Veille - 2015
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janvier
Ils espèrent aussi que la colère et l’indignation qui emportent la nation trouvera chez certains son expression dans un rejet et une hostilité à l’égard de tous les musulmans de France. Ainsi se creuserait le fossé qu’ils rêvent d’ouvrir entre les musulmans et les autres citoyens.
Here's a theory. Terrorists aren't offended by cartoons. Not even cartoons that satirise the Prophet Muhammad. They don't care about satire. For all I know they may not even care about the Prophet Muhammad.
This is a dangerous moment. Anti-Muslim prejudice is rampant in Europe. The favoured target of Europe’s far-right – like France’s Front National, which currently leads in the opinion polls – is Muslims. France is home to around 5 million Muslims, who disproportionately live in poverty and unemployment, often in ghettoised banlieues. This incident should rightfully horrify, but it will now undoubtedly fuel an already ascendant far-right.
Personne ne veut voir que la plus grosse fabrique à soldats d'Al Qaeda sur notre territoire, c'est la PRISON. Personne n'a compris que la France n'a pas basculé en 2015, mais il y a dix ans déjà, lors des émeutes. Personne ne veut voir que nous vivons encore les conséquences lointaines de l'immense humiliation coloniale et post-coloniale, et que vos leçons de "civilisation" et de "liberté d'expression" sont de ce fait inaudibles pour certains de ceux qui l'ont subie et la subissent ENCORE.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
The problem is that these are tried, tested, and failed strategies that serve largely as useful recruiting sergeants for terrorist networks like IS and al-Qaeda. We are so obsessed with these strategies, despite their abject failure, that while getting rightly worked up at the horrifying atrocities against the West like that just committed in Paris, we are incapable of mustering a similar emotional response to the reports of dozens of civilian casualties due to US-led airstrikes.
février
mars
The US intelligence community also likens finding a terrorist plot to looking for a needle in a haystack. And, as former NSA director General Keith Alexander said, “you need the haystack to find the needle.” That statement perfectly illustrates the problem with mass surveillance and bulk collection. When you’re looking for the needle, the last thing you want to do is pile lots more hay on it.
For residents of the United States — and indeed, the entire Northern Hemisphere — the impact of major ice loss from Antarctica could be dire. If Antarctica loses volumes of ice that would translate into major contributions to sea level rise, that rise would not be distributed evenly around the globe. The reason is the force of gravity. Antarctica is so massive that it pulls the ocean toward it, but if it loses ice, that gravitational pull will relax, and the ocean will slosh back toward the Northern Hemisphere — which will experience additional sea level rise.
Les sceptiques ont raison: collectivement, les médias d’actualité seraient fous de remettre leur sort entre les mains de Facebook. Individuellement en revanche, ils seraient fous de ne pas le faire.
Que peut-être, quand on dit que le vrai truc important c’est l’égalité des salaires, et qu’il faut commencer par ça, peut-être que justement il faut commencer par l’autre bout des choses. Peut-être que le jour où on arrêtera d’apprendre à nos gosses qu’il y a des couleurs, des jeux, des métiers pour filles et des pour garçons, peut-être que quand on commencera à accepter les féminins de mots traditionnellement masculins, peut-être que quand on arrêtera de rire grassement à la blague d’un pote qui commente pas méchamment pour rire les cuisses d’une fille qui passe dans la rue, peut-être que quand on aura mené ces combats ô combien dérisoires, d’eux-mêmes, sans révolution, les gens se mettront à payer les femmes du même salaire que les hommes.
avril
If you scoff at the parallels I’m drawing, you need to question why. Because the disparity here is directly related to gender, and being a girl is used as an insult more often than it’s celebrated. Look at the advert that caused a stir at this year’s Super Bowl, Always’ #LikeAGirl campaign, in which adults asked to “run like a girl” and “throw like a girl” did some floppy and flailing parody of those actions—and then young girls, not yet taught to doubt themselves and their bodies, ran and threw with graceful strength and confidence.