French Revolution

You can't imagine what a humongous fan I am of the French Revolution. I also love New Order songs... especially "Age of Consent," so this video above-- Oh God! No guillotines but, by the end, you get the point where all that excess it shows was leading. The French came to refer to Marie Antoinette as Madame Déficit and saw her as profligate self-serving, promiscuous (with Count Axel von Fersen, who looks very hot in the clip above) and reactionary.

Is Dr. Jordan Peterson’s worldview coherent? He is certainly eloquent and forceful when refuting many fallacious arguments from opponents, but has he questioned his presuppositions of classical liberalism? I don’t think he has and in this video we look at the good and the bad in Dr. Peterson’s arguments. The second half covers the ideological trek of how we got to the postmodern stage we are in now from the Middle Ages and is available at JaysAnalysis for 4.95 a month or 60.00 per year at the PayPal links.

I never forget Bastille Day; it's my parents wedding anniversary and I thought that was the coolest thing about their marriage. That Donald Trump was the guest of honor for the celebration of it today is a little bizarre, considering what it was all about.

Whether you've read A Tale of Two Cities or not, you know the French Revolution happened because the people were sick and tired of being sick and tired. Yes, the Revolution was about politics and religion and envy and many other things. But the spark was much more primal: hunger. Hunger based not on famine, but on the financial inability to provide food, because their money went to the building and upkeep of the palaces in whose shadows they lived.

It is sad that a nation defined by a great revolution has come to this: the docile copycat of a pseudo-ideological struggle at play elsewhere between globalism and nationalism. It is sad that in the country of Danton, Mirabeau, Montesquieu and de Gaulle millions have become resigned to their fate and submissive like farm animals.

Like many post-imperial western European states, France has not recovered easily from the scars of its lost empire.
The brutality of late-colonial French suppression of freedom fighters in French Indo-China (later Vietnam) and Algeria is among the darkest moments in French history and indeed all of European colonial history.
This is something that many in France continue to grapple with. The post-colonial collective conscience of France is still conflicted, angry and at times even desperate.

Then, just as liberalism began to transform the world, two pernicious ideas began to vie with it. Nationalism and socialism began to capture the imaginations of intellectuals and would eventually displace liberalism completely in the hearts and minds of the West.
Liberalism unlocked humanity’s creative potential, yielding the first ever rise of widespread abundance through industrial mass production. Nationalism and socialism unleashed humanity’s capacity for destruction, unleashing the first ever rise of industrial-scale mass murder.

Branko Malić
21st Century Wire

Party like Charlie Shee … er, Voltaire
Branko Malić
21st Century Wire
We continue with the introduction to Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, a veritable historical nucleus of modern conspiracy theory.

Branko Malić
21st Century Wire
What we nowadays call “conspiracy theory” is sometimes being refuted by simply pointing out the “fact” that people desperately need to make sense of the world, blame others for their own shortcomings, rationalize the unbearable randomness of history, etc.