It's the demography, stupid ..... Mark Steyn

The New Criterion ^ | 2 Jan 2006 | Mark Steyn

[Rummyfan]

Mark Steyn's speech to the New Criterion/Social Affairs Unit symposium in New York.

[Choose Ye This Day]

Long, good, and posted last night.

[Choose Ye This Day]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1550345/posts

[expatpat]

Much as I love Mark Steyn, I think he's wrong to write Europe off too quickly. There is a hard, nasty core at the heart of the European people. (The Germans in WWII, the French in Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Brits in Kenya and Malaya, etc.)

It has largely been quiescent since 1945, but it is still there, and will be resurgent when things really start to hurt. And when their homelands are at stake, they will win.

[Straight Vermonter]

...just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral

Oops. I suspect he is referring to the Hagia Sophia which mean "holy wisdom" not St Sophia.

[Aetius]

If their fertility rates remain so low, then by the time they decide to fight back, it may be too late.

[Rummyfan]

Busted! I haven't been getting my Steyn pings!

[Question_Assumptions]

My guess is that when the Europeans and Japanese become impoverished by the collapse of their social service system and imploding demographics and feel more threatened by other encroaching cultures than Republicans, things will change and the birth rate will start to rise (I often wonder whether intelligence, education, and affluence are evolutionary dead-ends ). Whether it happens soon enough to turn things around remains to be seen. And the wild card is whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons in radical Muslim nations like Iran leads to a full nuclear exchange that changes everything. Given how Hell-bent Iran and other Muslim nations and terrorists seem to be to get their hands on nuclear weapons, a nuclear exchange (possibly involving the US or the Russia, if the Chechyans get their hands on one, but more likely involving Israel, who has 100-200 nuclear weapons if the rumors are to be believed) may happen quite a bit before the demographic problems Steyn predicts actually happen. I'm not convinced, as he is, that the Muslim radicals are patient or all that smart. 9/11 suggests that they aren't either.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

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.

Well said.

[Question_Assumptions]

I've seen it referred to as "St. Sophia" in more than a few English sources, though you are correct that it's properly called "Hagia Sophia". I write it off as one of those things like talking about the "dead presidents" on US paper money, even though the guys on two of the more common bills ($10 and $100) were never presidents.

[Popman]

This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

Ouch, that's going to leave a mark

[governsleastgovernsbest]

Scary, depressing read, but hopefully one that will rally people to thought and action.

[Unrepentant VN Vet]

.......and that doesn't even mention the long-term effects of so-called "Progressive" education.

If there is any of that hard core left in Europe, it's only because somebody snuck in and cloned a whole bunch of folks, then stuck 'em in suspended animation.

If Steyn is wrong, IMO the error is only on the negative side of the time scale.

[Ditto]

Bookmark bump.

[AZLiberty]

This article could be posted every six hours for the rest of January and I wouldn't complain.

Steyn rules!

If he were American-born, I'd say, "Steyn for President in '08". They could at least have him speak at the Republican convention, along with Rush.

[Freee-dame]

bump

[mylife]

The progressive agenda —lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society: Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native-American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.

I believe that Steyn is correct in seeing that Al Queda views the liberal agenda as our weakness and wish to exploit "the enemy within".

Its our job to seed western ideals of self reliance to the east as well as the west in order to counter them

[Lurker]

For later.

L

[expatpat]

That hard core is still there. 1945 is only 60 years ago, the other examples in post #4 are more recent. Look at the neo-nazi kids, the football hooligans, and the after-pub fights in Glasgow if you don't believe it.

[rbg81]

I often wonder whether intelligence, education, and affluence are evolutionary dead-ends.

I'm not sure those are on there own--but they are when fused with both liberalism and materialism. Materialism definitely contributes to the lack of children. People want stuff, stuff costs $$, and kids are expensive and troublesome. So if they can't afford both, what do they choose? The stuff, of course. [Not that they really need that BMW, but that's beside the point--they want it!]

Liberalism, of course, gives them the out for making that choice. Sure, don't have those kids. Your gay friends will call you a breeder and there are too many exploitive white people anyway. Besides, having kids makes it tougher for women to climb that career ladder (which is the only real path to happiness). Liberalism is also responsible for higher taxes, which also makes it seem more expensive to have kids.

I can't even begin the tell you the number of smart people I have met who don't have kids, but have the car, house, vacation home, eat out 3X per week, etc. It's definitely reverse Darwinism.