The walking TED talk as president: Macron

[J Ed]

What is blind testing?

When you are tasting a wine but you don't know what it is before you taste it.

 

[mather]

When you are tasting a wine but you don't know what it is before you taste it.

What is the point in that? I would drink something if I didn't know what it was.

 

[J Ed]

What is the point in that? I would drink something if I didn't know what it was.

To demonstrate that you know about a wide range of expensive wines basically I think, it's conspicuous consumption.

It's also possibly 'junk science' Wine-tasting: it's junk science

 

[mather]

To demonstrate that you know about a wide range of expensive wines basically I think, it's conspicuous consumption.

It's also possibly 'junk science' Wine-tasting: it's junk science

Pretentious middle class posing in other words. Does Macron have any idea how much of a twat he comes across to people? I'm guessing not.

 

[redsquirrel]

All hail the saviour!

In his opening speech to parliament on Tuesday, Edouard Philippe side-stepped the notion of one-size-fits-all austerity, instead insisting that the plan of the new centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, was to reduce public spending while launching a €50bn (£44bn) investment programme and cutting a range of taxes, including slashing corporate taxes to boost businesses.

“Businesses must want to set up and develop on our territory rather than elsewhere,” he added, announcing that corporate tax would be cut from 33% to 25% in the next five years.

 

[J Ed]

From today's Graunid

 

[J Ed]

Self-appointed 'King' Macron is no antidote to Trump

It’s inescapable: the President of France is behaving very strangely. ‘Democracy is not enough by itself,’ he pronounced in a new book. ‘In French politics, this absence is the presence of a King, a king whom, fundamentally, I don’t think the French people wanted dead.’

That king will, of course, be himself. Philosopher Bertrand Russell once deployed a quick example of the plasticity of truth: if I believe that I am the King of France, I’m a madman – but if everyone else shares in my delusion, I will become the King of France. Emmanuel Macron is putting that to the test, seizing the crown and planting it on his own head, and waiting to see who bows.

Macron has decided that his will be a “Jupiterian” presidency – he will be “remote but dignified,” Coriolanian, not stooping to talk to the common rabble or listen to their stupid bleats. Jupiter, bloating and baleful out in the stark lostness of space, embodied in a thirty-nine year old banker. Macron, who has read Husserl and knows all about phenomenology, will not give the traditional Bastille Day interview, because his “complex thought process” would only be sullied by other people asking him questions.

This week, Macron dragged the two houses of the French Parliament out to the Palace of Versailles – gathering them for only the fourth time since 1848 - to sit them down behind guards in toy-cavalryman helmets and bleat a pompous speech that he hopes to turn into an annual tradition. Ninety minutes of trumped-up TED talk, interspersed with the grim dead orthodoxies of a moribund economic order: crush the unions, hack away workers’ rights, more power to the bosses. The main takeaway, the line repeated in all the newspapers, was his call to silence ‘the cynic that lies in all of us.’ Because there could never be any actual substantive disagreement; it’s only cynicism that’s preventing Macron from doing whatever he wants with the country.

But a lot of people in the mainstream media are behaving very strangely as well. As Britain withers in the rigor mortis of Theresa May’s zombie grip on power, and America drowns in the oily gush of sleaze pouring in sheets from Donald Trump’s oleaginous bolus of a face, Emmanuel Macron looks like the answer: proof that the sensible centre can still win elections, that power can still be wielded by smart, erudite men who don’t pander to a reactionary mob.

This is why the Financial Times published a breathtakingly obsequious hermeneutics of his official portrait (‘Two iPhones on the desk: I am the tech generation;’ ‘Tight hand grip on the table: I am firmly in control’); this is why the New York Times lapped up his regressive labour laws; this is why the Guardian pushes the idea that Corbyn – who actually increased voter turnout, while Macron dragged it down to unprecedented lows – should be taking lessons from across the Channel; this is why CNN compared him to James Bond. Now, as Antonio Gramsci never actually said, is the time of monsters, but Macron can fight them back.

It’s still tacitly forbidden to criticise Macron, even as he measures himself for his ermine cloak: if you don’t like Macron, you must prefer the mass social unreason of Trump and Brexit. Would you rather the National Front had won? No, of course not, but there are 67 million other people in France equally qualified for the job of not being Marine Le Pen; the 60% of Macron’s voters who chose him to stop the fascists taking power would have done so for anyone. But in the end it’s a false choice: Macron or the reactionary right rampaging across the world; the sickness or its symptoms.

Macron’s weird stabs at royalty aren’t a betrayal of his sensible managerial centrism; they’re the same thing. His politics are an antipolitics – during the election, he announced that he was ‘neither left nor right,’ ni droite ni gauche, which also happens to have been a slogan of the interwar French fascist party. He repackaged the blinkered dictums of a failing economic order as something new and insurrectionary, but at the same time invisible: no more politics, no more ideology, just solutions.

His En Marche! and its partners took 350 of the National Assembly’s 577 seats, up from a previous high of zero – MPs who aren’t part of any serious political project, but a collective formed entirely around his personality. (Now, just like any other CEO of any other flailing start-up, he’s promising to lay off one third of his underlings.)

Politicians have to govern according to their plans and their manifestoes; kings simply rule, because that’s ‘the way things are’. Nothing is more sensibly centrist than the restoration of absolute monarchy; centrism is the unthinking valorisation of how things are, the politics of no politics, rejecting the two ‘extremes’ of making things better or making them too much worse. It’s just another variety of the nihilism we’re facing in Britain and America. The strange, self-regarding boy-king of France is on the side of the monsters

 

[NoXion]

So a "Jupiterian" presidency under Macron will be one with no evidence of intelligent life and mostly filled with asphyxiating gas? Sounds about right!

 

[Casually Red]

It's official . He's a bigger wanker than Trump now .

Emmanuel Macron jostles his way to the front of G20 photo to stand by Donald Trump

Weirdo

 

[stavros]

He seems to be trying to fashion himself as a leader on mitigating climate change, distinguishing himself from Trump's position.

G20 leaders reaffirm free trade but break with US on climate change - France 24

 

[Idris2002]

He continues to have his admirers:

Spoiler

 

[DotCommunist]

there was disgustingly breathless run down of the G20 (including what grub the cunts ate) in the graun where it described the Macrons as 'France's new power couple'.

 

[JTG]

Just seen a thing on That Twitter saying he's made a speech describing Africa's problems as 'civilisational' and blaming women with '7 or 8 children'

Is this the case? Can't see much else about it atm

 

[JTG]

 

[Idris2002]

The cunt. The fucking cunt.

 

[Beermoth]

So glad he beat that fascist

 

[J Ed]

Neoliberalism rules

 

[seventh bullet]

His racism is too 'complex' for the likes of you and me.

 

[Idris2002]

I saw at least one mug on chitter defending this one.

 

[J Ed]

Well, yes...

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[Idris2002]

Now here's some revealing body language:



By their friends shall ye know them.

 

[camouflage]

So a "Jupiterian" presidency under Macron will be one with no evidence of intelligent life and mostly filled with asphyxiating gas? Sounds about right!

And also smelling of pee of course, due to all the amonia.

 

[camouflage]

I wonder who will be Ganymede...

 

[Idris2002]

 

[billy_bob]

Now here's some revealing body language:



By their friends shall ye know them.

There's a photo crying out for all sorts of things to be photoshopped into the space in front of them.

 

[Riklet]

He's neither left not right there ho ho ho

 

[DotCommunist]

Even in the face of Trump’s sexism, Macron is a genius in diplomacy | Mary Dejevsky

oh macron, we love you mmmm macron...

 

[agricola]

Yesterday's news:

Commemorating 75 years since a mass roundup of Jews during the darkest chapter of modern French history, Macron insisted that “it was indeed France that organised this.”

“Not a single German” was directly involved, he said, but French police collaborating with the Nazis.

 

[Idris2002]

Now he's fallen out with his military chief:

Spoiler: Text of FT story

France’s most senior military chief has resigned after a blistering spat with Emmanuel Macron, saying that proposed army budgets cuts meant he was no long able to “guarantee” the protection of France. In the first sign of the heavy opposition Mr Macron is likely to face as he seeks to cut €60bn of spending over the coming five years, General Pierre de Villiers suggested that €850m in planned military cuts this year was endangering the country. “In the current circumstances, I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defence force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country,” he said in a statement. Following the announcement of the government’s defence cutbacks, Gen de Villiers told a French parliamentary committee earlier this month: “I may be stupid, but I know when I’m being had”. Responding to the general’s remarks, Mr Macron told a French newspaper at the weekend: If something opposes the military chief of staff and the president, the military chief of staff goes. Mr Macron is facing a near €9bn hole in the country’s public finances over the next two years, forcing his centrist government to embark on deep spending cuts to meet an EU deficit target of 3 per cent of GDP this year. France’s budget deficit ended 2016 at a bigger than expected 3.4 per cent and will fall to just 3.2 per cent without an additional €4bn austerity effort this year, France’s state auditor has warned. After the war of words with the general, Mr Macron announced a €1.5bn rise in military spending in 2018 in an apparent attempt to ease tensions with the military. On Wednesday, Gen de Villiers said Mr Macron had accepted his resignation.

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[CNT36]

Now he's fallen out with his military chief:

Spoiler: Text of FT story

France’s most senior military chief has resigned after a blistering spat with Emmanuel Macron, saying that proposed army budgets cuts meant he was no long able to “guarantee” the protection of France. In the first sign of the heavy opposition Mr Macron is likely to face as he seeks to cut €60bn of spending over the coming five years, General Pierre de Villiers suggested that €850m in planned military cuts this year was endangering the country. “In the current circumstances, I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defence force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country,” he said in a statement. Following the announcement of the government’s defence cutbacks, Gen de Villiers told a French parliamentary committee earlier this month: “I may be stupid, but I know when I’m being had”. Responding to the general’s remarks, Mr Macron told a French newspaper at the weekend: If something opposes the military chief of staff and the president, the military chief of staff goes. Mr Macron is facing a near €9bn hole in the country’s public finances over the next two years, forcing his centrist government to embark on deep spending cuts to meet an EU deficit target of 3 per cent of GDP this year. France’s budget deficit ended 2016 at a bigger than expected 3.4 per cent and will fall to just 3.2 per cent without an additional €4bn austerity effort this year, France’s state auditor has warned. After the war of words with the general, Mr Macron announced a €1.5bn rise in military spending in 2018 in an apparent attempt to ease tensions with the military. On Wednesday, Gen de Villiers said Mr Macron had accepted his resignation.

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It's ok he has a new friend.

Mr Macron also condemned modern-day anti-Semitism and said this included anti-Israel sentiment.

Addressing Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, who attended the event, the French leader said: “We will never surrender to the messages of hate; we will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism.”