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curious2
2016 Feb 24, 3:45pm
The 20th century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending a third of your adult lifetime in "retirement", is premised on the basis that there will be enough new citizens to support the old.
This. Borrowing and spending and the welfare state all require inflation and/or expansion, and enable an apparently unstoppable array of political patronage networks. Self-styled "conservatives" focus on "entitlement" spending and underfunded pensions, but the same problem applies equally to wars, which have increased government spending massively from WWI through Iraq, which most self-styled "conservatives" still cannot admit was a mistake. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.†A culture of borrowing and spending has enabled so many patronage networks throughout the American Empire of Debt that an elite consensus favors borrowing and spending and inflation and immigration because their salaries depend on it, even if the consequences prove lethal.
The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
This too. Friedrich Nietzsche differentiated what he called master morality (primary morality) from what he called slave morality (secondary morality, arising in response to primary). Primary morality valued strength and victory, while secondary morality (including Christianity) valued surrender and meekness. Rome prospered as a republic with freedom of religion, and continued to prosper as an empire even with emperors who deified themselves. It conquered countless adversities including hostile neighbors partly because of a moral code that valued strength and conquest. Then it became officially Christian, replacing primary morality with secondary morality. Both subsequently and in large part consequently, it declined and fell.
But self-styled "conservative" Christians blame, wrongly, features of Rome (including same-sex marriage) that had been part of its strength. Cicero wrote of same-sex marriage in the time of Augustus (one of Rome's "five good emperors"), and Nero's five marriages included two to men. The empire continued to prosper, and Nero became extremely popular in the eastern empire, even though he was hated in the imperial capital (which he allowed to burn) and by the early Christians (whom he persecuted).
Today, Christian leaders including the pope demand that Christian countries welcome Muslim immigrants. They seem to see it as part of demanding respect for religion. As western science disproves religious tenets, including geocentrism and creationism, Christian leaders demand continued respect for false beliefs. Merkel heads Germany's "Christian Democratic Party" and opposes same-sex marriage, and sees Muslim immigrants as potential allies politically. In Ireland, devout Catholics were cheered by the sight of long lines of Muslim voters who turned out to oppose marriage equality. In both America and Ireland, opposition to marriage equality was almost entirely religious. Charlatans whose salaries depend on peddling false doctrines insist on faith-based government and refuse to understand the value of evidence-based government, even in America where the founders created expressly what Jefferson called "a wall of separation" between church and state (see, U.S. Constitution Article VI and Amendment 1, and later Amendment 14). Science does offer potential for longer lifespans and robotics to continue prosperity for a very long time, and many married same-sex couples are in fact having children, but charlatans' salaries result from tithes that depend on refusing to acknowledge those facts.
But Islam, while claiming to value submission and slavery to the Aloha Snackbar, is in fact an example of primary morality, i.e. master morality. Since its charlatans control its oxymoronically inchoate omnipotent deity, they can motivate deluded followers to fight on their behalf. Fighting for Islam is the highest virtue, and dying in that struggle is the only guaranteed path to paradise. You could spend your whole life doing good deeds, and those might weigh in your favor, but the only guarantee is to die fighting for Islam. They must fight "persecution of Islam" (including blasphemy, i.e. criticizing Islam) and now "terrorism" (which they define to include atheism or questioning the fundamentals of Islam). Each jihadi can plead on behalf of up to 70 relatives to enter paradise, so they can easily motivate lethal conspiracies including accessories before and after the fact. For example, in Pakistan, police struggle to cope with jihadi murderers who kill "moderate" Muslims, because the murderers can retreat into neighborhoods where neighbors ring bells to warn of police arrival. The police can only arrive in dark of night when most people are sleeping, and must work quickly to complete their mission before the bells start ringing, lest they too get killed by jihadis. Consider the story of Asia Bibi and the late governor of Punjab, for example: blasphemy is a capital crime under Sharia, which nearly all Pakistanis claim to believe in. A doctrine that says to kill its enemies has a primal strategic advantage compared to a doctrine that tells believers to love its enemies.
Personally, I favor the enlightenment and evidence-based decision-making, as most of the founders did, including Jefferson. That's what our Constitution says, and I support it.
Looking at the evidence, one particular doctrine declares itself at war against the western world, which Daesh calls "Rome." (America's founders chose Roman symbols for the new republic, and in my opinion Rome remains among the greatest civilizations in human history, so I'm flattered they call us Rome.) It makes no sense for America to promote Islam, but Saudi petrodollars drive patronage networks to promote Saudi interests at the expense of American interests and ultimately at the expense of western civilization. The Supreme Court has written that American government must not favor one religion over others, nor religion over irreligion, but America has demanded sanctions and sometimes gone to war on behalf of Saudi/Sunni interests in Bosnia, Serbia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Iran, to name a few examples.
Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
Evidently not. None has ever done so. To the contrary, a critical mass of between 10% and 20% seems enough to destabilize a previously pluralist country (e.g. Lebanon). The Weimar republic fell due to several factors including the Nazis and their allies outnumbering the police, preventing the police from providing security. France has had to suspend what had been considered fundamental rights to privacy in order to combat Islamic terrorists hidden among Muslims who comprise less than 10% of the population. For the reasons that the OP explains, France and Sweden will likely become more than 20% Muslim within the foreseeable future.
This ought to be the left's issue... Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant?
This, most of all. Most on the left have blinded themselves, apparently due to the (il)logic of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." I've debated occasionally with @Dan8267 on this point. His view is that Christians being more numerous in this country have more power over him, and so he counts Christianity as the biggest religious threat. I don't agree. On balance, Islam is inherently more violent, and Muslims are much more likely to be devout, and so in my opinion the problems of religiosity are much more concentrated and dangerous there. It's like comparing methanol vs beer: either can intoxicate a person, but methanol is much more likely to kill, and if methanol causes fewer deaths in America that is only because it has been prohibited while beer has been legalized; during Prohibition, both were illegal, and methanol killed many more Americans than it does today. A country with a Christian majority can debate and sometimes those debates get noisy with people saying unkind things, but in countries with Muslim majorities the sight of somebody's head getting cut off tends to discourage further debate. It's primal: the winning side is the side still living, regardless of who may have been technically correct about the earth revolving around the sun.
NDrLoR
2016 Feb 24, 3:50pm
The western world is going out of business because it's given up having babies
And aborted approximately 42 million at a rate of about 1M a year since 1973, removing their potential for reproduction.
indigenous
2016 Feb 24, 8:05pm
It would appear that the US is more likely to be taken over by Catholics/Mexicans than Muslims.
I would not include conquest as a virtue.
The Romans were taken over by the Christians in the same manner Mark Steyn describes regarding the Muslims.
indigenous
2016 Feb 24, 8:05pm
And aborted approximately 42 million at a rate of about 1M a year since 1973, removing their potential for reproduction.
Good Point.
indigenous
2016 Feb 24, 8:07pm
Notice Steyn points out that the Feminazis are very muted on this point in the EU and Britain. I.E. Patrick miss assigns this causality.
Al_Sharpton_for_President
2024 Nov 17, 4:25am
FarmersWon
2024 Nov 17, 11:52am
See that Hindu Cow Belt breeds crazy.
AmericanKulak
2024 Nov 17, 12:46pm
Nothing boosts fertility like war.
Yep, we're going to knock up the women before we send them overseas.
It's time for equity, the next war should be all-women draftees.
We can emergency authorize millions of Filipinas and Latinas to come in as emergency workers ;)
Ceffer
2024 Nov 17, 1:19pm
DOGEWontAmountToShit
2024 Nov 17, 2:42pm
Yeah, but what is the fertility rate in the invaders population?
That is what is propping up Sweden's and Germany's birth rates. They would be more like Switzerland's or even Italy's otherwise.
DOGEWontAmountToShit
2024 Dec 24, 3:49pm
China today is 4 times more populous than the United States. At the turn of the century, it could conceivably have roughly the same number of people as America.
China's population, reported to be 1.41 billion, will drop to 330 million by the end of the century, predicts Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This startling conclusion is included in a paper to be published in the Winter 2024 issue of the Contemporary China Review. He's not the only one concerned. "China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return," writes Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine. Yi puts it this way: "Left unaddressed, China's demographic trap could precipitate a civilizational collapse."
https://www.newsweek.com/end-china-great-power-population-collapse-opinion-2005236
HeadSet
2024 Dec 24, 6:16pm
China's population, reported to be 1.41 billion, will drop to 330 million
Yes, the number for a sustainable middle class. No nation can support a billion plus people unless 3/4 of them are living hand to mouth.
DOGEWontAmountToShit
2024 Dec 24, 8:02pm
Yes, the number for a sustainable middle class.
That's not how demographic collapse works. Absolute numbers don't matter; relative ones do.
Think of it being like a plague only in slow mo.
There won't be enough consumers or workers relative to retired for DECADES. And infrastructure breaks down because it can't be maintained. South Korea, Ukraine and Russia are also getting hit with this. Same for Germany, Spain and Italy as well.
Canada bought itself some time...probably 40 years because of its hyper immigration policies but most nations can't do that.
Ten years ago this month - January 2006 - The Wall Street Journal and The New Criterion published my first draft of what would become the thesis of my bestselling book, America Alone. The Journal headline sums it up: "It's the Demography, Stupid." Opening paragraph:
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
The argument was straightforward. The western world is going out of business because it's given up having babies. The 20th century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending a third of your adult lifetime in "retirement", is premised on the basis that there will be enough new citizens to support the old. But there won't be. Lazy critics of my thesis thought that I was making a "prediction", and that my predictions were no more reliable than Al Gore's or Michael Mann's on the looming eco-apocalypse. I tried to explain that it's not really a prediction at all:
When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%.
Enter Islam, which sportingly volunteered to be the children we couldn't be bothered having ourselves, and which kind offer was somewhat carelessly taken up by the post-Christian west. As I wrote a decade ago:
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.
That didn't work out too great for the Shakers, but the Europeans figured it would be a piece of cake for them: "westernization" is so seductive, so appealing that, notwithstanding the occasional frothing imam and burka-bagged crone, their young Muslims would fall for the siren song of secular progressivism just like they themselves had. So, as long as you kept the immigrants coming, there would be no problem - as long as you oomphed up the scale of the solution. As I put it:
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted.
Last year, Angela Merkel decided to attempt it. The German Chancellor cut to the chase and imported in twelve months 1.1 million Muslim "refugees". That doesn't sound an awful lot out of 80 million Germans, but, in fact, the 1.1 million Muslim are overwhelmingly (80 per cent plus) fit, virile, young men. Germany has fewer than ten million people in the same population cohort, among whom Muslims are already over-represented: the median age of Germans as a whole is 46, the median age of German Muslims is 34. But let's keep the numbers simple, and assume that of those ten million young Germans half of them are ethnic German males. Frau Merkel is still planning to bring in another million "refugees" this year. So by the end of 2016 she will have imported a population equivalent to 40 per cent of Germany's existing young male cohort. The future is here now: It's not about "predictions".
On standard patterns of "family reunification", these two million "refugees" will eventually bring another four or five persons each from their native lands - or another eight-to-ten million. In the meantime, they have the needs of all young lads, and no one around to gratify them except the local womenfolk. Hence, New Year's Eve in Cologne, and across the southern border the Vienna police chief warning women not to go out unaccompanied, and across the northern border:
Danish nightclubs demand guests have to speak Danish, English or German to be allowed in after 'foreign men in groups' attack female revellers
But don't worry, it won't be a problem for long: On the German and Swedish "migrant" numbers, there won't be a lot of "female revelry" in Europe's future. The formerly firebreathing feminists at The Guardian and the BBC are already falling as mute as battered wives - saying nothing, looking away, making excuses, clutching at rationalizations... Ten years ago, I wrote:
The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
"Multiculturalism" was less an immigration policy than an advertisement of our moral virtue. So the really bad thing about New Year's Eve is not that Continental women got groped and raped by coarse backward "migrants", but that all these gropes and rapes might provoke the even more coarse and backward natives. I did all the gags a decade ago:
The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims.
And so it goes ten years on. We're beyond parody now. A decade back, I noted:
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque... But for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games.
Nobody makes that mistake these days. Six Canadians working for a Quebec Catholic humanitarian organization repairing schoolrooms in Burkina Faso get slaughtered by Muslim terrorists, and the Prince Minister skedaddles to a mosque run by a woman-hating loon to hold the moment of silence.
Like I said, I did all the jokes way back when, and it's not so funny after ten years. My thesis was straightforward: a semi-Muslim France will not be France; it will be something other, and - if you happen to value things like freedom of speech and women's rights - it will be something worse:
Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates?
And so it goes, on the streets of the most "liberal" "progressive" cities on the planet.
A few weeks before The Wall Street Journal published my piece, I discussed its themes at an event in New York whose speakers included Douglas Murray. Douglas was more optimistic: He suggested that Muslim populations in Europe were still small, and immigration policy could be changed: Easier said than done. My essay and book were so influential that in the decade since, the rate of Islamization in the west has increased - via all three principal methods: Muslim immigration, Muslim birthrates of those already here, Muslim conversion of the infidels. David Goldman thinks aging, childless Germany has embraced civilizational suicide as redemption for their blood-soaked sins. Maybe. But it is less clear why the Continent's less tainted polities - impeccably "neutral" Sweden, for example - are so eager to join them. As I wrote:
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.
Somewhere, deep down, the European political class understands that the Great Migrations have accelerated the future I outlined way back when:
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
It's the biggest story of our time, and, ten years on, Europe's leaders still can't talk about it, not to their own peoples, not honestly. For all the "human rights" complaints, and death threats from halfwits, and subtler rejections from old friends who feel I'm no longer quite respectable, I'm glad I brought it up. And it's well past time for others to speak out.
http://www.steynonline.com/7428/it-still-the-demography-stupid