Our ageing world isn’t a catastrophe. It’s a triumph (not)
We are healthier, living longer and birth rates are falling. Only the most blinkered of economists could fail to rejoice… more false optimism from the Guardian. Zoe Williams believes the cup is still half full…
Mark Steyn: For the political class, the demography’s becoming an insurmountable obstacle. When your electorate’s split between a young implacable ethnic group and elderly French natives unwilling to vote themselves off their unaffordable social programmes, there aren’t a lot of options your average poll-watching pol will be willing to take. And the trouble with the social democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything. At the very least, European citizens should recognise that the governing class has failed, that the conventional wisdom has run its course, and that it is highly unlikely that those culturally confident Muslims will wish to assimilate with anything as shrivelled and barren as contemporary European identity. Donald Rumsfeld, a man confined to the enclosures of thought, likes to say that weakness is a provocation.
The complaceniks’ view that there’s nothing wrong with the EU that can’t be fixed by more benefits, more regulation, more taxes, more immigration, more unemployment, more crime and more smouldering Citroëns. If you carry on voting for the Euroconsensus, you’re voting for a suicide pact. M. de Villepin put it very well: ‘What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere?’ The Euroconsensus leads nowhere. Time to try elsewhere.
If we (or our kids) don’t start breeding anytime soon we are doomed….
Newslinks:
PoliGazette:Hope and Change Ain’t Good Enough
- David Kahane: Let’s Hear It for the Rainbow Tou
- Sasha Baron Cohen: It’s so sad, but I have to kill off BRUNO…
- Iowahawk: Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009
- Sadanand Dhume, Wall Street Journal: Radical Islam Checks In
- Rich Lowrey: Obama’s Brazen Dishonesty
- Sally Neighour, The Australian:Jihad In Indonesia’s Classrooms
- Ann Coulter:DEMS TO GOP NOMINEES: WILL THE DEFENDANT PLEASE RISE?
- Robert Avrech/Big Hollywood :Hollywood: The Head Game
- Conrad Black :The Real Tragedy Of Vietnam
- Daniel Pipes: America And Israel – Into The Abyss
- Melanie Phillips:Where Is All This Headin
- Barack Obama’s brazen dishonesty
- Syrian minister: ‘The source of all terrorism is the Jews’
- Gerald Posner: Morale at CIA Lowest It’s Been Since Carter
- Conservative kiosk not allowed at mall
- Prince sues model over rape accusation
- Prime suspect cleared as bomber
- Pakistan’s ‘mock war’ on Taliban
- Darkness falls as dragon swallows sun
- N Korea must quit nukes: Clinton
- Australian school on alert
- Recession Slows — but Does Not Reverse — Mexican Immigration
- Bin Laden Son Reported Killed In Pakistan
- The Radio Patriot: LISTENER FEEDBACK
The simulation of assimilation
I like the headline on this George Jonas column – “Jihad rules! Jews suck!” – because it gets to the heart of one of the big points he’s making – that we measure “assimilation” too superficially: If someone’s picked up the rhythms of the vernacular, we assume they’ve mastered the underlying harmonics of western society, too. Not so.
On the other hand, no matter how they talk, a lot of folks seem determined not to hear what they’re saying:
WASHINGTON – Efforts to bring together Jewish and Muslim communities hit another snag when an imam at a major Muslim conference gave an incendiary speech in which he said Jews were to blame for the Holocaust… Warith Deen Umar, a New York imam, spoke critically of Jews, saying that the Holocaust happened to the Jews “because they were serially disobedient to Allah.”
