Some more (French) Medieval Law Principles...

(Source: Link)

My first thought was Cersei Lannister's punishment...

Finished a task 4 days earlier than it’s due date, Isn’t that great !

This is major

For anyone not living in France, you might not have seen this on the news. But yesterday, on the 4th of March, abortion has become a constitutional right.

It is the first country worldwide to recognize that right as fundamental. And the result of the vote was overwhelming too ! (780 to 72)

What a beautiful day ☀️

In France, home-invasion is a plague protected by the law

You know what makes me sick? Squatting. Aka those people that sneak into houses and flats that are not theirs, and claim it as their own house.

Because in France, squatters and squatting is a true plague. It is a true plague because home-invaders are PROTECTED BY THE LAW! Yep, French law is just so sick.

Let me give you an example.

A grandmother lives alone in a little house somewhere in the suburbs. One day, she gets dementia and has to be hospitalized. Her daughter arrives. She takes her out of her house, because it is too dangerous for her to leave alone, and she takes her to the hospital, and then to a retirement house. Meanwhile the grandmother’s own little house stands empty. Well-closed, but empty. When the daughter discovers that to pay for the retirement home (and not to throw her mother into the public hell-holes where they beat up elder people) she needs more money than planned, she decides to sell her grandmother’s empty home. It is where she spent her childhood, but her mother’s health is more important.

But as she discovers, a family entered the house. They broke into the house one night, changed the locks and are now living in the house. They are squatters. They claim the house is theirs, and that they will stay there, and not leave.

You say: but the house does not belong to them! The daughter can still call the police for them to get out, no? Well... No. Because the law protect these kind of home-invaders. You see, there is a loophole in the French law. People can’t be dislodged of their domicile. But “domicile” has a very vague meaning in the French law - it is just your main dwelling. If you can prove that you live somewhere all the time, then it becomes your “domicile”. You don’t even have to own the place. 

And that’s how all the squatters and home-invaders work. They enter a place they never bought or that does no belong to them. They sign up contracts to install something : it can be a contract with a new electric company ; it can be a contract to install Internet or a new phone line ; any kind of contract works. Companies never check if people own the place they claim to be their domicile. So the companies do their work there, leave their contracts, and these contracts are enough. They are proofs that this place is your domicile. Home-invaders just present them to the law and say “This is proof that it is my domicile. We might not own the place, but we still live there, we claimed it as our domicile, and so you can’t get us away”. And thus the daughter can’t sell or even enter her mother’s house, and has to enter a long legal battle to get back the ownership of the place. A very costy battle, as it will need the hiring of several law experts. 

Because here you see, the home-invaders have all on their side. They claim the house was “abandoned” - and this already puts the law in their favor because invading an abandoned place is less punishable than an “occupied” place, and if the home is empty long enough, it can be claimed “abandoned” by unscrupulous people. Proving it is not means spending money to prove it in front of the law. As the home-invaders did not rent the place, there is no “renter-owner” relationship between the two, and the daughter can’t even have them expelled through her quality of owner. And the home-invaders are a family! EVEN BETTER! Because when squatting is proven, people can be expelled quite fast... if there is just one person. Multiple persons, it takes longer. And if there are children? Even longer - especially if they are minors. That’s why nowadays most squatting cases are about families invading so-called “abandoned” buildings. Or even whole groups! We are talking groups of twenty to forty people! Of course the living conditions tend to be dreadful, with filth, overcrowding and more... But the home-invaders don’t care, because they know they’ll be expelled one of these days, plus they are not the owners of the place so not responsible. They can literally do everything they want until they are kicked out - leaving behind them a huge mess that will require extensive cleaning (or even extensive work if they destroy parts of the home - it happens, they can leave stealing things such as sinks or ovens).  If the home-invasion happens around the “dark season” it is even worse, because due to a law originally made to protect the poor, it becomes terribly hard if not impossible to expel people during winter. Any kind of people, including home invaders, you can only expel them in the “bright season”. 

At least, if the daughter can prove that there was a breaking-and-entering to take possession of the house (windows broken, doors broken), it will allow proving the home-invasion much faster, and once the state of squatting is recognized by the law, the procedures to expel them can start. But long and costly procedures, that can take up to several years. Some cases are not as lucky. Lots of squatters find ways to take possession of the domicile without breaking and entering. Like stealing the key, or obtaining it from someone else. If let’s say you leave a copy of your key to a trusted neighbor or friend, to keep the house while your are gone on holidays or on a business trip, and they steal this copy of the key and enter the house... well you’re screwed and you’ll need a lot of wits and strength to obtain back your belonging. Especially since, as it is their “domicile” and they constantly stay in there to make sure no one can expel them when they’re not here, they can install all sorts of things to keep the rightful owners out - all sorts of security systems designed to prevent the one who actually owns the house to even step a foot near it.

Of course, in front of such situations, the rightful owners can try to take the matters in their own hands. Because you see, to target empty houses, home-invaders search for vulnerable people. They search for recently built houses that haven’t yet been occupied by the family that bought it ; they search for elderly people who have to leave for a long time due to going to the hospital or something similar ; they search for families going on holidays, or houses that were just inherited after someone passed away but the heir isn’t here yet. And they enter and they invade and they claim it as their own, and throwing them out needs a lot of time, money and effort. There’s several hundred cases of it across France - thanks to these law loopholes spreading so fast in today’s age. Some home-invaders are homeless, jobless people or families. Others are criminals that live on stealing and invading. Some are foreigners not speaking a word of French and wants to have a free place to live in. Sometimes they are actually victims of the business, as they are sold or given the house not knowing they are becoming squatters. But these last cases are rare: usually home-invasions are malevolent and willingly done.

As I said: what happens if the rightful owners decides to take action by themselves? Since the police can’t do anything until a judgement allows the expulsion of the invaders, you have to wait for the law - but given the law is a very long process in France which demands you to spend a lot of time and money building evidences, files and finding the right persons to hire and go to, some people can’t stand waiting for what is sometimes years. What happens if you break into the house that is yours and expel by force the owners? What happens if you wait for the home-invaders to leave and quickly change the locks while they are gone? What happens then? THEN YOU’RE SCREWED! Because as I said, the “domicile-protecting” law. The home-invaders can call a lawyer and sue your ass off, for breaking and entering or expelling them of their “rightful domicile”, no matter if you own the place and they were occupying it “illegally”. They can sue you off, and YOU ACTUALLY RISK MORE THAN THE HOME-INVADERS! The home-invaders, at most, will get from the law a firm expulsion. But they won’t go to jail, they won’t lose everything, they won’t have to pay anything: clean up the invaded place, taking ownership of it, any kind of expenses to repair the damages of the home-invader? That’s on the owner who is getting back the home! (And this is why some petty home-invaders break down everything in the home once they learn they are going to leave). But if the owner takes personal actions against them... the law will punish them. At best, they’ll have to pay for the home invaders. At worst they can face prison.

This is a plague that everybody is denouncing in France for years now, as squatting is booming... but the law hasn’t changed - because the loopholes and the laws the home-invaders use were originally designed to protect the poor and the homeless and people will low-income, and renters at the end of bad landlords. As a result they are very difficult to unwrap... and the home-invaders, the squatters, fester like hideous human cockroaches. They take advantage of the elderly, of the sick, of grieving family memebers, of people who want to start a new life elsewhere, and then sneak in and spit their poison in their face and ruin what is for many a childhood home, a sweet house for their children to grow up, the results of their yearlong savings - but what is for them just a free place they can crash in and can go out of without any kind of consequence. 

This makes me sick

Hey! you got screwed over by ubisoft or a live-service game going out of business and servers closing?

you own "The Crew" somehow?

Come and help try to finally get some accountability from the game companies by using french laws in an attempt to screw them back!

My mom, upon hearing the signification of certain architectural choices of the law courts, declare that "You all are at least a little megalomaniac"

And since then, whenever I lack of confidence, she says something in the lines of "if you want to study law, you need to act a little more megalomaniac than that"

It's one of the weirdest way to make someone gain confidence, but strangely it works well

In France, it is illegal to insult

I think this is really interesting…….

French Bill Disparages Genocide Victims

View On WordPress

I vaguely remembered that I’d woken up last night at 2am and scrambled desperately for my phone to Wikipedia-search something I just HAD to know, then immediately fell back to sleep.

But for the life of me, I could not remember what I had searched. Curious, I opened my phone’s browser to see this:

You know that feeling: it’s 2am and you really really need to immediately read the biography of Maximilien Robespierre. We’ve all been there.

To whom did this anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having occurred to him.

— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Update on May 1st protests and how the french goverment handled them?

^ The May 1st protests were pretty violent esp. in Paris; two cops were set on fire (they're ok, one has 2nd degree burns), lots of destruction in city streets, and hundreds of injured protesters. The French gov is sticking to its M.O. of denying any police violence against protesters, emphasising protesters' violence and portraying it as mindless anti-democratic savagery rather than the result of their own anti-democratic policies.

There were more people protesting in the streets on Monday than at any other May Day protest in the past 20 years (by a large margin—7 to 10x more people than usual.) And the numbers are still impressive in terms of this current social movement—there were about 1.2 million people at the first protest against the pension reform in January, 900K at one of the February protests, around 1.1M on March 7 and I think 1.2M on March 23rd... We're in May and there were 800K people in the streets on Monday (using the police's probably low estimate). The first marches earlier this year were peaceful; people started destroying shit in March after the 49.3 (=the gov not letting elected representatives vote on the reform); in the following weeks we saw a brutal escalation of police violence + suppression of just about any means of non-violent protest, which results in more violence.

The vast majority of protesters are still peaceful, but in terms of providing context for the increased violence, well—people protested peacefully, peaceful protests got banned. People banged pots and pans, pots and pans got banned and confiscated. People started a petition on the National Assembly website which got a record number of signatures, the petition was closed before its deadline and ignored. MPs asked (twice!) for a national referendum on the reform to be held, their requests were denied. Electricity unionists cut power in buildings Macron was visiting, now he travels around with a portable generator. Unions tried to distribute whistles and red cards (penalty cards) to football supporters before the French Cup finale last week, so the ones who wanted could use them if Macron showed up (he ended up hiding and greeting the footballers indoors rather than publicly on the stadium lawn); the police prefecture tried banning union members from gathering outside the stadium to distribute these items (although the ban was struck down by the judiciary as it was illegal, like most bans these days...)

Confiscating saucepans was already so absurd it felt like a gratuitous fuck you, but now they're trying to prevent the distribution of pieces of red paper. Cancelling petitions that would have had no real impact anyway. Prosecuting people for insulting Macron. Arbitrarily arresting hundreds of nonviolent protesters to intimidate them out of protesting (guess who's left then?). The French gov is systematically repressing democratic or nonviolent means of making your opinion heard, and when people get more violent they're like "This is unacceptable, don't these terrorists know there are other means of expressing dissent??" Where? This week a 77-year-old man was summoned to the police station and will be forced to take a "citizenship course" for having a banner outside his house that read "Macron fuck you" (Macron on t'emmerde). Note that he would have been arrested (like the woman who was arrested at her home and spent a night in police custody for calling Macron "garbage" on Facebook) but they decided not to only because of his age.

So that's where we're at; on Monday two cops caught on fire (well, their fireproof suit did) after protesters threw a Molotov cocktail at them. (The street medic who tried to help them with their burns ended up getting shot by a cop's riot gun a few seconds later—with French police no good deed goes unpunished!) The media talked a lot more about this incident than about the fact that the cop who got most severely injured on that day (broken vertebrae) was injured by an explosive grenade that a colleague of his meant to throw at protesters (you can see it at the end of the video below). If police with all their protective gear get so badly injured by their own weapons, no wonder the worst injuries have been on the protesters' side. (nearly 600 injured protesters on May 1st, 120 severely, according to street medics.) I'm not including images of these incidents in the video but on May 1st a protester had his hand mutilated by a police grenade + a 17 year old girl was hit in the eye by a grenade fragment, may end up losing it (during the Yellow Vests protests, Macron's first attempt at repressing a social movement, 38 protesters lost an eye or a hand).

What you see in the video: cops charging the front of a march to tear a banner off people's hands then retreating and drowning the street in tear gas when protesters throw paint bombs at them (protesters have umbrellas because of police drones); at 0:30, a journalist saying "They're not even arresting him, just kicking him when he's down—they kicked him right in the face!" then police spraying with tear gas protesters who try to fend them off; at 0:46 when a protester being arrested asks a journalist if he's filming and starts reading out loud a cop's ID number, another cop shoves the journalist and throws him to the ground; at 0:54, an Irish journalist runs away from the police tear gas grenades that you hear going off, at 01:08, the incident mentioned above when a cop drops a grenade he tried to throw, which explodes in his group, breaking another cop's vertebrae. There's a lot more I'm not including, like how CNN said "there's so much tear gas in Paris, our foreign correspondent can barely breathe", how another journalist was hit by a sting-ball grenade (he was also bludgeoned on the head so hard it broke his helmet—even though cops know the people wearing helmets are journalists...), and yet another journalist who was calling out a cop for aiming at people's heads with his riot gun (which is illegal) ended up having the guy aim the riot gun at his head from 2 metres away (getting shot with this "less lethal weapon" from that distance would be lethal.)

All of these videos are from May 1st (most of them from this account monitoring police violence.)

So yeah, nonviolent protests followed by violent police repression and bans of nonviolent means of protesting result in more violent protests. The French government responds by a) pikachu surpris, b) condemning violent protesters and praising violent police to the skies, c) continuing to ban everything they can think of. Confiscating saucepans didn't work but confiscating pieces of red paper will do the trick! Let's prosecute people for bashing or burning an effigy of Macron, because banning symbolic violence always works to prevent actual violence! And this week after the May 1st protests we learnt that the gov is thinking of making street barricades illegal, because that'll definitely solve everything. It's going to be interesting for history teachers to teach students about the 1789 revolution that allowed us to take down an absolutist regime and become a republic, under a government that banned barricades because they see them as terrorist anti-republican structures.

^ Statue symbolising the French Republic (on Place de la République in Paris) dressed with a 'Macron resign' shirt by protesters on May 1st.

📍University, 5:09 PM

01/12/2024

"Can that tiny pamphlet really contain all of Mosaic law?" Bro.  Sure.

___

JOKE-OGRAPHY: 1. Following from the last two comics, Mary has to make a sacrifice as a new mother, according to Mosaic law (Leviticus 12:1-8).  As a poor family, she and Joseph can't afford the prescribed sacrifice of one yearling lamb and one turtledove, so they address their "Mosaic Law and You" brochure and see if there are substitute sacrifices they can use.  It turns out there are!  According to Leviticus 12, if they can't afford a lamb, they can sacrifice TWO turtledoves (or pigeons) instead of one.  "Two turtledoves" is one of the lyrics in the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas," so in this cartoon, I add a list of other possible substitute sacrifices as if the song is an extension of the Leviticus law.  It is not.  I am a lying liar, who has lied. 2. "What's a french?" reflects the fact that Mary has no idea what "french" means.  Back in ye olde Bible dayes, France did not exist in its current form, as St. Joan of Arc hadn't yet slain the titan, Grumblebuff, whose head became England and whose body formed the rest of Europe.

12•01•24// my study pal, he loves to have a nap next to me while I work through my studies.

Looking great, Spy!

new stills for episode 4!