Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2026

“This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme“

Filed under: France, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

After an earlier post of his went viral, Maarten Boudry revisits the same topic but this time with references and footnotes that he regretted not including in the original:

This was not a carefully argued analysis, but an impassioned cry from the heart, dashed off in the heat of the moment after watching the horrific scenes of wanton destruction in France. To my surprise, the post blew up: it received thousands of likes and reposts, was translated into multiple languages and was cited in several newspapers. I was flooded with interview requests, which I declined because I’m still working on my book.

As a sometime academic, however, I felt a bit embarrassed that my little rant contained no sources and little in the way of actual argumentation. A dereliction of duty! So, to make it up to you, I want to elaborate on one of its underlying ideas: that “useful idiots” on the left have been marching alongside Islamists, and that the Palestinian flag has become the joint symbol of hatred for Western civilization. This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-leftism), and elsewhere as the Red-Green alliance. Does it really exist, and in what sense? Is it an orchestrated plot, or more of a rapprochement of convenience?1 And are the warm feelings mutual?

Come to think of it, I happen to have some academic expertise on the topic.

Photo from Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A conspiracy theory?

If we are to believe the vast majority of academics and journalists, Islamo-leftism is nothing but a “conspiracy theory” — a far-right fever dream in the same category as the Great Replacement or Judeo-Bolshevism. In 2021, more than 600 academics said as much in an open letter in Le Monde. As someone who has written several academic papers on conspiracy theories, I’m here to tell you: not only are these people clueless, they are part of the problem. They are abusing the valuable concept of “conspiracy theory” to shut down debate, much like the premature dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis during the pandemic.

A conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, is an unproven and speculative hypothesis about a secret and sinister plot hatched by a relatively small group of people. Typically, the very lack of hard evidence for the conspiracy is taken as proof that the conspirators are fiendishly clever and have covered their tracks. In my academic work, I have dubbed such self-sealing theories the intellectual equivalent of a black hole: once you’ve dived in, it’s hard to claw your way back out.

The rapprochement between parts of the left and Islam is none of these things. It is hiding in plain sight and has been extensively documented. Granted, some of the leftist romance with Islam may stem from secret funding by Qatar and Iran — which would qualify as a genuine “conspiracy”2 — but by and large these factors are incidental. The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.

  1. See Rob Henderson’s interview with Franziska Sittig, co-author of the 2025 book Intellectual Self-Destruction: How the West Gambles Away Its Future (the book is on my to-read pile)
  2. See this shocking piece by Ella Kenan about the secret plans of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, which amount to an actual conspiracy.

Penguins, man

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Penguins may be the reason we can’t have nice things … or they would be if they hadn’t gone extinct. You didn’t hear that? That’s because it didn’t happen, like so many events predicted by climate scientists over the last few decades. John Robson has the details:

Emperor Penguins on Snow Hill Island, Antarctica.
Photo by Ian Duffy via Wikimedia Commons.

We read in Phys.org that “Penguin poop is melting Antarctic snow by keeping algae green”. And of course we ask: Haven’t penguins lived there for millions of years? Answer: yes. Penguins evolved some 60 million years ago but Antarctica has only had significant ice coverage for 34 million. Yet they never kept it green, or turned it green, despite their predilection for dramatic defecation, until we invented climate. A story that caught our eye not just for the notion that a long-standing natural process could suddenly transform a continent but because we’d just also been told by National Geographic that climate change is driving penguins to extinction. But climate science is not like other kinds.

Despite waddling around looking comically unfit to survive in nature red in tooth and claw, penguins, with the very cool scientific name Sphenisciformes, actually flourish from the equator to the South Pole, with larger and thus better-insulated ones obviously being more common where it’s colder. It’s all part of the marvel of nature, including that having first developed the power of flight, which seems to us terrestrials like the A1 supreme deluxe way of avoiding being eaten, getting to food fast etc., some birds then chucked it to go back to running around but with fewer legs, like ostriches and emus but also kiwis and, in the good old terrifying days, the “terror birds” who ran up to 30 mph, stood up to 9 feet tall and “ripped the flesh from the body of other animals” and whose very name “Phorusrhacidae” is already frightening.

Others even decided running was also not for the birds, and walking was barely tolerable, so they jumped back into the water from which their ancestors had emerged during the Devonian. And it worked. Indeed, speaking of penguins’ evolution, Wikipedia adds that:

    There was a great diversity of species in subantarctic regions, and at least one giant species in a region around 2,000 km south of the equator 35 mya, during the Late Eocene, a climate decidedly warmer than today.

Warmer than today? Say it ain’t so! But it is. And a giant penguin, due to the fact that life likes warmth and struggles in cold. (There’s a reason Emperor Penguins are as lonely as they are hardy.) Now however we are doing them in. The NG article starts:

    In the storm-driven wilderness between South America’s southern cape and the frozen boundary of mainland Antarctica, the South Sandwich Islands form an isolated, crescent-shaped archipelago of rock and ice. Its rugged, northernmost isle, Zavodovski Island – where chinstraps and macaroni penguins blanket the hillsides that surround an active volcano – has held the title of the largest penguin colony on Earth.

And we know what you’re thinking. If the place is bristling with penguins, they must have pooped away the snow long ago. Unless they all died, which apparently they did:

    as chinstrap penguins began facing steep decline across the Antarctic Peninsula starting in the 1980, scientists wondered whether this remote island was faring any better. Through an analysis combining aerial drone surveys and manual population counts, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that in fewer than fifteen years, the island’s chinstrap population has plummeted by 63 percent – a loss of over half a million penguins.

And not for climate biologists the boom-and-bust cycle we learned about back in ye day in high school biology. Heck no:

    Their findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, identifies the island as home to the fastest-declining chinstrap population in the world, with climate-driven losses documented continuously since 2011. The decline wipes out more than a quarter of the total penguin population on Zavodovski, ceding the island’s title of world’s largest penguin colony to Cape Adare in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

Note the phrase “climate-driven losses”. Since we don’t know what climate is driving or how it’s untestable. But it’s taking us with the penguins:

    The Southern Ocean is no stranger to loss. This news comes just six months after Emperor penguins and Antarctic fur seals were officially declared endangered with declining sea ice levels cited as a leading culprit. Acting as the planet’s primary climate buffer, the Southern Ocean absorbs nearly three-quarters of global ocean warming and a fifth of man-made carbon.

Again, how you’d test any of those assertions is anyone’s guess, though whether they’re going to ask for and get grants to test them is a certain no.

Come to think of it, we’ve discussed the plight of the Emperor Penguin before. Even if you don’t read the old post, I do encourage you to watch the embedded video.

The Little Panzers That Said I Think I Can – Panzer I & II – Rearmament 11

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Oct 2026

How did the Panzer I and Panzer II help Germany defeat armies equipped with more powerful tanks? Armed with machine guns or a 20mm cannon, these little panzers helped spearhead a very big, very ugly war.

In this episode of Nazi Rearmament, Spartacus Olsson follows Germany’s early light tanks from their interwar development and the Spanish Civil War to the invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. We examine their design, armament, armor, production, and battlefield performance, and how they helped build the Panzerwaffe before more capable tanks were available in sufficient numbers.

Against opponents such as the French Char B1 bis and British Matilda II, their limitations were severe. But tank battles alone did not decide campaigns. Training, communications, concentrated mobile formations, and cooperation with infantry, engineers, artillery, and aircraft helped turn these modest vehicles into effective instruments of conquest. In France in 1940, those advantages combined with a risky German operational plan and Allied command failures to produce a devastating victory.

Their story also exposes the growing gap between Hitler’s ambitions and Germany’s industrial resources. Early victories encouraged further aggression, bringing occupation, exploitation, and mass murder to millions while drawing Germany into a war against an increasingly powerful coalition.

The generational difference in how young right wingers see the left

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens says that there’s a signficant difference in how older and younger conservatives view their opponents on the left:

You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.

When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.

These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.

When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.

We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.

We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.

Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.

They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.

A few days later, he also commented:

This blew up because people realize the age of discourse is coming to a close.

Discourse itself is meaningless at this point because discourse requires moral alignment, which is precisely the thing we are now fighting over.

Every other question has already been answered and there is nothing more to debate. The only thing left to do is to act, or be destroyed.

Planet of the Apes: Part 1 – Beginnings

Filed under: Books, France — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 26 Jun 2026

Let’s begin a look at the Planet of the Apes franchise, starting with Pierre Boulle’s novel that started it all. The book sets up all the themes that get reworked and reimagined through every subsequent take on the story, from the 1968 film to the most recent series of films.

00:00 Intro
01:52 Beginnings
05:09 Essentialism
08:08 Aping
10:02 Iterations
12:15 Endings

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QotD: Feminism as a luxury belief

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One ideology where it’s as true as it is for libertarianism is feminism. Feminism was led by (and greatly improved the life chances of) women like me. It was great for smart, disagreeable, career-focussed women who don’t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming precisely no-one seriously annoys the kind of smart, self-controlled person who can formulate a (libertarian) policy response to the War on Drugs, so too with women who were uninterested in home and family (or who were same-sex attracted) and found that being circumscribed professionally and romantically really, really rankled.

However, just as most people aren’t members of Heath’s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this — albeit in an ad hoc way — and because feminism as a wider movement was/is wedded to blank-slatism, they believed they could shift the dial on what was then called “female socialisation”. That is, they thought it would be possible to make women as a group more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.

Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men.

    No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

    “A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir”, in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p. 397.

de Beauvoir’s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response — not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution — to women unlike her. While it’s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism — including a pro-motherhood one — careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I’m old enough to remember campaigns for wages for housework. If some old school wonks got hold of this idea, it could form part of a suite of policies directed to increasing the fertility rate.

You don’t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They’ve been submarined. As I say, I’m old.

Women throughout the developed world — notoriously — tell pollsters they want more children than they have. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called “gender wage gap” exists because women have children.

Economists often decry this finding as a case of stated versus revealed preferences: what people do is more salient than what they say, something known since Roman times. Hence the Stoic quip acta non verba (“deeds not words”). However, even if fully half the “I want more kids than I have” response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as Louise Perry is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.

This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of ad hominem. It suggests that people plump for ideologies that will give them a leg-up, and do so deliberately. That said, political ideology is, like conscientiousness, heritable. Henderson’s and Heath’s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (the basis of Lorenzo Warby’s essays on this Substack). That’s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too.

Helen Dale, “People Unlike Me”, Not On Your Team, But Always Fair, 2024-05-29.

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