The Steyn Article
I’ve been meaning to comment on the Mark Steyn Op-Ed “It’s the demography, stupid” is for a long time (the page has been open in Firefox for a week now.) but it looks like i won’t get around to it, so I guess I’ll just post the link. James Lileks comments on it are here.
While I think Steyn overstates his case by a lot, mostly in not counting the positive value of immigration (buying, rather than building Westerners) and longer lives for a lot of people (who will be disproportionately our best and brightest).
Now that I think about it, he also overestimates (IMHO) the importance of population. There is really no reason to think that the asymmetries currently in existence will disappear. Still a society that can’t sustain itself (not true of America but true in Europe and Japan) is not healthy. Curiously unmentioned are payroll taxes.
Another random thought: the similarities to our current problems and late 19th century Bolshevism are eerie.
One Comment
grandmapa
It’s hard to argue with much in the article. The “Islamist” problem is a serious problem and we don’t seem to have the sense or courage to fight it. Most people in the U.S. are too fat dumb and happy to do anything.
I think his population rate points are a legitimate concern. He has some great points. “In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. Because of diverse birth rates, by 2000 each had about 20%.”
The enemy is willing to die by using 80-cent box cutters to kill thousands of us and cause hundreds of billions of dollars damage. Many people wonder why there have been no more terrorist attacks in the U.S., even though we are extremely vulnerable. The article says with only slight exaggeration “in a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?”
“We fret about McDonald’s and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .”
“Islamists…. want (the whole world), and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off…..They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.”
“That’s what the war’s about : our lack of civilizational confidence.”
I wonder if anyone in the West will rise up and lead us in reversing this trend? If so, will there be anyone with courage to follow?
Politics may not provide such a leader. The leadership may well have to come from religion.