Dear Log,
Look out everyone, the religion-benighted and/or imported peasantry may one day plot an uprising! -- as has never ever happened before in European history, what with Enlightenment values and whatnot. Have fun jihading the castle!
Also, this sobby movie and its review here and the snarling message-thread after it will solve everything!
Meanwhile:
«I would suggest a larger explanation for the prevailing anxiety: that, as throughout modern history, France functions as the coal miner's canary of modern society, reacting to political and social forces before anyone else.All I can say is that the coal mine seems to have a lot of canaries in it lately.[...]
We need to note the classical economist David Ricardo's neglected "iron law of wages," which says that in conditions of wage competition and unlimited labor supply, wages will fall to just above subsistence level. This "law" in the past seemed irrelevant since there never before has been unlimited access to labor. Thanks to globalization, that is now in prospect. The consequences have only begun to be felt.
In this perspective, what in France seems a sterile popular defense of an obsolete social and economic order might instead be understood as a premonitory appeal for a humane successor to an economic model that considers labor a commodity and extends price competition for that commodity to the entire world. The apparently reactionary or even Luddite position inspired by French reactions might prove prophetic.»
--"France: The Children's Hour"
