Invented to Counter America's Alleged Cultural Imperialism, the French Cultural Exception Is Outdated, Says New Book, and Ought to Be Junked

A concept invented in the 1980s to counter America's alleged cultural imperialism, the French cultural exception "remains the bedrock of our [of France's] cultural policy," writes Daniel Psenny in his Le Monde book review.

But in the Atawad (any time, any where, any device) era, declares Philippe Bailly in Pour en finir avec l'exception culturelle, the concept of the French cultural exception is outdated and ought to be junked once and for all.

Avec son livre en forme de coup de gueule Pour en finir avec l'exception culturelle, le journaliste Philippe Bailly, fondateur de NPA Conseil, société de conseil en audiovisuel, ne va pas se faire que des amis parmi les créateurs. Sur 200 pages bien argumentées, didactiques et remplies de références, il préconise tout simplement de passer de l'exception culturelle, datant des poussiéreuses années 1980 où cinq chaînes hertziennes rivalisaient entre elles, au "rayonnement culturel " plus adapté à notre époque numérique.

Face à la multiplication des écrans (télévision, tablette, smartphone...), à l'extension des réseaux sociaux et à l'irruption de la télévision connectée à Internet qui, dans quelques années, bouleversera entièrement le paysage audiovisuel, la réglementation française est aujourd'hui totalement inadaptée et obsolète.

"La société de l'écran remet radicalement en cause notre façon d'accéder aux programmes culturels et de divertissements", écrit Philippe Bailly. "La nouvelle donne se joue des réglementations nationales et rend l'action des régulateurs largement inopérante. Il est plus que temps de repenser les règles qui organisent en France la défense de la création."

Face à "l'impérialisme" culturel américain qui a déferlé sur le monde, l'exception culturelle française, mise en place au milieu des années 1980, reste le socle de notre politique culturelle. Avec cette "French Touch", il s'agissait avant tout, face aux Américains et aux directives de Bruxelles, de défendre la langue française et les industries culturelles, de protéger les créateurs, les auteurs et leurs droits. La bataille a été parfois rude et compliquée, mais les politiques — de droite comme de gauche — ont finalement admis que la culture n'est pas une marchandise comme les autres, mais un bien commun qu'il faut préserver des perversités économiques et financières.'

… Or, si l'exception culturelle fonctionnait bien au siècle dernier avec un numérique balbutiant, elle est aujourd'hui mise à mal par la liberté de choix donné au "specta-teur/consommateur" qui se joue des "lignes Maginot réglementaires". La réglementation française ne protège plus les créateurs constate Philippe Bailly, car "nous sommes entrés dans l'ère de l'Atawad : any time, any where, any device".

A Cultural Exception for an Exceptional Culture

This is how the young and vibrant Rock the Casbah:

A pensioner was killed by an urban joy-rider. Inhabitants of Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole are terrorized by the "friends" of a Murderer.

22/05/2009 - 12h00

SAINT-CYR L'ECOLE (NOVOpress) - Yvette, a retired 69 year old died from her injuries on Tuesday night at the Beaujon Hospital (Hauts-de-Seine). Tuesday afternoon, while walking down the sidewalk in Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole (Yvelines) this woman was struck by a motorcycle. Its’ driver, Youssof, was doing a wheelie on an unregistered motorcycle.

As part of the police investigation, several witnesses saw Youssof strike Yvette. Youssef was found to regularly do this type of urban rodeo. In 2006, he had struck and injured a child under the same circumstances. Youssof is also well known to the court for drug trafficking and for driving without a license. But a "support committee" was organized for Youssof ... "In the dense area of the city, the tension is rising a notch. Fear has gripped residents who dare not comment on the event for fear of reprisals," said Constant Julien in Le Parisien on 21 May.

Here’s that cultural exception that they’re always crowing about:

In this multicultural society, the French can die violently, but preferably in silence ...

Cultural Exception Within a Cultural Exception

Plan on aging disgracefully? Then you know where to go.



Via Hot AIr

The figures seem to call the overblown bleating about prejudice to shame. Weirder still is the desire to try to “normalize” the conclusions through selective reporting regardless.

No Life is Safe from the Collateral Damage in the Left’s Culture War

Fred Chichin (his real name, by the way), half of the pair known as the Rita Mitsouko died of cancer on 28 November. The ever-repugnant Marianne gives them “the treatment” in spite of a number of readers who are reasonable in their comments:

The Rita Mitsouko [Mysterious Rita] are no more, at least as it was known. They were loved and the duo, and long the most creative of French rock since their formation in 1979. An aggressive cancer overtook Frédéric Chichin, called Fred - guitarist, sometime dandy, and always excellent musician. His cancer had already been present for a few months and probably has not helped to alleviate the health problems of Catherine Ringer, the exuberant singer, and at first glance the more communicative of the pair. So, despite the welcome criticism of their latest effort “Variety”, Les Rita were not doing well. For some until recently in columns of Marianne, they were even very badly worn down politically. It seems, the "counterculture" no longer adored the two fifty-something formerly revered icons who became fair game in a progressive vulgate wrapped up in the a moment in the here-and-now.

Conversations (which in varying degrees met with the happiness of some) were deemed heretical by many others for two "rockers" eternally condemned to bear the burden of a shocked left. We therefore considered it tasteless to look askance at their concern with Nicolas Sarkozy or their friendship with the writer Maurice Dantec, the "sick man" of French Letters who is obsessed with the decline [of France] and assumes that there is an irreversible Islamization of Old Europe.
Les Rita admitted their lack of esteem for the French rap scene. That was enough, it seems, to disqualify the few judged worth in their artistic and moral judgment.
Supposedly out of fear, the polemic that harmed their recent tour had Fred and Catherine refusing to explain to the press their recent and highly controversial beliefs. The nearness of death is assurance that there was still time to use this way for those who convicted in advance.

As if they need to forced to explain anything. Dead only two days, and they have to work him over for no reason other than his personal views not jibing with Marianne’s politics, at it’s least vulgar it’s being done in a seemingly apologetic way. In other words – you can never be dead enough to draw the hateful accusatory tone of the most ideologically obsessed on the left.

Marianne editorialists should have enough of a clue to not say this. More stylized than “countercultural” to begin with, the beating they got for countercultural opinions is what put them out of favor with the vulgar bobos attempting to “manage” a cultural milieu to begin with.

You would think that the style of presence he greatly shared with musical partner Catherine Ringer vibrant presence to the media (her having done some porn in the 70s and 80s) would have given him that “cultural exception” that they dole out for their cultural compatriots, but it hasn’t. It just isn’t enough. Libération, on the other hand did not share their taste for Mao style re-education - the one so arrogant as to believe that it has to even imprint itself on the passing thoughts of the deceased when the normal modality in that media bubble is to display and induce as much fake public weeping as possible when any figure in “the culture” dies. Instead they give the guy an obituary send-off that so underhanded, that their fingertip should be bleeding.




François-Xavier Ajavon has more on some of Marianne’s “cultural” criticism of a man’s death which looks like yet another lame attempt to imprint a critic’s world view on anything it the criti’s path:

Nevertheless, Mme Marteau [tr. Ms. Hammer], Marianne, to investigate an authentic inquisitorial trial. We would like to meet with her in this beautiful little real bride ideal Bernardo Gui. We would like to hear him sing something on stage ... She repeats throughout the article that Rita Mitsouko have the "hatred" to spit (inevitable reference to their earlier, angrier years), They are racist, intolerant, aggressive, fake, crazy, dangerous, and so on. Part-time sociologist for hire that she is, Mme Marteau believes that the path people take is strictly with their political commitments. She believes that we are all determined by the environment in which we grew up and by parents who have done: "In the eyes of all, group emblematic of the Mitterrand years which could have only identified them on the left.”

So a reputation must be trashed, and a life is disposed of in for the sake of “the cause” – whatever it is today probably doesn’t matter. The ideological witch hunt must go on for the likes of these people who prove daily their inability to really live intellectually in a pluralistic society.

Shame on them.

La Fin for France's Film Rules?

What I found most interesting in Eric Pfanner's IHT article is how the EU, while striking down France's protection laws, said squarely and forthrightly that "the measure deprives French consumers of a wider choice of European cultural goods". That, of course, goes against the conventional wisdom here, the one that repeats the government's mantra, the one that claims that the government's protection is of the benign type, since it allegedly provides for endless diversity and boundless creativity. (Emphasis is mine.)

The European Commission has taken square aim at a pillar of the French "cultural exception," asking the government to change rules that ban television advertising of films and books.

Paris maintains that the ban aids the endangered newspaper industry by channeling ad sales its way and encourages media diversity by helping French films and books survive amid bigger-budget (that is, American) competition. The commission disagreed with that justification.

"By impeding operators in other member states from advertising and using a very efficient means of promotion to enter the French market, the measure deprives French consumers of a wider choice of European cultural goods," the commission said in a statement. The commission has been aggressively pushing ways to create a more unified market for goods and services across a newly enlarged European Union.

…Under pressure from the commission, France has already had to lift a ban on television advertising by retailers, which was intended to protect small shops against hypermarket operators like Carrefour. The French television ad bans are unusual, though Germany, like France, has long had restrictions on discounting of books, for instance, in an effort to protect small publishers and booksellers.

…Film is another matter [than the book market. The TBWA's Jean-Pierre Rousset] estimated that movie distributors might spend as much as E50 million, or $62 million, a year to promote their films in France. A sizable portion of this might be new spending from Hollywood studios or the larger French distributors, who have been forced to rely mostly on newspapers, billboards and radio until now.

"In the end, it's a lost fight," he said of efforts to keep the ban in place. "It's much better to find other ways to discover new talent." In addition to banning television ads for movies, France encourages local film production with the largest public subsidies of any European country. It has been relatively successful in its effort to foster the development of the domestic film industry.

In 2002, 35 percent of French box office sales stemmed from domestically produced films, the highest percentage in Europe …Thus, independent producers argue that ending the advertising ban would put them at a severe disadvantage.

…It is not all bad news, however. The government has also been weighing allowing French television channels to run more advertisements. Advertising time has been strictly limited, particularly on publicly financed channels like France 2. Because broadcasters are required to give a portion of their revenue to finance cinema and television production, increased ad sales could create a bigger pool of money.

The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures — with one exception

Something is obviously going terribly wrong here. The logic of relativism is taking Western academics into dark waters. They are now prepared to countenance practices that are obviously cruel, unnatural and life-denying, that is, practices that offend against all they claim to stand for.

…The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures, no matter how uncomfortable we might be with their beliefs and practices. However, there is one culture conspicuous by its absence from all this. The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.

Since the 1960s, academic historians on the left have worked to generate a widespread cynicism about the nature of Western democracies, with the aim of questioning their legitimacy and undermining their ability to command loyalty

writes Keith Windschuttle (thanks to Sock Pocket of Doom), who concludes that

The truth is that the riots, the arson, the death threats were not spontaneous outbursts from passionate religious believers but were carefully stage-managed by Muslim leaders. The imams of the Danish Muslim community consciously ignited the response some four months after the cartoons were published. They travelled to the Middle East where they generated support for a campaign quite deliberately targeted at Western culture's principle of freedom of expression.

Their real aim is not religious respect but cultural change in the West. They want to prevent criticism of its Muslim minority and accord that group special privilege not available to the faithful of other religions. Instead of them changing to integrate into our way of life, they want to force us to change to accept their way of life.

Muslim rage over the cartoons is not an isolated issue that would have been confined to Denmark and would have gone away if nobody had republished them. It is simply one more step in a campaign that has already included assassination, death threats and the curtailment of criticism. And our response, yet again, has been one more white flag in the surrender of Western cultural values that we have been making since Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie in 1989.

The Western concept of freedom of speech is not an absolute. The limits that should be imposed by good taste, social responsibility and respect for others will always be a matter for debate. But this is a debate that needs to be conducted within Western culture, not imposed on it from outside by threats of death and violence by those who want to put an end to all free debate.

The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it.

But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue.

Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist.

The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies.

The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures — with one exception

Something is obviously going terribly wrong here. The logic of relativism is taking Western academics into dark waters. They are now prepared to countenance practices that are obviously cruel, unnatural and life-denying, that is, practices that offend against all they claim to stand for.

…The moral rationale of cultural relativism is a plea for tolerance and respect of other cultures, no matter how uncomfortable we might be with their beliefs and practices. However, there is one culture conspicuous by its absence from all this. The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.

Since the 1960s, academic historians on the left have worked to generate a widespread cynicism about the nature of Western democracies, with the aim of questioning their legitimacy and undermining their ability to command loyalty

writes Keith Windschuttle (thanks to Sock Pocket of Doom), who concludes that

The truth is that the riots, the arson, the death threats were not spontaneous outbursts from passionate religious believers but were carefully stage-managed by Muslim leaders. The imams of the Danish Muslim community consciously ignited the response some four months after the cartoons were published. They travelled to the Middle East where they generated support for a campaign quite deliberately targeted at Western culture's principle of freedom of expression.

Their real aim is not religious respect but cultural change in the West. They want to prevent criticism of its Muslim minority and accord that group special privilege not available to the faithful of other religions. Instead of them changing to integrate into our way of life, they want to force us to change to accept their way of life.

Muslim rage over the cartoons is not an isolated issue that would have been confined to Denmark and would have gone away if nobody had republished them. It is simply one more step in a campaign that has already included assassination, death threats and the curtailment of criticism. And our response, yet again, has been one more white flag in the surrender of Western cultural values that we have been making since Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie in 1989.

The Western concept of freedom of speech is not an absolute. The limits that should be imposed by good taste, social responsibility and respect for others will always be a matter for debate. But this is a debate that needs to be conducted within Western culture, not imposed on it from outside by threats of death and violence by those who want to put an end to all free debate.

The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it.

But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue.

Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist.

The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies.

Get a Job, Ya Bum

So say Pejman Yousefzadeh discussed Sarko’s free market bait and switch:

At best, all Nicolas Sarkozy will do is to lull the French and Europeans into a state of complacency, making them believe that he and his policies can save them from the kind of free economic competition of which they are so deathly afraid. But eventually, a day of reckoning will have to come when France and Europe realize that either they must undertake radical reforms, or be left in the economic dust by Britain and America. Nicolas Sarkozy and people who share his views regularly present themselves as friends of Europe. But no enemy of the Continent, no matter how dedicated, could so effectively plan for Europe’s long term decline as well as Sarkozy and his allies are doing now.

Nonetheless that seems to be the exception for reality that the people of the cultural exception want. They’ll never be able to say that he didn’t listen to them.

- Tip ‘o the hat to alert reader Frank

After Dissing Depardieu's Self-Proclaimed Tax Figures, French Government Forced to Admit That 85% Tax Is Entirely Plausible

After stating that it was impossible for any one taxpayer to have to pay 85% of his income or fortune in taxes, as (the departing) Gérard Depardieu was claiming (i.e., suggesting that the movie star was lying), a government minister has had to admit that the members of the government were, or at least that he himself was, wrong and did not know the nation's tax figures.

Indeed, the Solidarity Tax on Fortunes has attained record heights in 2012 and, in the "right" circumstances, the sky-high rate is therefore entirely plausible. (L'Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune (ISF) is thus named, because of the effort of solidarity that, from the Left's viewpoint, "patriotic" rich people must make in order to help their brethren in poverty.)

La fiscalité française est affreusement complexe et changeante. Le ministre des relations avec le Parlement, Alain Vidalies, aurait été bien inspiré de s'en souvenir lorsqu'il a critiqué l'argument avancé par Gérard Depardieu pour expliquer sa décision de quitter la France. "Je pars après avoir payé, en 2012, 85 % d'impôts sur mes revenus", a écrit l'acteur dans sa lettre ouverte à Jean-Marc Ayrault. "Evidemment ce n'est pas possible", a répliqué, dimanche 16 décembre sur Radio J, M. Vidalies.

Lire aussi : Pour l'exécutif, l'affaire Depardieu reste un cas particulier

Le ministre s'est trompé. Il est tout à fait possible d'être imposé à 85 % sur ses revenus en 2012. Cette possibilité générale, qui ne dit rien du cas Depardieu, tient aux réformes successives de l'impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF) décidées par la droite puis par la gauche pour cette année. "Plusieurs centaines de personnes ont été imposées à plus de 85 % en 2012", estime même le président UMP de la commission des finances de l'Assemblée nationale, Gilles Carrez.

Meanwhile, the Socialist government is considering passing a 10% tax on… movie tickets! (It is currently 7%; on the plus side, other taxes have come, or will be coming, down.)

… Raising taxes on film tickets is doubly ironic, notes Clarisse Fabre, given that the French are always vaunting the cultural exception, indeed while defending in Brussels their subsidies to their nation's movie industry. (And many thanks to le Professeur Glenn Reynolds)

A Bruxelles, le gouvernement se bat pour défendre l'exception culturelle. Sur les bancs de l'Assemblée nationale, à Paris, c'est une autre histoire... Le projet de loi de finances rectificative 2012, que les députés ont examiné en nouvelle lecture, mardi 18 décembre, vient de le prouver. … les secteurs actuellement taxés à … 7 % vont grimper à 10 %. C'est ce qui est arrivé au cinéma — mais aussi au droit d'auteur, le vote suscitant l'indignation des sociétés de perception de droits (SACD, SCAM...).

Goddamn foreigners!	Putain d'étrangers!
Iegor Gran, author of the excellent novel 'NGO!' (now in Folio paperback), which blew away the sanctimonious sentiment surrounding non-governmental organisations, had the following to say in Libération dated 7 September 2003: France, cultural exception? Country of freedom? Balls! France, country of jealousy and fear, eaten away by an inferiority complex, little nation of little conformists! France, which waves its declaration of human rights like a magic charm, a Bové-esque monarchy, a cause for worrying with its good conscience wrapped in chauvinism! With regards to the 2003 literary season dripping with the blood of 9-11 victims he simply declared, 'You get the literature you deserve.' Who are these immigrants who, having lived in France for years, dare to make such commentary. I'm shocked. Shocked!	Iegor Gran, auteur de l'excellent livre 'ONG!' (qu vient de sortir en poche Folio), qui a balayé les sentiments bien-pensants véhiculés par les organisations non-gouvernementales, a tenu ces propos dans Libé de samedi 7 septembre 2003: France, exception culturelle? Pays de liberté? Mes choses! France, pays de jalousie et de trouille, rongée par le complexe d'infériorité, petite nation de petits conformismes! France, qui agite sa déclaration des droits de l'homme comme une amulette, monarchie bovésienne, consternante de bonne conscience tissue de chauvinisme! Au sujet de la rentrée littéraire fwançaise de 2003 dégoulinante du sang des victimes du 11-9-2001 il dit simplement, 'On a la littérature qu'on mérite.' Qui sont donc ces immigrés qui, vivant en France depuis des années, osent parler de cette façon. Je suis outré! Outré!

Otherwise Returning to the Middle Ages

In Quebecistan, it’s always 1938. It really isn’t much of a surprise when you imagine just how much the province that has done so much to guilt trip and bilk the Anglophones that they have a hate-hate relationship with has grown into a complex of Cultural Nationalism and Socialism. So much so, they might as well try a beer hall putsch, and then seek compensation from Ottawa.

Brussels Journal Reports:

Some three weeks ago, in close succession, anti-Semitic cartoons – at least two of which appeared to have been borrowed from Der Sturmer – were published on the editorial pages of three mainstream newspapers in the Canadian province of Quebec. The cartoons concerned the meeting between Mario Dumont, the leader of Quebec’s opposition party, the Action Democratique du Quebec, with fundraisers who had traditionally supported Quebec’s Liberal Party – the party currently in power. Some of the fundraisers were Jewish businessmen.

That some of them are Jewish is more than enough to stoke these primitives who have in the past and up to the present day, have used their own “cultural exception” be a fig leaf for their bigotry, racism, and tradition of corrupt political political blackmail.



Soldier, diplomat, and statesmanlike Governor General Georges-Phil Vanier would be in tears.

"If none of the above is possible, then smile."

You would think that being friendly is obvious to most everyone in the hospitality business. That only seems to apply outside of the land of the forcefield of cultural superiority cultural exception.

France was last week jolted by the realisation that, while still blessed with 79 million annual visitors, the country has slipped to third place - behind the US and Spain - for income from tourism.

But it's still the destination no. 1 for those who enjoy being personally abused.

The Stunning Stupidity of Europe’s Intellectual Class

The great enemy? “Googlization.” Why, you might ask?

A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information overload. Ordinary people have hijacked strategic resources and are clogging up once carefully policed media channels.

Disturbing! Without an exclusionary gatekeeper, people get to learn. Can’t have that, now, can we?

Before the Internet, the mandarin classes rested on the idea that they could separate "idle talk" from "knowledge". With the rise of Internet search engines it is no longer possible to distinguish between patrician insights and plebeian gossip.

Emphasis mine, by the way. The intellectuals, heaven forbid, will have to interpret the veracity of information for themselves. Something any real academic or reader has always had to do to earn the respect of those whom they talk down to.

The distinction between high and low, and their co-mingling on occasions of carnival, belong to a bygone era and should no longer concern us. Nowadays an altogether new phenomenon is causing alarm: search engines rank according to popularity, not truth.

I cant imagine why this is alarming to any honest person, since academics on the make for attention have never promised any sort of truth, especially in a continent obsessed with the false intellectualism of post-modern rants and tripe as a means of trying to make the individual ranter think himself smart.

Geert Lovink’s complaint seems to have more to do with being found out and having the regard an appointment or named position in society being taken away. This is no different that the complaints of the monarchs of earlier age seeing the poplauce just as most european though seem to see the world – slack jawed and unworthy in spite of their actual achievements in the expansion of what is known and what CAN be known.

Not only has popular noise risen to unbearable levels, we can no longer stand yet another request from colleagues and even a benign greeting from friends and family has acquired the status of a chore with the expectation of reply. The educated class deplores that fact that chatter has entered the hitherto protected domain of science and philosophy, when instead they should be worrying about who is going to control the increasingly centralized computing grid.

Quite the reverse is what’s true of the state of information sharing. By including those outside of an academic, political, or literary social milieu it has become less centralized, more accessible. As it undermines the currency of a “class” (something EUvians still seem to have a bipolar relationship with), this diffusion of access to publishing thoughts takes away what many believed was the monopoly of that class – one which carries still such a narrow range of world-views that it looks monolithic, desiccated, and has nothing left to say – not until it renews itself and lets others in.

The World Wide Web, which should have realized the infinite library Borges described in his short story The Library of Babel (1941), is seen by many of its critics as nothing but a variation of Orwell's Big Brother (1948). The ruler, in this case, has turned from an evil monster into a collection of cool youngsters whose corporate responsibility slogan is "Don't be evil".

Most people are no longer interested in the ubiquitous use of the casual use of Orwell, but it seems especially specious when it’s used to criticize the enablement of access to information, and to criticize the fact that information can be judged on the motives of author. The horror of the world of Big Brother is precisely that the source of information’s intent and content were singular, something Lovink seems to find comfort in when it comes to the repugnant and lazy elite that he seems so enamored with.

As such it doesn’t take much for him to find appealing any sort of invented nonsense shaped out of ignorance of a subject and grievance about others’ success in understanding it – in short, typical French popular intellectualism. Characterized by nativism massaging paranoia about the present and future, one must recall that the queen of the beehive in his day, Mitterrand, wanted to ban the personal computer because of the irritation it might cause other monopolists: book distributer’s cartel, the newspapers, attorneys, etc. For these people, the future doesn’t represent a possibility and an chance to exercise the best moral judgment possible, it’s something to be feared.

It’s an awfully strange thing for a subculture given to admiring any sort of fake revolutionary, even the mass-murdering types.

In 2005 the president of the French Biliothèque National, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, published a booklet in which he warned against Google's claim to "organize the world's information".[2] Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge remains one of the few documents that openly challenge Google's uncontested hegemony. Jeanneney targets only one specific project, Book Search, in which millions of books of American university libraries are being scanned. His argument is a very French-European one. Because of the unsystematic and unedited manner by which Google selects the books, the archive will not properly represent the giants of national literature such as Hugo, Cervantes and Goethe. Google, with its bias of English sources, will therefore not be the appropriate partner to build a public archive of the world's cultural heritage. "The choice of the books to be digitized will be impregnated by the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere", writes Jeanneney.

What Jeanneney couldn’t understand is that the globe would hold no cultural exception for his lazy ass, and that Google was in no way trying to gather an explanatory encapsulation of global culture, and certainly wouldn’t go out of its’ way to include the authors Jeanneney holds in as high a regard in the manner one man, Jeanneney would like to see them placed. That would be up to Jeanneney, and for Jeanneney to do something about, not insist that others do it on his exclusive behalf at the expense of other great eras, ideas, and bodies of thought.

If fact the things that his thesis reveals as a failure to find in those not legally structured to look up to him and the ideas he hold to be in high regard, not that differently than Big Brother is immense. We are to believe that less is more. Fewer readers is intellectually broader. Equality of opportunity requires a narrowing of the class permitted to express itself...

The stupidity of Europe’s intellectual class is stunning.

Cultural Exception: Exceptionally Paranoid

Radio gaga:

English-language radio stations complained Tuesday they had been refused an FM licence in Paris, a city which currently has Armenian, Portuguese and Arabic broadcasters but not a single English language station.
The BBC World Service, Paris Live Radio and World Radio Paris were all excluded from a shortlist of contenders for licences drawn up by the CSA, the French broadcasting authority.
"It is unknown in the developed world for a major city to not have at least some local radio in English," said Ian de Renzie Duncan, the director of Paris Live Radio, which has broadcast on satellite and cable in France.
"The CSA have just said 'no English radio' on our turf," he said in a statement.

Remember – this is about a frequency auction. It only puts them 9 years behind the US in getting out of the business of micromanaging the airwaves, and they still wrap their brains around the notion of private ownership, let alone foreign-seeming ownership of a frequency. So for the time being, the listener remains stuck with a weak AM signal for the BBC World Service, and nighttime listening on LW and AM from the UK reminiscent of the last century which is only enjoyable if you’re a old-fashioned DXer.

N.B. - Otherwise your choices are cable (pfft!) or satellite if your “quaint” shoebox apartment can see the south-western sky – something which this correspondent happens to experimenting with to making homesickness for North Americans a thing of the past. (Further details will be presented if things start looking promising.)

French Court Gives Jihadists Foot-soldiers their own “Cultural Exception”

John Rosenthal reports:

Last Tuesday, a Parisian appeals court overturned the convictions of five former Guantanamo inmates who had been found guilty on terrorist conspiracy charges in 2007. The development should give pause to wonder not only about the wisdom of plans to transfer Guantanamo inmates to European countries, but more fundamentally about the very idea of treating the “disposition” of Guantanamo inmates as an issue for civilian courts, whether in the US or abroad. The five French Gitmo detainees were repatriated to France in 2004 and 2005. They were tried and convicted on charges of belonging to a “criminal association formed for the purpose of undertaking a terrorist act.” The definition of this crime in French law is exceptionally broad. Not only does it permit what are, in effect, preventive detentions, but a suspect may be convicted by virtue of merely having had “regular contact” [relations habituelles] with one or more other persons who form part of such a terrorist enterprise.

And apparently that’s the favor they say they’re going to do for America, after telling us that they’ve councilled us on the wrongness of defending ourselves. They find a court that will release terrorists into the population, and we’re considered unwise and more dangerous.

The five former Gitmo detainees, however, did not merely have casual contact with members of a terror group. All five have admitted to receiving military training in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They were taken prisoner in the Afghan-Pakistani border region in late 2001, while fleeing the Battle of Tora-Bora

But somehow in the diseased minds of “the peace camp”, this doesn’t make them prisoners of war.



Leftist protesting nonsensically for the western liberal world to disarm itself outside a military equipment trade fair on 11-Sept-2001, while the attacks were taking place.

The French Cultural Exception Explained

It’s an exemption from the shackles of reason and truth-telling. It’s purpose is to fit whatever uninformed view of reality that you have – because there is simply no way you can’t be right.

What’s all that about? You ask... An Elle blogger, like a typical higher-being of the continent decided that all African-Americans could and should be defined by the three or four African-Americans that she’s familiar with in passing.

In an blog post titled “Black Fashion Power,” writer Nathalie Dolivo managed to insult American blacks as a whole while offering left-handed compliments to the First Lady Michelle Obama for taking on the Jackie O role in a “jazzy” way.

The writer imagines that the Obamas are the first to bring true style to African-Americans.

See, there you go. She did her national duty by defining nearly 37 million people she has no knowledge of outside of the doctored appearances found in photographs and videos, and there you have it.

And throw in some of that Jazz stuff too while you’re at it, it still being the hip thing with the kids, you see, at least in the minds of those Europeans who we are told simply know everything there is to be known.

I was reminded of this again just a few weeks ago when a Parisian in a bar was inquiring about the south as if the world that they lived in was straight out of ‘Mississippi Burning’. The man’s age, mature nature, and outward air of intelligence almost made me confuse him with someone with a shred of decency and intelligence. While willing to be ignorant of a culture, he was more than willing to have an opinion about who he thought were the good-guys and bad-guys in it.

Cultural Exception

Let me Schpank you Again, Liebchen

The EU is working hard to build an uneven playing field as a precedent for their thousand year empire. I used to suspect that the courts were being abused by EUbatting average) against large foreign companies, but am now quite convinced that the competent courts in these cases are playing along, and taking it as an entertaining or academic exercise at the expense of the eventual consumer.

Intel Defends Itself in Europe: Executives and lawyers representing microprocessor giant Intel appeared before EU regulators this week in a last-ditch effort to fend off antitrust action against the company similar to that which has plagued Microsoft recently. The hearings will continue today with representatives from Intel rival AMD explaining why, in fact, Intel needs to be curbed. "We're trying to convince the [European Commission] that this is a competitive market and that it behaves as one would expect a competitive market to behave, to the benefit of consumers," an Intel spokesperson explained. That's so cute, and I'm sure the EC will see things exactly that way, given that Intel sells over 80 percent of the microprocessors sold each year.

EU Worried that Microsoft Actions Might Harm Investments: And speaking of the EU, it turns out some there have concerns that its aggressive pursuit of Microsoft will have a negative effect on corporate investments in Europe. In a speech this week, former EU president of the Court of First Instance Bo "Duke" Vesterdorf said that slowing investment in the EU could result in slowing innovation and consumer suffering, the exact opposite of the effect the EU was shooting for when it went after Microsoft. Amazingly, Versterdorf said he regretted that Microsoft never appealed his court's decision against the company, though such an appeal had little chance of success.

After all, he might lose his meal ticket. The court’s racket is no different that the EUvian view of favoritism for well-connected and often partially state owned domestic industries. It is nothing more than trade-protectionism by another name, and it’s goal is to take without giving back, with consumers paying the difference, just as they do with their own protected industrial monopolies. If they plan on being a relic, maybe everything they do deserves to be treated as a cultural exception.



Sudden Sainthood

Observations of the Socialist Internationale in her Native Habitat

Elsewhere: who knew the French "cultural exception" was assumed by leftists to include rape and child molestation?

I'm not saying it's time for a presidential candidate who represents 'normality' over 'abnormality', or 'morality' over 'immorality'. But it is time for democracy without moral privileges.

Is a writer supposed to able to supersede the electorate? Why so uncomfortable with the idea of "normal"? Doesn't that just mean that it might reflect what's nominally acceptable to society as its' "lowest common denominator"?

Old socialist perv tries to force himself on a woman half his age. Libé readers only now nominally start to mildly question whether or not it might no longer be wise as a workplace fringe benefit. I'd say that they have a long way to go before they reach the 20th century. What do you expect from a country where employees still expect "lunch money". Bear in mind that these are adults that we're talking about.



Come on! Give Daddy some suga!

The typical reaction? That a European's attempted rape is somehow the fault of "American prudery"

oh, that sin-and-crime-laced word "sodomy"!

Sure, that's what we can tell the beurre qui batte to seure when her rectum gets prolapsed against her will.

Oh, That Cultural Exception!

New Years Eve at the stroke of midnight: normal people kiss, toast with champagne, and wish one another happiness and good health. Others, those people of refinement, are so culturally exceptional that they forego such pedestrian rituals.

The interior ministry had earlier said 445 vehicles were set on fire overnight, but later revised that figure to 1,147.

The number of arrests and cars torched topped last year's tally of 259 people detained and 372 vehicles burned.

This is for all of those sneering clowns peddling the “good society” “superior lifestyle” and even that “superiority due to their ability to execute well their own cuisine” racket. The entire country often sounds like it’s a PR racket, and little else.

- PS.: Welcome Lizardoids. Pull up a chair and don't forget

the mashmallows. It usually get even better after a few days.