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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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[BBC News] Violent clashes, looting and buildings ablaze in France as more than 1,200 arrested after protests

Again the ressentiment of the banlieues has spilled out into the rest of France (again), normally so distant, so deliberately and proudly ignorant, in that distinctly French way.

Some observations:

  1. The Anglo press seems to have no qualms calling this largely violent and destructive rioting. There’s the BBC headline above, but even CNN leads with the subtitle ‘riots spread across major cities’ and the imagery of the burning Limoges town hall, a beautiful example of classical architecture that has now fallen victim to the decisions of 1960s, only via a longer and more expensive form of demolition. Other websites are similarly descriptive, a far cry from mostly peaceful protests. The New York Times says “France reels from largest riots in years”. Perhaps this is the clarity of distance speaking, perhaps the end of Woke I, perhaps liberals get more upset about Paris burning than Minneapolis. I suspect a combination of all three.

  2. In general, Anglo elites, certainly liberal ones, have more exposure to the urban underclass than French elites do. The French sent them all to the suburbs to be forgotten so that the XVI could be preserved in perpetuity for themselves. Yes, there are a few homeless, some African touts, a couple of bad neighborhoods around big railroad stations, but by and large much of inner Paris is - riots aside - actually nicer, safer and better maintained than it was ten or twenty years ago. By contrast, in Britain or America elite housing and business districts in the urban core routinely abut absolute shitholes full of the worst scum these societies have to offer. Yes there are suburbs far away from the chaos, but those exist in every country and true bourgeois professionals consider them crass anyway. You can live in the West Village, possibly the most expensive neighborhood per square foot in America, and still be regularly accosted by scary homeless schizophrenic drug addicted people, who were also seemingly still in control of about half of Washington Square Park earlier this year the last time I went home. In San Francisco the Tenderloin is in the middle of the one of city’s central commercial districts, tech executives (some of whom live in Palo Alto but plenty of whom do actually have houses in San Francisco proper) have homeless people break into cars outside their $4m homes to defecate on the seat and rummage through their storage. In London, section 8 equivalent housing sits next to $20m mansions, too. Lib elites, for all their faults, actually confront more of their poor decisions in Anglo countries than in France, where the standard approach seems to be to just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.

    That is not to say, at all, that they make any better decisions. But SF liberal elites actually have to “and that’s a good thing”, which while delusional, involves a modicum more reflection than the head-in-the-sand policies of those who have and do run the fifth republic. There is a form of exposed ridiculousness in America because someone actually has to explain, with a straight face, why enforcing the law on broken tail lights is racist. In France, the equivalent policy would be that the police in the banlieues would just quietly decide they didn’t have the resources to enforce it.

  3. I actually think a lot of these demographics we see in this rioting accurately reflect the composition of under-25 year olds in major French cities. France bans all statistics on this kind of thing (see above), but demographic researchers have often suggested that the population of non-European first, second, third etc generation migrants in France is broadly quite similar to the equivalents in countries where governments do collect actual data, like the UK and Germany. Slightly higher, yes, but not substantially so. So if perhaps 21% of the UK is non-European, maybe the assumption was that it was 25% in France. I think it’s more like 35% in France, and I think among under 25s it’s probably more like 50%.

  4. One can’t deny that at least a noticeable minority of these rioters appear to be ethnic French. One thing one increasingly notices in a lot of European cities with native minorities, and London is a good example, is that the indigenous working class who remain largely assimilate with the migrant, typically Muslim, community, not the other way around. This makes intuitive sense, the white is deracinated and atomized, the Ummah is a after all a multicultural enterprise, and various South Asian and Arab Muslim parents are usually relatively racist against the other major ethnic group in these neighborhoods and so would far rather a daughter or son marry a white convert than, say, a British Somali. Anecdotally, I see small but growing numbers of white British Muslim, including many in South Asian dress, around parts of east London like Stratford now (yes, there are ginger Arabs, but I know an Anglo-Celtic phenotype when I see one). One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian. In the coming years and decades - and this is in part what Submission is about - many more of the remaining native populations will choose to assimilate themselves to this stronger, more forceful, more self-assured and ultimately more vital culture.

  5. There has been a lot of Raspail-posting on Twitter about these events, “they will burn your beautiful oak door” etc. I think what Raspail was correct about versus the ‘clash of civilizations’ types (they were right about some things, it must be said, but the particularly Islamic character of what is coming in Western Europe is not yet fully clear) is that a lot of this destruction is just a combination of entropy and lack of care or desire to care, rather than a particularly ideological hatred. Yes, there are educated 27 year old liberal hijabis at the Sorbonne well-versed in critical theory who can justify the burning of a 19th century city hall on the basis of anti-colonial resistance and the Franco-imperialist pacification of Algeria, but the rioting on the ground is primarily driven by rage, greed, and a fundamental lack of care or concern for the civilization, or the remnants of the civilization, in which these people live. This is something those indigenous French rioters, who have assimilated into another civilization (whether they have converted formally or merely abandoned their own identity for the void), also reject.

    We often forget that in the great historic conversions to Islam, it was overwhelmingly the converted natives who burned their temples and shrines and idols, who slaughtered their recalcitrant priests. We must expect more of that.

It continues to be marvelously unbelievable how deeply dedicated the western liberal democracies are to ensuring that boomers have a comfortable and cushy final 20-30 years of life.

I have posted on here before how this has become my ultimate blackpill and has turned me into a single issue voter. Almost every single pressing issue we face is downstream of this boomer retirement idolatry.

Shall I go down the list?

Housing - if a boomer’s house value goes down by a single dollar it is a genocide.

Health care - if we don’t keep them alive for infinity years with free healthcare and infinity third world immigrants to wipe their asses Jesus will weep.

National debt/fiscal policy - obviously they deserve to have free money in their accounts every month, with zero means-testing. After all, they PAID INTO IT (I can’t actually blame them too much for this, it’s sold that way by the government, but social security insurance was always a tax in all but name)

I hope the connection to France and these protests is clear. Would these third world behaviors and riots still occur? Maybe. But would those people even be here in the first place if we didn’t have the need for infinity dollars to boomer retirement and housing values? Infinity health care for them? Would the productive young people still feel demoralized about the future if they could afford a house and their government actually gave a shit about their future beyond just extracting and directing their productive capacity to ensuring old people get to enjoy 30 years of retirement (really it’s limitless if you can live long enough. Enjoy your free money and free healthcare and free African ass wiper).

Housing - if a boomer’s house value goes down by a single dollar it is a genocide.

Hyperbole aside, I am skeptical of the claim that it's the interest of boomers which are driving housing policy. To be sure, those boomers who bought houses between 1968 and 1995 have seen tremendous appreciation in home values, but there are other possible reasons for this increase other than legislative decisions aimed at serving the boomers.

A more likely scenario, in my opinion, is the urbanization trend which has been going on for quite some time now. For work, school, and cultural opportunities, lots of people want to live near big cities like New York, which arguably drives up the price of housing. An interesting example of this occurs in Israel, which has a much smaller overall percentage of baby boomers than the United States or Western Europe. And a government which is very much pro-growth. Nevertheless, it's crazy expensive to buy a house or apartment in Tel Aviv. And why not? That's where the fancy jobs are; that's where the nice restaurants are; etc.

So I guess I would ask for your evidence/argument for why housing shortages are due to legislative prioritization of baby boomers and not other causes such as urbanization.

Health care - if we don’t keep them alive for infinity years with free healthcare and infinity third world immigrants to wipe their asses Jesus will weep.

This was an issue 20 years ago, well before the first wave of boomers became eligible for Medicare. Of course, if your argument is simply that setting up the entire Social Security system created an entitlement program with a devoted constituency, making it difficult to cut even when fiscally advisable, then of course I would have to agree. At the moment it's the boomers who are benefiting but pretty soon Generation X will start becoming eligible for Medicare. And I am pretty confident that Generation X will be pretty adamant about receiving those benefits.

National debt/fiscal policy - obviously they deserve to have free money in their accounts every month, with zero means-testing.

I think there is means-testing in the sense that the government imposes a progressive tax on social security benefits. But anyway, as with Medicare this doesn't really seem like a Boomer problem so much as a systemic issue which resulted from decisions made back during the 1930s.

By the way, according to the AI, the annual program cost of Social Security is $1.609 billion while the annual receipts are $1.449 billion. Which is not ideal but it doesn't seem like a massive crisis waiting to happen. Just speculating, but I would guess the gap could be largely fixed through a modest increase in retirement age and higher taxes for wealthy recipients of Social Security.

That being said, given the rapid progress in AI, I doubt it's really necessary to increase retirement ages. Rather, I think that the government should get ready to start reducing the retirement age. Because the best case scenario with AI is that there is mass long-term unemployment. Which in practice means that the government needs to find a way to get money to people, and the obvious way to do this is to make use of the social welfare programs which are already set up: Social Security; Unemployment Insurance; etc.

Nobody derives from first principles 'ok I want a cushy retirement - so obviously the natural thing to do is to import a bunch of foreigners, many of which hate my country and burn things down and are super expensive because they don't like working and aren't very productive'... That's not a natural thought.

They don't produce wealth! How could they? The banlieues are not industrial. America's poor migrant street vendors are not the powerhouse of the US economy. America doesn't depend on Haitian workers in the meat packaging plants for US prosperity. Uber drivers and food delivery e-bike workers are not very productive, they cannot produce a surplus for boomers to skim off.

If the boomers were purely greedy, they'd prefer simpler policies like 'to make more wealth for my retirement, I'll pursue mechanization of the economy, robots and AI' or 'to ensure my house is expensive, let's restrict housing production.' There is an argument for importing people to raise house prices sure but 5 Uber drivers aren't going to raise house prices as much as one lawyer or engineer. The Uber drivers aren't buying detached houses in good areas, are they? It's technology, high end services, advanced manufacturing and finance that provides wealth that can be redistributed to the old.

Boomers might believe that mass immigration is needed to sustain their lifestyle but boomers are also relatively anti-immigration now in their old age. They voted for Brexit and Trump. Some of my boomer friends are unsettled by the demographic transformation they've seen, all the Chinese taking over certain suburbs.

Some boomers have an ideological commitment to multiculturalism and more accept the television's arguments that migration is needed to provide labour to care for them in their old age. The fundamental issue is ideological, not economic. There's never been a real economic case for mass immigration from poor countries, that doesn't make sense. The migrants get old and want pensions too! If it was just about needing labour for retirement homes, why not just import labour solely for retirement homes? No chain migration, no uber drivers or refugees pretending to be gay, just pick out care workers.

There's a teleological, ideological project of demographic transformation that then tries to justify itself economically. That's the real issue. It's like how in Britain they say 'oh mass migration is justified because of the Empire' but in Ireland they go 'Irish migrated out overseas, Ireland has always been a nation of immigrants' - these are just justifications produced afterwards.

It continues to be marvelously unbelievable how deeply dedicated the western liberal democracies are to ensuring that boomers have a comfortable and cushy final 20-30 years of life.

Is it though? That seems to make perfect sense: they're democracies.

What is strange is that rioting is typically not the activity of the old. So young people apparently riot when benefits to old people they were never gonna see themselves are cut. That's a psychological puzzle

So young people apparently riot when benefits to old people they were never gonna see themselves are cut. That's a psychological puzzle

I wouldn't call it that much of a puzzle. Young people accurately assess that they too will be old one day, and that receiving benefits at that time would be pleasant.

Very few are clear headed about gibs

I pay into my countries retirement plan, I have been for some time. I would be pretty annoyed if I had to pay the same amount or more for worse benefits. I anticipate this to happen, so I am in fact annoyed now. But the median person does not think this far ahead.

It's not that puzzling. Young conservatives pride themselves on basic moral superiority, the old have been established as morally superior to the young, so if you threaten the privilege of the old you are Literally Hitler and must die. (This also works for female privilege.)

It's an in-built instinctual response- I don't blame the young conservative, they were born that way. They're also going to destroy the country because those instincts are wrong, but at least they can say they killed and died for the right side of history, which is what matters to a six-foundation mind.

Anecdotally, I see small but growing numbers of white British Muslim, including many in South Asian dress, around parts of east London like Stratford now (yes, there are ginger Arabs, but I know an Anglo-Celtic phenotype when I see one). One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian.

Interesting. I occasionally pass hijabi women in the street who are clearly ethnically Irish and who I assume converted at their husbands' request, but I don't remember ever encountering an Irishman in Ireland who had converted. (I have an Irish friend in London who met a Syrian girl and converted, although I think they both understood it was just a formality.) Maybe it's only a matter of time.

I occasionally pass hijabi women in the street who are clearly ethnically Irish and who I assume converted at their husbands' request

I'm not doubting your lived experience queen, but my mind is being blown.

Like an Irish lady, who went to Irish highschool, who then some time met a Muslim fellow and now voluntarily wears a headdress?

To be fair, would you notice if you passed a man in the street who converted to Islam? A man can convert while changing absolutely nothing about his appearance or dress.

Countless times I've seen Muslim men wearing typical modern fashion with their wives wearing a head wrap or more.

If these guys were white and by themselves no one would naively think they were Muslims.

True. I can't remember ever seeing an ethnic Irishman wearing traditional Islamic dress (e.g. a thawb), a traditional beard, or a garment or adornment associated with that faith (e.g. a crescent moon pendant). But you're right that my friend officially converted to Islam without changing anything about his appearance.

I would guess, given the demographics of both gamers and rioters, that video game stores are disproportionately looted.

Dying to know the context of this.

Something about French redditors being upset about videogame stores being terribly affected.

"Mon jeu!"

France bans statistics

There are some clever ways to figure out the demographics, like looking at the names of newborns and calculating the name-origin frequencies; 30% of births in Paris have a Muslim or African name. If you combine this with a study on the likelihood of immigrants choosing a typical European name, you could probably arrive at a decent prediction of demographics among Parisians.

I think part of the reason the Pelicot gang-rape case didn't get as much attention as it perhaps should have was that, going by their names, at least 24% of the perpetrators were of Arab extraction; in other words they were 3.5x overrepresented relative to their share of the French population.

I think part of the reason the Pelicot gang-rape case didn't get as much attention as it perhaps should have

Huh? How much more attention could something have gotten?

I think it got significantly less attention than the Cornell 7, for instance.

Pelicot was front page on e.g. The Guardian, FT, etc. where the Cornell 7 were not. She also got a NYT magazine cover story.

They go by first name which undercounts things since plenty of Christian French Africans have French names.

Are we sure that this isn't a story about assimilation into local culture? France has been doing this since at least 1789.

One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian.

It sounds like this guy has a (presumably) loving wife, and I don't. Who is the real loser here?

I didn't think @2rafa was saying this guy was a loser.

Out of curiosity, for young and mobile French aware of this and wanting to escape the probable Islamist wave, what are their best options? There's Quebec and Germany with large French speaking populations, but they may not be long in following down a similar path. There's the US, but going to an Anglo country may be a big culture shock for them. Historically though, the US has a Jeffersonian pro-French bias embedded in the culture, freedom fries notwithstanding, so the US may be willing to expedite large waves of French immigration under a friendly executive.

There's French speaking Switzerland, but it's absorption capacity is rather limited.

Louisiana still has civil law but by this point imagine a totally alien culture.

Cajun French is generally easier to understand for metropolitan French speakers than Quebecois, because Cajun, like most creole languages, uses no inflections(yes, some inflections are written, but they are in the half of the French word which isn't pronounced). However, almost no one under seventy speaks it. Cajuns are, at this point, basically just Catholic harder-drinking rednecks with better food, and follow the usual patterns of redneck populations elsewhere in the country culturally- a huge wigger underclass occupying itself with drug use and a mostly country dixie upper 2/3 outmigrating to sun belt metroplexes. Acadiana itself is a depressing place with high crime rates, high average ages, horribly intractable poverty, and where substance abuse is the norm.

There is a fairly small elite group that is meaningfully more 'French/Cajun', but it's a tiny elite clique that has largely abdicated its responsibility to govern(in fairness, under substantial pressure to do so).

I am not convinced that this is primarily the work of ethnic non-French. The livestreams I watched had plenty of ethnic French people in them. But I am definitely open to the possibility that it is majority ethnic non-French.

The idea that ethnic French need Algerians to teach them how to riot also strikes me as unconvincing, given France's history.

I, like you, noticed that there isn't much "riots are the language of the unheard" messaging in mainstream media about these riots. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that this is because France is seen as a fragile linchpin of the whole US-led neoliberal order. But I don't think that's really the explanation. Too complicated, and wouldn't explain why even The Guardian isn't wholly on board. I think it's more likely that the ideas around African Americans and their history are just uniquely potent, which explains the mainstream's submissive reactions to BLM violence.

A few years ago I would have been against something like the France riots, but now I find myself sympathetic and wishing that Americans would start rioting as well. Politics as usual is showing itself to be incompetent to handle the problems of economic stagnation, corruption, enshittification, and the potential problem of AI job loss. Middle class Americans have been trained to believe that if they are poor, it is entirely their fault. This ideology was a good adaptation to the conditions of early America, but not a good adaptation to today's more zero-sum situation. In our current situation, a better adaptation for those outside the ranks of the elites might be to blame everything on the rich and to scare the living shit out of them until they give up their resources.

Does capitalism work better in the long term than socialism? Does it lift all boats higher than socialism does? In the conditions of 20th century economics, yes, undoubtedly. In the conditions that we are now entering, however, I am not so sure. In any case, I don't care much. To the degree that I have any socialist tendencies, they are selfish -- I'm not primarily concerned with what economic system is more moral or is better for the majority of people. If capitalism lifts all boats higher 30 years from now but leaves me poor for the next 30 years, I will support something other than capitalism. If I become rich, it is quite possible that I will start to support the current system.

The culture war angle about the riots is interesting when it comes to the most mouth-frothing types on places like X. I find myself in the position of disliking both sides. One side is making mouth noises I like about taking down the elites, but are also, realistically speaking, probably much too bought into the lefty memeplex, including the anti-white stuff, for my liking. And obviously there is a significant Islamist component. As a social liberal, I view the Islamic memeplex as being primitive barbarity. Do I have any illusions that if the rioters gained power it would actually be good for people at me? No, I view them as a potentially useful tool, not as a beneficial new ruling class.

The other side says things like "the Limoges town hall is worth more than thousands of rioters". And personally, I don't really care that much about the lives of the rioters, but I also don't give a single shit about the Limoges town hall. If burning it scares the elite, then I support burning it. Would I feel the same way about rioters burning, say, my building? Or would I feel the same way if they burned down thousands of city halls rather than just a few? No. But like I already said, my support is selfish, it's not some grand moral statement about what political/economic system is more just. I just hope that acts of this nature do not cause ordinary people to lose their lives. I'm fine with some degree of burning, but am not comfortable with killing people of my own socioeconomic class or below, and am squeamish even about the idea of killing the rich. Obviously the actual riots have burned hundreds of small shops and the like, which I do not support.

Does capitalism work better in the long term than socialism? Does it lift all boats higher than socialism does? In the conditions of 20th century economics, yes, undoubtedly. In the conditions that we are now entering, however, I am not so sure

The condition being massive welfare states - used by capitalists to fend off socialists at first - eating up more and more of the nation's money and vitality? I'm not really sure what that has to do with the old capitalist-socialist ideological debate.

You can't build because boomers want to keep their house prices up (and keep certain people out), you're taxed to shit to pay for welfare systems meant to solve elder poverty that never expected this fertility rate matched to this level of support for even well-off boomers, you get migrants because nobody wants this gravy train to stop. Trying to blame the rich, or capitalism, as this new class of Gary Stevenson populists do is just cope from people who can't admit that the system they're so proud of is fundamentally flawed and in danger.

If we don't want to blame the problem on socialism, I don't see how we can blame it on capitalism.

but I also don't give a single shit about the Limoges town hall. If burning it scares the elite, then I support burning it.

You should. Things like beautiful historic public infrastructure are the pieces that tell us we can work together and have a shared heritage.

Burning them down doesn't say "I'm serious" to the elites and others, it says "I am stupid, shortsighted, and my complaints can be dismissed out of hand and the whining of petulant violent children."

The response of elites and conservatives is seen here, the above is the good outcome, realistically many want literal death in response.

There's little protest value and a tremendous amount of further destabilization.

In our current situation, a better adaptation for those outside the ranks of the elites might be to blame everything on the rich and to scare the living shit out of them until they give up their resources.

The American and French fiscal problems are not because the rich are hoarding too many resources. Primarily they're being caused by the fact that spending is out of control because every interest group needs a cut to secure their votes in a democracy, and it's politically intractable to cut back entitlements to the base once they've been offered.

To the extent that every elite billionaire got fully expropriated at the full paper value of their assets, and without considering any of the obvious second-order effects that this would cause, neither France nor America could fund their current level of spending for even a year longer; much like the NBA players who end up going broke, you can always spend more money no matter how much you make.

To he degree that I have any socialist tendencies, they are purely selfish -- I'm not primarily concerned with what economic system is more moral or is better for the majority of people.

If AI really does unlock infinite labour and productivity, then sure, I'll be alongside you in the socialist protest lines for whatever good it'd do. Clearly we're very far from that point in the current state of the world though, and rampant welfarism is what's actually breaking the backs of pretty much every modern democracy.

I think this is the ultimate issue of democracy. The goal is to loot the treasury for your political allies. This works okay as long as the money doesn’t run out. Unfortunately, we’re now in the era where we no longer have enough productive labor to prop up the gibs. And so you have the fun of watching as political parties try to decide whether to cut off the gibs and save the country, or continue the gibs lest the entitled burn down the country.

Members of a demographic that has dictated politics for their entire natural life due to its sheer size most likely to believe strict majoritarianism is the most just/stable/holy system of government ever devised.

In other news, the wetness of water now in dispute.

Or more accurately, the boomer gibs are out of control. It's not every group in France it's really just the retirees. If we compare to say Sweden, which doesn't run a budget deficit but also has high social spending, more than the entire budget deficit comes from the difference in pensions (higher pensions, much earlier age of retirement).

What is bizarre is that younger people are supporting and protesting in favour of the system that very obviously won't benefit from themselves (or their children, it's just this generation of retirees). Perhaps that will change if people realise that this just is intergenerational exploitation.

Probably I am paranoid, but I strongly suspect that these types of riots (and also the BLM riots in the US) are organized and stoked by the Left. To be sure, they are playing with fire, but I don't see this as the next step in an Islamic takeover.

Remember the Time article about "fortifying" the election? It made no secret of the fact that zoom meetings were held and coordination was done to avoid any October 2020 riots that would have pushed voters to Trump. If those groups were able coordinate to avoid riots, then the obvious unspoken conclusion is that they can coordinate to cause them (or at least fail to coordinate and allow them to happen).

Isn't it reasonable to distinguish positive from negative action?

If we held everyone accountable for every potential intervention not taken, we'd still be in Afghanistan.

Under the circumstances of the article, no. There was no explanation of why they were powerless to stop the June 2020 riots or an explanation of why they failed to do so. If they evidently have that power, then they need to explain why they didn't use it.

Otherwise, giving them the benefit of the doubt is simply cooperating with defect-bot. They have explained how they manipulated procedural outcomes to get their desired result. They bragged about it, even. It was in a national publication! I have no control over how you or others act, but I decline to apply mistake theory when someone has openly declared they are operating under conflict theory.

'Paranoid'? Jean-Luc Melenchon is just openly cheering it on.

Marine Le Pen couldn't hope for a better piece of propaganda than gangs of immigrant youths torching beautiful French buildings. If the left is behind this, it's a pretty stupid move.

Marine Le Pen couldn't hope for a better piece of propaganda than gangs of immigrant youths torching beautiful French buildings. If the left is behind this, it's a pretty stupid move.

I would say it depends on how the media spins it. Really terrible things can be great PR if spun the right way. Surely there will be videos of French riot police beating people up.

And videos of white French youths engaging in firey, but mostly peaceful protests.

And as always: most "immigrant" youths are natural born citizens whose parents or grandparents immigrated.

Obviously the hard left in France strongly encouraged the protests that led to these riots, that’s not a conspiracy. Melenchon was cheering them on, and the next presidential election is probably him vs Le Pen. But the old white left in these countries largely doesn’t really understand the migrant underclass. If anything they remind me of those bourgeois Tehran communists who allied with the Islamists during the Islamic Revolution, before the latter swiftly and brutally dispatched the former. They are naive, they are stupid, they are fighting the battles of the 20th century, they do not understand the forces at play.

Obviously the hard left in France strongly encouraged the protests that led to these riot

It's not obvious to me. But then again, I haven't been following the situation in France.

But the old white left in these countries largely doesn’t really understand the migrant underclass.

I think the most charitable interpretation is that they see the right as a huge and immediate threat. As basically Nazis at the gates. From that perspective it makes sense to ally oneself with Muslims.

For those who want to see how it'll play out: the Green Party is going to be a bloodless example soon. They're already being outflanked by the Gaza voters they let in when Israel became one of the more important nodes of the Omnicause, they're already folding to more and more extreme statements that will squeeze out leftists who can't live with their stance on zionism and eventually they'll just try to knock over Polanski and replace him with one of their own.

Probably I am paranoid, but

I thought that was the mainstream consensus. Why would that idea make you paranoid?

I thought that was the mainstream consensus. Why would that idea make you paranoid?

I'm not following the situation in France carefully.

I would suspect the geopolitical rivals who have an interest in weakening Western countries in any and all ways. Inciting unrest is an important tool in the kit. This does not only, as the mainstream media would suggest, involve supporting the 'far right' (anyone right of the left), but will definitely also involve supporting the far left and various 'communist-adjacent' discontents, and stoking the resentments and confusions of the non-GDP-increasing minorities and Muslims. A Western country which has deep internal divisions, mistrust and riots cannot rally to combat the rise of the Chinese-Russian-Iranian-etc block.

They don't have to pick a dog in the fight or make sure anyone 'wins'. They just have to increase the amount of fighting and wasting of various resources and capacities that happens.

It's pretty hard to see the Islamic surge really going anywhere civilizationally, though. Outbreeding is one thing but the track record for modern Muslim states is pretty dismal and the best case scenario seems to be 'Muslim landlords with petrodollar lottery don't get in the way of actually-productive religious/ethnic minorities too much. Sure Europe as an institution could fall off, but I think it's more likely to just create irrelevancy and ennui than actually snowball into any particular super relevant Muslim bloc

There has been a huge diversity, over the last 1300 years, of Islamic states, many of which were comparatively advanced and well-run for the time. I certainly wouldn’t deny that. There are a lot of quite functioning things in the gulf countries.

But I think this goes to what @Ioper and @crushedoranges were discussing (and disagreeing on) below, namely that what is being imported isn’t really a functioning (however you might define functioning) Islamic civilization at all. You can’t say “well, there are things that work quite well about Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi and Oman”. This - if anything - is why Houellebecq isn’t pessimistic enough in Submission. The Emiratis and Saudis, in his novel, ultimately take control of France and it continues in a somewhat civilized way and life is good, as long as you are a man and convert (as per @BurdensomeCount). But let’s not forget that the Emiratis literally banned their own citizens from studying abroad in the UK for a period last year because so many were coming back radicalized (they only relented, apparently, after the UK sent some support when they were being attacked or at risk of being attacked by Iran).

What is instead being created is a kind of red-green coalition, built on rage and anger which will no doubt only swell as mass automation hits shortly. The resentment of the student class maybe initially enables the destructive rage of the underclass, they feed off each other, the former covering for the latter until the former is no longer necessary. There is no goal but free money, more distribution, things will burn until they get it. You might just as easily say (and you would be correct) that many white protestors in BLM rallies cared more about the ideology of Black Lives Matter than many black protestors did.

I mean the record isn’t good in the last 100 years. They don’t really innovate. Jews have a vibrant tech sector, a modern military, and a thriving democracy. Arabs have oil, and were it not for that, MENA outside of Israel would be as economically viable as South America or Central Asia. Nobody would know about them, just like nobody cares about the goings on in Peru or Chile or Kazakhstan.

Yeah, I don't think many people are expecting a new caliphate, just a slip into decline along the Brazil, South Africa, Haiti axis.

Politics will be held hostage to ethnic voting blocs that demand privileges. The magnificent cultural artifacts built over a millennium will be neglected and occasionally burned for lulz. The culture will be vulgar. The streets will be unsafe. It will probably be for the best if the UK and France give up their nukes prior to the takeover, just like South Africa did. There's still a lot of time before that needs to happen though.

Now it's Europe's turn to experience what happened to American cities in the North after WWII. Except the black population in America has been pretty stable for the last 50 years or so. Not so the Third World population of France and England, which is a growing rapidly.

It's tempting as an American to say that France deserves what is happening to them. But I think that's unfair. Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia didn't deserve what happened to them either. Sometimes bad things just happen and everyone is responding to their own individual incentives.

The thing is it's not merely a lack of caring of the "remnants of civilisation" here. Make no mistake, the state has extreme power, and can and will use it -- as you will witness if you make any effort to stop mass migration or its destruction.

They will freeze your bank accounts, block your social media, imprison you, or outright shoot you if necessary. The state is alive and well, it's just on the enemy team.

the imagery of the burning Limoges town hall

This pisses me off to no end. Time to bring back the reverse Guillotine. These "people" are replacable, the architecture and history isn't.

Yes there are suburbs far away from the chaos, but those exist in every country and true bourgeois professionals consider them crass anyway.

Never was a fan of this snobbery. Especially now with WFH become more normalised.

In the coming years and decades - and this is in part what Submission is about - many more of the remaining native populations will choose to assimilate themselves to this stronger, more forceful, more self-assured and ultimately more vital culture.

Indeed. For anybody reading this, you are welcome to join and you will be treated like a full brother or sister no different from any other brother or sister. Genuinely recommend it. However you should make sure that it's what you want to do because it's a serious and very big life decision.

Raspail-posting

Even the name Raspail sounds like some sort of portmanteu of Rasputin and Pale/Wail etc. etc. Conjures to mind images of some self professed clairvoyant mystic crying about whites being removed from positions of power in the future, which tbh, is basically what The Camp of the Saints is about, so chalk one up for whatever this variant of nominative determinism is...

Indeed. For anybody reading this, you are welcome to join and you will be treated like a full brother or sister no different from any other brother or sister.

This is not what African Muslim converts say about how Arabs treat them. And you yourself have posted repeatedly about how you consider yourself a higher class of being than the peasants ( but still Muslim!) who fetch and carry for you at home.

And of course, if there is one group that treats Arabs more brutally than the Israelis, it's other Arabs. Let's not even get into Shia versus Sunni.

Your own attitudes bely the pretty words about a universal Ummah. It's no more true than Christians saying " We are all brothers and sisters in Christ."

And you yourself have posted repeatedly about how you consider yourself a higher class of being than the peasants ( but still Muslim!) who fetch and carry for you at home.

Hey, converting means you don't get treated like a dhimmi anymore or as "not a real Muslim" or anything like that. The Arabs have this bad habit (they've had it for over 1200 years, the fall of the Ummayads was in big parts becuase the Arab Muslims kept treating the convert Muslims worse and it lead to serious resentment) but it's a speicifc Arab flaw, not anything to do with Islam or Muslims more genreally.

It doesn't mean that everyone is equal within the class of all Muslims. Yes, we are all equal before God, but that's because the differences between us are negligible in comparison to how Great God is (sort of like floating point precision smoothing), and not about how we're all equal as humans otherwise.

And of course, if there is one group that treats Arabs more brutally than the Israelis, it's other Arabs.

Again, a very specific Arab flaw. I'm not even a particularly big fan of Arabs personally, the Eastern ones lucked out with oil and now seem to think they rule the place, while in reality they aren't any different to Algerians or Tunisians or Libyans, some more humility from them would be very welcome.

But hey, if you're curious, your nearest mosque is probably not too far away (and only going to get closer as time goes by). There's no pressure either way.

Again, a very specific Arab flaw. I'm not even a particularly big fan of Arabs personally, the Eastern ones lucked out with oil and now seem to think they rule the place, while in reality they aren't any different to Algerians or Tunisians or Libyans, some more humility from them would be very welcome.

I'm not sure that's fair; the record of countries discovering massive amounts of natural resource wealth and using it to improve the lives of their citizens seems mixed at best (Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran come immediately to mind). I think places like the UAE and Bahrain deserve some credit.

I'm interested in you saying you're not huge on Arabs though. Am I correct that this is a minority view among non-Arab Muslims? My sense was that Arabs are basically the most admired ethnic group among Muslims, being the progenitors of the religion, the Quran being written in Arabic, and so on.

As someone who has studied the Middle East and Islam, and has a working knowledge of Arabic (don't ask me to recite the Quran or anything, I have zero interest in tajweed), I will pass on your offer. I know too much about Islam. (And the Quran is shitty Bible fanfiction, second only to the Book of Mormon in transparent and low-quality mimicry, inexplicably adored by people who turn off all literary faculties to convince themselves otherwise.)

and only going to get closer as time goes by

Bro, I'm far from the most Islamophobic person here, but this triumphal colonialist attitude of yours really makes me start sympathizing with the Retvrns.

I would much prefer to be Justian without the plague as opposed to Severus III

Perhaps this is the clarity of distance speaking, perhaps the end of Woke I, perhaps liberals get more upset about Paris burning than Minneapolis. I suspect a combination of all three.

I will note for the record that the yellow vests are said to include Le Pen supporters as well as Mélenchon supporters.

The statistics i'm aware of actually seem to suggest the opposite. Pew's estimates for Europe show negative net conversion rates for Islam, IE more people leaving the religion than joining it.

The growth of Islam in Europe is largely driven by migration, and to a lesser extent higher birth rates, although even that difference seems to be disappearing quite rapidly. French statistics show fertility among the children of immigrants converging towards that of the native population already by the second generation.

Meanwhile, Muslims are secularising too. In France, for example, 28% of second-generation people of North African origin identify as nonreligious, compared with 10% of the immigrant generation.

So the overall picture seems to be one of Islam growing because of immigration, while both Christians and Muslims are losing people to secularism. There are of course strongly religious groups within both religions that are much more resistant to this, but they're not necessarily representative of the wider populations.

If anything, the statistics seem to point in the opposite direction to what you're suggesting. The big religious shift in Europe is towards secularism, not Islam, as Pew's more recent research also shows.

Also, the number of Britons converting to Islam is microscopic. For every dude like the one in your example there are like 2-3 former Muslims engaging actual apostasy, not merely secularising. Nevermind the massively larger native British population.

I do agree that Islam is a big problem but let's be clear, its largely a problem of continued immigration. Islam isn't some memetically impervious ideology, it keeps growing in the west because they're replenished from the outside.

This is where descriptions of overt religious observance are less important, though. In many deeply Muslim countries, weekly mosque attendance (including for men) is below 50%. It’s not really about mosque attendance. It’s not really even about belief.

It’s about a much deeper cultural substrate. It’s about much deeper questions of identity and belonging. There’s that popular online meme mocking young western second and third generation Muslim men who drink, do or deal drugs, go out and hook up with (presumably non-Muslim) women, certainly don’t pray five times a day, but categorically, absolutely refuse to eat pork. The joke is the hypocrisy, but while it’s funny the irony misunderstands the point. They are still Muslims in a civilizational sense. Behaving like Baltimore gang members in St Denis doesn’t change that. Fucking a white girl doesn’t change that. A deracinated English boy who speaks Multicultural London English, goes to a 70% Muslim school, says in casual passing alhamdullilah and mashallah and inshallah brother (and versions of these boys are a feature of poor neighborhood public schools everywhere from Dublin to Vienna, by the way) is no longer a civilizational member of his ancestral culture. He may look like an Englishman, if you put him in tweed and send him to the Yorkshire dales. But he is no longer one in some real cultural sense.

It’s about a much deeper cultural substrate. It’s about much deeper questions of identity and belonging.

This sounds like The Troubles: it's often described as "Protestant v. Catholic", but the Pope and the Queen (literally the heads of the most prominent churches involved) were loudly not supporters of the conflict. But still the conflict persisted.

Uh, wasn't the main protestant church involved the wee frees, who are not headed by the british monarchy?

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on this, but all the descriptions I've read have given me the understanding that it was about religion only in the "deeper cultural substrate" sense, although not completely decoupled from the actual churches.

I recall someone here referencing a joke about whether a victim was "a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist". Similarly, the Unionists didn't always seem keen to listen to, well, the Union side, of which the Queen was head of state.

says in casual passing alhamdullilah and mashallah and inshallah brother

I'm unironically a fan of the phrase "X and inshallah", when used to refer to not having any damn plan. Sounds niftier than "X and pray".

What's wrong with "and God help us"?

I say "inshallah" casually. I remember once a bunch of people stopping and asking if I was muslim. No it's just funny

I use "God willing" in English occasionally. The meaning "except if prohibited by Providence" is otherwise a bit difficult to phrase.

This isn't about overt religious observance, which of course is far lower, it's about people actively identifying as non-religious.

The rest I'm not sure how to respond to since it's so vague and unfalsifiable. I'll note that the people you're complaining about would never have gone to the Yorkshire dale in tweed, mass migration or not. You're comparing the modern underclass with the historical upper middle class.

To be clear, I think Islam is really bad and immigration from muslim nations is bad and becoming worse; that doesn't mean people are becoming Muslim or Muslim culturally. The integration almost exclusively goes the other way. These people on aggregate just suck though.

If we were being overcome by Saladins and Ibn Khalduns and Abu Hurayras, one could - if grudgingly - accept defeat and conquest, for that is the way of things. But instead we are being choked to death by the alcohol-drinkers and the gang-rapers and the welfare-collectors, enabled by their watermelon compradors.

It makes one despair.

There is a bright side: if you were overcome by Saladins there'd be nothing to learn! Everyone understands losing to a Hannibal.

If Western civilization does die (dubious) it'll be a reinforcement of the importance of the concept of decadence which it, reasonably, thought it had demoted to the same status as polio.

My racism is a bit out of date - but isn't watermelon associated with the one of the types of black people Europe actually doesn't have problems with their integration or behavior

In the US at least "Watermelon" is a Commie who pretends to be an Environmentalist. Ie "green on the outside but a red on the inside".

Watermelon is an african-american stereotype, but I think in context it means 'commies deep down'.

Used to be, kind of still is, depending on the context? Can also refer to Environmentalist Commies (green outside, red inside), or pro-Palestinians (presumably watermelons were/are grown in Palestine, and the flag has red/green/black like a watermelon w/seeds?).

I was meaning the green-reds. But the pro-pali left is accurate, too.

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