A good article on French SOTT (translated with Deepl)
---
To swim in Paris and die: the rats of the Seine, magical thinking and the struggle against reality
Enrico Petrucci
Euro-synergies
Mon, 19 Aug 2024 22:55 UTC
Now that the Paris Olympics are over, the countless controversies that have arisen boil down to a single key: what happened on the banks of the Seine was a clash between magical thinking and the principle of reality.
From the opening ceremony to the sex of boxers, via the question of the bathability of the Seine, there has been an attempt to impose magical thinking, the power of words, as the sole yardstick of reality. The most blatant case in point is the failed attempt to make the Seine swimmable not only for the Olympic Games, but also to turn it into a new tourist attraction for the capital.
Swim in Paris and die
Easier said than done: the Seine has been a non-swimmable river since 1923 (at the 1924 Paris Olympics, they limited themselves to rowing), over 700 km long and with a flow of 500 cubic meters per second, flowing through a city of over 2 million inhabitants. Who have to live with the rats that infest it. An attempt at “good neighborliness” strongly advocated by the mayor of Paris, Anna Hidalgo, who explained in 2022 and 2023 that with rats, the city would have to learn to live.
The Olympic competitions then had the results everyone knows about. So much so, that even the sympathetic Guardian on the state of the triathletes after the swim in the Seine paraphrased the Olympic motto with a headline to make Libero green with envy: Citius, altius, antibioticus : le triathlon olympique un triomphe de l'optique pour Paris. It should be noted that in July, despite the media coverage of Hidalgo's swim in the Seine, at a time when swimming was at its worst, there had been talk of turning the triathlon into a biathlon by doing away with the swimming event. This would have been the best solution for the athletes' health.
Predictably, reality got the better of Hidalgo and Macron's magical thinking, and the 1.5 billion euros invested in making the river swimmable came to nothing. Including the Austerlitz reservoir, capable of storing 50,000 cubic meters of wastewater in the event of rain to slow its discharge into the Seine: the equivalent of a dozen Olympic swimming pools, or the amount of water that passes through the Seine in 8-9 minutes.
The problem is not just fluviological: the Seine is of course a complex 700 km system, with a major tributary like the Marne flowing close to Paris. The very nature of a city like Paris complicates the situation. As The Post wrote before the Olympics, all the hydraulic and technological paraphernalia had been put in place to make the river swimmable. From the classic hydraulic principles of sewer separation for clear and dark water, to the inevitable new technologies based on performic acid or ultraviolet rays, not to mention the new decantation basins mentioned above. A panoply of elements whose Plan B, in the event of rains washing the city's... faeces into the Seine, boiled down to the classic “fingers crossed”: let's wait and hope the bacterial level drops.
Mice and men
After all, we Italians are used to speraindio situations. But there's more: the absolute paradox of a municipal administration that wants to make seaside ambitions coexist with third-world situations such as the thousands of homeless people (most of them immigrants) who were expelled at the last minute from the streets of Paris just before the Olympic Games, or the invasion of bedbugs in Paris in 2023 (obviously, the fault of climate change). And then there are the rats. Living with rats while trying to make the Seine swimmable is another example of fighting reality and exercising magical thinking.
Both for the pathogenic rats (no Black Death, just leptospirosis, which is one of the risks run by Olympic athletes in the Seine) and for the rodents themselves, in front of which the white flag has been raised. Here's what Politico wrote in June 2023:
Anne Souyris, deputy mayor in charge of public health, announced at Thursday's Paris Council meeting that she had decided to form a committee on the issue of cohabitation, under the direction of the mayor. She added that this group would be tasked with finding a method of rat treatment that would be both “effective” and “not unbearable” for Parisians.
And the audience's jokes about the deputy mayor's surname, given the assonance with mouse...
But the Parisian administration's pantalonnade goes further. Because in the fight against reality, it's first necessary to “deconstruct” people's prejudices in order to construct a politically correct (in the broadest sense of the word) narrative. Indeed, according to Douchka Markovic, city councillor for the Parti Animaliste, the rats of the Seine are “victims of prejudice” and we need to start calling them by the right terms: it's better to talk about surmulots rather than rats, because “rat has a negative connotation” (“less negatively connoted”), as Le Figaro reported in 2022.
Knock, knock. “La réalité”!
More magical thinking, the problem of perception, applied deconstructionism: just “change the name” and, as if by magic, the pantagon will become a cute little field mouse worthy of a Disney-Pixar film. But reality always knocks at the door with the brutality of a letter carrier bringing registered mail in a green envelope: shortly after the advisor's release, the French National Academy of Medicine felt obliged to issue a press release to point out the obvious: rats are a danger to public health, and cases of leptospirosis are on the increase.
Is it possible to make a river swimmable while being forced to live with one of the main symptoms of a city's hygienic malaise? This is obviously an open contradiction. Whatever the budget and technology deployed, only magical thinking applies: if all the city's hygiene-related problems are not solved organically, reality will prevail. And the river at the limit of possible bathing will be a risk for athletes.
The magicians of the word
The edifying story of the Seine's balneability and its coexistence with rats is not just a symbol of the contradictions we have been forced to live with since good administration gave way to the magical thinking that is the practice of wokist ideology. There's another interesting observation that follows precisely from the animalistic city councillor's statements: the problem of language and perception.
Perception” is the key word for those who want to deny reality. Better “country mouse” than “rat” if you want to “improve” citizens' perception of the problem. Better “smallpox” than “monkeypox”, better “migrants” than “immigrants”, and so on, the whole chain of euphemisms that political correctness has set up for us in an attempt to magically reconstruct reality through the sound of words. The model of citizens and their perceptions can easily be found in many of the hot topics in our country that political wizards are trying to govern: for example, the issue of micro-crime and degradation in Milan is simply a problem of “perception”. An act of political witchcraft that can only take place because most of the mainstream press is mobilized to de-risk or cover up safety issues, and to label as “social panic” the dissemination of information and videos that prove the opposite. This is what they tried to do with the “perceived swimmability” of the Seine: Anne Hidalgo's swim was functional to reassure citizens and athletes alike. Here's what The Post wrote in the aforementioned article:
“As well as continuing to clean the river and monitor water quality, the hardest part will be changing the common perception and convincing people that the Seine really is clean and safe. In addition to action on bacteria, we'll also have to take action on visible pollution such as waste, mainly plastic, using floating barriers and waste collection boats”.
The power of images
All it took was a viral photo of a swimmer vomiting emblematically on the Paris 2024 Olympic logo to derail the propaganda tirade of a swimmable Seine. And the story of how the municipal administration wanted to live with rats while trying to clean up the city's river will go down in the annals of violations of the principles of reality and non-contradiction, as a warning against all deconstructionism.
In the meantime, we're finding that we're having more than one difficulty ordering the AI to come up with an image of the Seine with rats (string: “la Seine avec des rats” or “the Seine with rats”) that doesn't make the quays of the City of Light look like a branch of the Sylvanian Family. If ordinary people don't drink the clean water of the Seine, AI has fallen in with both feet.
The moral of the story is: beware of those who think that problems can be solved by changing names, rather than by taking concrete action. And especially its propagandists, whether real or virtual.
I'm sure the ferret would score more Brakedancing points than Raptor lady. 
