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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Pierre Fabre (big pharma) associated with the Dassault family used to have a big share in Valmonde, the owner of Valeurs Actuelles, and Olivier Dassault was for a time the lead editorialist (lead op-ed writer). Valeurs Actuelles used to be very traditionally conservative (vaguely associated with a conservative rural party) in the 1970s, then moderate right-of-center.
Olivier Dassault turned it into one of the main supports of Nicolas Sarkozy starting 2005 or 2006 for his successful presidency campaign in 2007 until 2014.
After the Sarkozy and Hollande eras Valeurs Actuelles turned far-right. Eric Zemmour, a publicist-turned-politician, used to write for Valeurs Actuelles. It is financially in the hands of the French-Lebanese Safa family.
I used to read their monthly magazine "Le Spectacle du Monde" which was at the time much less political. It is now independent, headed by an elderly diplomat and collaborator to former president Jacques Chirac.
Ragrding Sarkozy, you also forgot his close relationships with the late Lagardère father (biggest French media mogul in the 1990s) and with André Bettencourt and his window (L'Oréal, richest person in France in the 2000s). Despite his being in jail, Sarkozy remains administrator of the Lagardère trust.
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).
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).
> 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.
> > GE owning a TV network
> Ever watched any NBC IP in the 2000s and early 2010s?
Sure, recalling 30Rock's continual references to it brought it to mind as a relatively politically neutral US equivalent. Granting the limits of my TV consumption, NBC's IP never evoked thoughts of purchasing a nuclear sub or jet engine.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I was attempting to invoke Hanlon's Razor to rationalize the narratives being disseminated by news media, because I am exhausted by conspiratorial thinking. I chose the phrasing that I did in an effort to be as charitable as possible to both sides. I will not be badgered into wasting my time on an embarrassing and fruitless political debate on this orange website or any other.
So far we’ve had a genocide where the population increases, a destroyed hospital that was still standing, people begging for food from a photographer in a staged environment with no food being handed out, disabled children that look thin being used to fake starvation - if you’re exhausted by the conspiracy theorists you don’t to be as charitable as possible to them. Call them out.
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.
It's not always to gain views, because you can often see that the relative directors/presidents of such media companies openly support certain types of people. The way I see it, especially lately in Germany, is really about elections and politics. Even a stupid article can lead to "i will vote for xyz" in no time.
I would agree with you if media didn't have a direction, but in many cases they do.
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.
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.
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.
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".
In April 2024, Le Monde Group’s majority stakeholder became a financial endowment, or fonds de dotation (FDD), named Fonds pour l'indépendance de la presse.
This structure is also used by Mediapart, owned by Fonds pour une presse libre, and Libération, owned by Fonds de dotation pour une presse indépendante, 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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> If Justin Trudeau is found accepting money from a bunch of Taliban involved in weapons trafficking, would the RCMP turn a blind eye?
RCMP turned a blind eye to multiple corruption scandals involving bribery, fraud, embezzlement of public funds, etc. under Trudeau and his government, and helped cover them up. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption within the RCMP - there is a long list of nefarious and straight up illegal shit they have done over the years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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
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.
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
(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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It would take a combination of accumulated goodwill, unity, a significant legislative majority to overcome the filibuster, and a perceived mandate from the people (particularly in certain swing states) to survive the blowback that would follow pushing gun control on the level of another AR-15 ban through — plus a lack of other competing legislative priorities (e.g. health care reform) that could suffer as a result of the gun control push.
This lack of overwhelming political firepower and clear focus on guns and guns alone is why they haven't acted, not any kind of goodwill or sudden appreciation for the Constitution. They haven't banned common firearms yet because they can't, not because they don't want to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clearly, all the right-wing papers that have traditionnaly supported him (Le Figaro, Match) and all the hard-right-wing papers (owned by Bolloré, 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.
The real question I have in my mind, observing this from Germany, is: How much dirt does Sarkozy have on these families that own the media/press?
Was this a regime similar to Putin's role in the FSB when he collected all the dirt on oligarchs until everyone was controllable?
The logical choice for a media agency would be to disassociate themselves from Sarkozy, not the other way round. There has to be something else at play here, and I'm assuming it's not financial control because Sarkozy's family should not have much influence left there, given that the Judicative rulings already are done.
> 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.
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.
The BBC World Service is an official mouthpiece of the Foreign Office; it was (at least until recently) funded separately for that purpose, like Voice of America.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole concept of "state of emergency" becomes meaningless if you are somehow in a permanent state of emergency. Or if there is no change in circumstances whatsoever and a new administration decides that the country is suddenly in a state of emergency for no particular reason.
Sure, its politics but it shouldn't be a hack for the president to do whatever he wants illegally. Obviously the courts should step in and stop this. Otherwise the constitution might as well be discarded and the congress disbanded.
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.
> 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.
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.
> no such thing as the "rule of law." It is a political myth useful as an organizing principle
Everything we’re discussing is made up. That’s what social constructs like law, politics and language are.
> 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
You’re inspired by Legalism. It rejects the rule of law. It stands in conflict to the institutions of a republic, specifically, of voting.
(Also, the Chinese would execute someone for doing what Sarkozy or Trump did. Eliciting foreign interference in a domestic political contest and challenging the outcome of one with open violence. Former Presidents have been treated roughly for worse.)
> the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon"
The Senate didn’t threaten Caesar with prosecution until after he crossed. Cato, personally, was threatening him.
> a political coup executed using lawfare
Impeachment and conviction is lawfare according to you?
> 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
It’s been “discredited” before. The teeth are in removal from office, not impeachment per se. (That’s just American civic ineptitude.)
To the extent that we’re abusing the law, you’re correct. I’ve seen serious brainstorming on how a D President can use Trump’s precedents to act swiftly ahead of Congress and the courts, for example, to accomplish policy goals that are popular but have been difficult to do precisely legally. If the President is above the law, he doesn’t need to worry about that constraint anymore.
> If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.
It did. Caesar didn’t end the Republic. That was his son, Octavius.
The point is when the Republic’s laws stopped applying to Caesar, it was effectively dead. There is no point calling for votes in that context.
We have a large number of authoritarian fascists in America. (There are also authoritarian leftists. They have not been politically empowered like the right has been.) The historic solutions to those were through law and then violence. If the law doesn’t apply, that leaves only violence. That’s civil war.
We’re not there yet. But we do need to make a concerted effort to ensure these folks are politically incapacitated while a basic civic education campaign can be completed, since basic concepts like “rule of law” isn’t taught outside the elites.
You’re citing history, ancient and modern, inaccurately to push an edgy narrative. I don’t know if you’re trolling or have been unwittingly trolled.
I'm not trolling, just disagreeing. I personally wouldn't argue that everything we're discussing is "made up." I'm arguing that "rule of law" is a particular legitimizing myth or political narrative used as a frame to block certain kinds of actions as being "out of bounds" but is not, in fact, sovereign, because a) "rule of law" has no autonomy or executive action without political will, and b) it is used primarily by constitutionalists or other so-called enlightenment rationalists as a kind of rear-naked choke or groin-strike to end debate. Unpacking the meaning of "law" quickly gives the lie to the whole charade. We are not "ruled" by law. That truly would be legalism (not something I'm inspired by, tbf). We're ruled by people who control the law and use it to achieve political ends. On a pedestrian scale, some of us are subject to the law and some of us are not. Not just political actors but also favored groups. I hope that's not controversial for you.
I don't want to digress into Ancient Roman history but it's specious to argue that Caeser was only threatened after he broke the law. That's just not a plausible reading of history. It's well-established that crossing the Rubicon was the culmination of political conflict with the Senate, not the inception. Octavian would not have been in a position to end the republic if not for his uncle.
Impeachment is lawfare, of course. It is almost by definition a political act of parties in Congress. What could be more lawfare than that? Use the courts to attack your political enemies. Removal from office in a western democracy is "mostly peaceful" but I agree that removal from office is the solution with teeth. The parent post is about prosecuting former heads of state. That's 3rd world shit. At least in the 3rd world you would do that to remove a rival. Here it just seems to be vindictive. At best a shot across the bow of Sarkozy's patrons. If that's the motivation it's at least understandable. My objection is when people are propagandized to the point of being traumatized by political fights that have zero impact on their lives.
I don't believe terms like "fascists" have any meaning in the current political discourse and immediately suspect people who use that term casually. If half the country is fascist then we've really lost the plot. Nor do I think narratives about civil war are creditable at this time. The sectarian ingredients are not present in this country. Bringing it up is an appeal to extremes to discredit the vast middle ground.
What is the curriculum of that "basic civic education" campaign you propose should be completed? Sounds ominous.
> 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.
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.
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.
> there is no easy way to apply the rule of law to the head of state
Then you don't have either rule of law or, very soon, a democracy. What is obeying the outcome of an election but a legal matter? What's to stop the head of state from simply wiring the contents of the Treasury to his personal bank account? Deciding he doesn't like the official residence and having it demolished to build a palace?
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?
"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.
I assume the whole concept of the rule of law is also meaningless to you? Blatantly abusing your office for personal gain entirely in the open while violating a bunch of laws in the process (that nobody is willing or capable of enforcing for that that matter..) is corruption. Silly demagoguery won't change that.
> If you think only one party's members are guilty of technical crimes
Never said or implied that. No clue what you mean by "technical crimes" either.
Say someone is legally elected president of France. They serve their 5 years term, doing their job.
They get out of Elysée 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 république".
For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice de la république 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 naïve 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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Sarkozy was not the only one sentenced to jail in that trial: Claude Guéant 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...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I moved from the USA to France and your statement surprised me. Looking around for some data, I'm seeing around 4,600 French nationals who obtained U.S. permanent resident status compared to 13,000 issued to U.S. citizens by France. So about 3x more US -> France and rising.
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.
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.
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".
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").
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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 ;)
His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still jail him now "provisionally" (exécution 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.
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.
My understanding with Le Pen is that she used funds that were earmarked for he EU parliament staff to pay the salary of someone on her regular staff. I find it hard to believe that similar errors weren’t made by people the French establishment simply like more than her. Calling her a morally corrupt criminal for that is pretty obviously political, and if its political, it should be decided by a vote (which she would win)
She didn't simply used EU money to pay her party staff, she was the head of a stealing EU money system while also saying that EU costs to much to France.
Not only is she a morally corrupt criminal but also a corrupter. It was not a mistake she made, she was not alone and all convicted members of her party were fully aware they were committing a massive fraud.
Saying that is was an error and the trial was political, is plain disinformation.
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.
It is not political play. This is FUD spread by his political supporters.
The "exécution 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.
> 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.
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.
> His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still jail him now "provisionally" (exécution 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.
Over 85% of people sentenced with 2 years or more await their appeal in jail, at least initially.
I personally agree with you that shouldn’t be the case, but given Sarkozy made his entire political career about being tough on crime and harsher mandatory sentencing, I’d be appalled if he received any sort of special treatment.
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.
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.
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
The short answer is you can't. But There is enough hints that he maybe implicated at least as much as his collaborators.
One for example, is a testimony of a "smuggler" that he deposited the dirty money 2 times to his collaborator and once directly to Sarkozy. Not enough, he could lie.
A write-up of a meeting preparing the coming of Sarkozy (in arabic) that suggests there is another important subject to the visit of Sarkozy in Lybia. In a way that coincides, we know that the discuss alone (Gaddafy, Sarkozy and Guéant without any diplomatic representative only translators).
Not enough, maybe it was another secret subject.
That may explains the famous trip of Gaddafy in Paris. (10 of December 2007, which was an unexpected move regarding his implication in multiple "plane terrorist attacks" (DC10 UTA ( UTA 772),Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie)) and the "greatness" of the trip which was in "great fanfare" very uncommon one. https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3984020
Maybe Sarkozy really trade welcoming trip for good contracts but nobody trusts that.
It can also explains the implication of Sarkozy in nato air strike on Lybia to help the rebels (that leads to Gaddafy death). Gaddafy may have ask for help to interfere the revolt, and Sarkozy couln't politicaly explains it so did the opposite. At that moment, Lybia official reported that he must get the money back and that he was financed by their money (one of the two who reported it is dead, the other one is in exile and it's more complicated because he first support Sarkozy to get extracted from Lybia as he was caught by the rebels). At that time, nobody trusted the Lybia representative as the regime was a terrorist state.
Sooo, you can't tell that he knows, but it does explains a lot.
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.
I read that the ruling mention that they couldn't prove the money was used for the campaign and that the conviction is all about the participation in the conspiration you mention.
To be honest, what I would want to know is if he sent us to war in Libya to hide his crimes. That would be the real evil to me.
Getting him to jail for asking someone for campaign money really gives a weird feeling in that sense.
> 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.
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
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 Elysée.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Magistrats is a broad term that also include Procureurs, Judges but also some Lawyers.
The also is key: "Juge d'instructions" absolutely are "Magistrats" - just like Procureurs, etc are. Some of those "Juge d'instructions" are part of this union who put a target on the back of some politicians. How can they claim with a straight face that they are not biased ?
Either they know it's bullshit and they are simply lying; or they really believe their claims and they are just delusional. I don't know which one I prefer.
Question: Since when a random Union is representative of the political opinions of an entire profession ?
Spoiler: They never are.
Specially in France.
Even CGT, the biggest union in the country is currently a perfect good example of that.
CGT is loud. They are often extreme in there political opinions, regularly promoting extreme left ideology, some group historically had even close ties with the communists.... And they represent statistically nobody.
They represent less than 10% of people in France because this is currently the percentage of the unionized worker in the country.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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 "Fête 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.
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.
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
> 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?
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?"
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Important exceptions in Europe: the politicization of justice in Poland and Hungary. For exactly the same reasons, the protection of the ruling party. It's a serious risk when "separation of powers" collapses. As it has in America.
German constitutional law is also politicized, but it has good reason to be against Nazim coming back.
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
>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?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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'État, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
His SHU cell has everything the rest of the cells have ; a TV for €14/month, a hot plate, a landline, a shower, a fridge, and on a fixed schedule access to the library and the gym
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you re-read my comment carefully, you will see that I already mentioned that possibility: "unless you are already in preventive detention due to flight risk or danger." However, if you are not in jail, as was the case with Sarkozy, you cannot be sent to prison in the U.S. after receiving a sentence from a lower court while the case is still open and pending in higher courts on appeal.
In France, however, there is a special law, although rarely used, that allows a sentence to be enforced even if the judgment is not yet final.
It's not a nickname. It's simply because the prison is located on Rue de la Santé (Health Street). Rue de la Santé was named that way because there was a hospital there from the 17th to the 19th century.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
He is in the equivalent of the VIP wing of the only prison in Paris Intramuros (within the city walls), the Prison de la Santé.
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.
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!!!
Reassuring that there are still democracies where presidents who commit crimes go to jail instead of being allowed to continue committing crimes and pardoning other people who commit crimes.
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?
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.
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.
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, Niccolò 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
This is one of the greatest news I have heard of in the last 20 years or so.
More of that, please.
Politicians responsible for starting a war, bombing a country, causing a lot of our current issues (e.g., with illegal migration flows) for purely personal interests and nothing more than that should be in jail. He will not, of course, spend more than 3-4 weeks there, but who cares. Better than noting.
Also, the French people deserve better than this joke of a president.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
All the cells in the solitary confinement wing of the prison where he's incarcerated (La Santé 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.
He is in the VIP wing of La Santé 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
In the grand scheme of things, I don't really have any delusions with regard to with war. I am vehemently opposed to it, yet simultaneously think it's inevitable and will probably stay with us forever. When two sides have fundamental and irreconcilable differences, a physical altercation is likely. On the level of nations, this is war. And in war an unfortunate reality is that innocents will die.
But what Israel is doing isn't war and the innocents they're killing aren't unfortunate 'collateral damage.' They're primarily and purposefully killing civilians that had absolutely nothing to do with what aggrieves Israel, exactly the same as Nazi Germany was killing Jews who had absolutely nothing to do with their grievances. And they're doing this only thanks to American weapons and technology.
After all is said and done, Israel will claim victory, yet Hamas will likely be dramatically larger than ever, at least if there are any Gazans left, simply because each person whose brother, father, or child was killed by Israel is now going to hold a life-long death grudge against Israel, in the same way that Jews still seek out what few remaining Nazis there are, when they aren't getting standing ovations in the Canadian parliament at least (more of those 'foundational human rights' being displayed). And this is because genocide has nothing to do with war - it's something uniquely abhorrent.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
Article 3 ECHR should prevent the prison authorities from putting any prisoner in a position where they know he's going to "get roughed up". You and I both want that right for ourselves, so surely we should also extend it to Sarzoky?
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it a great deal (I'm not just talking about the current thread, but a clear repeated pattern with your account), and we've already asked you not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
How is calling for equal and humane treatment of prisoners high and righteous? You are recommending targeted abuse for certain prisoners that goes beyond the sentence imposed by a court. Maybe a better way of stating it is that you are low and unjust.
OP's point is that French prisons are famously derelict. They are overcrowded, dirty, dangerous. Regular prisoners do not enjoy the luxury of a VIP cell.
Sarkozy played no small part in making this happen.
We should absolutely wish for all prisoners to be treated decently, and it is a terrible thing that the matter is only brought up when someone like Sarkozy has to ensure a portion of what regular prisoners endure.
And worst of all, his political followers are all lamenting about the conditions he is in while remaining hardliners for the rest of the prisoners. You are right that OP should not wish ill on Sarkozy, whose distress is real and painful to see. But OP's frustration is understandable to anyone who cares even a little for the welfare of regular prisoners in France.
No high horse here, I promise you. I'm not French and I didn't know much in detail about Sarkozy before this, but being convicted of taking political campaign donations from the architect of the Lockerbie bombing is more than enough to make me think he's not a good guy. If you tell me he did a lot of other bad stuff as well, I believe you.
I'm just pointing out that the golden rule requires us to offer human rights even to people who we might think are scum. Because that's the only way to secure those rights for ourselves.
I understand, I do believe in the golden rule. I would not wish physical punishment on the guy, I am merely wishing for him to experience the same terrible living conditions he helped create. Let a man savour justice, for however long is lasts. He'll probably get to go home in a few weeks with an electronic bracelet anyway, and then move in and out of his home freely, as no one enforces these rules on the powerful.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've broken the site guidelines very badly in this thread. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669994 are the kind of thing we ban an account for.
Genuine question, but the more I think about this the less I think I understand.
Of course I have read the rules, I've reviewed them since you asked me to and I'm familiar with them. And I like the rules a lot and I respect you a lot as the moderator. But I'm genuinely not sure which of the rules I've violated, especially to the extent that it's something you usually ban for. I can try to construct a case for some thing or other, but they all seem a bit tortuous to me and I'm guessing you have a clearer answer.
I tried pasting the thread word for word into a few LLMs after anonymizing the conversation and trying to faithfully reconstruct the deleted comments. My prompt was just the chat then "what do you think of this exchange?"
I got several takes, including
- one from Gemma saying I (person B in the anonymized chat) was the voice of reason and trying to calm down a heated situation.
- an independent run from Gemma saying I was right in my response to person A (the user talking about Sarkozy) but that maybe my response was "too measured" and suggested a "stronger condemnation...would be more appropriate".
- one from ChatGPT 5 saying "Person B – Principled and fact-focused. They maintain the moral high ground, challenge the call for cruelty directly, and back up their concern about rising political violence with data. This is the adult in the room—ethical, rational, and de-escalating."
So based on the raw chat input, these LLMs are interpreting my responses somewhat opposite to you -- as a sort of anti-flame style.
In my original comment I was addressing their claim that others shouldn't act like they have the moral high ground just because they're advocating a violation human rights. I'm pointing out that if you advocate for violating human rights then you're putting yourself below the globally understood minimal ethical commitments. You can't both advocate for human rights violations and also say that other's don't get to be morally superior. The user explicitly acknowledged that they don't believe in going high when others go low. So they've deliberately occupied the low ground and I pointed out that if they do that they can't also condemn everyone else for being above them. I meant it as a literal statement: they logically have to pick one or they other.
Similarly with my other comment. I didn't understand what Trump or Sarkozy quotes had to do with the discussion the other user and I were having about the rising trend of people advocating for political violence on social media. I expressed that I didn't see any relevant connection, I asked why they would be relevant. I spent some time considering what good faith motivations there would be. I confessed that I couldn't think of any and it seemed like the only reason to want that would be to derail the conversation from talking about the trend of political violence toward the question of whether the anger and thirst for political violence is justified. I've also seen this pretty often on HN, as I'm sure you have. Their response made it clear in my view that their goal was indeed to make a pitch for not feeling sorry for these people, giving them a taste of their own medicine etc.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you that I've violated any rules. And I don't think LLMs are the source of truth in any sort of moderation discussion. They were just the tool I had at hand today to get other points of view. But I did want to convey that as far as I'm aware I've been operating in good faith and that I've made an effort to understand what in this conversation is so problematic.
For example in a followup question I asked which participants would likely see moderation comments on HN and ChatGPT says of me "Safe. Civil tone, evidence-based, de-escalatory. Fits HN’s preference for reasoned, data-backed argument."
My comments are sometimes terse and blunt, but they're rarely snarky or sarcastic. Sometimes they're slightly tongue-in-cheek, but in a playful way not a sarcastic way. And at any rate the comments in this thread weren't tongue in cheek. I tried to stick say what I was thinking quite literally and assume good faith.
No, I am calling for Sarkozy to experience exactly what he helped create, nothing more, nothing less.
Sarkozy ran a right wing populist campaign promising "zero tolerance" and being "tough on crime". He helped, through the policies passed under his term, create a huge overcrowding issue within our jail system. It would be only fair for him to experience all of that for himself, after the many heinous crimes he's committed.
I have been opposed to these policies in forever, and advocate for the humane treatment of prisoners. Now that Sarkozy is finally facing some retribution for his crimes, we should all feel sorry for him and bend over backwards to make his life more comfortable. Fuck that. He should reap what he sowed. I don't believe in that "they go low, we go high" bullshit.
So you don't think that increasingly violent populist right wing rhetoric has any impact on the current surge of political violence, that is provably committed by mostly right wing individuals? I'm telling you to include these quotes because they're incredibly relevant. You remaining blind to this is in very bad taste.
Sarkozy is at the root of much prison violence, but we should feel sorry for him now that he's facing prison himself? I won't. I am merely wishing for him to get a taste of his own medicine, not to be subjected to senseless, uncalled for physical violence.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Pierre Fabre (big pharma) associated with the Dassault family used to have a big share in Valmonde, the owner of Valeurs Actuelles, and Olivier Dassault was for a time the lead editorialist (lead op-ed writer). Valeurs Actuelles used to be very traditionally conservative (vaguely associated with a conservative rural party) in the 1970s, then moderate right-of-center.
Olivier Dassault turned it into one of the main supports of Nicolas Sarkozy starting 2005 or 2006 for his successful presidency campaign in 2007 until 2014.
After the Sarkozy and Hollande eras Valeurs Actuelles turned far-right. Eric Zemmour, a publicist-turned-politician, used to write for Valeurs Actuelles. It is financially in the hands of the French-Lebanese Safa family.
I used to read their monthly magazine "Le Spectacle du Monde" which was at the time much less political. It is now independent, headed by an elderly diplomat and collaborator to former president Jacques Chirac.
Ragrding Sarkozy, you also forgot his close relationships with the late Lagardère father (biggest French media mogul in the 1990s) and with André Bettencourt and his window (L'Oréal, richest person in France in the 2000s). Despite his being in jail, Sarkozy remains administrator of the Lagardère trust.
Dassault (major newspaper owner)
Is that like Lockheed Martin owning a major newspaper or GE owning a TV network?
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).
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).
> 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.
$32 million settlement for a lawsuit *they had already won*. They were supposedly “settling” with Trump so that he wouldn't refile it.
It was a straight-up bribe.
> GE owning a TV network
Ever watched any NBC IP in the 2000s and early 2010s?
Or SpaceX owning Twitter, or the president owning Truth Social?
Or Amazon owning the Washington Post.
Amazon doesn't own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos does. I'm not sure if this makes the situation worse or better.
Or journalists everywhere shaping stories to their own biases.
almost like ... journalistic integrity and ... maybe less monopoly ... are good things
that is not the same.
Sure they are. They’re both just people using whatever power they have to shape the narrative.
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", ...
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.
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.
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).
Sure but the public pressure “against the IDF” was manufactured. That’s an important point and relevant to the current discussion.
It was manufactured by the IDF soldiers uploading videos of their war crimes to tiktok.
I was attempting to invoke Hanlon's Razor to rationalize the narratives being disseminated by news media, because I am exhausted by conspiratorial thinking. I chose the phrasing that I did in an effort to be as charitable as possible to both sides. I will not be badgered into wasting my time on an embarrassing and fruitless political debate on this orange website or any other.
So far we’ve had a genocide where the population increases, a destroyed hospital that was still standing, people begging for food from a photographer in a staged environment with no food being handed out, disabled children that look thin being used to fake starvation - if you’re exhausted by the conspiracy theorists you don’t to be as charitable as possible to them. Call them out.
No.
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.
Are you saying the donation wouldn’t have an effect?
They were not against the IDF as an institution.
It's not always to gain views, because you can often see that the relative directors/presidents of such media companies openly support certain types of people. The way I see it, especially lately in Germany, is really about elections and politics. Even a stupid article can lead to "i will vote for xyz" in no time.
I would agree with you if media didn't have a direction, but in many cases they do.
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.
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
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.
What about Le Monde Diplomatique?
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".
In April 2024, Le Monde Group’s majority stakeholder became a financial endowment, or fonds de dotation (FDD), named Fonds pour l'indépendance 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_kretinsk...
This structure is also used by Mediapart, owned by Fonds pour une presse libre, and Libération, owned by Fonds de dotation pour une presse indépendante, 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...
Le Monde Diplomatique is a far-left (but rather intellectual) newspaper, completely separate from Le Monde.
Le Monde Diplomatique is a subsidiary (51%) of Monde SA.
"Le Monde owns 51%; l’association Les Amis du Monde diplomatique and l’association Gunter Holzmann, comprising the paper’s staff, together own 49%)."
But this 2010 article supports your point generally, claiming that the editors of the newspaper cannot influence the monthly. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2010/07/HALIMI/19372
"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.
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.
So how is the French populus reacting to Sarkozy being jailed?
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...
Imprisoning political prisoners is a great kick off to a bright future (historically speaking).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Except that Libya never was a French colony I think.
Ottoman then Italian.
Failing to hold those in power accountable for their corruption has not been something that has produced positive outcomes, historically.
What is your definition of a "political prisoner"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I cannot believe anyone actually watches “main stream media” at all?
>Does anyone watch mainstream media?
Many people over 60 (i.e. the people who vote) watch nothing but.
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.
I think propaganda is only obvious when it involves topics you follow or now intimately.
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.
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.
If you think that's scary, imagine a country where the corrupt ex-president doesn't even go to jail at all.
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.
Imagine a felon, convicted by a jury, claiming "the case was so weak it fell apart on its own".
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.
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.
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)
> If Justin Trudeau is found accepting money from a bunch of Taliban involved in weapons trafficking, would the RCMP turn a blind eye?
RCMP turned a blind eye to multiple corruption scandals involving bribery, fraud, embezzlement of public funds, etc. under Trudeau and his government, and helped cover them up. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption within the RCMP - there is a long list of nefarious and straight up illegal shit they have done over the years.
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.
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_Techno...
Exactly. Meanwhile 75% of French people agree that he should go to jail. This is nuts
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.
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
Isn't that the case in pretty much every Country to a certain extent though?
Certainly in the anglosphere
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.
This is exactly the same in the US. Perhaps all countries at this point.
As always, france is always just 5-10 years behind US craziness.
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.
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.
Pray tell which two things do they want to see?
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.
So remind me who was the chief prosecutor of the grooming gang and who’s the home minister now?
> 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?
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.
> 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
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
Well is his kid a good speaker or a bore?
> 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?
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.
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
Probably russian money is involved in this campaign of discord.
(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/international/110123/nic... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/france-investi...
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.
> 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.
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.
Man, that's a scary story. The Georgia thing especially is so easy to understand: just listen to the tape!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
No, you've won, you get to keep the guns and the school shootings and now the political shootings.
> political capital
Could you explain this a bit more?
It would take a combination of accumulated goodwill, unity, a significant legislative majority to overcome the filibuster, and a perceived mandate from the people (particularly in certain swing states) to survive the blowback that would follow pushing gun control on the level of another AR-15 ban through — plus a lack of other competing legislative priorities (e.g. health care reform) that could suffer as a result of the gun control push.
This lack of overwhelming political firepower and clear focus on guns and guns alone is why they haven't acted, not any kind of goodwill or sudden appreciation for the Constitution. They haven't banned common firearms yet because they can't, not because they don't want to.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't it curious how your comment collects downvotes, despite just stating facts.
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.
The biggest trick HN ever pulled was convincing people that this place was somehow uniquely resistant to systemic vote gamification.
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.
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.
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.
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 Bolloré, 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.
You forgot Bouygues (TF1) who was one of the witness at his wedding and godfather of one of his son.
Yes, TF1 is our right-wing news channel (non-populist), France 2 is our left-wing channel. So TF1 would widely support him.
The real question I have in my mind, observing this from Germany, is: How much dirt does Sarkozy have on these families that own the media/press?
Was this a regime similar to Putin's role in the FSB when he collected all the dirt on oligarchs until everyone was controllable?
The logical choice for a media agency would be to disassociate themselves from Sarkozy, not the other way round. There has to be something else at play here, and I'm assuming it's not financial control because Sarkozy's family should not have much influence left there, given that the Judicative rulings already are done.
> 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.
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.
The BBC World Service is an official mouthpiece of the Foreign Office; it was (at least until recently) funded separately for that purpose, like Voice of America.
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.
Is that satire? Like i said they're a punching bag for everyone.
[dead]
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.
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.
> 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?
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 :(
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.
You have to start from somewhere
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.
I think if you pay attention to French and German politics, it is hard to conclude that the EU is "ultra left-wing".
> 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 Libération, 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.
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.
He was not head of state when the crime was committed and he is not head of state now.
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.
This is either clever satire or seems to be saying a politician should be able to shoot somebody on 5th avenue without legal consequence.
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.
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.
The whole concept of "state of emergency" becomes meaningless if you are somehow in a permanent state of emergency. Or if there is no change in circumstances whatsoever and a new administration decides that the country is suddenly in a state of emergency for no particular reason.
Sure, its politics but it shouldn't be a hack for the president to do whatever he wants illegally. Obviously the courts should step in and stop this. Otherwise the constitution might as well be discarded and the congress disbanded.
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.
> 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.
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.
> no such thing as the "rule of law." It is a political myth useful as an organizing principle
Everything we’re discussing is made up. That’s what social constructs like law, politics and language are.
> 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
You’re inspired by Legalism. It rejects the rule of law. It stands in conflict to the institutions of a republic, specifically, of voting.
(Also, the Chinese would execute someone for doing what Sarkozy or Trump did. Eliciting foreign interference in a domestic political contest and challenging the outcome of one with open violence. Former Presidents have been treated roughly for worse.)
> the Senate's threatened political prosecution of Caesar is historically understood to have been a motivating factor in his "crossing the Rubicon"
The Senate didn’t threaten Caesar with prosecution until after he crossed. Cato, personally, was threatening him.
> a political coup executed using lawfare
Impeachment and conviction is lawfare according to you?
> 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
It’s been “discredited” before. The teeth are in removal from office, not impeachment per se. (That’s just American civic ineptitude.)
To the extent that we’re abusing the law, you’re correct. I’ve seen serious brainstorming on how a D President can use Trump’s precedents to act swiftly ahead of Congress and the courts, for example, to accomplish policy goals that are popular but have been difficult to do precisely legally. If the President is above the law, he doesn’t need to worry about that constraint anymore.
> If they hadn't threatened him with lawfare, would the Republic have survived a little longer? Perhaps.
It did. Caesar didn’t end the Republic. That was his son, Octavius.
The point is when the Republic’s laws stopped applying to Caesar, it was effectively dead. There is no point calling for votes in that context.
We have a large number of authoritarian fascists in America. (There are also authoritarian leftists. They have not been politically empowered like the right has been.) The historic solutions to those were through law and then violence. If the law doesn’t apply, that leaves only violence. That’s civil war.
We’re not there yet. But we do need to make a concerted effort to ensure these folks are politically incapacitated while a basic civic education campaign can be completed, since basic concepts like “rule of law” isn’t taught outside the elites.
You’re citing history, ancient and modern, inaccurately to push an edgy narrative. I don’t know if you’re trolling or have been unwittingly trolled.
I'm not trolling, just disagreeing. I personally wouldn't argue that everything we're discussing is "made up." I'm arguing that "rule of law" is a particular legitimizing myth or political narrative used as a frame to block certain kinds of actions as being "out of bounds" but is not, in fact, sovereign, because a) "rule of law" has no autonomy or executive action without political will, and b) it is used primarily by constitutionalists or other so-called enlightenment rationalists as a kind of rear-naked choke or groin-strike to end debate. Unpacking the meaning of "law" quickly gives the lie to the whole charade. We are not "ruled" by law. That truly would be legalism (not something I'm inspired by, tbf). We're ruled by people who control the law and use it to achieve political ends. On a pedestrian scale, some of us are subject to the law and some of us are not. Not just political actors but also favored groups. I hope that's not controversial for you.
I don't want to digress into Ancient Roman history but it's specious to argue that Caeser was only threatened after he broke the law. That's just not a plausible reading of history. It's well-established that crossing the Rubicon was the culmination of political conflict with the Senate, not the inception. Octavian would not have been in a position to end the republic if not for his uncle.
Impeachment is lawfare, of course. It is almost by definition a political act of parties in Congress. What could be more lawfare than that? Use the courts to attack your political enemies. Removal from office in a western democracy is "mostly peaceful" but I agree that removal from office is the solution with teeth. The parent post is about prosecuting former heads of state. That's 3rd world shit. At least in the 3rd world you would do that to remove a rival. Here it just seems to be vindictive. At best a shot across the bow of Sarkozy's patrons. If that's the motivation it's at least understandable. My objection is when people are propagandized to the point of being traumatized by political fights that have zero impact on their lives.
I don't believe terms like "fascists" have any meaning in the current political discourse and immediately suspect people who use that term casually. If half the country is fascist then we've really lost the plot. Nor do I think narratives about civil war are creditable at this time. The sectarian ingredients are not present in this country. Bringing it up is an appeal to extremes to discredit the vast middle ground.
What is the curriculum of that "basic civic education" campaign you propose should be completed? Sounds ominous.
> 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.
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.
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.
> there is no easy way to apply the rule of law to the head of state
Then you don't have either rule of law or, very soon, a democracy. What is obeying the outcome of an election but a legal matter? What's to stop the head of state from simply wiring the contents of the Treasury to his personal bank account? Deciding he doesn't like the official residence and having it demolished to build a palace?
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?
"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.
I assume the whole concept of the rule of law is also meaningless to you? Blatantly abusing your office for personal gain entirely in the open while violating a bunch of laws in the process (that nobody is willing or capable of enforcing for that that matter..) is corruption. Silly demagoguery won't change that.
> If you think only one party's members are guilty of technical crimes
Never said or implied that. No clue what you mean by "technical crimes" either.
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 Elysée 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 république".
For offenses committed while doing their jobs. Use your elected position as president to steal money? Cour de justice de la république 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 naïve 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)
> Using a prepaid line opened with a fake name...
Sorry, why is this such a big deal?
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.
Try being conservative in the United States. You have no idea.
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.
Basically this article would still be expanded if Gadaffi was not deposed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during...
Frankly, that record looks far cleaner than most US Presidents.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Sarkozy was not the only one sentenced to jail in that trial: Claude Guéant 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...
Some also "escaped" by death (Takieddine)
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)
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.
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.
s/Syria/Libya/
Oups I'm so sorry you're right.
which really makes me skeptical of the whole thing
I apologize for my mistake it is lybia in fact and not syria.
If you want to read about it in english, mediapart (one of the leading investigative journal on that case) has translated many of its articles : https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/dossier/sarkozy-gadd...
I believe there is a complete recap somewhere but sadly can't find it
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.
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.
President
President, not Prime Minister.
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).
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.
American food would be cruel & unusual punishment
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_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wider range in bigger cities, I think it’s quite common everywhere? Small town restaurants need pauses
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.
Did a van trip, I remember that too well.
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I moved from the USA to France and your statement surprised me. Looking around for some data, I'm seeing around 4,600 French nationals who obtained U.S. permanent resident status compared to 13,000 issued to U.S. citizens by France. So about 3x more US -> France and rising.
https://schengenvisainfo.com/news/number-of-americans-moving... https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/Articles/8c273940-72b7-4...
On a per-capita basis there are far more people who were born in France now living in the USA than vice versa.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/07/olympics-fren...
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3633212
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The fact that vastly more French people speak English than Americans speak French probably has a lot to do with it.
Because a significant percentage of people in every country crave authoritarianism and grift?
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...
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.
Great video about the lack of local rivalries in French football:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DadkD_06mM
Fyi: Austria had a "tough on crime" minister of the interior who ended up in a jail he ceremoniously inaugurated himself.
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 Schüssel government sure was great.
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".
Which one was that?
about six months instead of * check notes * 4 years
"We put all our politicians in jail as soon as they're elected."
"Why?"
"It saves time."
That seems to be Israel's approach for the last few decades. Well, they try, with some success even.
I really wouldn't want to get involved in anything that could be compared to what Israel do.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The book has a pretty good description of how to escape prison…
French prison, at that.
Might as well go heavy duty and get Papillon.
Sure hope it's got nothing to do with literature because even I can read more than two books in five years.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Interestingly in french we use "condamné" 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.
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.
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.
"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 ;)
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.
He should not be in jail now.
His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still jail him now "provisionally" (exécution 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.
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.
My understanding with Le Pen is that she used funds that were earmarked for he EU parliament staff to pay the salary of someone on her regular staff. I find it hard to believe that similar errors weren’t made by people the French establishment simply like more than her. Calling her a morally corrupt criminal for that is pretty obviously political, and if its political, it should be decided by a vote (which she would win)
> I find it hard to believe that similar errors
When you pay your father a cook and a bodyguard this way, this isn't really appropriate to call that “an error”.
> the French establishment simply like more than her
Bayrou (who was prime minister a month ago) is also charged with similar things.
And Le Pen is pretty liked by the French establishment actually …
She didn't simply used EU money to pay her party staff, she was the head of a stealing EU money system while also saying that EU costs to much to France. Not only is she a morally corrupt criminal but also a corrupter. It was not a mistake she made, she was not alone and all convicted members of her party were fully aware they were committing a massive fraud.
Saying that is was an error and the trial was political, is plain disinformation.
> 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
It is not political play. This is FUD spread by his political supporters.
The "exécution 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.
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.
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...
> 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.
I think speeding up trials and the judiciary in general would be a great benefit for many western democracies.
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.
I think we can clear the backlog real quick if we use LLM-As-A-Judge =)
> His case is going to appeal but the court decided to still jail him now "provisionally" (exécution 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.
[flagged]
Over 85% of people sentenced with 2 years or more await their appeal in jail, at least initially.
I personally agree with you that shouldn’t be the case, but given Sarkozy made his entire political career about being tough on crime and harsher mandatory sentencing, I’d be appalled if he received any sort of special treatment.
Thank you so much for that number. It's a relevant fact, and while many people posted their opinions, you alone mentioned that fact.
The court was motivated by the exceptional gravity of his crimes, as is allowed by French law
In the absence of any element pointing to the partiality of the judges, one cannot assume this was politically motivated
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?
In Russia some cases can be over surprisingly quickly ;)
So is this a criminal president receiving justice, or a politically motivated prosecution?
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...
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.
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.
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
How would one differentiate Sarkozy being in the know, and one of Sarkozy's inner circle doing it and keeping him in the dark?
That is a very good question.
The short answer is you can't. But There is enough hints that he maybe implicated at least as much as his collaborators.
One for example, is a testimony of a "smuggler" that he deposited the dirty money 2 times to his collaborator and once directly to Sarkozy. Not enough, he could lie.
A write-up of a meeting preparing the coming of Sarkozy (in arabic) that suggests there is another important subject to the visit of Sarkozy in Lybia. In a way that coincides, we know that the discuss alone (Gaddafy, Sarkozy and Guéant without any diplomatic representative only translators). Not enough, maybe it was another secret subject.
That may explains the famous trip of Gaddafy in Paris. (10 of December 2007, which was an unexpected move regarding his implication in multiple "plane terrorist attacks" (DC10 UTA ( UTA 772),Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie)) and the "greatness" of the trip which was in "great fanfare" very uncommon one. https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3984020 Maybe Sarkozy really trade welcoming trip for good contracts but nobody trusts that.
It can also explains the implication of Sarkozy in nato air strike on Lybia to help the rebels (that leads to Gaddafy death). Gaddafy may have ask for help to interfere the revolt, and Sarkozy couln't politicaly explains it so did the opposite. At that moment, Lybia official reported that he must get the money back and that he was financed by their money (one of the two who reported it is dead, the other one is in exile and it's more complicated because he first support Sarkozy to get extracted from Lybia as he was caught by the rebels). At that time, nobody trusted the Lybia representative as the regime was a terrorist state.
Sooo, you can't tell that he knows, but it does explains a lot.
If the justice system doesn’t know exactly why it’s putting Sarkozy in prison, he does...
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.
I read that the ruling mention that they couldn't prove the money was used for the campaign and that the conviction is all about the participation in the conspiration you mention.
To be honest, what I would want to know is if he sent us to war in Libya to hide his crimes. That would be the real evil to me.
Getting him to jail for asking someone for campaign money really gives a weird feeling in that sense.
> 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.
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
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
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 Elysée.
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.
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.
> politically motivated prosecution is very unlikely.
Judges are socialists
https://www.grasset.fr/livre/le-coup-detat-des-juges-9782246...
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
> 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.
> Magistrats is a broad term that also include Procureurs, Judges but also some Lawyers.
The also is key: "Juge d'instructions" absolutely are "Magistrats" - just like Procureurs, etc are. Some of those "Juge d'instructions" are part of this union who put a target on the back of some politicians. How can they claim with a straight face that they are not biased ?
Either they know it's bullshit and they are simply lying; or they really believe their claims and they are just delusional. I don't know which one I prefer.
Question: Since when a random Union is representative of the political opinions of an entire profession ?
Spoiler: They never are.
Specially in France.
Even CGT, the biggest union in the country is currently a perfect good example of that.
CGT is loud. They are often extreme in there political opinions, regularly promoting extreme left ideology, some group historically had even close ties with the communists.... And they represent statistically nobody.
They represent less than 10% of people in France because this is currently the percentage of the unionized worker in the country.
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?
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.
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).
The "Red judge myth"is, well, a myth. And Fillon's case was very clear and he had all the reason to be prosecuted.
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.
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 "Fête 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.
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.
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
I didn't talk about the communist party. But yes you are right, the PC is dead in France.
> 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?
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?"
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.
It is a politically motivated prosecution of an ex-criminal president.
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...
> 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.
Not jailing him before the appeal would not be preferential treatment for someone without risk of re-offense or flight.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is France, getting money from Obama would likely have been worse.
Wow, calling the Obama administration a regime seems like... a dog whistle?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This among a list of shady things like unauthorized spying. The man is not on his first rodeo
Yes, and you should lock them all up.
Some are corrupted by power, other by the desire to get into power. He belongs to the second group.
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.
I hope Trump goes to Prison at some point
oh I wish the American people were this brave
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.
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.
Mistakes and worse is going to be part of any system. Systematic partisanship is something else.
Also we don't make reality TV shows (disguised as "news") about it.
Important exceptions in Europe: the politicization of justice in Poland and Hungary. For exactly the same reasons, the protection of the ruling party. It's a serious risk when "separation of powers" collapses. As it has in America.
German constitutional law is also politicized, but it has good reason to be against Nazim coming back.
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
>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?
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
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
Sorry to trigger you so badly
I broadly concur.
The electorate does not care at all with rational thought but with emotional resonance. That is the nature of the beast and it cannot be changed
Obama and Clinton, tho deeply flawed, tapped into that and won
Trump tapped into that and won.
People care a lot, just not rationally
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...
> 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)
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.
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'État, 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.
and everyone's favorite example of killing a democracy/republic to avoid prosecution, Julius Cesar.
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.
The Americans would never be this accountable as you can't make a shitload of money and be accountable. You have to choose
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.
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.
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.
Half of them are, half of them are not.
more like third of them are, third of them are not and a third doesn't care
I can agree with that. I sometimes forget that quite a lot of voting-age people just don't vote.
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
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...
The "support" seems to be mainly "engineered" by billionaire-owned media
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.
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.
As an American, I envy you and your country. What millions of us wouldn’t give for the wheels of justice to catch up over here.
Broadly speaking, it's a good sign of a healthy democracy that wealthy, powerful people can sometimes still go to prison.
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.
Does he have better conditions than any other French persons convicted of a similar crime?
The cell is the same but he is alone in it, most convicts have a cellmate
Not the ones in solitary confinement like him I assume?
His SHU cell has everything the rest of the cells have ; a TV for €14/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-...
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.
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.
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.
> 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 “exécution provisoire”: https://www.justice.gouv.fr/sites/default/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.
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.
"Hoisted by his own petard" would be a more appropriate saying to invoke.
That is a quote from Hamlet, but it has a very odd literal meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard
What do you mean? You can get detained and held in jail without bail until sentencing if the court orders it.
If you re-read my comment carefully, you will see that I already mentioned that possibility: "unless you are already in preventive detention due to flight risk or danger." However, if you are not in jail, as was the case with Sarkozy, you cannot be sent to prison in the U.S. after receiving a sentence from a lower court while the case is still open and pending in higher courts on appeal.
In France, however, there is a special law, although rarely used, that allows a sentence to be enforced even if the judgment is not yet final.
I did catch that, I just found your statement contradictory - "it's not possible unless the court uses a mechanism that makes it possible".
Et la santé !
French joke.
He is jailed in a jail nicknamed "La Santé", which is also the the french cheers sentence. "À la votre *et la santé".
Will be the running gag of this christmas and new year.
It's not a nickname. It's simply because the prison is located on Rue de la Santé (Health Street). Rue de la Santé was named that way because there was a hospital there from the 17th to the 19th century.
I hesitated to call it a nickname, as the name is "Paris-La Santé".
But got covered by Wikipédia "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 "Métonymie de lieu" but I just didn't want to insist about that, it feels a little pedantic.
> it feels a little pedantic
Typical French conversation then!
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.
So he used money from Libya to get elected and then later he bombed them?
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.
> 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?
> 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.
In a country with a working judiciary, unlikely.
In a banana republic, the optics don't really matter in these kinds of situations.
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.
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.
Yeah, only a few contestants in the Olympics got sick after the triathlon! ;)
I think he was trying to chase the Libyans into France.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
He is in the equivalent of the VIP wing of the only prison in Paris Intramuros (within the city walls), the Prison de la Santé. 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.
> 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.
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!!!
Reassuring that there are still democracies where presidents who commit crimes go to jail instead of being allowed to continue committing crimes and pardoning other people who commit crimes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Quite a shame it took this long
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.
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.
Gone are the days of the guillotine ...
She is thirsty my friends.
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, Niccolò 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.
Would he have gone to jail if the money had come from Zionists? Because that's how campaign finance currently works in the US.
Interesting story but why is this on HN?
The French understand how to run a society.
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.
Although, as you note, it could always be better… it is still impressive that your system seems to be overcoming 2 and 3.
compared to most countries you are still doing great!
We are losing our democracy, same reasons as the USA. We are just fighting as much as we can.
Huh, this made me find this wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_state_and_gov...
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.
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
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.
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.
Politically deadlocked, failing economy, with the judiciary doing political dirty work?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Government shutdown...convicted rapist as President.. ;-)
This is one of the greatest news I have heard of in the last 20 years or so.
More of that, please.
Politicians responsible for starting a war, bombing a country, causing a lot of our current issues (e.g., with illegal migration flows) for purely personal interests and nothing more than that should be in jail. He will not, of course, spend more than 3-4 weeks there, but who cares. Better than noting.
Also, the French people deserve better than this joke of a president.
[flagged]
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
The point being made is that the death penalty does not serve a rehabilitation purpose for a pretty obvious reason.
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".
Very few first-world countries have death penalties?
Very few countries in general.
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_country#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
afaik only the USA and Japan
And not all of the US, just a bit over half (27 states).
Singapore and China
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_country
and thailand
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.
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)
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.
Future corruption is less likely if punishment is expected. Not that complicated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Law doesn't seek to punish
Then who is tasked with delivering justice to the victims?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Take responsibility is just a euphemism, though. For some people that is someone going behind bars. What do you actually mean?
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?
This sort of thinking always misses that part of the reason for punishment is deterrent of others.
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.
> 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.
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.
It has to be a deterrent rather than punishment, because crimes can't be undone; it's better to prevent them.
I don't know, if somebody kills my child, I don't know why you'd expect me to be helpful to him.
Even to prevent them continuing to kill someone else's child later?
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)
It would not be good for a deceased either, especially if they are wrongly convicted.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)"
If they show no remorse or actual will to better themselves, that's obviously not enough and the reason why we have prisons.
What you are referring to is vengeance, not justice. Some people see the two as inseparable and others do not.
Sure, then who is reponsible for vengeance if not law? And why vengeance is not part of justice, this is not clear here.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
All the cells in the solitary confinement wing of the prison where he's incarcerated (La Santé 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.
He is in the VIP wing of La Santé 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.
I can’t figure out whether you think a humane prison system is good or bad.
OP's comment suggests they think a tiered justice system is bad.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In the grand scheme of things, I don't really have any delusions with regard to with war. I am vehemently opposed to it, yet simultaneously think it's inevitable and will probably stay with us forever. When two sides have fundamental and irreconcilable differences, a physical altercation is likely. On the level of nations, this is war. And in war an unfortunate reality is that innocents will die.
But what Israel is doing isn't war and the innocents they're killing aren't unfortunate 'collateral damage.' They're primarily and purposefully killing civilians that had absolutely nothing to do with what aggrieves Israel, exactly the same as Nazi Germany was killing Jews who had absolutely nothing to do with their grievances. And they're doing this only thanks to American weapons and technology.
After all is said and done, Israel will claim victory, yet Hamas will likely be dramatically larger than ever, at least if there are any Gazans left, simply because each person whose brother, father, or child was killed by Israel is now going to hold a life-long death grudge against Israel, in the same way that Jews still seek out what few remaining Nazis there are, when they aren't getting standing ovations in the Canadian parliament at least (more of those 'foundational human rights' being displayed). And this is because genocide has nothing to do with war - it's something uniquely abhorrent.
In the Nordic countries, that's just a regular jail cell. Except the fridge I guess.
They're cold enough there
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.
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.
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!
Huh, it's not nearly as cold as I thought it would be in Tromsø.
We have good prisons in France, it's a good thing
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.
What do I have to do to go to a jail like that!
Here is a guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D04wb7P_v-4
Vote.
I wonder what frech jail food is like.
The wine pairings are particularly unimpressive.
They offered a rather indifferent Rausan-Segla.
I hear the choux pastry is often verging on the dry side of acceptable
Apparently he gets to buy food and cook himself, although no alcohol allowed of course. So the question is really: how's his cooking?
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.
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 ?
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?
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Probably very similar to food served at colleges in America, since it all comes from Sodexho
French stick arrives pre-hardened.
So many heavy sauces?
There's not many heavy sauces in french cuisine anymore, that's part of history now.
He's obviously a cuisine classique Escoffierite.
American fries
British food.
I mean, jail should be a punishment, right?
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.
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Article 3 ECHR should prevent the prison authorities from putting any prisoner in a position where they know he's going to "get roughed up". You and I both want that right for ourselves, so surely we should also extend it to Sarzoky?
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Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it a great deal (I'm not just talking about the current thread, but a clear repeated pattern with your account), and we've already asked you not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
How is calling for equal and humane treatment of prisoners high and righteous? You are recommending targeted abuse for certain prisoners that goes beyond the sentence imposed by a court. Maybe a better way of stating it is that you are low and unjust.
OP's point is that French prisons are famously derelict. They are overcrowded, dirty, dangerous. Regular prisoners do not enjoy the luxury of a VIP cell.
Sarkozy played no small part in making this happen.
We should absolutely wish for all prisoners to be treated decently, and it is a terrible thing that the matter is only brought up when someone like Sarkozy has to ensure a portion of what regular prisoners endure.
And worst of all, his political followers are all lamenting about the conditions he is in while remaining hardliners for the rest of the prisoners. You are right that OP should not wish ill on Sarkozy, whose distress is real and painful to see. But OP's frustration is understandable to anyone who cares even a little for the welfare of regular prisoners in France.
I think the OP is in fact calling for an equal treatment of prisoners. Sarkozy isn't getting the average prison treatment here.
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No high horse here, I promise you. I'm not French and I didn't know much in detail about Sarkozy before this, but being convicted of taking political campaign donations from the architect of the Lockerbie bombing is more than enough to make me think he's not a good guy. If you tell me he did a lot of other bad stuff as well, I believe you.
I'm just pointing out that the golden rule requires us to offer human rights even to people who we might think are scum. Because that's the only way to secure those rights for ourselves.
I understand, I do believe in the golden rule. I would not wish physical punishment on the guy, I am merely wishing for him to experience the same terrible living conditions he helped create. Let a man savour justice, for however long is lasts. He'll probably get to go home in a few weeks with an electronic bracelet anyway, and then move in and out of his home freely, as no one enforces these rules on the powerful.
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Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've broken the site guidelines very badly in this thread. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669994 are the kind of thing we ban an account for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Genuine question, but the more I think about this the less I think I understand.
Of course I have read the rules, I've reviewed them since you asked me to and I'm familiar with them. And I like the rules a lot and I respect you a lot as the moderator. But I'm genuinely not sure which of the rules I've violated, especially to the extent that it's something you usually ban for. I can try to construct a case for some thing or other, but they all seem a bit tortuous to me and I'm guessing you have a clearer answer.
I tried pasting the thread word for word into a few LLMs after anonymizing the conversation and trying to faithfully reconstruct the deleted comments. My prompt was just the chat then "what do you think of this exchange?"
I got several takes, including
- one from Gemma saying I (person B in the anonymized chat) was the voice of reason and trying to calm down a heated situation.
- an independent run from Gemma saying I was right in my response to person A (the user talking about Sarkozy) but that maybe my response was "too measured" and suggested a "stronger condemnation...would be more appropriate".
- one from ChatGPT 5 saying "Person B – Principled and fact-focused. They maintain the moral high ground, challenge the call for cruelty directly, and back up their concern about rising political violence with data. This is the adult in the room—ethical, rational, and de-escalating."
So based on the raw chat input, these LLMs are interpreting my responses somewhat opposite to you -- as a sort of anti-flame style.
In my original comment I was addressing their claim that others shouldn't act like they have the moral high ground just because they're advocating a violation human rights. I'm pointing out that if you advocate for violating human rights then you're putting yourself below the globally understood minimal ethical commitments. You can't both advocate for human rights violations and also say that other's don't get to be morally superior. The user explicitly acknowledged that they don't believe in going high when others go low. So they've deliberately occupied the low ground and I pointed out that if they do that they can't also condemn everyone else for being above them. I meant it as a literal statement: they logically have to pick one or they other.
Similarly with my other comment. I didn't understand what Trump or Sarkozy quotes had to do with the discussion the other user and I were having about the rising trend of people advocating for political violence on social media. I expressed that I didn't see any relevant connection, I asked why they would be relevant. I spent some time considering what good faith motivations there would be. I confessed that I couldn't think of any and it seemed like the only reason to want that would be to derail the conversation from talking about the trend of political violence toward the question of whether the anger and thirst for political violence is justified. I've also seen this pretty often on HN, as I'm sure you have. Their response made it clear in my view that their goal was indeed to make a pitch for not feeling sorry for these people, giving them a taste of their own medicine etc.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you that I've violated any rules. And I don't think LLMs are the source of truth in any sort of moderation discussion. They were just the tool I had at hand today to get other points of view. But I did want to convey that as far as I'm aware I've been operating in good faith and that I've made an effort to understand what in this conversation is so problematic.
For example in a followup question I asked which participants would likely see moderation comments on HN and ChatGPT says of me "Safe. Civil tone, evidence-based, de-escalatory. Fits HN’s preference for reasoned, data-backed argument."
My comments are sometimes terse and blunt, but they're rarely snarky or sarcastic. Sometimes they're slightly tongue-in-cheek, but in a playful way not a sarcastic way. And at any rate the comments in this thread weren't tongue in cheek. I tried to stick say what I was thinking quite literally and assume good faith.
In comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669994 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45668588, you clearly crossed into personal attack which is not allowed here.
Okay thanks for the extra info, I sincerely appreciate it. I was unaware you read them as personal attacks. I'll keep that in mind in the future.
No, I am calling for Sarkozy to experience exactly what he helped create, nothing more, nothing less.
Sarkozy ran a right wing populist campaign promising "zero tolerance" and being "tough on crime". He helped, through the policies passed under his term, create a huge overcrowding issue within our jail system. It would be only fair for him to experience all of that for himself, after the many heinous crimes he's committed.
I have been opposed to these policies in forever, and advocate for the humane treatment of prisoners. Now that Sarkozy is finally facing some retribution for his crimes, we should all feel sorry for him and bend over backwards to make his life more comfortable. Fuck that. He should reap what he sowed. I don't believe in that "they go low, we go high" bullshit.
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So you don't think that increasingly violent populist right wing rhetoric has any impact on the current surge of political violence, that is provably committed by mostly right wing individuals? I'm telling you to include these quotes because they're incredibly relevant. You remaining blind to this is in very bad taste.
Sarkozy is at the root of much prison violence, but we should feel sorry for him now that he's facing prison himself? I won't. I am merely wishing for him to get a taste of his own medicine, not to be subjected to senseless, uncalled for physical violence.
I'll link you aaplok's comment, somewhere else on this thread, that summarizes my viewpoint with much more verve than I: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667285
He is a former boss of french police. It is not possible to throw him in one of these overcrowded prisons.
And he could also take this opportunity to clean the cells using his much loved Karcher!
Now do Trump.