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Parisians Now Have a 9 pm Curfew
I was freerer when I was 16.
We also can’t gather in groups larger than 6.
Masks are of course mandatory, even in the street and at the office alone in front of your computer.
I had a lot of hope after the kids went back to school last May: No mandatory masks.
Then masks became mandatory in closed spaces, then on certain streets and now everywhere all the time, except in our own houses. And to be honest, I really don’t know what logic prevents them from pursuing that as well.
Like in the states, you don’t have to wear it if you are eating or drinking or smoking. I just imagine the virus veers around and makes a u-turn as soon as it encounters someone sipping bottled water.
They did start an app StopCovid (when French people want to be catchy, they use English), which apparently isn’t any good. Hadn’t ever heard about it. But when I met a friend for lunch last week the waiter gave us a piece of scrap paper to write our telephone numbers down. “Why?!” I said aghast.
“Contact tracing,” she said calmly, dutifully printing her name in block letters.
I didn’t know at that time that there was an app, so little used as to be almost unknown, but I did smirk a bit at the pretense that these waiters were going to sit down with all these little scraps of paper at the end of day and obediently call each customer to inform them that there had been a positive case in the restaurant at around 1:45 pm.
When you complain about this, people say this insane thing: “cases are going up though!”
To which I respond “SO WHAT?! Deaths are way down.” Generally, I have found French people that I encounter to be mostly somewhat skeptical, but very compliant, with the odd terrified rabbit here and there, like the woman who works on my floor who lives in the suburbs and now bikes to work. I remember her terrified round eyes above the mask under her bike helmet when we took the elevator together. I was wearing my mask under my nose, as usual, feckless égoïste that I am.
But there is a third and in my opinion even more deeply sinister reaction, which certainly exists also in the US. The greens are delighted. They started off jealous (“they didn’t shut down for the US!”) and then found a way to appropriate the lockdown (“see?! We can do it!”) and have now succeeded in fully integrating it into their Great Reset programme. A more callous, self-serving, manipulative interpretation of events would be hard to imagine. They are now jubilant.
Apparently, these new restrictions are part of an effort to get those pesky sociable 20-somethings under control. They keep partying and then infecting their grandmas, apparently. So haha 9 pm curfew should CRUSH their joie de vivre.
My husband’s young cousin has started engineering school in Nancy and he’s been quarantined in his minuscule room.
I can’t help thinking that with all these nonsensical, yet draconian and totally arbitrary restrictions, we are shaping a generation whose contempt for institutions will make 1968ers blush. I don’t know how I can convey the seriousness of government or the difference between legality and illegality, or the relationship between common morality and laws to my kids. Nothing makes sense anymore.
Published in General
I changed the tag line on my personal blog. It now reads: Defy Tyranny. Break the Lockdown.
What if you have five children?
Is Germany spiking. Waiting for that…
No more R rated movies for Parisians. They’re 11 people short for admission. Under 17 not admitted.
They have gone from the “City of Lights” to the “City of home when the streetlights come on”. Those people will only be half way through dinner at 9pm. Yikes.
Is there even a twisted logic where a curfew has any bearing on the transmission of this virus?
Honestly. We are truly Alice in Wonderland through the looking glass.
Off with their heads.
Tocq,
The Great Barrington Declaration just injected a huge shot of sanity back into the world. Even the creepy W.H.O. now admits that the lockdown s*cks. Only an obsessive-compulsive Statist like Macron could love the lockdown. The vast majority of leading epidemiologists in the world have signed the Great Barrington Declaration which is why the W.H.O. caved on this.
France isn’t interested in the truth on COVID or the truth about the Notre Dame arson. That is such a shame. Abe Lincoln wasn’t French but he wasn’t too bad. France is in need of a new birth of freedom. Is Paris burning?
Regards,
Jim
Technically, the raid was after dinner at Gethsemane, IIRC…🤔
My husband and I signed it and I spontaneously sent it to the mother of a friend of my 7-year-old and she wrote back that she had signed it. I have also sent it to a couple who are quite skeptic but haven’t heard back yet.
I suspect that these measures are so political, that the principles covered in the Declaration don’t even apply.
Macron has solved his gilet jaune Saturday afternoon problem. They did come out once this fall. Very disappointed to see they had masks.
French people contrary to their romantic reputation are actually very submissive, I think. They never protest about principles. But they get real ornery when it’s about their vacations or raising the retirement age by 2 years.
Can I also ask my American friends to remember if it’s as big a deal when the President speaks over there as it is here? It’s all very “His Royal Highness will Speak at 8 pm” here and I just don’t remember that in the states. And my populist Trump fan French husband will dutifully listen to the whole thing. He didn’t last night.
Last night, Macron announced the measures in his usual charmless, paternalistic, wrist slapping, Kathy-Bates-in-Misery manner: “Because you have been VERY naughty boys and girls, this situation has prolonged itself. It’s all your own faults for being naughty and going out to restaurants so those restaurants are gonna have to close at 9 until you do better. Possibly 1 December, Daddy will reconsider. That’s all for now. Beddy bye.”
this would be a perfect moment for the Gilets Jaunes to re-emerge.
I suspect though that French people (polls show 70%) are actually really scared of this stupid virus and that explains this incredible passivity.
This is so idiotic.
This whole year has been idiotic.
Tocq,
I shall frame this description of Macron. Vive le France!
Regards,
Jim
Mister Bitcoin,
The best summation in a nutshell so far.
Regards,
Jim
Tocq,
I have it on good authority (OK perhaps not so good authority) that Macron is a collaborator. We must take the palace before 6:00 pm.
Regards,
Jim
As I mentioned to my beloved in the car this morning when the radio newsreader breathlessly reported the number of new cases in our town, the statistic would be much more useful if it was Number Of Cases Per 1,000 Tests.
Mis,
Also, they might have mentioned that nobody has been in the ICU with COVID in a month. Shock value headlines are so much fun, aren’t they? Makes the news seem, I don’t know, relevant?
Regards,
Jim
Exactly my impression. People are either 1) genuinely frightened (which is mysterious to me), 2) obedient, 3) happy, if they’re greens or 4) like us
My pleasure. My favorite Macron moment was when he told an unemployed guy, on video, to “cross the street” (as in ‘get on your bike’). Then after 6 months of Saturday riots I saw “Manu, we crossed the street” graffitied accross a Haussmanian building in Paris’ “beaux quartiers.” The riots lasted two years. It’s only Covid that ended them… wait… coincidence?
Here it’s more like Covid STARTED the riots.
Maybe. Or you could think that BLM was just waiting for an opportunity to explode.
I am also baffled by 1, but I keep running across people who fit into this category. I don’t understand it at all.
I live in a county with almost half a million people. The county health department publishes the data about Covid every weekday. Less than 100 people have died, and over half of them have been over 75. This is not a reason for fear. Even if you’re old.
At some point, people should get a little more in touch with the basic truth that death comes to everyone. They are choosing to make life more elusive.
I think that people don’t pay attention to the news except what they unquestioningly get from facebook or other MSM apps.
1) It seems very stressful for some to look for news outside the MSM.
2) they don’t like being different or thinking differently
3) lastly, there are high status beliefs and low. Oddly Covid started off as low status fear (saw this at work when I was the only one who worried about it and my unmasked boss discounted me, like I was some querelous housewife) and now it’s up there with climate change as The Luxury Belief (boss now concerned and masked).