bpet wrote:israel67 wrote:You're lucky. I just checked and here in France, pepper spray is a 'Category Six Weapon', and therefore prohibited.
What a pathetic country this is. Get me out o' here ... please !!
Having been there many, many times, I'd have never guessed that Paris Texas is more "civilized" than Paris France. Based on your post, I'd have been wrong!
If Texas ever outlawed pepper spray, they'd have to close 90% of the Mexican restaurants in the state. Either that or people would resort to carrying enchiladas just to have a reasonable substitute. I say 90% because some of the Mexican food facilities still think serving Santa Fe or California style mush is tasteful and they have the nerve to call it Mexican food.
Somehow I'm not surprised that the French have outlawed pepper spray but I have to wonder what good it has done based on the recent riots in that part of the world. Maybe glass bottles are next. After all, they can make a pretty efficient weapon either whole, broken, or used as a container for flammable liquids.
No thanks! I think I'll stay here and avoid anything associated with France.
I know that since the Iraq war, it's customary to bash France, and well yeah, I can see your point but honestly, France was once a great country. I don't mean centuries ago, but as recently as say, 1990, France was an awesome place.
Now, she has been taken over by the
yobbo. France is a police state, and the law does not do anything to change that. Why should it? The biggest fascist of them all is the one at the
top of the tree.
An example that might sound trivial to you, but when this happens on a daily basis, it wears you down and seriously impacts your quality of life. Verbal abuse is now the norm in the city's public transport system. It happens to me virtually every time I get into the métro. It usually takes the shape of a young man with a mobile phone capable of playing music, but since he has been brought up believing that the world revolves around him, he doesn't bother to use earphones. If someone asks him if he wouldn't mind turning the music down, the person gets either the finger, or a punch in the face. If you ever come here and take the métro, you'll note that there are little fold-down seats next to each door. There are signs in French, English, Spanish and Italian next to those seats, asking customers not to use the seats at rush hour. Does anyone pay any attention? Not a chance. They continue sitting when the car is so cramped that people are at 45° angles to avoid the knees of those sitting down. I've seen men and women politely ask the ignorant scum to stand up, and they've been rewarded with a punch in the genitals. When they're not knifed, that is. Then you get a crowded platform and you're going to bump into someone. Apologise and see where it gets you. It'll get you a threat to 'crever' you (which is French for 'burst' or in a US context, 'cap').
Now take my block. I'm on the fifth floor (the sixth for Americans, as you count the 'ground' floor as the 'first' floor), and am the only Jew living in this block. The rest are Muslim. This isn't racism, but needs to be seen in the context of the situation in the Middle East. I dare not go outside this appartment openly wearing my yarmulke and in the métro, always stand back from the edge of the platform as it only takes a second to be pushed under a train.
You think I'm paranoid? It's happened.
Anyway, in this block on the fourth floor, i.e. just below me I have two appartments: one directly below and one off to the South. Both are occupied by two Muslim tranvestite couples, the 'passive' one of whom is a prostitute. They apparently only have one set of keys because at 3 am every morning, the .. erm .. 'worker' finds himself ('herself'?) down in front of the block, whistling up for the keys to be thrown down. His ('her'?) partner seems to be a heavy sleeper, as the whistling typically lasts half an hour.
During the day, they usually crawl out of bed at one pm and immediately put their 'Raï' music on. If you've never heard this, it's Arabic music with a very loud sort of 'whining' instrument, and a repetitive background. It goes on from one pm until maybe eight pm, and then the other 'couple' starts up. It's so loud that my windows shake and on two occasions, the vibrations have caused the power lead to 'pop' out of the back of my Dell computer monitor.
Oh just an edit... I forgot to mention that when they can't be bothered taking their trash downstairs, they drop it down the middle of the stairwell, and urinate in the elevators when they can't be bothered coming back upstairs, should they be caught short.
Above me, I have a woman who plays the same sort of music until maybe three am. But she doesn't just play the music: she dances. Well, I think she's dancing, although to be honest, it sounds as if she's hammering the floor with a 16lb hammer.
This is the same, day in, day out. When I don't have that noise, I have to suffer the hot hatchbacks driving up and down the street, punks with one arm hanging out the window as their one billion watt stereos blast out hip-hop loud enough to be heard on Mars.
If you call the police, they talk to you as if
you're the troublemaker. They'll tell you it's up to the Town Hall. False. They'll tell you they can't do anything before 10 pm. Again, false. If you insist, they'll say OK we'll send someone round. They never do. So the scum basically ruin their neighbours' lives in complete -- and I mean
complete impunity.
No way am I going to go and knock on their door. These people have so little respect for their fellow human beings, that I'd be expecting a bread knife in the gut. And guess what. Yep, that's right: I don't have the right to carry any means of self defence on me. 'If it goes South, call the police' they say. Yeah, right. It wouldn't have
gone South if the police had done their work!
You're going to say why don't I move, and you'd be right. But for the moment, I don't have the financial means to move, although today I finally had had enough and started looking for a small appartment elsewhere, just the time to get my journey to the US sorted out.
It's all gone downhill. Our government is so corrupt that they don't even bother concealing their bribery and their criminal acts anymore. France has become like a South American banana republic. If you complain to the press (for example), nine times out of ten your letter will never be published because the people who own the newspapers are all friends of the President. If your complaint is aired, it'll be so that they can call you a 'radical', a 'marginal', or a 'communist'. One guy went to a meeting where Sarkozy was going to speak (this was before the election), and raised his hand to speak. He was a well-known critic of Sarkozy. As he raised his hand he wasn't armed, he hadn't spoken, he hadn't disrupted the meeting. He was tasered in the back and bundled out of the meeting by plains clothes officers.
You get the police going into schools and asking children not to commit crime. Children get rewards for being good. Imagine it!! '
Please don't commit crime, we'll give you some candy if you're good ...'. Then they wonder why this place is screwed ? Then they wonder why teenagers think they don't need to use earphones or stand for elderly people?
Rant over.
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