December 4, 2012

Douthat: "Don't Mention the Decadence"

Ross Douthat got a lot of backtalk from NYT commenters who didn't like his suggestion that below-replacement fertility in America is a sign of "decadence." The consensus was that America has too many people already so what we need is more immigration. 

Now, Ross responds in "Don't Mention the Decadence."

Let me point out an example of a country with a culture that's not decadent, at least as measured by Total Fertility Rate.

Many have suggested that low fertility is an automatic accompaniment of an advanced economy, high technology, limited land, and/or high real estate prices. That's close to being always true. Yet ... there's one high tech economy with famously limited land and soaring real estate prices where fertility among the majority was high and is going higher. Meanwhile, fertility among minorities is dropping. 

This happens to be the one wealthy white country where the majority believe they deserve to outbreed minorities and feel no compunction about talking and writing about how to make that happen, even in public, from the lowest to the highest strata of society.

From Wikipedia on Demographics of Israel:
Fertility Rates, by Age and Religion[40]
YearTotalJewsMuslimsChristiansDruzeOthers
20103.032.973.752.142.481.64
20113.002.983.512.192.331.75
Jewish TFR increased by 10.2% during 1998–2009, and was recorded at 2.90 during 2009. During the same time period, Arab TFR decreased by 20.5%. Muslim TFR was measured at 3.73 for 2009. During 2000, the Arab TFR in Jerusalem (4.43) was higher than that of the Jews residing there (3.79). But as of 2009, Jewish TFR in Jerusalem was measured higher than the Arab TFR (2010: 4.26 vs 3.85, 2009: 4.16 vs 3.87). TFR for Arab residents in the West Bank was measured at 3.05 in 2010,[41] while that for the Jewish residents was reported at 5.10 children per woman.[42]

69 comments:

Anonymous said...

Douthat is clearly guilty of wrongthink, and he can look forward to an abruptly truncated career at the Old Grey Whore.

Party memberships have been revoked for much less, comrade!

Anonymous said...

Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article.

Anonymous said...

It's become harder and harder for Arabs to raise children in Jerusalem. For example, it has been decades since a school was built in the Arab parts of town. The Israelis won't allow it. Historically, the Arabs of Jerusalem and other major cities in the levant have been some of the most literate communities in the Arab world. Restricting access to education does, in this case, seem to restrict fertility.


Risto

Anonymous said...

It's become harder and harder for Arabs to raise children in Jerusalem. For example, it has been decades since a school was built in the Arab parts of town.

Can't they homeschool or mosque-school?

Anonymous said...

Yes, to some degree, but making it more difficult to raise a child may reduce fertility. And the housing situation is a mess, too, which may reduce fertility further.

Risto

Anonymous said...

Restricting access to education does, in this case, seem to restrict fertility.

It also depresses the fertility of the more intelligent more severely. It's dysgenic. See also the Soviet Union and things like the Holodomor, where the kulaks and rural leadership classes were decapitated and disproportionately affected.

TomV said...

Dear Jewish iSteve readers:

Can you please comment on the anonymous who said "Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article"? I am truly curious about how mainstream that kind of sentiment is among Jews.

MC said...

"Restricting access to education does, in this case, seem to restrict fertility."

I'm not so sure about the causation there. If education increases fertility among Palestinians then that would be pretty much the only example in the world.

Thursday said...

The Israelis having children are almost all religious:
http://fora.tv/2010/09/05/Eric_Kaufmann_Shall_the_Religious_Inherit_the_Earth

Anonymous said...

If you are looking for a country to emulate, Israel isn't the one.

1. It's doomed.
2. It takes the worst of both advanced and backward and stirs it up.
3. Whiskey loves it but doesn't care to move there for some reason.

Auntie Analogue said...

As for the virulence of the smart set's comments against Ross's observation on decadence, methinks thou Douthat protest too much.

Anonymous said...

Steve, here's a situation just reaming with symbolism...

In New York, a mentally ill black beggar pushed an asian man in front of a subway... and instead of helping the guy everyone ran away. A picture of the incident was taken by a muslim(who says he tried to help using the flash of his camera) and then plastered on the front page of Rupurt Murdoch's NYPost.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/man-pushed-in-front-of-midtown-subway-train-witnesses-say/

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/nypost-photo-subway-tracks-cover-173659604.html

ATBOTL said...

"It's become harder and harder for Arabs to raise children in Jerusalem. For example, it has been decades since a school was built in the Arab parts of town. The Israelis won't allow it. Historically, the Arabs of Jerusalem and other major cities in the levant have been some of the most literate communities in the Arab world. Restricting access to education does, in this case, seem to restrict fertility."

It's outrageous the things Israel gets away with. Imagine how Jews in the media would feel if a major city in America had refused to build any new schools in black neighborhoods for decades.

The NYT would have a whole series on it. They wouldn't want to hear both sides either.

Anonymous said...

"Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article."

Oh look, the thought police are here.

Anonymous said...

I read this as a pro-Semitic rather than an anti-Semitic article.

Anon.

Anonymous said...

The Haredim are preponderantly Ashkenazi.

Aaron Gross said...

Douthat's follow-up column was just weird. He's trying to argue based on his liberal audience's axioms, I get that. But he's assuming some kind of really primitive utilitarianism: You liberals want to maximize the total autonomy and success, especially female autonomy and success, so you should try to increase the total number of future people, especially females, who will be the vessels of autonomy and success. Huh? He expects someone to buy that?

By the way, I think it was Havelock Ellis who defined "decadent" as "the whole is less than the sum of its parts." So by that definition, yeah, it's decadence. If you don't like it, you can take "decadent" as morally neutral, as Ellis did.

kaganovitch said...

"The Haredi aka Orthodox are the ones with the high birth rate and guess what low IQs high unemployment and keep brawling with Palestinians while the women do all the work. Who do Haredi Jews sound like, I bet it's not the jewish kid that sat next to you in math class? Look up articles at Haaretz.com on demographics"


You confuse and conflate several different groups here. Orthodox as in observant jews (dati in hebrew)comprise approx 40-50 % of the jewish population. Ultra orthodox (haredi in hebrew)comprise less than 10% of the population. There are sub groups of course too - Hardal, Daati-leumi etc. All these groups have robust TFR , Haredim most of all of course sloping downwards as you move left much the same as among American orthodox jews of which even the leftmost has above replacement TFR. It is the secular ashkenazi elites in Israel who have death spiral fertility rates. Haredim by the way are least likely to brawl with palestinians as a substantial portion of them don't accept the legitimacy of the state in the first place, don't serve in the armed forces for the most part etc. Using Ha'aretz to gain insight into religious life in israel is like using the ny times for insight into evangelicals - pretty much guaranteed to miss

A Jew said...

"Dear Jewish iSteve readers:

Can you please comment on the anonymous who said "Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article"? I am truly curious about how mainstream that kind of sentiment is among Jews."


Jewish iSteve reader here. I don't agree with Anon's sentiment, and don't consider this an anti-Jewish post.

"It is the secular ashkenazi elites in Israel who have death spiral fertility rates."

Oh that's not a problem. You don't have to go back far at all in the family trees of secular ashkenazi elites to find their ancestors rocking black hats and sitting shell-backed, memorizing the Talmud. In the same way, today's ultra orthodox are raising future generations of secular elite ashkenazis. In fact, that's one reason they have so many kids -- they realize that they're going to lose one or two to the secular world.

Anonymous said...

"Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article."

Of the 10,000 anti-white articles that pour out of the MSM every week how many are written by Jews?

TGGP said...

agnostic would say this is the result of them being "marcher lords" with a hostile frontier, imbuing them with asabiya. I personally wonder what the TFR is if you exclude the ultra-orthodox (who don't pay taxes or face the requirement to serve in the military).

Anonymous said...

Romney's defeat caused by 'extraordinary' drop in white male support as autopsy of failed Republican campaign gets underway

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243028/Romneys-defeat-caused-extraordinary-drop-white-male-vote-autopsy-campaign-gets-underway.html

"Mitt Romney lost the election after an ‘extraordinary’ collapse in support among white men, the very group the Republicans counted on to turn out for him.

As the official inquest into the defeat got underway, the former Presidential candidate’s own pollster revealed his lead among white males was cut from 27 points to as low as 12 points."

"Now Neil Newhouse, his campaign pollster, has begun to sift through the data to determine what the key factors were.

He said that he had to give ‘credit’ to the Obama campaign for getting out the Latino and African- American vote, and praised the President’s so-called ‘ground game’ for being extremely effective.

He said: ‘We weren’t surprised by racial composition; we were surprised by the partisan composition...The real hidden story here on our side, the number of white men who didn’t vote in this election compared to four years ago was extraordinary.

‘And these white men were replaced by white women. We were taking a group we won by 27 points and replacing them with a group we won by 12-14 points.’"

Anonymous said...

Israel is bit of an outlier.

Basically, there's an undeclared 'breeding war' with Palestinians going on, and also a lot of pretty useless orthodox Jews have large families for 'religious' reasons.

Anonymous said...

A few months ago an Israeli Jew publicly doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire - he later died of his burns.
He did this in protest at the extremely high cost of accomodation in Israel, and his impossibility of establishing any sort of independent life. It was part of a mass wave of protests.
Seems to fly in the face of calls for 'population growth'.

Simon in London said...

TGGP:
"agnostic would say this is the result of them being "marcher lords" with a hostile frontier, imbuing them with asabiya."

That would be my impression - and clearly the West Bank settlers have asabiya in spades.

My impression is that the South African Boers also had good Asabiya and generally high fertility when rural, but this dropped as they urbanised, and they were overwhelmed as much by black immigration into SA as by higher black fertility.

In Northern Ireland where I come from the rural Protestants again have/had high asabiya and high-ish fertility, around 4 kids/woman not uncommon, but the Catholics' prohibition on birth control gave them an advantage, typically of +1-2 children/woman.

Anonymous said...

Haredi Jews are mostly responsible for the high birth rates, although they ate only 10% of the population. 10 children are the norm for Haredi women, Google it. Religious Zionists have on average only 3-4 children. No wonder that the Haredi Jews will outbreed then all and Israel will become a Haredi-dominated state. This is now practically inevitable. It will take just a few decades until they become a majority.

Aryeh said...

As an Orthodox Jew who regularly reads iSteve, it's pretty clear that Sailer has an animus towards the Jews. He seems to respect the Jewish people and Israel (he often admits as much), but there is not a whole lot of love. Which is perfectly acceptable (the sentiment is mutual, for what it's worth).

Anonymous said...

"Anonymous12/4/12 7:15 PM
Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article."

How "alienated" are you that you can't tell a kick from a compliment?

Imagine how the "Hispanics" feel when they get their twice-daily bashing.

Anonymous said...

Steve, another great thread here.

Let's assume that the jewish population of Israel is made up of three distinct groups.

ultra orthodox (jews that essentially refuse to work, and refuse to serve in the military) 10% of the jewish population

modern orthodox (jews that are observant, that work, and that serve in the military) 30% of the jewish population

secular jews 60% of the population


Can anyone give me a source that shows the birthrate of each of the three groups? Would be interesting to know.

Anonymous said...

As is well known in the HBD blog-o-sphere, the Ashkenazi jews in Israel have dramatically higher genetic IQ than the mizrahi jews. The exact figures are not clear, but I think a fair estimate is Ashkenazi Israeli IQ at 105 and Mizrahi at 92

Can anyone comment on the relative fertility of Ashkenazi vs Mizrahi, segmented among religious vs non religious

Anonymous said...

It is a well known truism here at I Steve that genetically high IQ secular women choose to have very few children and this pattern holds true throughout the world.

But if you look only at secular high IQ women, those that feel they can combine super high status careers with multiple children will often have multiple children.

Those secular high IQ women who feel that there is a tradeoff between prestige career and children will typically have few or no children.

Generally, traditional societies like japan italy and spain make it hard for super high IQ mothers to have prestige careers and as a result the super high IQ women skip having kids.

Denmark makes it very easy for super high IQ mothers to have prestige careers. as a result, fertility of super high IQ women is very healthy in Denmark and in fact fertility may actually be eugenic there.

So I would characterize Israel as actually following the same pattern as Denmark - the secular culture is pro natalist and high IQ women in Israel can combine careers in high technology with multiple children.

That is why there is irreconcoilable conflict between those of us that are HBD aware and those that are Larry Auster style traditionalists.

Traditionalism calls for a society similar to what you see in Japan, but in traditionalist societies like this the women go on birth strikes. In an aggressively non traditionalist society like Iceland for example, or Denmark, the secular women are willing to have plenty of children.

DCThrowback said...

Not Jewish (so who cares what I think!) but agree w/ anon 9:30. This is a pro-semitic piece that will "offend w/ hatefacts" the elite secular, blue state Jews that are a large part of our elite class. As been stated 100x, who cares what the elites say, watch what they do.

re: the Romney autopsy, I wonder how many of those white males were folks who supported Ron Paul and decided that the GOP had left them behind. That's probably easily reconcilable, and probably based off the # of primary votes Paul got in each state.

Bostonian said...

Douthat's column is good, but he does not mention that fertility is negatively correlated with women's education in the U.S., which has a dysgenic effect. NYT readers would go nuts if he said that.

Anonymous said...

Lost in the whole discussion either on the NYT site, or here, is that Douthat married a SWPL fellow journalista over five years ago, and the evidence suggests they have no children.

Decadence for me, but not for thee.

Harry Baldwin said...

Aaron Gross said... Douthat's follow-up column was just weird. He's trying to argue based on his liberal audience's axioms . . .

Yes, that's what struck me as well. It's useless, like all establishment Republicans' efforts to push conservatism based on liberal assumptions, i.e., "affirmative action in college admissions is bad because it places blacks in schools at which they can't succeed" or "illegal immigration is bad because it deprives our poor blacks of entry-level jobs." These kinds of arguments have never gained any traction.

Anonymous said...

The European Union must really take the cake.
Overall, it has had nigh on 40 years of sub-sub replacement fertility, yet today, at this very moment it has mass, intractable unemployment of around 11% - something that would have previously been considered impossible due to basic shrinking labor force requirements.

What epic, monumental , collosal economic mismanagement could possibly engender such a state of affairs?
- In the 1960s, the EU was sold by the elitists, to the British public, as means of invigorating economic growth, believe it or not.

Big Bill said...

Fundamentalist Judaism has been exploding in Israel and the USA. The semi-assimilated Jews are loath to talk about it in mixed (goy) company, but they are embarrassed about it big time. The fundie breeder Jews keep their women barefoot pregnant and in the kitchen.

Secular Jews have been at war with fundie Jews for almost 200 years (Haskala). The seculars thought they won when the shtetls were cleared in WWII, but the fundies have come back with a vengeance.

Read the Reform writings of 100 years ago, or Ruppin's attempts to eliminate the despised "Jew" and replace him with the "New Hebrew Man" when he was (re)engineering Jewish society and culture in the Jewish Colony of Palestine.

For now, the fundie breeders are winning. Secular Jews are assimilating, dying out and being replaced just as we are.

Ron Unz's long article in Am Con details the Jewish intellectual collapse in the USA as they are being surpassed by Asian immigrants, but won't give up (yet) their hegemony over the professoriate and college admissions.

A 3-5 year old article in the Israeli press points to the seculars losing the demographic battle in Israel. It celebrated an old fundie Jewish lady and her living 1100+ (!) descendants. The commenters were instructive. For how much longer can any healthy, advanced society support that many non-contributing members?

As secular Jews in Israel escape the 8-10 child per woman tidal wave we can expect to see the flood of Jewish refugees from Israel increase as they look for an easy life in Imperial America.

Really, Israel is suffering from the same decadence and feminist sterility that plagues the West. it is being similarly preyed upon by fundie Jews and others (Africans) looking for a free ride before it all goes tits up.

Anonymous said...

The Jewish Israeli birth rate is skewed upward by the extremely high birth rate of the ultra-Orthodox.

Steve, you might want to check out Arnold Kling's new blog, askblog (the url is arnoldkling.com, I think). He uses opposition to immigration as an example of how conservatives (according to him) exxagerate the risk of "barbarism" to oppose any change. In comments, I tried to point out that this violates Arnold's own stated principle that, in arguing, one should characterize one's opponent's views as "charitably" as possible. Based on Arnold's subsequent post, I don't seem to be getting through.

Anonymous said...

What's hilarious is how many people think that the 4-8 children of devout Christians will become secular, liberal or both.

That is not true. The retention rate is around 80%. They lose a few, but not a lot.

heartiste said...

"Of the 10,000 anti-white articles that pour out of the MSM every week how many are written by Jews?"

How many of those 10,000 articles were written by people hired by Jews?

Anonymous said...

Well, as soon as America is presented with the problems inherent in being a tiny fascist ethno-supremcist apartheid state, surrounded by angry neighbors that we periodically attack and kill, and as soon as we have the world's strongest country underwriting the whole enterprise for no discernible reason, then Israel's solutions will be relevant.

Luckily, we live in the 21st Century.

Anonymous said...

This article discusses Jewish demographics:

Will Your Grandchildren Be Jews?
http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/WillYourGrandchildrenBeJews/

It is about the US but it probably applies to Israel. So you can see the high birth rate is not Jewish but Orthodox Jewish. Since such labels are arbitrary you can decide if Orthodox Jewish and Secular Jewish are the same, as you can decide of Catholic and Lutheran are the same, or different.

But since Steve Sailor likes IQ inheritance theories, didn't that Rushton guy claim that high birthrates correlate with lower IQ when comparing say African, European, and Asian? So if you apply Ruston's theory to Jews, Orthodox Jews should be lower IQ but higher birthrate.

This might lead to a happy coexistence of high IQ low birthrate Jews providing high IQ services to the low IQ high birthrate Jews that do the mundane jobs. But unfortunately Israel ,being a democracy, can't force Jews to do things they don't want to do if those Jews are numerous and well organized. So Israel is forced to import Africans and others to do mundane jobs like cleaning hotels.

Note I am just using Rushton's theories because Steve Sailor writes about them a lot not because I agree with them. I have no well informed opinion on Rushton.

Anonymous said...

"Yet ... there's one high tech economy with famously limited land and soaring real estate prices where fertility among the majority was high and is going higher."

Utahstan?

SFG said...

"Can you please comment on the anonymous who said "Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article"? I am truly curious about how mainstream that kind of sentiment is among Jews."

I'm a half-breed, so I may not be typical, but I'm from NYC, so maybe I am.

Yeah, he seems to have a chip on his shoulder about Jews. That doesn't necessarily mean he wants to exterminate us--and a lot of people have trouble making this distinction! I'd say a lot of Jews are really, really, scared of things going down like they did in post-Weimar Germany. Over the years and time away from New York, I've become convinced a true repeat of the 1930s is unlikely, but I've had a hard time convincing anyone of this.

I'm not even staying Steve's attitudes aren't justifiable somewhat--a lot of Jews are really big in the open-borders movement, and immigration's his #1 priority right now. I try to spread a little sedition among receptive audiences myself--don't you think that maybe we have enough immigrants already? Isn't it important new arrivals assimilate into the majority culture? But, yes, I do see that.

Anonymous said...

My solution to increase the birth rate, is for husbands to let their wives have children with other men if they want. I call this gamete adoption.

Women won't be so picky about who they marry this way, so they'll marry earlier. And, they'll want extra children from different men, because women like variety.

Anonymous said...

Simon in London
South African Boers...were overwhelmed as much by black immigration into SA as by higher black fertility.


Wait a minute, wait a minute, your saying blacks immigrated into apartheid South Africa?

I bet that oppressive tyrannical police state instituted draconian measures to regulate this immigration.

Aaron Gross said...

@Harry Baldwin: Hey, whoa! I'm not complaining about rhetoric that accepts your audience's basic assumptions, in this case liberal assumptions. I like that kind of rhetoric, if it's possible to make your case based on the other guy's premises. I wish there were lots more of it!

My complaint wasn't that Douthat argued from liberal premises, but that he gave such an unconvincing and, well, just plain bizarre argument.

Simon in London said...

anon:
"Denmark makes it very easy for super high IQ mothers to have prestige careers. as a result, fertility of super high IQ women is very healthy in Denmark and in fact fertility may actually be eugenic there. "

According to my French colleague with four children, this is true of France, also. The US by contrast has dysgenic government policies, though I don't think anywhere is as dysgenic as the UK.

Anonymous said...

"That is not true. The retention rate is around 80%. They lose a few, but not a lot."

Ha. You wish. Even the fecund, cohesive Mormons are down to under a 65 percent retention rate.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/5611/mormon_numbers_not_adding_up/

Baptists are more like 60 percent.

IHTG said...

ethno-supremcist

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Anonymous said...

IHTG said:

ethno-supremcist

You say that like it's a bad thing.


It is a bad thing. It creates social distrust and, often, violence.

Anonymous said...


ethno-supremicist

You say that like it's a bad thing.


I suppose it depends on whether you value not getting rockets shot at you by your neighbors. If you're OK with endless frontier warfare, it's great.

Anonymous said...

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Jews certainly think it's a bad thing as a general principle. After all, there are a lot more gentiles than there are Jews.

Anonymous said...

Jews certainly think it's a bad thing as a general principle. After all, there are a lot more gentiles than there are Jews.

No, the sentiment is not general and it is not principled. It is applied particularly and exclusively to gentiles. Jews think it is a bad thing for gentiles to have an ethnic consciousness. But, by contrast, most believe it is important for Jews to be ethnocentric.

Anonymous said...

To many Jews NOT being 'ethnocentric' means you're a "Bad Jew". Whenever some Jew strays from the "Party Line" on Israel or Immigration, you'll often see other Jews play the "You're a Bad Jew" Card. As in "you're letting *your* people down" by attacking Israel or supporting Immigration restrictions.

BTW, most Jews when they stop being "ethnocentric" don't become nationalists or patriots but followers of a "universalist" ideology. Communism, Socialism, Libertarianism, etc.

Perspective said...

Anon wrote:
"Can anyone comment on the relative fertility of Ashkenazi vs Mizrahi, segmented among religious vs non religious"

Statistics are fairly hard to come by, but I did manage to find this in wikipedia: "The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998 and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose to 8.51 in 1996 from 6.91 in 1980. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.[43]" Overall, in the mid 90's TFR was higher for the Mizrahi. I think the rates are starting converge however.

About 20 percent of Haredim are Sephardic/Mizrahi. There has also been extensive mixing between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. According to this Haaretz article: "The study shows that the rate of mixed Jewish children born in Israel has been rising annually by half a percent until it reached some 25 percent in 1995 - the last year a population census was carried out. That year only 5.3 percent of the Jews aged 40-43 were mixed, compared to 16.5 percent among the 20-21 age group and 25.1 percent among the 10-11 age groups."

Anonymous said...

EVerything the West is castigated for by the SCoth-Irish is taken for granted in Isreel

Anonymous said...

TomV said...

Dear Jewish iSteve readers:

Can you please comment on the anonymous who said "Here's Steve's weekly kick the Jew article"? I am truly curious about how mainstream that kind of sentiment is among Jews.


Why? Afraid of offending the right crowd? Yawn, do you think they give a shit about offending Christians? They relish it.

Anonymous said...

from Douthat: "If you are a true misanthrope, a radical environmentalist, or a partisan of voluntary human extinction, then of course you can feel free to answer “no” to these questions. But readers who consider themselves humanists should consider"

Being an opinion scribbler for a major media organ has gotten a lot more difficult if now you have to worry about whether something you write will offend the "voluntary extinction" demographic... Sheesh...

Anonymous said...

Everything the West is castigated for by the Scots-Irish is taken for granted in Israel

Not just taken for granted--celebrated and promoted.

Omni Consumer Products said...

Isn't it strange how Detroit--Now with 1 Million Fewer than 60 Years Ago!--has become the universal yardstick, cautionary tale, and microcosm for everything that's going wrong or will in the late-capitalist West? In the early 80s I remember laughing at Eddie Murphy cop movies and noting the oddness of publishing sensation Sparky Anderson but never expected those acorns of dysfunctionality to grow into today's tall oaks of metaphor.

Matthew said...

"As an Orthodox Jew who regularly reads iSteve, it's pretty clear that Sailer has an animus towards the Jews."

To me it's pretty clear that Steve enjoys pointing out the double standard that exists between what non-Jewish whites are allowed to say and do versus what Jews are allowed to say and do.

Jews are allowed to have their own, explicitly Jewish country, but Danes aren't allowed to keep Denmark Danish, Brits aren't allowed to keep the UK British, etc. White, historically Christian countries are not allowed to have ethnocentric public policies and most certainly aren't allowed to regard Christianity as part of their identity.

This should be pretty obvious to any intelligent person who reads iSteve. Real anti-Semitism is notably lacking from his posts (though perhaps not the comments).

Silver said...

BTW, most Jews when they stop being "ethnocentric" don't become nationalists or patriots but followers of a "universalist" ideology. Communism, Socialism, Libertarianism, etc.

In other words, the continuation of racial politics by other means.

neil craig said...

The late professor John McCarthy once pointed out the strong correlation between high fertility and lack of rights for women.There is also a similar correlation between states with growing economies and women being allowed to hold down jobs.

This is a pretty distressing result for those of us who like civilisation and progress. An even greater one for those who want permanent immigration to rich countries - since the result of failed cultures being permanently able to export people to make up an ever increasing share of the population of their more successful neighbours is obvious.

On the 3rd hand note how closely the historic lamenting of every culture from ancient Greece on how "we are getting decadent" comes down to women having more power and fewer children.

Anonymous said...

"The late professor John McCarthy once pointed out the strong correlation between high fertility and lack of rights for women.There is also a similar correlation between states with growing economies and women being allowed to hold down jobs."

Interesting. How high does fertility need to be for a nation to hold off the foreign onslaught, maintain stability, maintain progress, and sustain a modestly-sized welfare state?

If white fertility is currently around 1.9 births/woman, all you would need is for one in every three women to have an extra child to raise it to 2.2. That doesn't sound too far beyond the reach of what minor cultural changes can accomplish in a short period of time.

J McKeown said...

A low birthrate is an essential accompaniment of a low death rate. In the USA in 2011 there were still more births (3.95 million) than deaths (2.51 million), which is well above replacement, for now.

Silver said...

The late professor John McCarthy once pointed out the strong correlation between high fertility and lack of rights for women.

That's a rather banal observation. Birth rates only started receding and life only began getting good for the great mass of people during the 20th century so you can find all sorts of correlations between high birth rates and shitty social and living conditions.

A low birthrate is an essential accompaniment of a low death rate.

No, it isn't.

neil craig said...

Silver the emperor Augustus complained the Roman aristocracy, being effete and pampered were giving up having children.

The churches', particularly catholic churches' strictures against birth control go back to Rome's adoption of Cgristianity - before it became the official religion Christianity is full of females who became saints for refusing to take husbands.

The problems of the right of a woman to choose to run off with a new husband, throwing the matrilineal system of inheritance into chaos, is part of the subtext of the Trojan war & probably of the disappearance of that system.

Anonymous said...

everyone, secular and religious alike, has children

But the haredi families have a heck of a lot more of them than the secular families. And Israelis may be proud but are anything but secure in the long term. I'm also Jewish, btw.