8/25/2003: French violence against women

This one comes from the summer doldrums. It's become extra hard to find news images that are compelling just on their own right now, so we go to plan "B" with images that are compelling through their explanation. Ordinary photo, extraordinary circumstance.

This is beloved French actress Marie Trintignant as she prepared to work on a documentary for French TV. She's dead now.

And an autopsy now shows that she was, in fact, killed by her boyfriend with a combination of blows from his fist and head butts.

I wonder if she will become the new poster woman for anti-violence campaigns, because as the caption notes, the news has unleashed an outcry over domestic violence in France -- where one in 10 women is beaten at home.

Now here's the completely unfair, biased, one-sided part of my post. They are now revising upwards the number of dead in France from last week's heat wave: it's headed over 13,000. It turns out Chirac himself was on a three-week sunbathing vacation while his country broiled to death. I don't take any glee from all this pain, but often hard leftists (i.e., not Sycamore) say that the long run goal of compassionate government policies is to produce a more compassionate society. After this week, I'm skeptical: 13,000 dead and 1 in 10 women facing domestic violence is not a compassionate society... unless you count the compassion of the mourners.

What's your point about Chirac? It may not look good that he's off on vacation, but what can he really do about the heat wave? He has no control over the weather.

What I have taken from what he said, and what I interpret his point to be, is that a good leader won't be off vacationing while his people are toiling through an extraordinarily hot summer (to them, anyway - try Mississippi or Texas!). Whether or not he could be doing anything (perhaps organizing, say, lots of ice water for the people, though I understand public relations type things like this are the President's job and not the Prime Minister's) or not is sort of irrelevant; what it <b>looks like</b> is him enjoying his life because of his prestige while the normal people suffer back home.

Now, as far as a compassionate society, I think what he was trying to say is that a really compassionate leader would be suffering with his country, showing them that they're all in this together and they'll beat it together.

(On a side note, I don't understand why everyone's dying. It gets real hot here all the time. Big deal. Drink more fluids and stay inside, people!)

The situation in France this summer appears to be very similar to that in Chicago in 1995: an unusually hot summer in a place where many people don't have air conditioning. And the average high in June and July in France is 75...I believe this was the hottest summer there in 40 years.

And while Chirac couldn't have predicted the weather, he should have been in France while this was going on. Imagine if Dubya was at the ranch in Texas on 9/11 and just stayed there. It's more of a psychological boost than anything.

Traditional French sayings:
"If woman were good, God would have had one"
"Women are taught by nature, men by books."
"three girls and their mother, four demons for their father."
"The eye of a woman is a spider's web."

but we know they aint true. Right?

What I'm not sure about is the number 13000. I think this number is inflated. How many deaths are attributed to heat when it could have been other issues. Meanwhile there is another euro country in the same heatwave (I apologize I don't recall who it was) and they have recorded zero deaths due to heat - simply because they aren't labelling them that way. Maybe someone is ill or otherwise and the heat didn't help, but not necessarily dying just because its so hot.

What does the heatwave have to do with violence against french women? What does deaths from a heatwave have to do with whether or not a society is compassionate? Apart from the fact they're all in France what does any of this have in common? Death?

Looks like someone's imagination got away from them...

I personally don't give a shit if he was on vacation, and I imagine a lot of French didn't care either. But I do think it looks bad...you're the leader of a country that currently has hundreds or thousands of people dead, and you're off on holiday.

Hell, even Kofi cut his vacation short after the UN bombing.

The number sounds high to me--that's a lot of dead people. But when you look at the numbers like this...

About 525 people died in Chicago in 1995 (Univ. of Illinois)...from what I recall, almost all (if not all) the deaths occurred within the city limits. With a population of about 2.8 million at the time, that's 1 death for every 5600 residents.

The entire nation of France seemed to get beat down by this heat wave. Going with 13,000 dead (as I said, this sounds a bit high to me at this point) and a population of roughly 59.2 million in France (US State Dept.), that's 1 death for every 4553 residents. Knock that number down to 10,000 and it goes down to 1 death for every 5920 residents.

Just on this alone, it seems plausible that there could have been this many heat-related deaths...but like gossard said, it's all in the labeling: I would imagine a good number of deaths were due to heart and lung ailments and dehydration.

Well, I guess it's come down to this... we must outlaw heat! This can be most efficiently done by destroying the sun. If not for ourselves, then for the children. The poor, miserable children. Won't someone think of them?

Not the sun. I loved children, particularly fried.:p

"Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing...block it out!" - C. M. Burns

Hmmmm.

I would imagine France is playing with the numbers to support the freakin' Kyoto Treaty or to pacify the global warming folks or something. I'll have to go back and check but it may be that 13,000 died during the heat wave and not necessarily because of the heat wave but the wording is carefully constructed to create the impression of causality.

France is known for keeping dubious "cause of death" stats such as not counting a heart-attack death a death by heart attack unless a doctor is present during the heart attack. If this isn't perfectly accurate (I read it a few years ago) - French practice is at the very least consistent with an effort to deliberately lower the total figure of deaths by heart failure.

They may be doing something similar with heat-wave deaths - just in the opposite direction for some cause as yet unknown. At least that would explain the amost casual reporting of the number.

Just a hunch.