[Sandwich]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/jer/?id=110009137

Gigot: Welcome to "The Journal Editorial Report." I'm Paul Gigot.

"America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" forecasts a dark future in which the nations of Old Europe fall to Islam fundamentalism, and the United States remains the last Western democracy. Earlier, I spoke to the author, columnist Mark Steyn.

Gigot: In your book, you write that "much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the 21st century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many, if not most, European countries," end quote. That sounds like a doomsday scenario. Why don't you explain that?

Steyn: It is. I've tried to be cheerful, but it is hard to be cheerful about apocalyptic-type stuff. And this is what it is. Basically, 17 European countries have what demographers call lowest-load fertility, from which no society has ever recovered. That means they are basically not having enough babies.

And the way Europe is set up, they have these unsustainable social programs and welfare, and they imported the babies that they didn't have. And they imported them essentially from the North Africa and the Middle East. So we're seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now.

[achtung]

Yep, I'm not surprised.

Get out there and start knockin em' up!

[IceFire]

Not surprising.  Not sure how that will all go down...but I know that France's population has been falling for a long time.  It was a problem before WWII.  The thing is...the highest educated and most well off countries seem to have the fewest babies while the lowest educated with the fewest resources and money tend to have the most babies.  Its kind of silly as it should be the other way around although I fully understand the reasoning...

Thing is...I wouldn't exclude the US from that tally there.  Ever growing immigrant population from places outside of Europe.

[achtung]

Not surprising.  Not sure how that will all go down...but I know that France's population has been falling for a long time.  It was a problem before WWII.  The thing is...the highest educated and most well off countries seem to have the fewest babies while the lowest educated with the fewest resources and money tend to have the most babies.  Its kind of silly as it should be the other way around although I fully understand the reasoning...

Thing is...I wouldn't exclude the US from that tally there.  Ever growing immigrant population from places outside of Europe.

No no, the white people here are still having on average like two or three kids so it's basically a slow growth. You've also got to rememver Canada, they're almost purely of European descent, aside from a few Asians and Blacks.  North America still has a little time on it's hands.

Oh, and also, many people of a different ethniicity usually have kids that act very very Americanized.  Whether that be a good or bad thing.

[Davros]

Europe Needs to Start Having Babies 

Can continents do that ?

[IceFire]

Not surprising.  Not sure how that will all go down...but I know that France's population has been falling for a long time.  It was a problem before WWII.  The thing is...the highest educated and most well off countries seem to have the fewest babies while the lowest educated with the fewest resources and money tend to have the most babies.  Its kind of silly as it should be the other way around although I fully understand the reasoning...

Thing is...I wouldn't exclude the US from that tally there.  Ever growing immigrant population from places outside of Europe.

No no, the white people here are still having on average like two or three kids so it's basically a slow growth. You've also got to rememver Canada, they're almost purely of European descent, aside from a few Asians and Blacks.  North America still has a little time on it's hands.

Oh, and also, many people of a different ethniicity usually have kids that act very very Americanized.  Whether that be a good or bad thing.

Depends on where you are in Canada.  Quebec is nearly all european, the prairies tend to be european, chineese, and native.  Ontario is a mix.  My town is very white but the nearby city is much more multicultural from all over the world.  I guess I still live the campus life so I'm exposed to more diversity than normal.

[Unknown Target]

Thing is...I wouldn't exclude the US from that tally there.  Ever growing immigrant population from places outside of Europe.

The thing about the US is, that although it was founded by Europeans, the demographic has always been much, much more mixed than Europe - in fact, Europe is just now starting to deal with the problems of socially integrating it's different ethnicities. All the new immigration in the US really isn't changing the demographic's too much (I think), so they are the only industrialized country that's undergoing a population boom.

[Flipside]

That would be a working theory were it not for the fact that whilst first-generation Middle-Eastern immigrants are quite set in their ways, by the time they get to the second or third generation, that has changed, and you see far more European attitudes from them. This is no different to the Hispanic population of the US, or, indeed, the African population of it. There are just as high a percentage of 'African English' for example, but they are still English,

As for the 'Islamicism' of Europe... Well, quite frankly that's an incredible level of 'reporting without bothering to look'. It's easy to talk of the few European muslims who have been pushed to extremeism, but there's a strange blind eye being turned by the media to the internal battle between moderate European muslims and their hardline elders.

Since the dawn of time society has been about population drift, there's some pretty bad science going on in that article if it's convinced itself that the native Europeans are going to 'breed themselves out of existence'. That's more scaremongering that scientific fact.

[Bobboau]

there is a problem with immigration when you have large numbers of people who do not want to integrate, and who form there own communities. the old models of immigration are based on much smaller growth relative to the native population, and less of a tendency to accept people who refuse to integrate. the current situation in the west is much different than it was 50 years ago, and I fear there is a potential for a cultural collapse, and this fear is heightened by the fact that many westerners refuse to even consider these problems oftine deriding them as simple racism.

[Flipside]

The culture in America 50 years ago was different to the culture now, that's what culture is supposed to do, change over time.

I think scaremongering on the part of reports like this are far more of a problem than the imminent risk of the end of civilisation as we know it. Islam has been in Europe for decades, it's just that until 9/11 they were just another minority group, the number of Muslims coming into the UK from the Middle East, for example, is less than the number of Eastern Europeans of all denominations.

Personally, I find the fact the Author managed to squeeze in a comment about Europes 'unsustainable social programs and welfare' and seems to think that we 'imported the babies that they didn't have' just shows how little the Author has actually studied his subject.

[Bobboau]

I didn't say better, I said diferent. when things change you cannot rely upon models based upon them anymore, that was my point.




look you have a tree pronged potential problem;

1)historically low birthrates below replacement level

2)historically high immigration

3)a prevailing culture that promotes and enhances cultural differences between the different subgroups, rather than attempts to bring everyone together.

if any one of these were different I wouldn't be so worried, but the combination is concerning to me.

[Mr. Vega]

What is happening to europe right now is exactly what happened to it 1800 years before.

[Flipside]

Not to mention what happened in the US when the Europeans first arrived.

Let's deal with these one at a time.

1) Historically low birthrates. Not really, low birth rates compared to when we started recording them, certainly, but it's always interesting to see headlines reading 'Teenage pregnancies at highest for 40 years!' on the cover of a newspaper, and then hear something like this. Someone has to be wrong.

2) Same problem as above really, how long have we actually been recording immigration for? Certainly, the immigration of people from more distant countries has increased, but not to the level it is commonly believed to be.

3) As far as that is concerned, the lines are starting to be drawn between integration and tolerance, once again, the media brings you the nutty-nutty-muslim-with-a-hook(tm), but not the guy who owns a bedsit with two mates and is studying at university for a degree in Games writing, and thinks the 'Muslim Cartoons' incident was stupid and blown out of all proportion. I can assure you there are far far more of the latter than the former.

I will admit that birth rates in the UK are lower than they should be, but we are a lot lot further from any kind of massive 'cultural shift' in Europe than this report suggests, if anything we are seeing a massive cultural shift in those who come here, integration will happen over time, whether we like it or not, it's human nature. The University student is no more likely to vote for a government canditate that promotes Sharia law than I am, for example.

Thing is, the danger isn't Islam, it isn't fundamentalism, it isn't christianity and it isn't the US, the danger is ignorance. Most of the younger immigrants seek out education before anything else, and with that education comes free will, and with free will comes the belief in your right to have an opinion. Yes, sometimes that opinion is radical, even violent, but we've had that since before Guy Fawkes, and we've had our dose of fundamentalism under the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell etc.

I do understand the concerns, but a great deal of what people seem to believe about Europe is based far more deeply on assumption and generalisation than actually coming here and looking

[Turey]

1) Historically low birthrates. Not really, low birth rates compared to when we started recording them, certainly, but it's always interesting to see headlines reading 'Teenage pregnancies at highest for 40 years!' on the cover of a newspaper, and then hear something like this. Someone has to be wrong.

3) As far as that is concerned, the lines are starting to be drawn between integration and tolerance, once again, the media brings you the nutty-nutty-muslim-with-a-hook(tm), but not the guy who owns a bedsit with two mates and is studying at university for a degree in Games writing, and thinks the 'Muslim Cartoons' incident was stupid and blown out of all proportion. I can assure you there are far far more of the latter than the former.

Thing is, the danger isn't Islam, it isn't fundamentalism, it isn't christianity and it isn't the US, the danger is ignorance. Most of the younger immigrants seek out education before anything else, and with that education comes free will, and with free will comes the belief in your right to have an opinion. Yes, sometimes that opinion is radical, even violent, but we've had that since before Guy Fawkes, and we've had our dose of fundamentalism under the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell etc.

Three GREAT points. Thank you Flipside.

[Bobboau]

so your saying that a birth rate that is lower than the death rate is something that has probably happened repetadly over large stretches of time? I've heard similar arguments about how global warming is made up because it only takes into account what we've recorded for the last 300 years.
Come on, it's a _BAD_ thing, and I think the records are good enough to talk about the current situation.

the demographics of a region have a large number of variables, and you can only integrate when there is a culture to integrate into, it has not reached the point of being a problem yet, but it could. The low birth rate is by far the most troubling aspect, as so long as there is a vastly larger native population your assumptions are correct, the minority will eventually integrate, but what happens 50-100 years from now if these trends continue? cultures that are alien to Europe, namely Muslims, are at all time high percentages and have much higher growth rate than the larger population, this clearly leads to the potential for problems in terms of the long term survival of current European cultures. and this isn't a simple change in a culture, it's the importation of one culture into another.

[Descenterace]

Given that there are already quite enough people on this rock we call Earth, I really don't think population increase is particularly desirable.

[Flipside]

So your saying that a birth rate that is lower than the death rate is something that has probably happened repetadly over large stretches of time? I've heard similar arguments about how global warming is made up because it only takes into account what we've recorded for the last 300 years.
Come on, it's a _BAD_ thing, and I think the records are good enough to talk about the current situation.

Let's put it this way, would you consider less people being born than dying as such a bad thing if you took into consideration that most of the Baby-boomers are now well into their 60's? Couple that with the fact that we only really started recording births and deaths properly after WWII and you start to get the answer.

Edit : To be honest, I don't really get the Global Warming comparison, Global Warming was hypothesised through a huge amount of various data sources, not just global temperature scales, but also atmosphere/core samples, scans of the atmosphere in various spectrums, and, most importantly, years of comparing and analysing data from multiple sources. What this Author has effectively done is looked at one source of information and drawn a vast doomsday of Europe conspiracy from it.

[Bobboau]

perse no. however in the context of competition with other groups yes.

[WMCoolmon]

While we're tossing around BSG quotes, here's a nice one for the occassion.

All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

[Mobius]

Europe needs babies? I can give some help