Comments on: The New York Times catches up with Mark Steyn (sort of)

By: Peadar Ban

Peadar Ban — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:34:19 +0000

Some wit recently said that there isn’t a word printed in the Times that is not an editorial. I thinks that includes words like “the” and “and”. I am surprised to learn that people outside the asylums that were once called Institutions of Higher Learning still read that rag.

It does not rise to the useful level of fish wrapper, anymore.

By: Arnie Keller

Arnie Keller — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:09:04 +0000

But does anyone take seriously anything the Times prints? Even words like “the” or “and”?

By: Fresh Air

Fresh Air — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:10:26 +0000

I read (-groan-) the entire article in the NYT magazine. The author actually has some talent. He did a good job identifying (admitting?) the problem and fencing off the possible causes for it.

Then, after raising the most likely candidate for the declining birthrate–secularism–he fails to follow up to see if it’s correlated. Then whilst trying to explain the higher birthrates in northern Europe, he fails to even consider an issue he touches (courageously, for the NYT) on earlier–namely that Muslim immigrants breed at much higher rates than the pre-existing Europeans.

After getting about two-thirds of the way, I was utterly disappointed that he failed to even look at the twin conservative theses of Mark Steyn, much less refute them. Instead, he simply went on and proferred up what is, to my mind, an absurd argument for the higher birthrates in the north: nannystate liberalism, which supposedly allows these working women the freedom to have more children, etc., etc.

Balderdash! Take a look at the names of the children being born in these countries. Mohammed is pretty darn popular these days for a reason. And the reason the birthrates are up is because these new immigrants who are arriving in the north are delighted at the additional dough they get for doing what they would do anyway: have large families.

Honestly, this writer is exactly the reason I don’t read the NYT any more.

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:14:22 +0000

The scoop? The scoop! SIGH. The Death of the West by PJB was published in October, 2002.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:30:16 +0000

The intelligentsia, left and right (there are, unremarkably enough, both kinds), are always saddled with truths whose names dare not be spoken. The realities treated in demography are a fine example of the awful impermanence of such truths. Until very recently, demography was a sword of the socialists. Who had not heard the term “population explosion?” Today it is despised by them as a Bushian casuistry of the conservaties. Why? Because new putative truths are always knocking off the old ones. The new truth of the left is that the population explosion of Muslims in the West (and the population suicide of the indigenes) is of no importance, which “truth” is a way to epater les bourgeois (here, conservatives). That’s much more important than whether there is a demographic crisis looming for the West, forty years from now, or not. The political engagee has a horizon of ten years — at most. I could mention now some similarly friable truths among conservatives, now, but I shan’t — this time.