposed to rehabilitate someone.
|
| It's for security reasons. It's also why he's got bodyguards.
| orwin wrote:
| They found secret meetings between his close advisors (two of
| them) and Lybian terrorist in chief before his election
| (without the embassy being warned of those), they found
| documents saying Lybia put money aside to found his political
| campaign, Khaddaffi was the first leader to Visit Sarkozy
| after his election, they found Lybian money going toward
| France, but they "lost track" of the money (probably most of
| it was cash), and couldn't prove that this money was used for
| the political campaign. Since the only thing they could prove
| are those secret meetings, they decided that they would stay
| on the side of caution and only convict him of provable
| offense (in nonviolent crime, that's often the case to be
| clear).
|
| I would be wary of going through the appeal court. The judges
| motivation make it quite clear they were _extremely_ lenient
| and chose to ignore how contradictory a lot of statement
| were, and the other cases linked to this. If he is convicted
| for "subordination de temoin" in the related case, it is
| likely that his sentence would be set to a longer time.
|
| The fact that Sarkozy started the Lybian war was also outside
| of the scope of the trial, sadly.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| He's 70 and going to prison for a few years unless it get
| reversed, it's not about rehabilitation.
|
| It's about making sure crimes have consequences, however
| highly placed you and your friends are.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| He is in the equivalent of the VIP wing of the only prison in
| Paris Intramuros (within the city walls), the Prison de la
| Sante. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Sant%C3%A9_Prison The
| prison has three main sections: the VIP wing, the night-time
| incarceration wing (sentence adjustment), and the high-
| security wing.
|
| As the most serious cases at the national level are often
| tried in Paris, the high-security wing is filled with drug
| traffickers, murderers and terrorists, at least for the
| duration of the proceedings, which can take years in France.
|
| Sarkozy is in the VIP wing with two bodyguards nearby. These
| are hardly the conditions one would imagine for isolation.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I think he was trying to chase the Libyans into France.
| csomar wrote:
| More like bombed Gaddafi and guaranteed his downfall than
| bombed "Libya". It is probably a bit more complicated than
| that, though. The U.S./NATO were also involved and there is a
| lot of money there.
|
| He probably thought he could get away with it. But make no
| mistake this is a political play and everyone involved is as
| dirty as the Paris Seine.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Hey! The Seine isn't dirty as this guy.
|
| Maybe the Seine was heavily covered as dirty by the media but
| remember that you shouldn't swim in the San Francisco bay
| either. Wait for the next JO to hear about water quality
| problem with the LA beach area under rain.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Yeah, only a _few_ contestants in the Olympics got sick
| after the triathlon! ;)
| dmead wrote:
| The French understand how to run a society.
| rapsey wrote:
| Politically deadlocked, failing economy, with the judiciary
| doing political dirty work?
| belter wrote:
| Government shutdown...convicted rapist as President.. ;-)
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Seventh biggest economy with the 21st biggest population
| seems like an economy that punches above its weight. Plus a
| low GINI coefficient suggests there's less wealth divide than
| a lot of other places. Seems like they have a mature economy
| and don't need to grow forever like a tumor. Once you reach a
| certain point, optimizing for quality of life seems nice, and
| the French do seem to aim for that.
| alex_duf wrote:
| I think unfortunately both can be true at the same time,
| politically deadlock AND punching above its weight.
|
| There's a lot to fix in France, and a lot of things going
| well.
| fraboniface wrote:
| While "quality of life first" remains true in spirit for a
| lot of French people, this hasn't been supported
| politically since 2000 (when legal weekly work time was
| reduced to 35 hours - many people do more but they are
| compensated for it). And even that law was an exception. In
| truth, France has taken the neoliberal turn of the 80s
| almost as much as other countries, and growth and
| competitiveness has been the only mantra of governments for
| 40 years. We're mostly protected by laws passed before the
| 50s.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "optimizing for quality of life seems nice, and the French
| do seem to aim for that."
|
| Looking at economic trends, it does seem like _optimizing
| for quality of life of the boomer generation_ at the cost
| of the future generations, which is not so nice.
|
| Without major cuts to its welfare state (which is Europe's
| most massive one as a percentage of GDP), France's finances
| are unsustainable. The necessary tax revenue just isn't
| there and you cannot borrow indefinitely to spend on
| entitlements.
|
| As of current trends, if something explodes the Eurozone,
| it will be endless accumulation of French sovereign debt.
| It is the same as once Greece was, but ten times as big.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Huh, this made me find this wikipedia entry:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_state_and_gov...
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Wild.
|
| Norman Saunders: Saunders was alleged by the US Drug
| Enforcement Administration to have accepted $30,000 from
| undercover agents to ensure safe passage of drugs by
| permitting safe stopover refuelling of drug flights from
| Colombia to the United States. Video evidence showed Saunders
| accepting $20,000 from an agent. Saunders was convicted in
| July 1985 of conspiracy, though he was acquitted of the
| charge of conspiring to import drugs into the United States.
| He was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $50,000.
|
| Then he went on to get re-elected. And then had an airport
| named in his honour. Nuts.
| pols45 wrote:
| It's not Nuts. These guys are just front office foot
| soldiers of the Elite. Elites on all sides use these kind
| of characters to protect/expand their power.
|
| The Elite all don't get along with each other, but in a
| "civilized" world where there is enough loot to share with
| everyone, they don't need to directly attack each other.
| Unless something really threatens and freaks them out.
|
| But once in a while they authorize their foot soldiers in
| the military, judiciary, legislatures, media to attack each
| other. Which is all just a side show -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elites
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| Seems like he was arrested in the United States under US
| law for conspiracy to import drugs into the US. I can see
| why people in the Turks and Caicos Islands wouldn't really
| care about a guy being arrested for drug smuggling in a
| foreign country. I might well vote for a politician who
| spent years in a foreign country's prison for breaking that
| country's laws.
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| Well no. French person here. While this verdict is a great
| victory for democracy in itself, a lot of problems around it
| are still not solved.
|
| - Prosecuting white-collar crime still takes ages and takes
| over a decade, long after the resulting sentences have a real
| impact
|
| - People like Nicolas Sarkozy have powerful media relays (most
| of the TV/newspaper owners in France are friends of him or at
| least sympathetic) and they can smear the judgment, smear the
| judges in the media with impunity
|
| - His allies are currently in power, he was invited for a short
| discussion by president Macron and got a visit in prison from
| the minister of justice Darmanin, which reeks of favoritism
|
| So the road ahead is still long, and I'm not even talking about
| current political climate which is horrendous.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Although, as you note, it could always be better... it is
| still impressive that your system seems to be _overcoming_ 2
| and 3.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| compared to most countries you are still doing great!
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The grass always looks greener at the other side, right?
|
| I would say that when it comes to political dysfunction, France
| is a fairly bad case. The Gaullist semipresidential system was
| a mistake. IIRC only Erdogan copied it.
| _ache_ wrote:
| We are losing our democracy, same reasons as the USA. We are
| just fighting as much as we can.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| For context, it's not even the first time he's condemned, but
| this time the crime was sever enough so he couldn't avoid prison.
|
| He delayed the case enough (almost 13 years) so that he's now
| more than 70 though and I doubt he stays to long in prison
| because of his age.
|
| But it's nice to see that he couldn't run away from justice
| forever and is finally in jail.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| He should not be in jail now.
|
| His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still jail
| him now "provisionally" (execution provisoire), which sounds
| like a political play. Coincidentally, the same is happening to
| Le Pen with respect to the decision to ban her from
| elections...
|
| As for "delaying" the case, this is just the French court
| system for you. Everything takes years and years.
| aaplok wrote:
| It is not political play. This is FUD spread by his political
| supporters.
|
| The "execution provisoire" is a measure that was introduced
| when his own party was in power, to make sure that terrorists
| were jailed immediately. He happened to be condemned for
| breaching the same law (association de malfaiteurs) that is
| used against terrorists.
|
| I once read a comment by a lawyer that he was amazed by the
| number of politicians who ended up being caught by laws they
| had voted for. This is what happened here.
|
| In fact when he was president he implemented another law, on
| minimum mandatory sanctions for repeated offenders (peines
| plancher) which was repelled by the subsequent
| administration. He would have been caught by that too
| otherwise.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Political aspects of the justice system are never
| acknowledged for obvious reasons but it does not mean they
| don't exist.
|
| I cannot be sure of what is happening (hence "seems") but
| neither can you, especially regarding decisions that are
| discretionary.
|
| At least here there is a guilty verdict even if not final.
| In France people can be jailed for years without a trial...
| pyrale wrote:
| > Political aspects of the justice system are never
| acknowledged for obvious reasons but it does not mean
| they don't exist.
|
| Sure, but also, he did the crime. There can not really be
| any doubt for the people who followed the trial, and the
| judges have shown extreme caution, rejecting charges when
| there was the slightest doubt.
|
| The political opinion or lack thereof of judges is
| irrelevant.
| orwin wrote:
| Exactly, and he he is also judged in a separate case to
| have heavily leaned on a witness, and in another separate
| case for bribing a judge.
|
| At one point when you're this corrupt, putting you away is
| the only solution.
| pyrale wrote:
| > He should not be in jail now.
|
| He should definitely be in jail, as some of the things he's
| been charged with, and also in other cases sentenced for,
| were conspiracies to rig his trials and attempts to lean on
| witnesses, in cases including, but not limited to, this very
| trial [1]. Him being behind bars is necessary to stop his
| attempts to rig his own trial.
|
| [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Sarkozy-Kadhafi
| kergonath wrote:
| > His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still
| jail him now "provisionally" (execution provisoire), which
| sounds like a political play.
|
| No. That's how it's done, and he can thank himself because he
| introduced the process himself. It's utterly disgusting to
| hear him bloviating about criminals in 2007 and now whining
| because he's on the receiving end. Shameless.
|
| The law is the law. He's been convicted enough and he belongs
| in jail.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _As for "delaying" the case, this is just the French court
| system for you. Everything takes years and years._
|
| Is there a country for which that doesn't hold true?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| In Russia some cases can be over _surprisingly_ quickly ;)
| oezi wrote:
| I think speeding up trials and the judiciary in general would
| be a great benefit for many western democracies.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Speeding is a big word here. It's been 13years already. But
| I agree with you. And actually Sarkozy was the most pushing
| politic to support this, not just when it's about him.
| shmel wrote:
| I think we can clear the backlog real quick if we use LLM-
| As-A-Judge =)
| boudin wrote:
| Why would he have a treatment of favor? Almost every person
| convicted in his situation has a an execution provisoire,
| there's no special treatment here. Same for lepen.
|
| Let's put things straight, both of them are criminals, giving
| them a treatment of favor would be insane.
|
| And to show how morally corrupted they are, both of them have
| been really loud about a no tolerance justice system. I guess
| that speaks for itself.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think you should say convicted instead of condemned. It's not
| really wrong, but condemned has many other connotations, which
| makes it less clear. It's not the first time he's convicted in
| court overall, but it's the first time for this charge.
| _ache_ wrote:
| Please, can you explains the difference between "convicted"
| and "condemned"? Convicted is about the fact of been a
| criminal and condemned about the fact that you have a
| condamnation/conviction/sentence?
| thyristan wrote:
| "Convicted" is a neutral, technical term meaning "a court
| found him guilty of that crime". "Condemned" can mean the
| same thing, with the added tone "the crime was particularly
| heinous or immoral, and he got served with a fitting, just
| and hard punishment". It includes a moral judgement about
| the crime and about the deservedness of the punishment.
| There are also meanings of "condemned" that are used in a
| religious context (so the same as above, but without the
| court of law) like "the sinner is condemned to hell for all
| eternity", "sisyphos was condemned to eternal useless
| labor". Metaphorically, it can also be used to describe
| someone without the power to exact punishment just telling
| off somebody for their immoral behaviour, like "the
| newspaper article condemned his doings as acts of
| barbarism".
|
| The general difference is that "convicted" is neutral in
| tone. "Condemned" includes a particular tone, and religious
| and moral connotations, which might be unfitting in some
| cases.
|
| Edit: Take the above with some grain of salt, might be at
| least incomplete, maybe somewhat wrong. After consulting
| the internet, I've found out that there are even more
| meanings and nuances, which I didn't know about. Sorry for
| being an arrogant non-native-speaker trying to score
| internet points ;)
| genezeta wrote:
| Apparently, in English, _convicted_ means that someone has
| been officially declared guilty of some crime. After being
| convicted comes being _sentenced_ , which is when the
| punishment is set.
|
| On the other hand, _condemned_ is specifically about being
| sentenced to death -or sometimes life in prison or some
| similarly _hard_ punishment-. Which is also why a building
| is said to be condemned when it is set to be demolished.
| cwizou wrote:
| Interestingly in french we use "condamne" for sentenced,
| and for any kind of sentence (even a fine).
|
| We don't ever use "sentence" in a legal context (it still
| exists but is old fashioned), things diverged quite a bit
| it seems between those languages.
| genezeta wrote:
| In Spain, in a legal context, it's either _condenado_
| (condemned) or _sentenciado_ (sentenced) more or less
| indistinctly. I have the impression we use a lot of words
| without much care for details.
|
| Out of that context, it's usually _condenado_ the one
| used.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Condemned has many other connotations which get in the way.
| "She condemned him" (she declared that he was
| reprehensible). "We condemn racism" (We really don't like
| racism). "Eternal condemnation" (Going to hell). And other
| meanings I'm sure that I'm not aware of.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Thank you. Past a certain level it's pretty hard for non
| native speakers to improve because you don't get tons of this
| kind of feedbacks.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| oh I wish the American people were this brave
| leptons wrote:
| Half of them are, half of them are not.
| pbkompasz wrote:
| more like third of them are, third of them are not and a
| third doesn't care
| leptons wrote:
| I can agree with that. I sometimes forget that quite a lot
| of voting-age people just don't vote.
| _ache_ wrote:
| France population isn't very better, I can assure you, it's not
| about been brave.
|
| We just still have a working judiciary system. But for how
| long? It barely correctly financed and his independence his
| attacked every days in the oligarchy controlled medias.
|
| I hope you fix your judiciary system one day.
| throw101010 wrote:
| Sarkozy himself tried to reform it and remove a key position
| in that system the "juge d'instruction" who conducts
| investigations indepedantly of the executive power in complex
| cases (like his many cases). It makes the procedures much
| more efficient and less prone to influence from the
| government.
|
| Fortunately he failed to do it when he was in power, and this
| is in my opinion a big factor in his current demise.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Reading up about Israeli politics, it seems that this might be
| a "be careful what you wish for" situation. They had previously
| put in prison both a prime minister and a president, and the
| disastrous governance there over the last decade and a half
| appears to be in large motivated by Netanyahu's almost certain
| knowledge that he'll go to prison if and when he loses his grip
| on the reins.
|
| The documentary The Bibi Files was a particularly interesting
| examination of the allegations against him and his almost
| shrugging response to them [0]. And going back to America, a
| week ago Trump asked the Israeli president to preemptively
| pardon Netanyahu during his speech at their parliament [1],
| which I find to be concerning on all possible levels.
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33338697/
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-urges-
| israel...
| yard2010 wrote:
| I'm not into politics and I'm far from an expert but this has
| more to it. Netanyahu doesn't just wait until he loses his
| grip on the rein, he's making the changes to the system (i.e
| ruin the whole country for everyone) so he won't count as a
| criminal when this is all over.
|
| No offense but the french people should thank god their
| criminal in control didn't go all the way through turning the
| country into a shit show in the process.
|
| As I said before I believe we live in a global time in which
| countries must embrace the rule of law systematically in
| order to survive as democracies. Otherwise you just get a
| kleptocracy with extra steps, just like in the US, some of
| Europe and Russia.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Yes, exactly - I was hoping to allude to that, but
| apparently wasn't clear in my writing. It seems to me that
| he has arrived at a "L'Etat, c'est moi" mentality, doing
| everything in his power (and consolidating as much
| additional power as possible) to stay out of prison, even
| (as you said) at the cost of destroying the country around
| him and the rest of the middle east, intentionally
| aggravating all the conflicts in the area, to be able to
| continuously yell out about crises that (in the mind of
| those who support him) necessitate his staying in power.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Thinking about this some more, I'd like to offer an even more
| controversial opinion, being a proposal for a governance
| structure that I think would have entirely different failure
| modes:
|
| How about it if by a fuller acceptance that power corrupts,
| we have the head of government only serve for one term and
| automatically be taken to (actual) prison once their time is
| done. They would then have an expedited trial by a
| socioeconomically diverse jury representing the population,
| judge their overreach in different areas, and how long of a
| sentence they should be given; at best, they would be
| released after a month or two for time served. Afterwards,
| unless this has been explicitly revoked from them due to
| gross misconduct, the former head of government would be
| given a sufficiently generous stipend to live and travel
| without ever needing to work again, and encouraged to spend
| the rest of their lives on charitable pursuits.
|
| The big risk I see here is that by stripping some of the
| long-term power from the head of government, it would lead to
| a re-concentration of powers in a head of party role, or
| other behind-the-scenes power brokers, but the intent here is
| that the head of government once elected is explicitly given
| the ability to overreach, and particularly knowing that
| they'll be set for life, they'll have the freedom to act
| independently, in what hopefully would be their take on the
| country's best interests, and a desire to leave a positive
| legacy. And furthermore, I think that restricting the
| ascension to power to those who are willing to take on that
| prison time would attract people who are a bit less vain than
| the typical crop of candidates, and at the same time reduce
| the stigma of prison in general, and hopefully lead to
| political interest in improving prison conditions.
| Nicook wrote:
| and everyone's favorite example of killing a
| democracy/republic to avoid prosecution, Julius Cesar.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > motivated by Netanyahu's almost certain knowledge that
| he'll go to prison if and when he loses his grip on the
| reins.
|
| Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is determined by trial in an
| open court where defendent has the right to cross examine
| witnesses and present evidence. Do not assume guilt or
| innocence based on heavily politisized reporting.
|
| For anyone who is not following the trial, Netanyahu was
| charged with bribery and a few lesser charges which do not
| have a direct US equivalents. As soon as the prosecution's
| case-in-chief was over, the judges publicly notified the
| prosecution that they should drop the bribery charges as they
| are unlikely to be able to prove them.
|
| The prosecution case for briberty was built on a hypothesized
| meeting in which Netanyahu supposedely instructed the
| director general of the ministry of communications to serve
| the interests of Elovitch.
|
| During cross examination, the defense managed to prove
| conclusively that such a meeting, as described, could not
| have occurred. They also showed that the prosecution had in
| its possession all the necssary evidence to show such a
| meeting could not have occurred.
|
| https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/local/409910/ (use
| Google Translate)
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| The first trump campaign was fueled by government and banks not
| being held accountable, ex. after the financial crisis and
| bailouts of banks. Though trump kind of piggy backed on those
| sentiments along with the tea party/koch brothers backing. Just
| goes to show you need to apply justice blindly and harshaly, or
| else you will trigger peoples strong and inate sense of
| injustice and burn it all down
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The first trump campaign was fueled by government and banks
| not being held accountable
|
| Nah that's horse shit. Trump has been trying to ride outright
| populism since Ross Perot showed you could be a moron with no
| experience and people would still insist you were somehow a
| genius because you had a million dollars.
|
| Trump's first campaign was nothing more than the republican
| party being utterly ravenous to demonstrate the hatred that
| AM radio and Fox News had been cooking up for a generation.
|
| The tea party movement was not organic, it was invented and
| astroturfed into existence. The outcome was not planned, but
| it was entirely intentional.
|
| Trump was the biggest source for the birtherism bullshit
| remember?
|
| The people who believe haitian immigrants eat dogs, that
| portland is currently on fire, or that Mr "grab them by the
| pussy, they let you do it" and "I used to watch all the ms
| teen USA girls change" is somehow not the primary pedophile
| problem were never serious about justice, never cared about
| it being applied equally, and _will never be satisfied with
| an actual fair justice system_. They believe that crime is at
| an all time high despite no evidence. They believe the man
| that has quite literally scammed _them_ time and time again
| is a "great businessman" or knows what he is doing at all.
|
| The people who say "Obamacare is the worst thing" and yet
| "Don't you dare take away my ACA coverage" _at the same time_
| do not care about justice.
|
| These people keep electing Republicans despite mountains of
| objective evidence that Republicans _nearly alone_ are
| responsible for America 's current budget and debt problems.
|
| A lot of these people are utterly furious that the Federal
| Government forced them to treat black people like people in
| the 60s and have been holding a grudge ever since. You don't
| scrub rainbows off of cross walks because you are upset about
| justice.
|
| The people cheering on the black bagging of American citizens
| and hate fueled oppression and the literal suppression of
| free expression or thought _do not care about justice_
|
| The people who were upset by the injustice of 2008 were the
| Occupy movement. Where are their political candidates?
| worik wrote:
| Yes
|
| I do not think you should let the Democrats off
|
| Defending a status quo that is so obviously broken, where
| injustice is getting baked in to cultural expectations...
|
| I am sad that it has come to this, and I fear for the
| health, very existence, of the republic
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's the _voters_ fault.
|
| They want to hurt people. They elect Republicans _to hurt
| people_ and openly cry that the republicans do not hurt
| the "right" people, and then _vote for them again_. They
| cheer on siccing the damn National Guard on random blue
| cities, which they have never even seen and have no
| knowledge of because they hate liberals. They cheer for
| sending brown skinned people to torture prisons and
| putting razor wire in the rivers they use to cross
| because the cruelty is intentional. They 've wanted to
| turn the southern border into the berlin wall at least
| since Bush Jr, and emphatically want the guards to be
| just as hostile as the soviet ones.
|
| The day after the Penn State massacre by the National
| Guard, more than half of the polled people _blamed the
| students for getting shot_. They were upset that students
| were protesting the Vietnam war.
|
| They just want "uppity" people put down, because non-
| conformance is somehow the biggest problem I guess? The
| want this imagined social and societal conformance that
| only existed in their head. Though a large fraction of
| them explicitly want a theocracy and to take away your
| rights to not be christian or to be taught things that
| are against a _fundamentalist_ christian perspective,
| which is funny, because the "christian" religions
| pushing for this are insanely unchristian.
|
| The entire reason the US has laws on the book for
| "Religious exemptions for required vaccines" that are
| currently being weaponized to for some reason bring back
| nearly eradicated diseases is entirely because of the
| Church of Jesus Christ; Scientist, which claims to be
| christian even though it's a cult that spawned from like
| 20 literal Simps competing for the attention of an insane
| lady who plagiarized her fake religion from a crackpot
| "doctor" right here in Portland Maine, and outright lied
| about a miraculous disease recovery that never happened.
| This same group also successfully prevented states from
| punishing parents who let their children die from
| completely preventable illness for "religious reasons".
|
| This is not "Freedom of religion". Those dead kids are
| not free from religion. In fact, the US and state
| governments went out of its way to carve out rules to
| allow parents to impart THEIR religion on their kids.
|
| A _lower bound_ of 10% of Americans openly state that
| they believe Continental Drift has not happened and that
| god created humans and the earth as it is now within the
| past 10k years. 30 million americans openly state that
| they believe easily verifiable science is not just wrong,
| but outright _a conspiracy against them done by science
| in league with satan_. That is not an exaggeration. There
| 's an entire parallel set of media industries around
| teaching your kids that science is fake and that
| scientists think you are stupid, have no evidence, and
| are literally helping satan trick you into hating god.
| They consistently make movies, shows, books, etc where
| they are the poor little victims of an authoritarian
| state who literally busts down their doors for believing
| in god. They insist that Starbucks not saying "merry
| christmas" is an attack on their religious freedom. They
| WRONGLY assert that the US was founded as a "christian"
| nation, including multiple currently sitting members of
| state and federal legislatures. This can only be a lie,
| as the founders were not shy about being not
| conventionally christian.
|
| Since the Civil Rights Act, Americans have reliably
| elected more and more Republicans. It took BS marketing
| slogans ("It's the economy stupid") to elect Clinton and
| the worst economic event in many decades to get them to
| vote for Obama, and a pandemic to vote in Biden.
| Otherwise they reliably elect Republicans and let them
| cause problems.
|
| I cannot fathom how people still "blame democrats". They
| cannot do anything when people do not vote for them,
| _that 's how democracy works_ and this goes triple for
| the US democracy that does not give minority parties any
| power. There is _nothing_ a democrat president can do
| with a hostile congress and court, and _that 's as
| designed_
|
| You can say "Well the democrats need to be more
| electable" or something, but you cannot court the racists
| and religious fundamentalists without objectively
| abandoning important things like "Freedom" and "Justice"
| and "children should be educated in a way that may not be
| compatible with religious fundamentalism and
| unquestioning parental authority if the parent is wrong
| about something".
|
| When democrats in the 90s backed liberalism, it's because
| _that 's what americans voted for_ as seen by Reagan's
| landslide. When they backed the stupid Crime bill, they
| did it because _that 's what americans were screaming
| for_. Now, even though those were objectively what
| Americans wanted, Democrats are held at fault for both.
| Even though when they tried to _not_ embrace liberalism,
| they lost nearly all power, and it nearly destroyed the
| democrat party.
|
| When Democrats suggest incentives to build new power
| infrastructure, that's socialism and anti-american and
| they are killing the economy and destroying our country.
| When Donald Trump cuts us off from global markets and
| talks about invading our allies and massively increases
| the cost of _building things in the US_ and literally
| takes a national stock in a private company, that 's
| somehow fine and nobody ever says the S word.
|
| There is an _insane_ double standard, where Democrats are
| absolutely panned for not having Authoritarian power to
| fix everything and be perfect even after they do not get
| voted in, but republicans get to _seriously undermine our
| country and people_ and still somehow get elected. It 's
| infuriating. It is deeply dishonest.
|
| There are plenty of polls that demonstrate that there is
| a huge effect from having "(D)" next to your name. Voters
| will say "I agree with this" in a poll, and then also say
| "I refuse to support a (D) doing this" in a similar poll.
| They then vote for a republican who objectively will not
| do that thing, because their public platform loudly
| declares they support _the opposite_. Most republicans
| want a legalization of weed, but keep voting for
| republicans who openly declare their intent to continue
| to criminalize weed. There are several states that have
| public referendums that pass popular measures which are
| then outright contravened or illegally suppressed by
| Republican governments, and those same voters _reelect
| those same politicians_
|
| Republicans openly state that they will prevent democrats
| from doing things, and it is _still blamed on democrats_
| yard2010 wrote:
| The Americans would never be this accountable as you can't make
| a shitload of money and be accountable. You have to choose
| dmix wrote:
| Trump has already been convicted multiple times by the courts
|
| Putting an active president in jail was not something the
| country wanted to risk, I'm not convinced prior Supreme
| Courts would have agreed to that either in other situations.
| If Trump did not win the election he would have faced serious
| consequences, beyond the millions of dollars he already owes
| from other trials.
|
| Sarkozy is easier to put in jail because he's not in power.
| lordnacho wrote:
| What I see in the US is that the judiciary has already become
| partisan. In most of Europe, if there's a trial, the judge is
| just some nameless character. I mean, he has a name of course,
| but nobody can really point the finger at them and say they are
| interested in one side or the other. It's just not the done
| thing. By contrast, American judges are appointed by
| politicians, and people can claim they are not impartial. (Or
| elected, same thing)
|
| Here's a weird observation. I know the names of several US
| supreme court judges, and their right/left lean, despite never
| having lived there. I've lived in four other countries, and I
| might know one judge due to him having a funny name.
|
| What also doesn't tend to happen in Europe is questioning the
| legitimacy of the system. People can get sentenced and they
| just... accept it.
| phito wrote:
| Also we don't make reality TV shows (disguised as "news")
| about it.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| I think that's just a case of you not knowing European judges
| are partisan, rather than you knowing they're not. I think
| the relative obscurity of judges in Europe is just lack of
| scrutiny, and I personally know of numerous situations where
| cases are handled poorly.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Mistakes and worse is going to be part of any system.
| Systematic partisanship is something else.
| wiether wrote:
| Et la sante !
| _ache_ wrote:
| French joke.
|
| He is jailed in a jail nicknamed "La Sante", which is also the
| the french cheers sentence. "A la votre *et la sante".
|
| Will be the running gag of this christmas and new year.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| It's not a nickname. It's simply because the prison is
| located on Rue de la Sante (Health Street). Rue de la Sante
| was named that way because there was a hospital there from
| the 17th to the 19th century.
| _ache_ wrote:
| I hesitated to call it a nickname, as the name is "Paris-La
| Sante".
|
| But got covered by Wikipedia
| "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_de_la_Sant%C3%A9", so
| I did called it a nickname too.
|
| I'm pretty sure it can be called a "Metonymie de lieu" but
| I just didn't want to insist about that, it feels a little
| pedantic.
| wiether wrote:
| > it feels a little pedantic
|
| Typical French conversation then!
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Oh no, we hold back when we're here. For example, I
| didn't mention the possibility that it might simply be an
| ellipsis. And no one wants to talk about apocope.
| qq66 wrote:
| So is this a criminal president receiving justice, or a
| politically motivated prosecution?
| looobay wrote:
| He received money from Libya for his presidential campaign [0],
| he's just a criminal ex-president...
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F...
| catwell wrote:
| It's way more complicated than this.
|
| First, this is mostly about things that happened before his
| election.
|
| The tribunal ruled he did not personally benefit, and he did
| not directly solicit money to finance his campaign either.
|
| However, some of his closest allies (who would become his
| ministers later) did the latter. The tribunal could not find
| any direct proof he was involved but ruled there were enough
| "converging indications" that he knew and did nothing to stop
| it.
| _ache_ wrote:
| To be fair, the probability that the short explanation "He
| received money from Libya for his presidential campaign" is
| actually the truth is very high.
|
| There is no formal proofs, but as you say, (the judges
| deliberated that) there is enough "converging indications"
| to support the idea that the short explanation is true.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| If the justice system doesn't know exactly why it's
| putting Sarkozy in prison, he does...
| MaxL93 wrote:
| I'm sure the court could have gotten him on other
| charges, but they went with the absolutely 100% safe one
| rather than the other 99% safe ones.
|
| Sarkozy and all of his billionaire media allies are
| already trying their hardest to undermine the credibility
| of the justice system at every turn with extremely
| dangerous rhetoric; I dread to imagine what this would
| have been like had they gone with ever-so-slightly-less-
| safe charges
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| How would one differentiate Sarkozy being in the know,
| and one of Sarkozy's inner circle doing it and keeping
| him in the dark?
| ajnin wrote:
| This is disinformation.
|
| The tribunal didn't rule he didn't personally benefit. It
| ruled that he conspired to corrupt the leaders of Lybia to
| steal money from the Lybian people and fund his electoral
| campaign. In my book becoming president of France is
| certainly a "personal benefit". There are numerous factual
| evidence, documents from Lybia, fund transfers, secret
| meetings of his closest friends with Abdullah Senussi, who
| has been convicted to life in prison in France for
| orchestrating the bombing of UTA flight 772 which resulted
| in 170 deaths and is also currently investigated for
| another plane bombing.
|
| The money he got allowed him to spend about twice the
| allowed amount on his campaign, giving him an unfair
| advantage in the election. In other words he dealt with
| terrorists to potentially steal the presidential election.
| What Sarkozy did is extremely severe, I'd call that high
| treason. He got far less that he deserved.
|
| Also it's worth mentioning that it is his _third_
| conviction. He already got a 2 years and 1 year sentence
| which were confirmed in appeal in other cases.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > The tribunal ruled he did not personally benefit
|
| the money didn't go in his pocket, but he benefited from it
| by being elected president (partly thanks to this illegal
| funding), which to this day gives him a life of money and
| various privileges.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Not only this, but he plotted to whitewash the terrorist
| responsible for a terror attack on a plane which killed more
| French people than the terror attacks of the Bataclan... this
| guy is despicable and merits to be behind bars
| dominicrose wrote:
| This was 36 years ago. He became president 18 years ago,
| and only now in prison. Justice sure takes its time. I used
| to live in the same street as this prison, it's only a 5 km
| walk to Elysee.
| sebstefan wrote:
| Not just from Libya, he met & received money from the brother
| in law of the Libyan dictator Muhamar Kadhaffi
|
| The brother in law personally orchestrated the crashe of a
| civilian airliner, killing 170 passengers
| alex_duf wrote:
| The former, a tribunal has proven there was an illegal
| collusion between him and Muammar Gaddafi, in order to finance
| his presidential campaign.
|
| There's been bags of cash that transited by private airplanes,
| terrorist acts in reprisal, and ultimately a probable demise of
| Gaddafi's regime in response.
|
| Some real dirty actions with lots of lives lost.
| _ache_ wrote:
| And it's the second sentence for a illegal financing of his
| presidential campaign.
|
| Formal proofs of this illegal financing have been linked to
| two of his closest collaborators but not him directly. He is
| so convicted for "association de malfaiteurs" wich mean
| "partnership with criminals / wrongdoers".
|
| The illegal financing also explains what the US call the
| "Sarkozy war", which what a very odd move from France.
|
| Note that, despite the formal proofs of the wrong doing,
| Sarkozy has the support of most major medias AND from the
| current president Macron which is not exactly the same party
| as Sarkozy (but close enough). That suggests politically
| motivated prosecution is very unlikely.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Difficult to say.
|
| Even if indeed guilty, things like jailing him "provisionally"
| despite his appeal are discretionary decisions of the court so
| also open to all interpretations despite the very black and
| white comments here...
| kergonath wrote:
| > Difficult to say.
|
| It really is not. Nobody is benefitting from this
| politically, and the facts are difficult to ignore.
|
| > jailing him "provisionally" despite his appeal are
| discretionary decisions of the court so also open to all
| interpretations depiste the very black and white comments her
|
| It's just how it's done in cases like this, and he can thank
| himself for having normalised it.
| motorest wrote:
| > Even if indeed guilty, things like jailing him
| "provisionally" despite his appeal are discretionary
| decisions of the court so also open to all interpretations
| depiste the very black and white comments here...
|
| I read it the other way around. You're arguing for
| preferencial treatment on the ground that any inconvenience
| could be misconstrued as politically motivated.
|
| In the meantime you're seeing a case involving organized
| crime, lieutenants caught red-handed, and charges extended to
| the leader of the criminal enterprise. You're not seeing any
| doubt being raised on the charges, only on whether the
| politician could have political opponents.
| thrance wrote:
| Not difficult at all. Tens to hundreds of judges had a say on
| his case over the many years he's been on trial. What are the
| chances he only got left-wing judges? This muddying of the
| waters is exactly how you get to Trumpism and a blatant
| shamelessness of politicians in the face of obvious
| corruption.
| greatgib wrote:
| Just to be clear, here the law is just respected. He was the
| one that pushed the regulations for that. It was a big part
| of his political speech to say that law should be hard, rules
| should be enforced for people in his situation to do
| mandatory time with a very strict justice.
|
| But now he is also the subject of his own policies and it
| does not like that. Looks like justice is ok just when it is
| not affecting him personally.
|
| His attitude is totally disgusting and indecent.
| dmurray wrote:
| A bit of both. He definitely did criminal things, but they look
| worse because Gaddafi was such a politically unpopular
| ("terrorist") leader in the west. If he'd got the same funding
| from the Obama regime, surely he would never have gone to
| prison.
| motorest wrote:
| > If he'd got the same funding from the Obama regime, surely
| he would never have gone to prison.
|
| Speaking as someone who isn't french,
|
| If Sarkozy received the same funding from Obama it would have
| beem extremely shady.
|
| From Gaddafi it sounds outright treacherous.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| I mean, I don't think we need to put air quotes around
| "terrorist" for Gaddafi. This was a ruler who was happy to
| bring down Western passenger jets and put bombs in night
| clubs.
| monerozcash wrote:
| This is France, getting money from Obama would likely have
| been _worse_.
| ahoka wrote:
| Wow, calling the Obama administration a regime seems like...
| a dog whistle?
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| There are so many different political perspectives that
| would inspire someone to use the word "regime" to talk
| about Obama's presidency of the US, that I'm genuinely not
| sure which one the parent commenter is likely coming from.
| It's not a dog whistle it's a whistle for every type of
| animal.
| lucasRW wrote:
| A bit of both, there's no doubt he's more than guilty.
|
| But it is also clear that judges (who are notable left-leaning,
| if not far-left) are much more efficient at prosecuting right-
| wing figures (Fillon, for 0 reason this time).
| ivann wrote:
| The "Red judge myth"is, well, a myth. And Fillon's case was
| very clear and he had all the reason to be prosecuted.
| lucasRW wrote:
| No it's not. A majority of judges belong the the "Syndicat
| de la Magistrature", a communist-leaning organization
| (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicat_de_la_magistrature)
| which even participates (despite the supposed
| "independance" it should abide by) to the Communist Party's
| annual conference ("Fete de l'Huma"). COMMUNIST, not
| "socialist". Furthermore, many organizations and known
| figures of the french magistrature have regularly explained
| how they view there job as having a political mission,
| particularly, "avoiding prison", etc, etc... rather than
| enforcing the law.
| ivann wrote:
| Your own link said it 33%, so not the majority. A union
| has no obligation of "independence". Being member of a
| union does not mean you agree with everything, just that
| you think it's the best to defend your interests. The
| "Fete de l'Huma" is not the Communist Party's annual
| conference but it is indeed left leaning. There is no
| need to write communist in all caps, it's not an insult.
| For your last point you'll need to provide sources.
| lucasRW wrote:
| Yeah, it's not communist, it's just "left-leaning",
| organized by L'Humanite, a communist newspaper (who calls
| itself so), known for amongst other things, for grieving
| the "great comrade Stalin"'s death on its front page
| dated 9th March 1953. :o)
|
| And sure, belonging to a communist-leaning syndicate
| which publicly takes political stances (one being to say
| "dont vote for Sarkozy") has strictly no influence on how
| you deliver sentencing, nor does the famous incident "mur
| des cons" in 2013.
| popol12 wrote:
| Man, the communist party (and the communist ideology) in
| France is pretty much dead today. They're not even that
| much to the left today. They have no power and their boss
| has no social credibility outside of its party (see
| "Fabien Roussel n'est pas un camarade" songs)
|
| Your claim that the judges are red is a popular right
| wing fantasy
| motorest wrote:
| > But it is also clear that judges (who are notable left-
| leaning, if not far-left) are much more efficient at
| prosecuting right-wing figures (Fillon, for 0 reason this
| time).
|
| This blend of comments strike me as odd. Are you actually
| complaining that a judicial system is too efficient at
| catching corruption at high levels? Is this bad? What point
| are you trying to make, exactly?
| lucasRW wrote:
| As I said, the system is very efficient against Sarkozy who
| no doubt deserved it.
|
| It is unfortunately way less efficient at jailing or
| expelling multi-reoffenders, who have entered the country
| illegally, then broken the law multiple times, been in
| front of judges 30, 40, sometimes 100 times, been
| officially notified that they have to leave France
| ("OQTF"), yet, are still free to roam around until they're
| 101st crime ends up in the news and everyone asks "how come
| the non-politicized judges let them out 100 times before?"
| LunaSea wrote:
| Fillion was very clearly guilty since he hired his own wife
| with public money while she never worked a day in her life at
| that job.
| csomar wrote:
| It is a politically motivated prosecution of an ex-criminal
| president.
| Macha wrote:
| Sarkozy has been out of politics for a while and the current
| government is the closest in alignment to his politics, so it's
| hard to see the political gain here.
| fransje26 wrote:
| Mostly the former.
|
| The current sentence is for the illegal financing of his
| presidential campaign to the tune of 50 million euro, which is
| well above the legal cost cap. Although the amounts are benign
| compared to the amount of bribery seen in the US presidential
| runs, it is still unfair democratically and should be punished
| harshly accordingly. Interestingly, this case isn't motivated
| by financial greed, as in bribery for his own financial
| interests, but by power, i.e., help win the presidential
| election.
|
| It should be noted that most of the bigger parties are known to
| have "alternative" accounting tricks so you can be certain that
| they also don't fully respect the funding cap, but they
| probably get away with differences (that we know of/suspect) of
| a few (tens of?) percent.
|
| Sarkozy was not only well, well above that, with order O(200%),
| it was also done with money coming from a known dictator:
| Gaddafi. This brings a lot of interesting additional ethical
| questions to the table. Such as: what was the quid pro quo
| expected from such a payment? Or: what role did it play in
| Sarkozy ordering the bombing of Libya?
|
| It could also be considered politically motivated in the sense
| that the judges themselves are not a-political (and it's fully
| in their rights to have a political opinion) and that some of
| the high-profile cases in the past have been handled by judges
| of a different political leaning. And without putting the
| impartiality of the justice system into doubt, some questions
| have been raised when some of the judges were a bit too vocal
| in the criticism of their political opponents.
|
| And in parallel, although the judiciary system in France
| theoretically acts independently from the executive branch, the
| zones of influence are a bit murky and there are some indirect
| ways through which some pressure can be exerted onto the judges
| to facilitate, or in other cases slow down some cases.
|
| So you could be certain that such a high-profile case was not
| done without the go-ahead of the executive. In that sense, it
| can be considered politically motivated.
|
| Which doesn't mean Sarkozy shouldn't go to prison. He
| absolutely should. But please also clean-up all the other
| crooks, and go strongly after those that enriched themselves at
| the cost of the country. There are plenty of them, with lots of
| low-hanging fruit.
| adev_ wrote:
| > So you could be certain that such a high-profile case was
| not done without the go-ahead of the executive. In that
| sense, it can be considered politically motivated.
|
| Not really. It is more complex than that.
|
| There is two systems within the system for the "penal"
| (judiciary) in France:
|
| - Le parquet, with a "procureur" who indirectly under the
| influence of the executive power.
|
| - The "Juge d'Instruction". They are independent judges
| called only for complex affairs that are in charge of proof
| gathering and with more or less free hands.
|
| Sarkozy affairs landed in the second system.
|
| Politicans tend to hate the second systems for obvious
| reasons.
|
| It is worth to notice that Sarkozy himself tried to reform
| the system and remove the "Juge d'instruction" entirely but
| ultimately failed.
| IMTDb wrote:
| It's also worth noting that members of the second system
| had his picture pinned on a wall called "The wall of the
| assholes"[1] amongst other political and public servant
| they did not like. They still claim they are totally
| independent and impartial when judging any of these
| figures.
|
| [1] (French Wikipedia article about the affair) https://fr.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_du_%C2%AB_Mur_des_cons...
| adev_ wrote:
| > It's also worth noting that members of the second
| system
|
| Nope. This picture was found in the office of an Union
| related to "magistrats".
|
| Magistrats is a broad term that also include Procureurs,
| Judges but also some Lawyers.
|
| The union is not specifically associated to the position
| of "Juge d'instruction" by any means.
|
| But yes, generally speaking Politicians do not like
| Magistrats and Magistrats do not like politicians in
| France. And honestly, it is more healthy like that.
| fransje26 wrote:
| Well yes. But no. And that's exactly why there is always a
| risk of a "politically tainted" investigations.
|
| The "Juge d'instruction" is not an independent judge that
| will, out of his own will, start an investigation.
|
| He can start an investigation when asked by the
| "procureur", directly or indirectly under influence of the
| executive power, or by private citizens, as a "partie
| civile". The Sarkozy case was started by the former.
|
| On top of that, the "juge d'instruction" is nominated by
| the Minister of Justice for a period of 3 years, which
| means it is, once again, linked to the executive power.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Are you genuinely interested in the answer, or are you using
| rhetorical techniques to create the illusion of ambiguity when
| a quick search for the facts of the case produce a clear and
| definitive answer?
| jakub_g wrote:
| In some ways, this reminds me of Bernard Tapie, called "a man
| with 1001 lives". It's a really interesting story from 1980s/90s
| of a self-made-businessman, turned politician, getting to the
| very top, doing deals with African leaders, becoming minister,
| having his football club (Marseille) win the European Champions
| League; which however was a turning point that started his
| downfall, as they bought a domestic game just before, to avoid
| injuries before the big final.
|
| A very interesting documentary [2] explains all this. There's
| also Netflix series that I didn't watch though.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Tapie
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_football_bribery_scanda...
|
| [2] https://lcp.fr/programmes/les-mille-et-une-vies-de-
| bernard-t...
| 10729287 wrote:
| Fun fact, what is today perceived as a historical and intense
| rivalry between the Paris and Marseille football teams was
| actually completely made up and orchestrated by Bernard Tapie
| and the TV channel Canal+ (then recent owner of PSG) in the
| 1990s.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Great video about the lack of local rivalries in French
| football:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DadkD_06mM
| franze wrote:
| Fyi: Austria had a "tough on crime" minister of the interior who
| ended up in a jail he ceremoniously inaugurated himself.
| croisillon wrote:
| about six months instead of * check notes * 4 years
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| 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".
| cenamus wrote:
| Which one was that?
| ginko wrote:
| The only Austrian minister that went to jail I can think of was
| Grasser and he was minister of finance.
|
| edit: Ah right, there was Strasser. The Schussel government
| sure was great.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| We, French, are very proud of having put an ex-President in jail,
| for his crimes of having tried to whitewash a dictator
| responsible for the death of more French people than the Bataclan
| terror attacks in exchange for money.
|
| This person humiliated our country, and we're glad our justice
| put him behind bars
| wiether wrote:
| I'm a "half empty" kind of person and seeing how much support
| he's still getting is quite sad to see.
|
| Karine Le Marchand expressing her support is one thing,
| identifiyng herself as being part of the same caste as Sarkozy,
| but seeing the same support from regular folks, who have most
| certainly been screwed over by the ex-President...
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| It's amazing how all these conservatives who want to be tough
| on crime change their minds when it comes to one of their
| friends.
| pyrale wrote:
| I'm re-reading The Truth, from Terry Pratchett, and Lord de
| Worde's definition of criminal is really fitting here: to
| him, a criminal is a poor person, belonging to the criminal
| social class. For the elite, justice is to be served if
| they need it, and when they order it.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| The "support" seems to be mainly "engineered" by billionaire-
| owned media
| tasuki wrote:
| > Sarkozy said he would take two books with him into prison, a
| life of Jesus by Jean-Christian Petitfils and the Count of Monte
| Cristo
|
| The Count of Monte Cristo is a good choice.
| byroot wrote:
| It has nothing to do with literature.
|
| It's just a not so subtle way to claim he's innocent and that
| he'll get his revenge.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Amusingly, it's also inspired by the life of the writer's
| mixed race black father, who in the 1700s became the highest
| ranking black general in the west not to be surpassed until
| the American generals in the 1990s and supposedly attracted
| the jealousy of Napolean (See "The Black Count").
|
| So there's something there for everyone I guess.
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is one of those I should have known better moments.
| But I have never put together Alexander Dumas the author
| being related (son of) to Thomas-Alexander Dumas of
| Haiti/France despite them both being French, mix-race and
| overlapping in time. Learning about Thomas-Alexander Dumas
| in context of Haiti and the French revolution vs the
| context of reading Alexander Dumas I just never thought of
| it.
| whobre wrote:
| The book has a pretty good description of how to escape
| prison...
| Andrex wrote:
| French prison, at that.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Sure hope it's got nothing to do with literature because even
| I can read more than two books in five years.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| "We put all our politicians in jail as soon as they're elected."
|
| "Why?"
|
| "It saves time."
| spwa4 wrote:
| That seems to be Israel's approach for the last few decades.
| Well, they try, with some success even.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I really wouldn't want to get involved in anything that could
| be compared to what Israel do.
| jokoon wrote:
| Quite a shame it took this long
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Our politicians are suffocating and under funding the French
| justice system, so that it takes so long and the majority of
| white-collar and non-violent crimes slip under the radar.
|
| This is by design and not an unintended consequence.
|
| Justice in this country is only served thanks to the incredible
| determination of the members of the judiciary.
| yard2010 wrote:
| > He will have a toilet, a shower, a desk, a small electric hob
| and a small TV, for which he will have to pay a monthly EUR14
| (PS12) fee, and the right to a small fridge.
|
| Yea.. poor people call it a hotel room.
|
| One can only dream about such a judicial system that puts
| criminals behind the bars even if they are very very VIP. Rule of
| law is what makes the difference between real democracies and
| AliExpress ones.
| pavlov wrote:
| In the Nordic countries, that's just a regular jail cell.
| Except the fridge I guess.
| Razengan wrote:
| They're cold enough there
| dotancohen wrote:
| I spent a week in a hostel in Norway (Trumso). The room has
| a refrigerator, but no freezer. The food to be kept frozen
| was put on the shelf hanging outside the window.
| type0 wrote:
| Doesn't work if it's not winter. Also you should keep
| your food in a fabric bag that hungry magpies and
| seagulls can't open.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Huh, it's not nearly as cold as I thought it would be in
| Tromso.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Thanks. We didn't actually use the shelf.
|
| I'll take the time to recommend everybody go see the
| Northern Lights one time in their lives. Not only are
| they beautiful, the brain has a hard time contemplating
| something so huge and far away that the eyes discern no
| parallax. But unlike the moon and stars, they move!
| anjel wrote:
| I wonder what frech jail food is like.
| blitzar wrote:
| The wine pairings are particularly unimpressive.
| codeulike wrote:
| I hear the choux pastry is often verging on the dry side of
| acceptable
| spwa4 wrote:
| Apparently he gets to buy food and cook himself, although
| no alcohol allowed of course. So the question is really:
| how's his cooking?
| tobylane wrote:
| They offered a rather indifferent Rausan-Segla.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| So many heavy sauces?
| wiz21c wrote:
| There's not many heavy sauces in french cuisine anymore,
| that's part of history now.
| esafak wrote:
| He's obviously a _cuisine classique_ Escoffierite.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| French stick arrives pre-hardened.
| kkkqkqkqkqlqlql wrote:
| British food.
|
| I mean, jail should be a punishment, right?
| rkomorn wrote:
| The food at two of the schools I went to in France most
| definitely would serve as punishment.
|
| In fact, I don't even think you could make British food as
| bad as that food was.
| grugagag wrote:
| American fries
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Probably very similar to food served at colleges in America,
| since it all comes from Sodexho
| ycosynot wrote:
| I have been 15 months in French psychiatric jail. It tastes
| like * _. It is basically plastic trays, very industrial
| microwaven at the last time, and you hope everyday that it
| will be your favorite meal, because they tend to rotate the
| food, and it tastes lik *_ all the time.
|
| Also I Wanted to say that French jail is NO JOKE. You already
| hurt from inhumane solitary, or else you have a cell with a
| TV (there is indeed a TV) but to socialize with psychopatic
| and/or "exotic" people. They're not "kind", and they're not
| nice.
|
| Even other exotic people had a rough time. It is filled with
| aggressivity, honor struggles, ect.. JAIL IS NO JOKE. On top
| of that, it spans a looooong time... You cannot realize how
| loooong it is to be in jail, it feels forever. People who
| never went to jail cannot realize that.
|
| I am basically thinking nowadays that jail is torture and it
| should not be a thing. It is very torture... Let us militate
| for the end of that.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _I am basically thinking nowadays that jail is torture and
| it should not be a thing. It is very torture... Let us
| militate for the end of that._
|
| You kill a single mom and her children for fun , those
| people shouldn't suffer consequences for that ?
| ryoshoe wrote:
| No state can claim to have a 0% false conviction rate.
| Would accept inhumane treatment while imprisoned if
| other, more deserving, people received the same?
| skrebbel wrote:
| I can't figure out whether you think a humane prison system is
| good or bad.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| OP's comment suggests they think a _tiered_ justice system is
| bad.
| tauwauwau wrote:
| Law doesn't seek to punish but to rehabilitate. Act of taking
| freedom away from the criminal is violent enough. Treating them
| badly is just a sign of unfair/poor society that cannot
| maintain (afford to keep) it's promise to be civil to all
| citizens.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Your confounding how things should be with how they are.
| These are two distinct philosophies, only one of which is
| relevant in most of the real world, unfortunately.
| rorylawless wrote:
| Punishment and rehabilitation aren't mutually exclusive.
| Arguably, the punishment aspect is served by the removal of
| freedoms that being locked in prison entails.
| Rehabilitation can be any number of things that the
| prisoner does while in prison.
| Tepix wrote:
| > Law doesn't seek to punish but to rehabilitate.
|
| That's unfortunately not universally true. This is most
| obvious when considering the death penalty.
|
| Norway exemplifies a rehabilitative justice model and it is
| effective, evidenced by low recidivism rates.
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| Very few first-world countries have death penalties?
| Tepix wrote:
| Very few countries in general.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| But most of the people live in countries with death
| penalties. All the top 6 countries by population have
| death penalty and only 4 out of biggest 17 countries do
| not have death penalty.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_count
| ry#...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depen
| den...
| master-lincoln wrote:
| afaik only the USA and Japan
| Andrex wrote:
| And not all of the US, just a bit over half (27 states).
| sfdlkj3jk342a wrote:
| Singapore and China
| zabzonk wrote:
| and thailand
| amiga386 wrote:
| There are 53 states (out of 193 UN states + 2 observer
| states) that have not abolished, and continue to use the
| death penalty.
|
| "First-world" is Cold War terminology meaning Western
| countries and their allies, as opposed to second-world
| Warsaw Pact states and their allies, versus third-world
| non-aligned states. This would include death penalty
| states like Pakistan and Iran, who at one point were
| British dominions.
|
| If we instead mean "developed countries" (as defined by
| the IMF), then 4 out of 60 developed countries have not
| abolished the death penalty: they are the United States,
| Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.
|
| The other 49 states continuing to use the death penalty
| (including China) are not considered "developed
| countries" by the IMF.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_count
| ry
| wisty wrote:
| Maybe Norway prisons are just really nasty. No drugs, no
| fights, no conflict with the wardens, just boredom and then
| solitary confinement if you do anything that's "not OK".
| Teever wrote:
| A death penalty doesn't have to intrinsically be about
| punishment.
|
| It can be about removing the threat that a person poses
| from society permanently.
|
| It can be about making the victims feel a sense of relief
| and justice.
| bagels wrote:
| The point being made is that the death penalty does not
| serve a rehabilitation purpose for a pretty obvious
| reason.
| rat9988 wrote:
| > Law doesn't seek to punish
|
| Then who is tasked with delivering justice to the victims?
| n4r9 wrote:
| Must justice include punishment? If someone hits me, I'd
| much rather they take responsibility, apologise, and work
| on themselves to become a better person, than simply get
| locked up for a while.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Those are not the only two options that they can choose
| from. And being hit is a very minimal example. Would you
| say the same for rape? No punishment required; just
| apologise and work on yourself?
| thih9 wrote:
| You skipped the "take responsibility". In case of a more
| serious crime a simple apology is indeed not enough. But
| it should still be possible to proceed with something
| more productive for everyone than putting the perpetrator
| behind bars. As you say, there are many options.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Take responsibility is just a euphemism, though. For some
| people that is someone going behind bars. What do you
| actually mean?
| lostlogin wrote:
| Apply the same thought process to 'punishment'. Those who
| spend a lot of time in prison seem to come out worse and
| reoffend.
|
| How is that helpful?
| rat9988 wrote:
| I don't know, if somebody kills my child, I don't know
| why you'd expect me to be helpful to him.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Even to prevent them continuing to kill someone else's
| child later?
| lukan wrote:
| A death sentence would certainly prevent this person from
| killing another child.
|
| (Whether a death sentence is good for society in general
| is a different question)
| esafak wrote:
| It would not be good for a deceased either, especially if
| they are wrongly convicted.
| lukan wrote:
| Indeed, but it would also be not good to be wrongly
| sentenced to life in prison.
|
| Once inside, chances to get out with a retrial are pretty
| slim.
|
| Fatal misstakes are bad in any situation.
| philipallstar wrote:
| This sort of thinking always misses that part of the
| reason for punishment is deterrent of others.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I think most people who commit a crime either do it in
| the heat of the moment, or believe that they're very
| unlikely to get caught. The distant prospect of
| punishment doesn't apply in either case.
|
| I guess there are some edge cases. Drug smugglers for
| example are probably aware of the rough probability of
| detection and weigh it up against the length of jail
| time. But I reckon Sarkozy thought he'd just get away
| with it and didn't even consider what the potential
| punishment would be.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > But I reckon Sarkozy thought he'd just get away with it
| and didn't even consider what the potential punishment
| would be.
|
| It's worth considering then that the next person who has
| the option to do this might behave differently, given
| Sarkozy has not got away with it.
| n4r9 wrote:
| There's definitely some truth to that. There are
| situations where someone might restrain themselves
| because of the consequences of getting caught. I suppose
| the question is whether the consequence needs to be
| _punishment_ as opposed to correction or isolation. In
| the case of a narcissist like Sarkozy, the reputaional
| tarnish of being publicly labeled as guilty would be an
| emotional blow.
| esafak wrote:
| It has to be a deterrent rather than punishment, because
| crimes can't be undone; it's better to prevent them.
| lenkite wrote:
| Prison is nonsense and a waste of human life. Best
| punishment is caning like Singapore. Do fast and quick.
| Pain is an _excellent_ memory aid. Most stable lowest
| recidivism rate.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| > those who spend a lot of time in prison seem to come
| out worse and reoffend. How is that helpful?
|
| You're implying that imprisonment makes people offend
| more - perhaps the simpler explanation is that most
| criminals will commit crimes when they get the chance,
| especially prolific criminals. Prison takes them off the
| streets and stops them victimising more people - this is
| helpful.
| n4r9 wrote:
| It's not a hard and fast definition, but generally
| involves:
|
| * An honest acknowledgement of ones behaviour and its
| impact on others.
|
| * Accepting the consequences of your behaviour, whether
| legal (such as going to jail), financial, or personal.
|
| * Taking the initiative to make amends where possible.
|
| * Taking steps to improve oneself and/or prevent the same
| behaviour in future.
| SirMaster wrote:
| If the only repercussion for assault is they need to
| apologize and "work on themselves", then what's stopping
| more people from committing assault? There needs to be
| punishment.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I don't think that people are stopped from committing
| assault by an abstract risk-benefit calculation that
| considers the likelihood of jailtime. It's not what stops
| me, at least. Mostly I just don't want to. And even if I
| do want to hit someone, I know that that fleeting
| temptation doesn't accord with my fundamental values;
| I'll feel bad afterwards. I'm intimately aware that they
| might retaliate, or that I might accidentally kill them
| (or vice versa). It just doesn't _feel_ worth it because
| I 've been socialised to weigh up those odds. But the
| distant prospect of jail time feels abstract and harder
| to socialise into people in the heat of the moment.
| amiga386 wrote:
| You're not a remorseless psychopath, though. Some people
| are.
|
| For a nuanced discussion, the Illustrated Guide to the
| Law is an excellent introduction. Here's the section on
| Punishment: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=41
|
| It ends with the summary "The State punishes those who
| commit crimes partly in the hope of preventing future
| offenses (via rehabilitation, deterrence, and removal)...
| partly to restore a sense of balance and fairness (via
| retribution)... and partly because fuck you, that's why
| (retaliation)"
| 9dev wrote:
| If they show no remorse or actual will to better
| themselves, that's obviously not enough and the reason
| why we have prisons.
| triceratops wrote:
| Depending on how hard they hit you, the extent of your
| injuries, and the circumstances surrounding the assault
| (premeditated or not, provoked or unprovoked), why not
| both lock them up _and_ have them work on themselves?
| nevon wrote:
| What you are referring to is vengeance, not justice. Some
| people see the two as inseparable and others do not.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Sure, then who is reponsible for vengeance if not law?
| And why vengeance is not part of justice, this is not
| clear here.
| 9dev wrote:
| Because vengeance has never done anyone any good. You
| never feel better after getting vengeance, just hollow.
| Thus, a good legal system should strive to provide
| justice, not vengeance.
| I-M-S wrote:
| Have you ever distributed vengeance so you can personally
| speak how you felt? Or are you mindlessly repeating
| strings of words that are supposed to go together like an
| LLM?
| 9dev wrote:
| I don't have to justify to you, random internet stranger.
| I have made my share of experience, and read a fair bit
| about that of others, in history and literature; and I'm
| confidently standing behind my opinion.
| lukan wrote:
| What is "justice"?
|
| To use the example from a sibling comment, if a person
| kills a child and the father kills this guy out of
| vengeance .. it will do those children good, who can now
| live in safety afterwards from that person.
|
| But if in reality the murderer also had family who did
| not believe he murdered anyone in the first place now set
| out to seek justice/vengeance, then yes, it becomes a war
| .. which is why we have courts and police nowdays, but
| what justice is, is still rather arbitarily defined.
| Concretely it means enforcing the law. And laws are
| written by people.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| What you are asking about is called Retributive Justice.
|
| The reason the answer is not clear is attitudes to
| Retributive Justice vary widely across cultures and
| political systems. In OECD countries, the dominant (but
| not universal view) is there is no role for Retributive
| Justice in a modern society.
|
| That is my position. The reason I don't think vengeance
| should be part of Justice is it's counter productive. The
| role of society as I see it, is to create an environment
| that produces nice things for myself and my family, so we
| prosper. I think it's self evident having as many people
| as possible working hard maximises this.
|
| Justice is a unfortunate blight on that. Producing nice
| things requires people to work cooperatively, people
| working cooperatively requires rules. You can't have
| someone kill another for food when they could be working
| on a farm instead, so we have a rule for that. The role
| of Justice is to encourage people to follow those rules,
| so Justice is necessary too. But Justice is costly. It
| requires police, lawyers, judges, and jails. It removes
| people who could be producing nice things from society
| and makes them a burden to carry instead. "An eye for an
| eye" sounds equitable, but it means there are now two
| people without an eye instead of one. There have been
| calculations on what the Justice systems costs a typical
| OECD country. The answer seems to be around 2% of GDP.
| For the USA, that's about $600 billion per year.
|
| Because of that large cost to me it is self evident you
| want as little Justice as possible. Just enough so just
| about everyone follows the rules, and no more. If you are
| forced to productive people from society and feed, house,
| and protect them in a jail, then you should strive to
| redirect, educate, and train them so when released they
| will become productive, and produce nice things. For me.
| This is called rehabilitation. Every modern society
| preaches rehabilitation over vengeance, but not all do
| it.
|
| So what rule does vengeance play in this? Vengeance is by
| definition punishing people more than rehabilitation
| requires. Thus it costs money to extract vengeance.
| Sometimes a lot of money. In my country jailing someone
| for life means it costs my government $300/day,
| potentially for decades. That means I have less nice
| things. It even means the victim has less nice things, in
| the end. After all, that money could be paying for
| teachers and schools, to educate the victims kids. The
| conclusion most most people in OECD societies have drawn
| from that is vengeance has no role in Justice.
|
| In this view, the becoming the victim of a crime is no
| different to any another unfortunate event, like losing
| your house to a storm, or becoming the victim of a plane
| crash, or dying from cancer. You don't get to seek
| vengeance for those events, so why should being the
| victim of a crime be any different? Adding to that, you
| are not entirely powerless against random destructive
| events. You can insure against them. Crime is no
| different. We can and do insure against the ill effects
| of crime.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| The core point of organized justice is to prevent blood
| feuds and long-running inter-personal or tribal conflict.
| Essentially, to interrupt or prevent a cycle of violence.
| Justice is reaching consensus on a set of facts and then
| ascertaining an appropriate compensation. That compensation
| can include a loss of freedom, a monetary payment, mandated
| service hours, or historically - torture and death. But
| what matters is a process that is broadly seen as a fair
| assessment and compensation sufficient to prevent revenge
| by the impacted parties.
|
| Justice as prevention is secondary - and arguably
| ineffective - or we'd have no crime, no recidivism, no
| addicts, nobody acting with obviously negative personal
| outcomes.
| mothballed wrote:
| Systems that seek to reduce conflict and compensate
| victims did not historically make much use of
| imprisonment.
|
| For a modern look at this, look at the xeer system of
| Somalia, where victims will almost always prefer
| payment/compensation over punishment.
|
| Imprisonment is largely an invention of the state, as
| they push victims and inter-personal conflict aside, and
| rather use their tools to subordinate the citizen to the
| order of the state and then charge the victim taxpayers
| the cost of imprisonment and funnel the money into their
| buddies running and working the prisons.
| saoh wrote:
| Rehabilitate and/or deter. The extent to which it is either
| the former or the latter depends on the country. That also
| determines whether or not "treating them badly" should be a
| feature of the justice system.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I would like a mixture of punishment and rehabilitation. If
| some kid shoplifts, then the balance should be in favor of
| rehabilitation. If someone commits treason or murder, then
| that balance is entirely on punishment, there is not
| rehabilitation left.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Law doesn 't seek to punish but to rehabilitate_
|
| The purposes are _punishment_ are deterrence, retribution,
| and rehabilitation [1]. (Incapacitation is also typically
| considered in sentencing.)
|
| The potential deterrence and retributive benefits of cruel
| have been known for ages. It's why jailers did it. Those
| potential benefits are balanced against rehabilitation. But
| that doesn't make it the supreme consideration, particularly
| for crimes of corruption.
|
| [1] https://web.uncg.edu/dcl/courses/vicecrime/pdf/m7.pdf
| wtcactus wrote:
| An eye for an eye makes the all world go blind. But, one eye
| for both eyes quickly renders the all bad actors of society
| blind and incapable of harming the law abiding citizens.
|
| It's not fancy around these parts to give the example of El
| Salvador, because most of us live in a very comfortable
| bubble and can pretend we support all these fancy thing of
| "reintegration and not punishment" but go ask what the people
| in El Salvador think about how their country got rid of
| criminal violence.
| sdsd wrote:
| So the idea is this will rehabilitate Sarkozy? Do you believe
| that this experience will rehabilitate Sarkozy, or even that
| he's an active threat to commit more crimes in the future? It
| seems like the only conceivable social benefit of
| incarcerating him is to punish him for corruption as a
| deterrent to others. But his luxury prison room probably
| won't do that, so it's basically just an expensive legal
| formality to satisfy public demands for "justice" (ie,
| retribution for wrongdoing)
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| It's not a luxury room like drug lords have had in corrupt
| countries. He's in the VIP wing, which means life generally
| sucks except he won't have to worry about random violence
| or gang politics. It's a lot better than normal prisoners
| get, but it's hardly a vacation.
|
| I agree that the point is punishment and deterrence to
| other public officials, proving no one is truly out of
| reach of the law.
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| Future corruption is less likely if punishment is expected.
| Not that complicated.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Not entirely. There are a few different motivations for
| punishment: one, is to act as a deterrant (people won't do
| the crime because they fear the punishment. Tends to work
| best when people think they are likely to be caught), two is
| to act as a form of correction/rehabilitation: (after one
| punishment people are less likely to do it again. Tends to
| have problems when the punishment sets people up to be more
| likely to commit crime, by either putting them in contact
| with other criminals or further pushing them into desperate
| circumstances after the punishment), third is as a sense of
| justice, to some extent as revenge. The punishment of an
| offender can help the victims on an emotional level and also
| foster trust in the system (requires that the punishments are
| viewed as just and proportional). Lastly, in extreme cases,
| as a form of protection/prevention: by removing the person
| from being able to commit any further crimes.
| ajnin wrote:
| All the cells in the solitary confinement wing of the prison
| where he's incarcerated (La Sante in the middle of Paris) are
| exactly the same. Due to safety considerations the inmates
| don't have common utilities like showers or dining area so they
| have everything in their cells where they remain most of the
| time. It's not preferential treatment, in fact it could be
| considered quite cruel to have almost no contact with others.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| He is in the VIP wing of La Sante prison. The part visible from
| Boulevard Arago is an overcrowded high-security wing, and it is
| not uncommon to hear screams and shouts in the evening when
| passing by.
|
| Two wings, two different moods, one prison.
| Razengan wrote:
| What do I have to do to go to a jail like that!
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Vote.
| esafak wrote:
| Here is a guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D04wb7P_v-4
| mrtksn wrote:
| > One can only dream about such a judicial system that puts
| criminals behind the bars even if they are very very VIP. Rule
| of law is what makes the difference between real democracies
| and AliExpress ones.
|
| Unfortunately, the trend for more rule based order has
| reversed. European governments are all struggling when the "who
| cares about rules" governments are full steam ahead. Even if
| they have net negative approval, they have plenty of fanatical
| supporters, they hold full narrative control through the media
| which is owned by their super rich allies. Oh and by the way
| this is happening because the "rule based world" folks screwed
| up and weren't fair either.
|
| It's going to be worse before it gets better. The west is going
| through a phase and all I hope is that would be too
| destructive. Thankfully, the world isn't made just from "the
| west", so I guess its not the end for the humanity - yet.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Thankfully, the world isn't made just from "the west", so I
| guess its not the end for the humanity - yet.
|
| "Humanity" as in "the species homo sapiens sapiens", yes,
| that will survive.
|
| But "humanity" as in "societies ruled by foundational human
| rights and democracy"? Not if Trump's USA, China, Russia and
| Modi's India have their will.
| mrtksn wrote:
| So? That part of the world used to be the leading
| civilizations for centuries. Maybe its their turn again.
|
| Personally I don't have problem with that, my stuck is with
| the decay of the west. I like the European way of life,
| makes me sad to think that it might be coming to an end and
| that the rest of my life I will have to care deeply about
| the implications of geopolitics and power instead of more
| important things higher in the Maslow pyramid.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I don't understand how somebody can speak of the West
| having "foundational human rights and democracy" non-
| ironically now a days. We are literally providing the
| weapons to carry out an actual genocide in Gaza. And
| 'democracy' doesn't elevate Trump vs Biden as the two most
| liked candidates in the country. It's just a system with
| intentionally massive barriers to entry played by political
| elites and the occasional outsider billionaire, exactly the
| same in systems of minority rule.
|
| The past ~10 years have been a serious masks off moment. I
| long for who we were in the past, but I sometimes wonder if
| we ever were that, or if it was just a more well maintained
| facade. But this current nonsense? Yeah, I'm not
| particularly upset about giving another bloc having their
| time in the limelight, because at this point somebody
| calling what we've become to be grounded on 'foundational
| human rights and democracy' is plainly nauseating.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Hamas decided to invade Israel, they knew that Israel
| couldn't and wouldn't let the single most deadly day for
| Jews since 1945 unanswered.
| baby wrote:
| We have good prisons in France, it's a good thing
| kulahan wrote:
| Doesn't France have a fundamentally different legal system from
| the US and British versions? IIRC, USA etc. rely primarily on
| precedent for their legal systems. France, Germany, and others
| rely on written law specifically.
|
| I imagine in the latter form, it's easier to get big boys in
| jail, because simply being defeated once doesn't weaken all
| future attempts. I could be completely misremembering though.
| randomtoast wrote:
| By the way, this is not possible in the U.S and in many other
| countries. When someone is convicted of a crime, they don't
| usually start serving a prison sentence until the case is final.
| If they appeal, the sentence is automatically paused or can be
| stayed by the court. In practice, this means you don't go to
| prison (unless you are already in preventive detention because of
| flight risk or danger) while your case is still being fought in
| higher courts.
| timpera wrote:
| It needs to be noted that it's not the norm in France either.
| The court chose to send him to jail until the appeal because of
| the "exceptional gravity" of his behavior, which came to a
| surprise for many. He will most likely ask the courts to review
| the execution of the sentence until the appeal in the next few
| days.
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| > It needs to be noted that it's not the norm in France
| either.
|
| 85% of prison sentences of more than two years also carry
| "execution provisoire": https://www.justice.gouv.fr/sites/def
| ault/files/migrations/p... (page 2). Sentences of more than 2
| years are not the norm though.
|
| > He will most likely ask the courts to review the execution
| of the sentence until the appeal in the next few days.
|
| He already did.
| darkamaul wrote:
| Sarkozy was convicted for "association de malfaiteurs"
| (criminal conspiracy) related to allowing associates to meet
| with Libyan officials to discuss covert campaign financing
| for his 2007 election. Remarkably, while convicted of
| conspiracy, he was acquitted on the actual underlying
| charges.
|
| The tribunal acknowledged no direct evidence linked Sarkozy
| to receiving or handling the funds and that the disputed
| flows weren't established as having served his campaign. Yet
| the conviction rested on a "bundle of concordant indices"
| rather than established facts.
|
| The irony: Sarkozy spent his political career advocating for
| tougher criminal laws and harsher punishments. The
| "association de malfaiteurs" law was reintroduced in 1986,
| and he championed its application throughout his tenure. Now
| he's imprisoned under the very provision he helped expand--
| convicted on evidence of intent to prepare a crime rather
| than proof of an actual crime, exactly the kind of broad
| prosecutorial power he once argued was necessary.
|
| He got bitten by his own sword.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| "Hoisted by his own petard" would be a more appropriate
| saying to invoke.
| chasil wrote:
| That is a quote from Hamlet, but it has a very odd
| literal meaning.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard
| diath wrote:
| What do you mean? You can get detained and held in jail without
| bail until sentencing if the court orders it.
| silcoon wrote:
| What about Silvio Berlusconi? The Italian "premier", multiple
| times prime minister, founder of multiple parties and leader of
| the right.
|
| Owner of Milan FC and involved in constructing large parts of
| Milan city. Multiple people in his parties were condemned for
| corruption, the co-founder of his main party "Forza Italia"
| called Marcello Dell'Utri went in jail for concussion with Mafia.
| Berlusconi had a mafia boss - Vittorio Mangano - living
| permanently in his mansion near Milan. Owner of large
| construction companies, movie companies, a large bank, publishing
| companies, multiple newspapers, a lot of investments and three of
| the main TVs in Italy, and never went in jail a single day. He
| was able to create laws ad personam, like that the tree most
| important political positions in the country got immunity from
| law persecution, and he also was able to shorten the limitation
| period for crimes, in order to avoid charges.
|
| He got sentenced or prosecuted for: fiscal fraud for his Mediaset
| TVs, underage prostitution, prostitution racket (some of the
| girls were appearing in TVs and got elected as politicians to get
| $$$ government pensions), mafia murders '92/93 (where Falcone e
| Borsellino died, the two judges that brought to international
| attention the danger of Italian Mafia), multiple accounting
| frauds, criminal appropriations, and corruption. He had few
| personal lawyers which the main one of them, Niccolo Ghedini, got
| elected in parliament.
|
| When I read about Sarkozy or Trump, I think they're just bad
| clones of Berlusconi. They read his manual. Congratulations to
| France to take politics and corruption more seriously then
| Italians.
|
| P.S. Berlusconi was best friend with Putin and Gheddafi.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Why when a high profile politic is sentenced it goes to a 5 star
| suite while the rest of mortals are thrown to a hole?
|
| It seems that when you cross a certain invisible threshold
| "justice" applies just a bit differently. Same in Argentina with
| corrupt and ex-robber Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
| msh wrote:
| Does he have better conditions than any other French persons
| convicted of a similar crime?
| liendolucas wrote:
| I don't know, but what I do know that "jail" has a very
| different meaning for me.
|
| In Argentina the lives of people of an entire country have
| been ruined because of the last 20 years of robbery from the
| state arcs.
|
| Yet every disgusting politician is out there or has served a
| laughable sentence. And what do you get in turn after ripping
| off a country? A home prision benefit.
| sebstefan wrote:
| The cell is the same but he is alone in it, most convicts
| have a cellmate
| msh wrote:
| Not the ones in solitary confinement like him I assume?
| sebstefan wrote:
| His SHU cell has everything the rest of the cells have ;
| a TV for EUR14/month, a hot plate, a landline, a shower,
| a fridge, and on a fixed schedule access to the library
| and the gym
|
| https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/nicolas-
| sarkozy-...
| greatgib wrote:
| Something really scary in France right now is that you can see
| really clearly how most mainstream media are used for propaganda.
|
| Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles in
| most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies
| supporting him. It's hard to imagine but non stop. You have
| everyday interviews of his family saying that it is an injustice,
| that he did nothing, that the judgement was rigged, that he was a
| great men that served France and so should not be treated like
| everyone else. Article about how sad the poor family is. Number
| of articles repeating friends of him verbatim s that the
| judgement was fake.
|
| Almost none speaking about the facts, the grounds for his
| sentence, the big number of other trials against him that are
| running. And also the other definitive convictions he got. Like
| for attempting to bribe a head prosecutor to get insider info
| about his case. Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...
|
| But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France
| belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| Exactly. Meanwhile 75% of French people agree that he should go
| to jail. This is nuts
| wiz21c wrote:
| And then France will get Bardella... It's very very close
| now. And thanks to Trump we are now arming Europe. It doesn't
| go in the right direction.
| croisillon wrote:
| that's the problem with first-pass-the-vote: 75% against
| him and scattered over 10 candidates, 25% for him will help
| him reach the second round
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| That's not the issue. The issue is that there are _hundreds_ ,
| if not thousands, of french politicians who _should_ be in
| jail.
|
| I don't disagree with him going to jail: but it's one heck of a
| corrupt country where they all have their hands in the cookie
| jar.
|
| Most french politicians who served at the EU, for example, have
| friends and family as "employees" on their payroll (well, on
| the EU citizens' payroll). Same at non-EU level: it's called _"
| emplois fictifs"_ in french ("fictional jobs"). Soooo many
| stories about politicians at so many local, regional, national
| and supra-national levels engaging in "emplois fictifs".
|
| So many mayors in France have dirty money on their hands. Where
| for example they block construction permits then, once joyfully
| greased with cash, allow the construction permits.
|
| But Sarkozy was right-wing and the EU, and France in
| particular, is ultra left-wing. So it's good to put a right-
| wing president in jail.
|
| Once again: I've got nothing against him going to jail. But
| we're talking about a country were judges are openly leftists.
| They're not impartial.
|
| It's all rotten and disgusting.
|
| And why do you think all the leftist french mainstream media
| root for right-wing Sarkozy? Because these media are at the
| hand of corrupt politicians who think a politician going to
| jail is a dangerous precedent. They're nearly all corrupt, so
| they're shitting their pants to see that even a president is
| sent to jail.
|
| But yup: one politician in jail. Great. Only 9999 more to go.
| And corrupt judges.
| ithkuil wrote:
| You have to start from somewhere
| phtrivier wrote:
| > And why do you think all the leftist french mainstream
| media root for right-wing Sarkozy?
|
| Which are the "leftist french mainstream media" rooting for
| Sarkozy ?
|
| The "leftist french mainstream media" I can think of would be
| Liberation, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Obs, France Inter...
|
| Do you have a link to articles where any of those are
| "defending" Sarkozy, cause quite frankly I missed it.
| akudha wrote:
| _corrupt politicians who think a politician going to jail is
| a dangerous precedent_
|
| There is a reason why administrations don't go after obvious,
| in-your-face crimes committed by previous
| administrations/politicians. They all hate each other, but
| they are also terrified that if they prosecute previous
| administrations (for legitimate crimes), they'll be the
| target when someone else is in power (even if they themselves
| didn't commit any crimes).
|
| I suppose it might be easier to prevent misbehavior by
| highest officials of the land by having stricter scrutiny,
| laws etc than prosecuting them after the fact, but who
| watches the watchdogs? Who watches the judiciary? As an
| ordinary citizen, it is _exhausting_ to just even follow the
| news.
|
| And if it is this bad in _democracies_ , imagine how it is
| like in countries like Russia.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > even if they themselves didn't commit any crimes
|
| Does that still even exist? The problem I see in politics
| is that everyone has their hand in the cookie jar to some
| degree.
|
| You don't get into politics unless you already have your
| hand in there, or are given the option to prove yourself
| where moving up the ranks involves helping someone getting
| their hand in there, with the unspoken assumption that
| they'll return the favor. And of course once you're in and
| have your hand in there, why rock the boat and waste all
| that effort?
| akudha wrote:
| _Does that still even exist?_
|
| I don't know. I suppose there is behavior that is illegal
| and behavior that is unethical. I guess there aren't that
| many politicians that are ethical, but there may be some
| (hopefully?) who don't do downright illegal things?
| Maybe, I dunno.
|
| The fact that collectively we all have such low
| expectations and such low opinions about our
| politicians/government says a lot about the sorry state
| of affairs :(
| aborsy wrote:
| This is very common in big governments particularly in
| France: bureaucrats introduce problems, you will then have to
| beg them and generally provide favors of some kind for its
| removal. I saw it in universities and organizations.
|
| Lots of bureaucrats everywhere.
| popol12 wrote:
| France is ultra left-wing ? Wow, the Overton window must have
| shifted to the right even more than I thought.
|
| You sound like you actually don't know much about France. For
| instance your accusations about left wing media rooting for
| Sarkozy has no foundation. The judges being biased toward
| left is groundless as well. Many left wing politicians have
| been condemned by French justice.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| I think if you pay attention to French and German politics,
| it is hard to conclude that the EU is "ultra left-wing".
| someuser2345 wrote:
| > Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...
|
| Sorry, why is this such a big deal?
| ben_w wrote:
| Committing a crime is bad, trying to cover up that you're
| committing a crime makes it obvious (as a generalisation) you
| knew you shouldn't have been doing the crime.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Since a few days, there is an abundance of cover and articles
| in most major newspaper here with propaganda and repeated lies
| supporting him.
|
| How much of this is driven by contrarian and counter-cyclical
| reporting?
|
| I'm not familiar with French media, but I see the same pattern
| in every country where I've kept up with the news: Media starts
| being favorable to a topic when it's up and coming, switching
| to being highly critical when that topic becomes mainstream,
| then reverts again to exploring the positives when the topic
| falls out of favor.
|
| You see it even with people like Elizabeth Holmes. News stories
| about her fraud were everywhere until she had to go to jail,
| but now the news has swung to humanizing her, claiming her
| sentencing was excessive, focusing on the angle of a mother
| separated from her children, and confusingly ignoring her fraud
| at all.
|
| It's all designed to be counter-narrative and rise waves of
| controversy. The more controversial, the more shares and views.
| dijit wrote:
| I have a much less charitable view than you about Elizabeth
| Holmes.
|
| The fact that a new publicist was hired by her before all the
| sympathetic press started coming out is enough for me to
| believe that there's a link _there_ and not a natural news
| swing cycle.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/news/611549/elizabeth-holmes-
| people...
| orionsbelt wrote:
| I don't have a strong enough view here to have an opinion,
| but I think someone as rich as her always had a publicist,
| so to play devils advocate, it may be true that the press
| only played ball with the publicist after she was
| convicted.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Elizabeth Holmes had some very big fish as investors she
| ended up defrauding, so it's possible the devil's best
| advocates were busy advocating she go to jail before her
| sentence.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Or maybe just the new publicist is better than the old
| publicist?
|
| Or maybe it's a simple change of strategy; the goal is
| now "rehabilitate image" rather than "prevent conviction"
| - and with the new strategy, a new team.
| scotty79 wrote:
| This reminds me so much of fashion and what young people find
| cool and not as the time passes.
|
| Enslaving our media to what triggers the cravings of the
| masses was probably one of the dumbest thing we did. And we
| owe it, like many other terrible things, to ad industry.
|
| It's a parasite of the economy and cancer of society. Serves
| no useful purpose beyond what an open access database of all
| products and services could cheaply fulfill.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| French media are owned by his literal relatives, one
| (Bouygues, owner of the largest French /media? With TF1 etc.)
| being the witness of one of his wedding and godfather of his
| son Louis. The other son is married to the heir of
| Darty/FNAC. I don't remember where Dassault (major newspaper
| owner) fits but they were both close as well.
| adolph wrote:
| _Dassault (major newspaper owner)_
|
| Is that like Lockheed Martin owning a major newspaper or GE
| owning a TV network?
| vkou wrote:
| Or SpaceX owning Twitter, or the president owning Truth
| Social?
| votepaunchy wrote:
| Or Amazon owning the Washington Post.
| nailer wrote:
| Or journalists everywhere shaping stories to their own
| biases.
| alessandru wrote:
| almost like ... journalistic integrity and ... maybe less
| monopoly ... are good things
| stefs wrote:
| that is not the same.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Amazon doesn't own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos does.
| I'm not sure if this makes the situation worse or better.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > GE owning a TV network
|
| Ever watched any NBC IP in the 2000s and early 2010s?
| kakwa_ wrote:
| It's actually kind of worse. Because you get a mix of
| Dassault (the company)'s agenda (defense spending, pro-
| industry) and a push for the fairly conservative views of
| the Marcel Bloch/Dassault descendants themselves.
|
| To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative
| newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100
| years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a
| more comfortable budget to push its views".
|
| The closest I can think of in the US context is Bezos
| owning the Washington Post to both push his personal
| views and Amazon's interests.
|
| Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of
| Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy
| for his son).
| DFHippie wrote:
| > Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of
| Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy
| for his son).
|
| If it were just a toy for his son these things wouldn't
| have happened - Stephen Colbert canned - Bari Weiss hired
| to head the news division - $32 million settlement for an
| easily winnable lawsuit
|
| I've probably missed some. Ellison is a huge Trump
| supporter and is clearly reshaping CBS to at least go
| easy on Trump, if not to make it yet another right wing
| propaganda outlet.
| yujzgzc wrote:
| Or Musk, who heads a few businesses that directly benefit
| from government contracts, including some in the defense
| sector, owning one of the largest online media platforms
| (fka Twitter).
| aj_hackman wrote:
| I don't think this is a deliberate ruse, but news
| organizations giving in to public pressure. I remember the
| NBC coverage of the conflict in Gaza in the days immediately
| following October 7, and how their narrative swung rapidly as
| public consensus against the IDF developed.
| nailer wrote:
| The public pressure against "the IDF" (but really against
| Jewish people) came from Qatari sponsorship of US higher
| education. If you dislike AIPAC you should dislike Qatar
| much more, for their budget is much higher.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Qatar gave a great deal of money to Tulane University -
| if you want to call an insititution with a 40% Jewish
| student body anti-Semitic I don't know what to say to
| you.
| aj_hackman wrote:
| I made a deliberate effort to neutralize my statement as
| much as possible. We could argue on this issue, but what
| we can't disagree on is the fact that there's an issue
| (which is all that's relevant to the point I was trying
| to make).
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Imprisoning political prisoners is a great kick off to a
| bright future (historically speaking).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What is your definition of a "political prisoner"?
| seszett wrote:
| 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.
| derektank wrote:
| 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.
| holoduke wrote:
| As a result the country entered dark ages with suffering
| unseen before. Of course Gaddafi was betrayed by the
| French. Just like France is betraying all of their former
| colonies.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Except that Libya never was a French colony I think.
| hollerith wrote:
| >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.
| nemo wrote:
| Failing to hold those in power accountable for their
| corruption has not been something that has produced
| positive outcomes, historically.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| It's a phase lead relationship.
|
| Much like a brushless motor controller, if you pull towards
| the direction the rotors already faces, it's uninteresting.
| But if you lead the momentum in a different direction...
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Thank you so much for this comment - you've put a name
| ("contrarian and counter-cyclical reporting") on a phenomenon
| that I've observed a lot and is one of the main reasons I
| don't consume the media anymore.
|
| The craziest example for me was NYC congestion pricing. When
| it was about to happen, all the reporting was about all of
| the downsides of the tolls starting. A week after the New
| York Governor "indefinitely paused" congestion pricing, the
| reporting was all about the downsides of the tolls not
| starting.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| So the media intentionally stirs controversy and they
| aren't even getting paid to do it by hostile states or the
| ultra-wealthy? There really is no hope is there.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| The media relies first and foremost on advertising
| revenue, which depends on ratings or viewership metrics,
| which become the goal. The more viewers you get, the more
| expensive advertising slots become: the point stops being
| to report the facts and starts being to engage the
| audience at an emotional level, so that they come back
| for more.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the newsroom did used to be slightly more insulated when
| advertising was limited by technology, but once the doors
| blew open with Craigslist and other online ads it became
| a craven race to the bottom for both attention and
| shrinking the newsroom
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _There really is no hope is there._
|
| No, there's not. The incentives are hopelessly
| misaligned.
|
| If the biggest, most profitable story is the destruction
| of civilization itself, then the news media -- which like
| so many other institutions in our society is owned by
| people too old or too wealthy to suffer the eventual
| consequences -- will cheer it on.
| Bratmon wrote:
| There is one group that funds the majority of the media
| and conditions that funding on nonstop controversy all
| the time: average people.
|
| The vast majority of people don't look at news media
| (much less pay for it) unless there's a massive
| controversy.
| rcxdude wrote:
| There is also a bias that the people who agree with the
| status quo tend not to be noisy about it, so as the status
| quo shifts you may well hear from different people to
| before.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| 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 respective owners of TF1 (main French TV
| channel), Le Parisien (major newspaper) and CNews/Europe1
| (major TV channel & radio) are personal friends of Sarkozy (a
| la "witness at your wedding, god father of your son or let's
| celebrate your election on my yacht" kind of way).
|
| The Figaro (main right-wing newspaper in France) and its
| owners, the Dassault family, are also not far away.
|
| Seeing the Figaro website was actually quite funny. Because
| the evidences are so damming, their main page was textbook
| "how to propagate fake news with plausible deniability". It
| was mainly pro-Sarkozy Editorials/Tribunes from non-
| journalists people, articles titled with quotes from
| Sarkozy's supporters and the few articles actually on the
| case were about the side stories.
|
| French press ownership map:
|
| https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/PPA#&gid=1&pid=1
|
| There are only two truly independent major media left in
| France: Mediaparte (the ones we have to thanks for Sarkozy's
| well deserved condemnations) and Le Canard Enchaine (a bunch
| of scandals, but lately, the "Affaire Fillion").
|
| The rest is either owned by billionaires, state run, or is
| far smaller and doesn't have the aura, size & credibility to
| reveal such scandals.
| neves wrote:
| What about Le Monde Diplomatique?
| keane wrote:
| In April 2024, Le Monde Group's majority stakeholder
| became a financial endowment, or fonds de dotation (FDD),
| named Fonds pour l'independance de la presse.
|
| En: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/about-
| us/article/2023/09/24/two-ma...
|
| Fr: https://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-
| medias/article/2023/09/24/d...
|
| This was the result of journalist demands, covered here:
| https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/le_monde_daniel_kreti
| nsk...
|
| This structure is also used by _Mediapart_ , owned by
| Fonds pour une presse libre, and _Liberation_ , owned by
| Fonds de dotation pour une presse independante, with
| _Mediapart_ being inspired to emulate _The Manchester
| Guardian_ (which has been operated by a trust since
| 1936): https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/le-
| monde-appartie...
| mbivert wrote:
| "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.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| I had the same experience as you with Le Monde
| diplomatique. The language used in some of the articles
| felt a lot like propaganda ( hyperbolic language, us vs
| them, anger/emotional language, basic facts being ignored
| etc ). I was very surprised since the paper had a good
| reputation , and gave up. Maybe ( hopefully) this has
| changed.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Groupe Le Monde (Xavier Niel, founder of Free and 42
| schools, wed to Bernard Arnault's daughter (French
| Bourgeoisie is a small world)).
|
| But Le Monde Diplomatique's redaction has been able to
| remain independent thanks to it's 49% shares and veto
| right.
|
| It's also fairly small (~10 permanent journalists +
| independent contributors, ~150k monthly readers).
|
| It's not really the kind of journal able to sustain a
| long investigation, it's more "social commentaries with a
| left-leaning/alter-mundialist point of view".
| baby wrote:
| There is some of that, but most often the contrarian news is
| commissioned and paid for, and if it succeeds then you get
| organic growth
| greatgib wrote:
| It's hard to imagine but they are not contrarian fueled
| articles. It's not the usual thing, here are only interviews
| of their closed one with their verbatim highlighted. Words of
| support from public figures. The day before going to jail he
| was received at the current president office (like the french
| Whitehouse) the day after, the "justice minister" went to see
| him in jail to give him his support.
|
| You have editorial like "Sarkozy stays honorable and
| magnificent despite an illegal non proof based sentence" "His
| wife so sad that this hero of the nation that did so much,
| proud father, beloved by his friends, will have to live this
| hard experience" All days long.
|
| A few examples just to give one newspaper:
| https://x.com/Le_Figaro/status/1980589938941874341
|
| Or "Sarkozy in jail, the fault of the justice!"
| https://x.com/Le_Figaro/status/1980567283157139926
|
| And we now all know well what book "he will bring" to show
| how honorable is this man: "The count of Monte Cristo", "life
| of Jesus Christ", ...
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| What's crazy to me is seeing this happen at an individual
| level. In 2022, my conservative family members were reluctantly
| but firmly on board with the idea that Trump did the crimes:
| lied to the tax man, stole the classified documents, leaned on
| the Georgia secretary of state to "find me 11780 votes," and on
| Jan 6 set up fake electors and asked Pence to overturn the
| election. In each case, they gave a good fight, but as those
| who are familiar with these cases know, the evidence is
| overwhelming, almost comically so at points (the fake elector
| certifications are so poorly put together that they are tough
| not to laugh at, the recording of trump bragging about the
| classified documents and establishing intent belongs in a law
| school documentary).
|
| By 2024 they were 100% in lock-step with the party line that
| all cases were fake news lawfare (but wouldn't engage with
| detailed argument, of course) and in 2025 they are gaslighting
| me about ever having had those arguments at all. The only thing
| keeping me sane is the correspondence that I kept proving that
| our conversations weren't a product of my own fevered
| imagination.
| adriand wrote:
| Man, that's a scary story. The Georgia thing especially is so
| easy to understand: just listen to the tape!
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| That, and Mike Pence went on Fox News and said:
|
| > President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice
| president presiding over the count of the Electoral College
| to essentially overturn the election by returning or
| literally rejecting votes.
| bnjms wrote:
| I'm going to go find these recordings now. But do you, or
| anyone else, have a preferred location for this type of
| data?
|
| For example reddit is consistently an echo chamber in the
| reverse direction. Another example is any clips selected by
| cable news are doubted by republicans for intentional
| malicious framing. Which is fair enough since I've seen
| plenty of intentionally obtuse takes of things said which
| are already unacceptable.
| le-mark wrote:
| > stole the classified documents
|
| A nitpick of mine is how Trump having the documents wasn't
| the case against him. The case against Trump was an
| obstruction case because he lied and concealed the documents
| from authorities, going so far as shuffling them between
| properties, having his lawyers give false statements, and
| defying subpoenas.
|
| This differentiates Trumps document case from everyone else's
| (ie Bidens); the right loves to use this as an example of DOJ
| weaponization when they couldn't be more different.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Yes! And when the FBI started closing in he asked his
| bodyguard to pull some of the documents and his IT guy to
| wipe the video evidence! The details are sooo much worse
| than the high level description can do justice.
| 9dev wrote:
| Isn't it curious how your comment collects downvotes, despite
| just stating facts.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Pretty much expected at this point. I'm much more worried
| about "Democrats are terrorists" and "terrorists don't have
| rights." Right now they're busy black-bagging immigrants,
| but I can see where this is headed.
| LexiMax wrote:
| The biggest trick HN ever pulled was convincing people that
| this place was somehow uniquely resistant to systemic vote
| gamification.
| glenstein wrote:
| >and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had
| those arguments at all
|
| This part is especially fascinating because I have heard of,
| and even had, remarkably similar experiences. The only real
| thing is the perpetual now. It's not even that they aren't
| curious or aware of what they said previously, they even
| emphatically deny their own words.
|
| I don't know if you remember when Ebola was a big news topic
| because there were two or three cases in the U.S., but I had
| a family member insisting it was "just the beginning" and was
| going to get worse. A year later he said there's "probably a
| lot of stuff happening that's not reported yet". Two years
| later he forgot he ever said it.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what
| they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own
| words.
|
| Tribal alignment. If the tribe had moved on from Trump and
| he had lost the election, your relatives would still be
| grounded in these conversations and reality.
|
| Trump is still the leader of their party and cultural
| movement, They have zero incentive to acknowledge the truth
| if it conflicts with these loyalties. If anything, such an
| action would be dangerous and risk their standing within
| their tribe, So the loyalty test then becomes denying
| what's clear and obvious to prove you are still a loyal
| member.
| walkabout wrote:
| I have relatives who've been concerned enough about the
| "[democratic candidate] will take your guns!" thing that
| they've _made and displayed_ signs about it. For multiple
| election cycles.
|
| That these same candidates, when elected, haven't even
| attempted such a thing, even when they have an aligned
| Congress, doesn't seem to register at all. They hear their
| lying talking heads say it again the next time, and believe
| it whole-heartedly. It's so weird. You'd think at some
| point they'd start to wonder why it never happened.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| They would do it if they had the political capital, and
| further they will tell you as much.
|
| Why would I not believe candidates who have spent their
| political life advocating the banning of the most popular
| rifle in America? When someone shows you what they are,
| believe them.
|
| If Democrats want people to stop reacting that way, they
| need to commit to leaving law-abiding gun owners alone,
| not say "well it'll be fine, believe us" yet continue to
| campaign for bans and pass idiotic restrictions that do
| little to control crime.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They have lost all ability to remember the past.
|
| Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and
| blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you
| have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it
| was his administration in control" and they have this
| insane double take look like they can't possibly remember
| that.
|
| Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a
| fluke.
|
| My father is a general contractor and viscerally
| experienced Trump's first term stupidity tripling his
| material costs. He still voted for him again, as "good for
| the economy", or "the democrats have gone too far". He
| blames democrats for the regional grocery chain hiring gay
| people as managers, which is funny, because they hire those
| people because they are the right kind of MBA types. He
| literally can't recognize the problem when it's in his very
| face.
|
| My father has never been outwardly sexist and always
| demonstrated respect for strong women and their ability to
| participate in normal society. He still was convinced by
| right wing media that he should be afraid of women in the
| cockpit.
|
| The soybean farmers were fucked by Trump's first term, and
| he gave them over $10 billion dollars. They all voted for
| him again, and it happened the exact same way.
|
| Like, at this point, how do you convince people who change
| their memory of reality to fit their ideology?
| glenstein wrote:
| I do think there would be some utility to isolating and
| elevating this particular issue. It seems to be pretty
| uniform as a phenomenon. Conspiracy theorists can't
| remember the past.
|
| I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question
| about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself
| response to challenges. I think fact checking is a
| perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in
| a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and
| utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy
| ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic
| response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like
| evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.
|
| One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons,
| another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of
| frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists
| and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the
| habit of factual investigation. But I also think there
| are such things as like experimenting with principled
| philosophical stances like relativism or disputing
| baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially
| fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are
| philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge
| and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards
| the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.
|
| So even though I actually personally believe in the
| importance and significance of isolating out and
| emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as
| conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think
| they have processes to metabolize and respond to those
| criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent
| they might try to articulate a principle in defense of
| not remembering the past. Because surely some will give
| it the college try.
| orionsbelt wrote:
| But his NY felony convictions were not about those cases but
| about paying off Stormy Daniels. That case I do think was
| lawfare; it was politically motivated and on similar facts
| would never have been brought against, as an example, Joe
| Biden.
|
| It's also a very dangerous precedent to bring criminal
| charges against the presumptive (and in hindsight, actual)
| winner of the at time forthcoming presidential election, even
| if some of the cases have merit. Regardless of the merit of
| the cases, it's impossible for that scenario to not be at
| least partly politically motivated and to have the effect of
| trying to disenfranchise half the country.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me, he also broke campaign finance
| laws with the pornstar payoff.
|
| No, if Joe Biden had the same facts against him the entire
| right wing -- including you -- would be eagerly prosecuting
| them and singing of the high-minded justice in doing so.
| Have you forgotten "lock her up!"?
|
| "President is above the law" is a far more dangerous
| precedent to set, and "nominees are above the law" is out-
| of-this-word nuts.
| orionsbelt wrote:
| Assumptions, assumptions...
|
| I am not right wing, have never voted for Trump or
| chanted "lock her up", and no, I believe in principles
| and not party loyalty and would have felt the same had it
| been Biden.
|
| I was also against Clinton's impeachment for the same
| reason. Stormy Daniels and Monica Lewinsky were both
| private sexual matters, and to try to use ancillary
| technical crimes (obstruction; campaign finance) to
| remove your political opponent is a bad precedent and
| it's bad when both parties do it.
|
| Your reply itself also proves my point. You say that the
| right wing would have prosecuted Biden on the same facts,
| not that the same left wing New York DA would have.
| Justice shouldn't be left wing and right wing.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| If impartial non-partisan justice were your concern, you
| would spend your time focusing on the most egregious
| violations (Aileen Canon, the Supreme Court, etc) rather
| than grabbing the conversation by the horns and
| aggressively steering it towards an alleyway where you
| hoped to force a draw.
|
| Your choices betray your priorities and they are not what
| you claim.
| underlipton wrote:
| I appreciate that you've been willing to do the work in this
| regard. A major part of the issue is people (lead, in part,
| by establishment Democrats) absolutely _desperate_ to avoid
| rocking the boat - really a euphemism for "kicking the can
| on the social dislocation that's inevitably coming, and all
| the harder for it".
|
| It's similar to the people who push against unionization for
| fear of being retaliated against, only to get capriciously
| laid off during the next cyclical downturn. Seek your justice
| now, as delay is a form of denial.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I would disagree on the "most mainstream media".
|
| Clearly, all the right-wing papers that have traditionnaly
| supported him (Le Figaro, Match) and all the hard-right-wing
| papers (owned by Bollore, Arnault, etc..) that have _personnal_
| ties to him are playing their "opinion" part.
|
| I don't think public media is defending him at all. Left or
| Center-left papers are not (obviously.)
|
| The tie breaker would be: "what is TF1 20h saying" (this is, no
| matter what new media says, still the one thing that most
| people watch and treat as "the news") - and I don't think they
| have been "blatantly" defending him.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| You forgot Bouygues (TF1) who was one of the witness at his
| wedding and godfather of one of his son.
| eastbound wrote:
| Yes, TF1 is our right-wing news channel (non-populist),
| France 2 is our left-wing channel. So TF1 would widely
| support him.
| jmkni wrote:
| Isn't that the case in pretty much every Country to a certain
| extent though?
| morkalork wrote:
| Certainly in the anglosphere
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I think that, at least from my American perspective, there are
| two uncomfortable truths about national political figures:
|
| 1. They are the voice of a group of millions of people, and
| therefore a perception will exist that an attack on the
| politician is an attack on those people as well 2. Sure seems
| like a lot of them are compromised in some way, so any time one
| is targeted it will always seem selective in the moment
|
| I don't know how much that intersects with what you're
| observing, and I don't really have easy answers.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Parasocial relationships via social media strikes again! You
| no longer need to start a cult, just get big enough on social
| media and have an army of "followers" (both in the literal
| and proverbial sense) that you can control and weaponize.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| This is exactly the same in the US. Perhaps all countries at
| this point.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Probably russian money is involved in this campaign of discord.
| handelaar wrote:
| (Fellow readers: this is not kneejerk Russia-bashing but a
| reference to the recorded fact that Sarkozy has received at
| least hundreds of thousands of euro from Russian government-
| linked entities, apparently in exchange for favours.)
|
| For example: https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/internationa
| l/110123/nic...
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/france-
| investi...
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| That doesn't mean their intelligence services aren't also
| stoking various fires, some calling for more inquiries.
| Discord is to their benefit.
|
| A politician who is no longer able to exert influence going
| to prison isn't a big loss to them, in fact it's arguably a
| good outcome. They get to have had favors while Sarkozy was
| in office and an angry France now that's he's out.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > is that you can see really clearly how most mainstream media
| are used for propaganda.
|
| Was there ever a time or place where this was not true?
| glenstein wrote:
| To greater or lesser degrees, and in different ways. Which is
| important because otherwise you can end up "agreeing" to the
| reality of the phenomenon even if you have an entirely
| different thing in mind. I might be thinking of, say, Hungary
| or Poland weaponizing the press and using it to destroy their
| own democratic institutions. Someone else might think it
| means saying global warming is real.
|
| In Hungary and Poland, they are specific, time-bound events
| with important institutional implications and unique factual
| circumstances. "It's always been that way" is risky because
| it can be used to airbrush away specific moral urgency with
| vagueness and false equivalences, and even functions to
| apologize for active advancements of authoritarianism as they
| are happening in real time.
| epolanski wrote:
| I think propaganda is only obvious when it involves topics you
| follow or now intimately.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is untrue. What makes it seem true is that there are
| extremely bad or nonsensical arguments that some people will
| accept (often without examination) when they support their
| own predetermined (often by lifestyle) side, but they will be
| far more critical of _any_ argument that supports the other
| side. They spot the bad arguments on the other side and call
| them out, but _ignore_ the good ones because they cause
| stress.
|
| The best way to notice this in yourself (I think) is if there
| are arguments for the other side of an issue that you simply
| avoid discussion of altogether. When they are brought up, you
| attack the source, personally attack the person repeating
| them, or refuse the discussion on some other terms. This is
| reflexively _doing_ propaganda, on a small scale, but as a
| reaction to being cornered.
|
| If you find yourself in this situation, resorting to
| repeating slogans you've heard rather than treating the
| argument exactly as you would treat an argument in an
| uncontroversial context, it's better to shut up, listen, and
| reflect.
|
| The only moral position is to be a collection of any valid
| argument you can find, always trying to clarify their degree
| of soundness. Whenever you deviate from that, you're defying
| reason, and weakening civil society (which relies on secular
| protocols.)
|
| If you consume propaganda with that mindset, you notice
| because it has very little useful content at all. It's
| astounding how long media can go on about a subject without
| saying _anything,_ or making _any_ coherent claim, and scary
| when you see people who seem to get something out of that
| avalanche and they can 't quite explain how they got there.
| It's how Saddam did 9/11.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't get the whole point of your post.
|
| What I meant is that general media (either social or
| legacy) has often strong biases and narratives and at
| certain times it gets too much to the point of propaganda.
|
| But, if you're not very intimate in some topic, or have not
| been part of the events it's not that obvious.
|
| Few examples.
|
| 1. Almost a million people protested the war in Gaza few
| weeks ago here in Italy, in many cities, but if you turned
| on the tv (any channel really) or read the news this was
| skipped and instead the entirety of the focus was on few
| limited clashes with the entire narrative being built about
| how if you protest for Gaza you're automatically violent
| and antisemitic. Nonsense.
|
| 1.5 At an anti-Covid protest in Piazza San Giovanni, a
| place that comfortably holds half a million people, the
| place was ultra full, as packed as during concerts...But
| ask the police and the official numbers were below 10k.
| Ridiculous, it was at least 15 times as much. I wasn't part
| of the protests but lived nearby so I had a full account.
|
| 2. Around 15 years ago our main airline (Alitalia) was in
| terrible shape and Air France-KLM wanted to buy it out, pay
| the debts and retain most of the workforce. Non stop
| bombarding on every outlet about how we could not sell our
| main company, and that taxpayers would foot the bill. The
| bombarding went on with plenty of interviews of how
| Alitalia staff was in favor of this operation, but I had
| several friends working for the company and actually the
| opposite was true: most of them supported the merger rather
| than the bailout, but the propaganda did its best to
| silence these voices.
|
| Again, how would you know about those things if you were
| not intimately knowledgeable about the topics?
|
| I really don't have time to get knowledgeable and fact
| check or be part of every world, national and local event.
| Thus I'm not equipped with distinguishing a genuine fact
| based narrative from a biased one.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| If you think that's scary, imagine a country where the corrupt
| ex-president doesn't even go to jail at all.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Imagine a country where every level of the judiciary and law
| enforcement is used to persecute a president, with cases so
| weak that they fall apart on their own, or are so obviously
| politicised it turns everyone against said systems, even if
| there is substance to the claims. But he still wins the
| popular vote, because he is so good and everyone else is so
| bad.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Imagine a felon, convicted by a jury, claiming "the case
| was so weak it fell apart on its own".
| nullc wrote:
| A felon convicted of essentially same 'crime' his
| opponent in the prior election committed but was given a
| settlement and a fine instead.
|
| Hilary Clinton funded the creation of the Steele
| dossier-- which was later shown to be generally false and
| unsupported-- but paid for it through one of her law
| firms and misclassified it as legal expenses in an effort
| to conceal its origins.
|
| Trump was criminally charged with falsification of
| business records because he paid Stormy Daniels hush
| money (to get her to deny her earlier claim that they had
| an affair) via his lawyer, and classified it as legal
| expenses. A visible hush money payment would have made it
| ineffective, just at the Steele dossier being known to be
| a campaigned paid hit piece would have made it
| ineffective.
|
| There are plenty of things to ding Trump on, but I think
| if you're trying to persuade someone that the legal
| system wasn't weaponized unfairly against him this is a
| particularly poor example.
|
| Even an argument that the facts make him worse here (e.g.
| maybe you say concealing an accusation of an affair says
| more about his integrity than paying for a false report
| says about hers)-- wouldn't change that this is just not
| a good example.
|
| Particularly because there was nothing unlawful about the
| hush money payment itself-- the crime was an obscure
| accounting violation resulting from it... and in any
| other circumstance nothing would happen at all or at
| most, as seen with Clinton, a nominal fine would result.
| Sure, it's true that random details (like what state the
| acts in) will often decide if an act is technically
| illegal or not, but that's hardly an argument for the
| fairness of the justice system or that it was fairly
| applied to him.
|
| I don't even hope to convince you of this-- but only to
| convince you that your example is unlikely to convince
| others, and is easily exploited to wrongfully convince
| people opposite your intentions.
| h1fra wrote:
| As always, france is always just 5-10 years behind US
| craziness.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| 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 your electorate for too long and eventually they will
| respond.
|
| The incredible successes of Trumps second term so far will
| encourage and empower populists everywhere.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > 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?
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not sure how much populists differ from
| authoritarians, but for the latter "consolidating power"
| is the definition of success, all else is unimportant.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Pray tell which two things do they want to see?
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| 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.
| baby wrote:
| I think we won't get there because we are willing to put
| corrupted politicians in prison. The day Trump goes to prison
| I will change my mind on US politics.
| lunias wrote:
| I don't think this problem is exclusive to France. I'm more
| interested in how the consumption and consideration of
| mainstream media is trending given its rampant bias. Clearly
| they think they can get away with it, I wonder if people are
| letting them.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| It's definitely not a problem exclusive to France:
| https://swprs.org/the-american-empire-and-its-media/
|
| Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for providing a link
| to a website and infographic shining light on the lack of
| independence in US media. That's HN for you.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I cannot believe anyone actually watches "main stream media"
| at all?
| almosthere wrote:
| Try being conservative in the United States. You have no idea.
| duxup wrote:
| And yet he's in jail right?
|
| Not sure how much an impact what you describe is having.
|
| I see non optional and IMO skewed reporting all the time, I'm
| not sure it is all directed by someone.
| lenkite wrote:
| Basically Libya would still have been an intact nation with
| college tuition and free health care if Gadaffi hadn't been so
| extraordinarily stupid to give money to Sarkozy - who later had
| him murdered and his nation destroyed via NATO to cover this
| fact up.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Basically this article would still be expanded if Gadaffi was
| not deposed:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during.
| ..
| lenkite wrote:
| Frankly, that record looks far cleaner than most US
| Presidents.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| That's a complete non-sequitur.
|
| Btw, I've seen chinese tankies and I've seen russian
| tankies. First time I see a gadaffian tankie.
| lenkite wrote:
| Maybe speak to some ex-Libyans then ? The security and
| economic stability compared to continuous civil war and
| chaos - which caused far more atrocities and deaths tends
| to change one's opinion on NATO sponsored regime change
| very fast. Millions of your so-called "gadaffi tankies"
| out there - just not much in the Western world.
|
| But keep thumping yourself on the chest. What do all the
| deaths and suffering matter ? The bad guy has been
| beheaded after all and the War stockholders got richer!
| Mission Accomplished!
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I was born and raised in one of the most authoritarian
| regimes in Europe. I know what totalitarian regimes do,
| and I experienced the crushing poverty that followed the
| demise of such a regime.
|
| The crimes of the Gaddafi regime are one thing, the
| ensuing chaos is another. We celebrate the end of a
| brutal regime and we despair at the death and destruction
| that followed.
| lenkite wrote:
| Did your nation encounter the same scale of calamity that
| Libya did ? I think not - it is easy to "celebrate" the
| end of a brutal regime when you don't have to pay the
| price.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Always has been, for those willing to pay for smart and
| unscrupulous people to manipulate the news. People must know
| this is what is happening but they are still seduced by the
| media. The brilliant _Chicago_ press conference musical number
| comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBM82Ju2kJU and
| the source material there was essentially the same techniques
| working to making murderers sympathetic, in _1924_.
|
| At least in France he'll serve a sentence- in the US we might
| have elected him again and let him make the charges go away.
| tekbruh9000 wrote:
| Something really scary is people believing what's printed or
| filed in court as fact without bearing witness.
|
| Faith based society is not just the domain of the religious.
| 1984 been the norm since well before Orwell wrote the book.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > But what you see in the end is that 90% of medias in France
| belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.
|
| The only way the current wave of right-wing media ends if by
| finding a new way to fund media & making it impossible to
| concentrate in the ends of a few rich folks.
|
| And good luck with that, folks don't want to pay for media.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| 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 it's a
| punching bag for everyone and politicians love to bully it
| into submission, because it is subject to some level of state
| control. It's funded by forcing everyone to pay for a TV
| license.
| malnourish wrote:
| 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.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Is that satire? Like i said they're a punching bag for
| everyone.
| Hilift wrote:
| > 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families
| that are friends with him.
|
| That isn't a problem if the electorate aren't easily
| influenced.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| What incentive does the French media (or any media for that
| matter) has to tell the truth?
|
| I do not want to be all about doom and gloom but I do not think
| that there is any media on this planet that delivers factual
| information without lying (either directly or by omission) to
| shape the opinion. And no, having a narrative is not lying as
| long as all the facts are presented, which allows the reader to
| make their own judgement whether they are buying into the
| narrative or not. Unfortunately, today journalists/editors
| believe that they have to report in a specific way as otherwise
| the "fight" would be lost.
| ctrlp wrote:
| This is hopelessly naive. Heads of state should not be
| prosecuted in democracies. It sets a bad precedent and there is
| no easy way to apply the rule of law to the head of state.
| There are too many examples in history of abusive lawfare
| practices. Better not to nitpick about "crimes" in such cases
| and let the man disappear from the stage. Aggressive
| prosecutions only increase the likelihood he'll try to mount a
| political comeback.
| stenl wrote:
| He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he
| is not head of state now.
| ctrlp wrote:
| 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 degrades confidence in the law for the
| rest of us. To preserve the law for the common stock, we
| can't use law against political figures without debasing
| the currency of law. It is also the case that trying to
| constrain political figures using the law is anti-
| democratic. If the will of the people can be overruled by
| the shrewd use of legal challenges then you have a
| juristocracy, not a democracy. The legal system can and
| will be abused when it is used politically.
|
| Not only is it a category error, it is undesireable. Let
| them fight it out in the special realm of politics and
| leave our legal systems alone so we can enjoy their
| benefits.
| cjfd wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| ctrlp wrote:
| There is no such thing as the "rule of law." It is a
| political myth useful as an organizing principle for
| regime change or as a legitimizing myth for an
| established political class seeking stability, but that
| doesn't make Law sovereign. Political Will (in the form
| of those who control institutions) rules and makes the
| laws. The laws are "parchment barriers" if there is no
| political will with the force to impose laws.
|
| It is 100% false that prosecuting current and former
| politicians _strengthens_ law when we 're talking above a
| certain low threshold of corruption. In those cases, it's
| up to the ruling class to police its own by using the
| legal code against low-level political figures and
| officials. The Chinese Communist Party operates this way
| more overtly but same principle. The incentive to do so
| is to strengthen the _legitimacy_ of that ruling class,
| not because the law says you must.
|
| According to the Law, you and I are committing "Three
| Felonies a Day". If the law were _en vigueur_ then you
| and I and everyone else would be prosecutable 1984-style.
| It 's at the whim of The Prosecutor to decide whether or
| not to pursue. Sound good to you? Me neither. The only
| thing stopping that is politics. When the political will
| is on the side of prosecution, then there will be
| prosecutions. We saw this with some heavy-handedness
| during the early days of the GWOT, 2020, Covid, hate
| speech legislation, many such cases.
|
| The point being, interpretation of laws is a point of
| political conflict, often very sharp-elbowed. Even in the
| cases where laws are unambiguously stated (rare), there's
| still interpretation of the evidence, which doesn't
| happen in a political vacuum. Who would disagree?
|
| You don't have to look far in history to see the abuse of
| the legal system in politics. Watergate is a prime
| example. Uninformed people think Nixon committed crimes
| and had to go. Anyone who spends just a little time
| looking at the details of that episode understands it as
| a political coup executed using lawfare. Whatever you
| think of Nixon's politics, the facts support that he was
| taken down by the anti-communist hawks in the defense
| establishment, largely in consequence of his opening up
| China. (The reasons were anti-USSR but given that China
| subsequently went from an agrarian backwater to a global
| competitor, one could debate whether they were right for
| the wrong reasons.)
|
| Impeachment as a check/balance was just recently burned
| in Congress as a political tool to remove a sitting
| president. Extremely shortsighted. Or perhaps it just
| exposed it as a paper tiger. I thought it was burned when
| it was used against Clinton but it was only singed. Now
| it's completely discredited and no one will take it
| seriously ever again. That's the effect of abusing the
| law for political purposes.
|
| What happened to the Roman Republic was overdetermined,
| but the Senate's threatened political prosecution of
| Caesar is historically understood to have been a
| motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon". If they
| hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic
| have survived a little longer? Perhaps.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| This is either clever satire or seems to be saying a
| politician should be able to shoot somebody on 5th avenue
| without legal consequence.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Well as long as he declares that it's an "official act"
| he is certainly able to do that perfectly legally.
|
| Given that the precedent is that the president can
| arbitrarily decide that the country is in a permanent
| state of national emergency and suspend the constitution
| indefinitely (which is literally what happened with the
| tariffs) that seems quite reasonable.
| ctrlp wrote:
| You are right without meaning to be. This is actually the
| correct interpretation. Who else decides if the country
| is in a state of emergency? That is politics.
|
| _Upon hearing these words, pqtyw was enlightened._
| ctrlp wrote:
| It depends on the politician. And not whether they
| _should_ but whether they _could_. That 's the critical
| distinction. One that gets lost when ignorantly
| amplifying misquotes. The actual quote from Trump was
| that he could do so and not lose votes. About that he was
| correct. QED.
| qwytw wrote:
| > To apply the law to political figures can never be done
| in a clean or unambiguous way
|
| Well yes. That's certainly the case when the system is
| deeply corrupt and only superficially democratic. They
| shouldn't be above the law nor their opponents should
| have the power to abuse it.
| pqtyw wrote:
| Well, at least Sarkozy tried keeping it under the rug. And
| did more or less disappear from the stage because of how
| extremely unpopular he was (making any type of "political
| comeback" somewhat unfeasible).
|
| Unlike someone else who is engaging in extreme corruption and
| is trampling the constitution of his country completely in
| the open and will likely never face any repercussions.
|
| Maybe... if someone did prosecute him this whole thing could
| have been avoided?
| ctrlp wrote:
| "Corruption" is a term for proles. It's better understood
| as a political word that loosely translates to "what my
| opponent does." If you think only one party's members are
| guilty of technical crimes, then we are on different
| planets.
|
| If you're talking about Orange Man Bad then he was, in
| fact, prosecuted, and it was a political own-goal by the
| Dems. Complete and total waste of time and resources for
| short-term political gains that never actually
| materialized. And it discredited the institution of
| impeachment forever. Well done.
| someNameIG wrote:
| The whole point of democracies is that the head of state, and
| other politicians, are just average people bound by the same
| laws as everyone else. They're public servants doing a job,
| that's it.
| karambahh wrote:
| Why would "elected" status grant you immunity?
|
| Say someone is legally elected president of France. They
| serve their 5 years term, doing their job. They get out of
| Elysee Palace, draw a gun and shoot a passer by. Do they get
| a free pass? Wouldn't that victim deserve justice?
|
| That person, not a divine being, a mere mortal like the rest
| of us, has been convicted of serious offences. He is now
| serving his sentence as any other person would (well, not
| exactly, for instance he gets a clean solo room and 24/7
| security detail).
|
| If your point is "an elected head of state should not be
| prosecuted by a standard court of justice" (a point I still
| disagree with btw), the french judicial system got that
| covered with "cour de justice de la republique".
|
| For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your
| elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice
| de la republique it is. Not a walk in the park, judges & a
| "jury" of members of the Parliament. Aggravating
| circumstances (committing an offense while in an official
| capacity) means theoritically harsher sentences.
|
| What he's been convicted for was as a private citizen.
| Standard judicial system. As should be, nothing naive about
| this.
|
| (Huge simplification of the french judicial system, the
| actual nature of his current legal status, etc as this case
| is utterly complex. Judge's ruling is over 400 pages long,
| and he's appealing, and he'll mostly spend a month in the lam
| and the rest under house arrest)
| wubrr wrote:
| The fact that he is even going to jail, or that there was a
| trial at all, is amazing. In Canada, top-level corruption like
| this just gets covered up by RCMP (who are directly top-down
| controlled by PM) - many cases of this.
| brailsafe wrote:
| One that I've noticed recently is that we had a housing
| "crisis" up until prices actually sort of started dropping,
| and now all the coverage is about the plight of condo
| developers. Thankfully we have the former mayor of the most
| expensive city in Canada as the housing minister, chosen over
| the MP for Beaches who actually seemed to give a damn.
| wubrr wrote:
| That's arguably negligence (though such blatant negligence
| is evidence of corruption), but there are corruption
| scandals involving straight up fraud and embezzlement of
| public funds by the top levels of government almost every
| year.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Techn
| o...
| karambahh wrote:
| He has half a dozen court dates set for other stuff related
| to corruption/money/....
|
| Assuming he's losing the appeal on this particular case, he
| will have been sentenced for scheming with a convicted
| murderer (Lockerbie amongst other things).
|
| If convicted, that person will be guilty of criminal actions
| together with a foreign dictator and his terrorist in chief.
|
| Not exactly stealing gums.
|
| The case is of particular seriousness and he's a convicted
| person, repeat offender.
|
| Would something as serious be put under the rug in other
| democracies? I'm not so sure. If Justin Trudeau is found
| accepting money from a bunch of Taliban involved in weapons
| trafficking, would the RCMP turn a blind eye?
|
| (Why do I say "if convicted"? He appealed, so he is innocent
| until proven guilty. Why is he in jail? In large parts
| because his political party lobbied for this type of
| sentences. Leopards did eat his face)
| baby wrote:
| In the last years I've noticed a huge number of pro sarkozy
| videos with epic soundtracks and diverse appearances from the
| guy. He is clearly a good speaker, but also clearly incompetent
| and mostly a good actor. I also noticed how much they invited
| his son to talk about important topics when the guy is just...
| The son of sarkozy
| holoduke wrote:
| Most of western media is extremely biased and not different
| than Chinese media. Good luck finding a job as a journalist
| with controversial ideas. Only the selected minds are offered
| positions. Of course we in the west still have a choice to read
| from different sources, but 95% of the people are stuck with
| propaganda news outlets.
| akkad33 wrote:
| > Something really scary in France right now is
|
| I mean he's going to jail. If anything that's better than most
| countries. In India, a chief minister who instigated racial
| riots never even had to go to court for it and he even became
| the current de facto autocrate
| VeejayRampay wrote:
| thanks for this post
|
| it should be repeated ad-nauseam that he is a crook, a shame
| for the country and its values and that the whole discourse
| about the injustice of the sentencing has heavy anti-liberal
| vibes
| tsoukase wrote:
| A former Prime Minister of a first world country in jail is
| insane. He must have made a crime without the help of others
| because in political scandals usually a whole gang of public
| people is liable. Then you have to convict the monkey with the
| bananas and the whole tree.
|
| If we follow the French justice, in my country (Greece) about 10%
| of people including almost all the politicians of the last
| decades should be in jail.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Well the crime was about using syria's then dictator muhammar
| kadafi's blood money for his first presidential campaign. So
| there is a very strong incentive to keep this as private as
| possible. And in effect he's not the only one to be trialed and
| judged.
| pif wrote:
| s/Syria/Libya/
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| which really makes me skeptical of the whole thing
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| And everyone can guess who was president when France was very
| eager to move against him. The UN mandate was just for
| securing the air space. But France and Britain successfully
| went in for the kill instead, making sure Sarkozy never had
| to pay back that money.
| Xixi wrote:
| Sarkozy was not the only one sentenced to jail in that trial:
| Claude Gueant and Brice Hortefeux were also convicted,
| receiving sentences of six years and two years, respectively.
|
| And then there are the many other trials involving Sarkozy and
| those around him...
| yujzgzc wrote:
| Some also "escaped" by death (Takieddine)
| umanwizard wrote:
| President, not Prime Minister.
| regularjack wrote:
| President
| rsynnott wrote:
| Chirac also got a jail sentence, though it was suspended on
| account of his age.
|
| In Ireland, we prefer to just tie them up in tribunals for the
| rest of their lives:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Haughey (PM til '92,
| under investigation from '97 to '06, at which point he died)
| etiennebausson wrote:
| That's what Sarkozy was going for, he had been slowing the
| procedure by any means necessary for 13 years.
|
| That's why he's so pissed he was send to prison during his
| appeal. He expected to slow that down too, and get to stay at
| home on account of his age should he lose his appeal.
| lugu wrote:
| His gang went way off track. The big picture is pretty wild and
| his involvement started in the 90s. This isn't your average
| politician stealing money.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Imagine, a land full of mother sauces, divine cuisine and
| pastries, and a corrupt and sentenced felon actually facing
| (eventual) justice for the crimes they committed. This sounds
| like a magical land (all is relative).
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Even the food in prison should be good? Croissants, etc made by
| french chefs? There might be another french revolution if they
| import cooks from america, russia or north korea just for
| people in prison.
| VHRanger wrote:
| American food would be cruel & unusual punishment
| thelastgallon wrote:
| The Eighth Amendment (Amendment VIII) to the United States
| Constitution protects against imposing excessive bail,
| excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments. This
| amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the
| rest of the United States Bill of Rights.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eighth_Amendment
| _...
| stackedinserter wrote:
| France sucks for living tbh. I have a family there and while
| it's nice to visit, I would never live there. Salaries are low,
| there are no many jobs even in Paris, rent is high, taxes are
| high, everything is expensive and less comfortable than in US
| or Canada.
|
| I miss my suburban home after a week there, every time.
| thesumofall wrote:
| Worked in a 2nd-tier city in France for a while. And, yes,
| salaries are low in comparison but I found it a very livable
| place. The French just emphasize different things. Good
| quality restaurants are very affordable, I had 45 days of
| paid vacation, etc.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I just spent a few weeks in southern France. Lovely place,
| lovely food, lovely people...
|
| ...with one national flaw. All that lovely food is
| available strictly between the hours of 12 and 2 (for
| lunch) and 7 and 9 (for dinner). If you don't eat on the
| precise timetable as everyone else (say, jetlag) then you
| don't eat.
| brohee wrote:
| It's a small city thing. In Paris and Lyon at least, some
| establishments have very extended hours or are even 24/7.
| And you can get a kebab at ungodly hours in even small
| cities.
| juliendorra wrote:
| Wider range in bigger cities, I think it's quite common
| everywhere? Small town restaurants need pauses
| stickfigure wrote:
| Even in small towns in the US, it's fairly rare for
| restaurants to have such limited hours. It's more
| commonly seen with high end restaurants in cities.
|
| I certainly understand why, I'm not mad about it, just a
| disappointed. I really liked the food.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Did a van trip, I remember that too well.
| seydor wrote:
| Gone are the days of the guillotine ...
| le-mark wrote:
| She is thirsty my friends.
| ytNumbers wrote:
| There is no excuse for corruption. However, everyone in all
| countries should ask themselves whether or not most of the
| representatives in their congress/parliament would, if
| investigated, be found guilty of the same sort of corruption.
| Power corrupts.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Yes, and you should lock them all up.
| varjag wrote:
| Relatively few politicians get their campaigns funded by
| hostile states, although it increasingly becomes more common.
| And while corruption is multifaceted this is clearly one of the
| graver violations. Let's hope all of them end up prosecuted.
| People were shot for less.
| khamidou wrote:
| If you read up on this story, you'd find out it's not run off
| the mill corruption. Sarkozy actually conspired with a foreign
| state - in particular with someone who directed a terror attack
| that killed 50 french citizens (!) - to fund his campaign.
| agumonkey wrote:
| This among a list of shady things like unauthorized spying.
| The man is not on his first rodeo
| lugu wrote:
| Some are corrupted by power, other by the desire to get into
| power. He belongs to the second group.
| baby wrote:
| I hope Trump goes to Prison at some point
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Broadly speaking, it's a good sign of a healthy democracy that
| wealthy, powerful people can sometimes still go to prison.
| Demiurge wrote:
| This is slightly off-topic, but is it "jail" or "prison"? I see
| this switch all the time, and French does not make a difference.
| But, in English, and many other languages, jail is more specific
| than prison, and is usually for short term or pre-sentencing
| holding. If someone is sentenced, it's usually a different
| facility called "prison". Is BBC making a mistake, or are they
| actually saying Sarkozy will be held in in an actual jail?
| xen0 wrote:
| At least in British English usage, there is no distinction
| between Jail, Gaol, and Prison other than at least one of these
| is a dated word.
|
| I believe only the US has a strong distinction between Prison
| and Jail.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The relevant word here is "Prison", the French noun.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Sant%C3%A9_Prison
|
| The BBC article is using the two terms interchangably. Very few
| readers are concerned about the distinction you are making.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| this is how I remember it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq2ICyCSSpM
|
| for those who don't watch videos:
|
| you go to jail if a cop doesn't like you. you can only go to
| prison if you're poor.
| mandeepj wrote:
| South korea and Brazil have already punished their criminal ex-
| prime ministers and ex-presidents. And, now France. It's high
| time the suit is followed here in US as well. The next right step
| at this point is to throw the clown behind the bars!! Serve the
| Justice!!!
| petre wrote:
| Good. He took money from Gaddafi to finance his campaign and then
| aided killing him, throwing the country into a decade long civil
| war. How much more morally corrupt can one get?
|
| I hope LePen goes to jail as well although it would be harder for
| the prosecutors to follow the money and convict her.
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