Edmund Burke wrote Reflections on a Revolution in France which I asked Grok to summarise:
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is a foundational conservative critique of the French Revolution.
Written as a letter, it rejects the revolutionaries’ abstract theories of natural rights and pure reason as a basis for remaking society. Burke argues that a sound political order rests on inherited tradition, historical institutions, property, religion, and gradual change rather than sudden rupture. He sees the French upheaval as dangerously destructive of the social fabric—an “unnatural” experiment that tears up the organic bonds of custom and continuity linking past, present, and future generations.
He predicts that the destruction of established authority will lead not to liberty but to chaos, followed by tyranny (a forecast many later judged prescient). Against the radicals’ blank-slate approach, Burke defends “prejudice” (accumulated practical wisdom), the mixed constitution, and the rights of inheritance over abstract equality.
The book became a classic statement of conservatism and a major influence on later critiques of revolutionary ideology.
Burke’s seminal analysis prompted Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, in 2009, which I read then and have quoted many times since. Like French Riots, we DID warn you, on 22 October.
Yes. About these French riots, I’ve posted exclusively centre-conservative points of view. Reason being the POV from the Left is well represented by the mainstream media which is all around us. It is the air we breathe. The BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNOW, abc, ABC Australia, CBC Canada, the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Age…. Well, you get the picture.
So here I’m just giving a little bit of the Other Side’s View.
If you want to make sure you’re covering all views, you could subscribe to Ground News, which specialises in covering all media, Left, Right and Centre. I’m not sponsored by them. Or by anyone else.
John O’Sullivan writes “A New French Revolution”. Which I post in full below the fold, courtesy of the National Review.
/Snip:
Of all the things that have been hardest to communicate in my life, this seems the most impossible: that our civilisation is not, by some law of nature, immortal. It has no right or likelihood to continue existing if it insists on committing harakiri. The people who are welcomed onto our airwaves, work in parts of our government and lead some of our political parties include those who would burn down this country in a heart-beat. They would look us in the eyes and kill us. And we know that because they have done it elsewhere.
They don’t do it at the moment because the time is not right. But when they feel it is, they will act. At which point I suppose people will have to decide whether they wish to be spectators at their own funeral pyre or not.
“Seriously, fuck these people.”
Says Brendan O’Neill. In his latest: “The delusional vanity of the Sally Rooney cult”
As I commented the other day: “We warned you!”
Indeed we warned European governments much earlier than I realised:
The problems that France has been creating for itself were foreseeable, and indeed foreseen. As long ago as March 1959, de Gaulle is reported to have warned, “The Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty?” The Anti-French Revolt in France Rich Lowry.
And: “…100 million people… saw this coming”. Bridget Phetasy.
I’m reminded of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”, by Christopher Caldwell, which I read when it came out on 2009, and have quoted numerous times since.
A key thing he noted was that the descendants of immigrants to Europe from Islamic countries were far more radical and less integrated than their parents and grandparents. This is in contrast to all other immigrant waves, where those born in the host country integrated into its values and customs.
I noted this in my own post in 2015:
And so, also, in Europe and the UK: waves of migration absorbed and contributing to their host countries, with their children hewing to their new nation.
All, that is, until the immigrations from Islamic countries.A weird thing happened with these migrants. The children of the original migrants -- instead of working on the base set for them by their parents -- began to bend to more fundamentalist Islam than their parents.And we know where that leads. "Lone wolf" attacks; calls for Sharia. Despising of their own nation.The best documentation of this phenomenon is in Christopher Caldwell's "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe".He shows -- in careful argument with scrupulous references -- how the descendants on Pakistanis in the UK or Turks in Germany, have turned against their parents and their countries, in favour of the Islamic Ummah, the great would-be caliphate of Islam.Caldwell quotes Hilaire Belloc, the great writer, orator, poet, sailor, satirist, man of letters, soldier and political activist, and leftist Catholic academic.Writing in 1936, in "The Great Heresies", Belloc is quoted in Caldwell (p 112):"... It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than thousand years its greatest opponent."
Prescient, what?!
Briefly noting:
Centre-right media are now going after Trump.
Venerable conservative voices like the National Review and the Spectator have been critical of Trump in recent-ish times. Especially on Russia. e.g.:
It’s cases like these that drive companies out of California.
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| “Ansar Allah” are the Houthis. The Red, white and black is their flag, missing a bit of green. The “Maoist Communist Union” is… Maoist-communist. This was in NYC on 7 October, celebrating the mass-murder of Jews in 2023. All same-same in France. The Marx-Muhammad Alliance. |
These crazy French riots!
They may have begun as student-led protests at poor teaching or large class sizes. But they quickly morphed into the Red-Green Alliance for Hating on the West.
Red being the Left, here represented by an opportunistic alliance of Marxist, Maoist, Anarchist groups, funded by international progressive NGOs.
Green being the colour of Islamic terrorism, of Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis.
This Red-Green is a potent and poisonous alliance. An alliance of Marx & Muhammad. Aka the Red-Green Alliance. Aka The Islamo-Communist Alliance. Whatever its name, it is highly dangerous.
These black-clad, keffiyeh-wearing, Palestinian-flag waving young devils are the spawn of the M&M alliance. “Anti-semitism” doesn’t cover it. Pure Jew-hatred is what it is. Pogroms in Europe is what we’re witnessing. Danger and chaos is what’s brewing.
In my view this alliance is more dangerous than the Brownshirts of Germany’s 1930s. Germany’s Jew-hatred, its pogroms, were secular. Vicious and genocidal, sure; but secular. Today’s is not just secular, but has a potent injection of divine steroids. It’s turbo-supercharged by Allah, that Murderous Supernatural Superbeing. “The One” (Muslims: point your index finger to the sky)… who not only encourages every Muslim to kill every Kuffar, (that would be me), but promises them eternal paradise if they fail. What a deal!
Once again: we warned you! We who studied the texts and the historic behaviours of Islam, warned about this decades ago, but were vilified as bigoted, racist and Islamophobic. France, the whole of Europe, have brought this existential danger on themselves.
Maybe they can reverse it. I hope so. But I doubt it. Islam don’t give up easy.
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“The French Protests in 9 Minutes”. Andrew Neil, ex BBC Anchor, resident in France,
“The Suburbs Burned First”. Gregg Roman, Middle East Insider
“The Pogrom Inside the Riots”. Noah Rothman. In full below the fold, courtesy of the National Review.
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| So Fong, 82’ gaff-rigged schooner, built 1930. In Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong |
Chung Yeung. Aka, the “Double Ninth”.
A day for Sweeping the graves. Showing Respect for one’s ancestors. That’s the holiday today, here in Hong Kong.
Saving old ships. Respect for maritime heritage. That’s my post for today, here in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s maritime heritage is embedded in the fabric of the city, but many of its hand-built wooden vessels have been lost to time and urban development. PostMag discovers how one dedicated organisation is racing to preserve this inimitable slice of boating history.
But back to the Double Ninth. It refers to today being 9-9 on the Chinese calendar. And to the number “nine” being associated with the “Yang” of Yin-Yang, Female-Male, from the I-Ching (Yi Jing), The Book of Changes. (Which I once read and tried to study until I admitted to myself that, really, it’s a farrago of superstitious nonsense…).
In short today is a day for Men. Double-Men Day. Let’s hear it for men! Less controversially, representing Health, Auspiciousness and Longevity.
I was once given $10,000 and asked for $1 in change. I asked why. The answer: Because that way I’ve given you $9,999.
“In what scenario is it necessary?”. Who needs it?” “Why doesn’t he end world hunger?” Or poverty, or sickness, or homelessness… and so, drearily, on…
Me? I prefer those who go “Wow!”
To those who go “Wah…”.
Of course the flying Tesla Roadster is a gimmick, but that sort of misses the point. It’s the tech flex! Which isn't a gimmick.Tesla's bulk business is about advanced technology from EV to self driving, but decided to create the most ridiculous manual drive supercar. Supercars are a gimmick almost by definition, based on how wild can you make them.The gimmick that can make the car literally fly, briefly, can make it corner like no other supercar and accelerate, literally like a dragster on a test track. It's got nothing to do with flying continuously, but having a car that will outperform every Lamborghini, Ferrari or McLaren with technology that they cannot replicate because it requires experience from space launches and computation that they don't have now nor will in future.So Porsche, Bugatti, Aston Martin just became legacy prestige brands, like Rolex, Richard Mille or Patek Philippe. These cars celebrate the bygone age and the baroque, physical complexity of the internal combustion engine just as mechanical watches do for non digital, complex time-keeping mechanisms.But they won't be faster, any more than a mechanical watch keeps better time than a Casio. They are now, de facto, mobile jewellery and no longer supercars with superlative performance. And this affects their ability to market the bulk business of mainstream European internal combustion engine cars.It's the end of an era of industrial era manufacturing.
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| Screenshot from Lars’ video below |
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani whining that his hijab-wearing auntie was stared at in the subway, the day after 911. Like, the next day. With the Twinn Towers lying in smouldering ruins. He’s upset that his auntie gets suspicious glances from fellow passengers.
That’s the epitome of Muslim victimhood. When all the figures at the time and even after 911, showed that Jews were attacked and vilified at much higher rates than any other ethnicity, including Muslims immediately after their co-religionist had killed 3,000 people on 911.
Norm McDonald mocked Muslim victimhood. And the suicidally empathetic who indulge it. He tweeted on 16 December 2016:
"What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?"
Time for my regular reminder that “Islamophobia” is a confected word, designed to stifle criticism of Islam. At which it’s been remarkably successful. It was an invention of the Muslim Brotherhood who had noted how effective the word “homophobia” had been. Hence “Islamophobia”.
Which Christopher Hitchens summed up as
“Islamophobia is a word invented by fascists, used by cowards to manipulate morons.”
Victimhood is very much a part of the Left’s playbook, a natural outgrowth of the Oppressor/Oppressed narrative.
“The cloying cult of Muslim victimhood“, Brendan O’Neill.
At the link, or in full below the fold, courtesy Spiked.
/ Snip:
The operation briefly stalled when an airline employee tried to argue that Dearborn was located within the United States. Federal officials reportedly advised the employee to visit Dearborn before making any further statements.
😂🤣!
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Federal immigration authorities announced today that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar would be deported from the United States to Dearborn, Michigan.
A Department of Justice investigation had uncovered falsified records used by Omar to illegally gain American citizenship. Upon revoking her citizenship, the DOJ signed off on an immediate deportation order, and Omar was placed on a one-way flight to Dearborn.
"Omar will finally be gone from the country she so deeply despises," announced Border Czar Tom Homan. "We wanted to send her somewhere she would feel more at home, and this saved us about $1,400 on airfare. It's not every day you can carry out an international deportation on a domestic Southwest flight."
Civil rights advocates protested the deportation, stating that it was cruel to send a U.S. Representative to a dangerous third-world country. "In Dearborn, women are not allowed to move about freely or dress how they wish. There is no freedom of speech or religion," said civil rights lawyer Ben Adams. "It is beyond evil to send Omar to such an awful place."
At publishing time, immigration agents stated that they would not be returning the phone they had confiscated from Omar, but she could have her pager back.
H/T Bee.
Here are 10 compelling reasons to vote for Democrats in 2026:
“The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.
The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards.”
