Un trop vert timide

Thank you, but the pessimist I am cannot reassure you on this point.

Currently France and most of its population are very far from that fierce image, and that’s not new.

Our so-called “leaders” follow objectives and methods similar to their U.S. counterparts, with an apparent lag / delay. Our ten years president is a neo liberal with also some traditionalist catholic views on social norms. The asymetry in apparent power is such that those politicians don’t have too much to fear from the general population. (For now at least.) They just have to get enough people to vote for them once in a while, and manipulative communcation campaign do the job real fine.

Demonstrations and strikes don’t often work: they are generally ignored, circumvented, or smeared, criminalized, and sometimes violently repressed. (With accusations of terrorism). We even have a very violent “police” unit seemingly fully dedicated to beat up demonstrators. (The “BRAV-M”.) More powers, more tools, more weaponery and legal protections are given to the police (or similar) forces.

The fatigue and discouragement from our worsening living conditions depowered the fights for general interest causes. (against domination and exploitation systems, for example)

But !.. the same worsening living conditions are becoming bad enough that people become more afraid of being passive than of the consequences of opposing the “elites” and their goons. I sure hope the balance will tip in favor of those who fight for a better life before the faschist-style authoritarism is fully installed.

2027’s elections will be quite a battleground, but honestly we’re in need of more than some “providential” elected president with a good program. The framework of our current institutions system is rotten, focused on presidential power, and must be discarded to a framework based on equality of rights, equality of opportunities, solidarity, freedom, respect, compassion.

TL;DR:

France is currently not as much a land of rights and successful social fights as some believe or claim it is. It is also not a land of freedom anymore. (See freedom of press rankings, for example.) It’s rapidly (d)evolving into a fully fledged capitalist owned, highly repressive, police state. There are reasons for despair, but also some reasons for hope. All is not lost, but the fight will be arduous.

The same strategy is used in France. Our social welfare, including retirement funding and medical care, is being dismantled this way.

Fortunately for us, the homeowners not only owned the homes but also the property each home sits on and there was no community property or services to deal with.

Dose “homeowner” in the USA refer to someone that eihtre don’t own the home or the land on which it sits ?

I don’t know if it is legal in France cause I have no skill in property right, but I never heard of this case. The closer I heard of if a shop “owner” (franchisee) that builds and open a franchise shop, but the franchise owning big company actually owns the land and the building. Never heard anything like it for homes, despite knowing the existence of systems like “viager”.

My point still stands though. HOAs are just a smaller form of private government which requires involvement, voting and understanding of the homeowners involved.

True, with limitations. As said by others, there can be conflicts between multiple duties for a homeowner. (e.g. HOA meeting VS work obligation.) So the HOA should also have some systems to adapt to external constraints, like a procuration system for votes.

Also if some members of the HOA commit abuses, the responsibility of thei abuses will mostly sit on them. The non commited homeowner share a part of responsibility because of their negligence, bu the biggest part of responsibility is always owned by the perpetrators themselves, never by the victims. This part should never be omitted when communicating about abuses, as its omission carry a strong risk of shifting the responsability to the victims of said abuses. (That’s probably why there are so strong reactions to your point.)

I’ll fininsh with a fun fact about French HOA :

• The HOA themselves are mostly infamous in very big complexes with many units, because of the difficulty to make so many interests align (that formulation is meant to include absentee/negligent owners.)
• The really infamous ones are the “syndic de copropriété”, commonly perceived as being greedy bad faith companies, abusing power despite merely being service providers for the HOA. (But from what I understand having one is mandatory, which plays a part in their disproportionate power.)

They require residents to be involved though. Anybody who lives in an HOA or similar and doesn’t participate (go to meetings, read their bylaws etc.) contributes to the organization being abused.

That’s actually wrong. Homeowners associations require homeowners to be involved, not residents. There is actually a very strong difference between the meanings of “homeowner” and “resident”.

In France a form of “HOA” exists for what some countries call condominium: co-owned lot of houses (FR: “lotissement”), or co-owned multi-appartments complexes. Only co-owners can participate to the full general assembly or be elected as a representative member in the “Conseil syndical” (aka. “CS”, the council of co-owners representatives) ? Whether these owners reside in the complex does not matter, and such owners can be “moral entities” (ex: companies). On the other hand, residing rentees are not invited to participate, even remotely, to any of these general or CS-restricted assemblies. Usually these HOA and their provider named “syndic de copropriété” manage the complex as a whole, as they managed any part of the complex that is not a part of a unit. (aka. “common parts”) The rentees are usually not even supposed to interact directly with the HOA.

Personal anecdote: residing as a rentee in an appartement inside a co-owned complex can lead to some interesting conflicts. For example, when the HOA doesn’t maintain common water pipes, and these pipes flood the rented appartment, whose owner is neither available nor reactive. I’ve experienced the rentee side in this situation. Not fun. And it wasn’t the clean water input. (And if you claim the owner wasn’t fit to be a decent landlord, I’ll actually agree. They weren’t a malevolent, bad-faith greddy scum of a landlord, but they were indeed an incompetent one.)

I use

1. sublime-text when not confined to a terminal
2. nano for example with git’s CLI
3. vi/vim when the others are not available.

We know that Trump is only the chaotic mouthpiece for a much larger and much more problematic power structure in the USA.

A power structure that has been quietly and increasingly fucking the rest of us for decades. Trump simply ripped the mask off and got loud about it.

Not just in the USA. All around the world, mainly among the self proclaimed “(representative) democraties”, which are many countries. (The openly authoritarian regimes are already authoritarian, but can still progress toward more intolerance.)

And yes Trump, while himself being the symptom of these systems current state, has acted as a catalyst for the march toward hateful authorianism.

If we’re talking about D.J. Trump, then I’m pretty sure we can expect at least some sighs of relief in many countries, but not from those in power. This guy is a nuisance for more than just the USA, because of the USA’s geopolitical dominant position, and also because of the international networking between supremacist leaders and similar.

Agreed.

There was a famous case in France several years ago, around the freshly dead heinous monster named Jean-Marie Le Pen. His “orator talents” were praised after his death, both by dominant media and dominant politicians, including supposed to be ennemies with him and his legacy. Those who still publicly stood against him and his legacy were told to rospect the dead and were vilified. But as some members of communities he targeted said: “I will respect him in death like he respected us while alive.”

The man was a white national-supremacist with ties to the OG nazis. Racist, imperialist, xenophobe, LGBT-phobe, redheaded-phobe(?), … He very probably participated with enthousiasm in torture and other mass crimes from the french side during Algeria’s independence war. (Also, colonialisation is a mass crime in itself.)

So yeah, fuck forced reverence. This guy was a hateful mass criminal, and his death didn’t change this fact.