As longtime readers will have noticed, I'm increasingly bored by the daily soap opera of politics, mainly because professional politicians rarely have anything to say about anything that matters. The left nominally addresses the Great Remaking of the World - from mass immigration to transgender bathrooms - by confining itself to a few bogus sentimentalist bromides ("We've always been a nation of immigrants", "Love wins") designed to assure everyone that a) "diversity lotteries" and chain migration are a good thing; and, if you're minded to bring up problematic details, b) it's inevitable, so don't bother trying to resist. The right, on the other hand, is terrified of being demonized as racist, homophobic and whatever'snextophobic, and so finds it safer to talk about corporate tax rates.
For my own part, I'm inclined to agree with Ann Coulter:
Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration...
Republicans who treat immigration as a backburner issue should be required to run on the issues they consider more important -- in California. See how your arguments fare in a state that's already been transformed by immigration. That's your new country.
How stupid do you have to be to carry on about taxes, defense spending, ISIS, abortion or the Ten Commandments while intentionally losing on the one issue that will determine the outcome of all these other issues? Too stupid to be of any real help.
As I said to Tucker Carlson the other night, the demographic transformation of the western world is "the biggest story of our time", and it will indeed determine all the others:
~Taxes? Big Government welfare programs depend on a high degree of social solidarity between givers and takers. If you think in France or Germany that young Mohammed and Ahmed will be willing to pay higher and higher taxes so that Jean-Pierre and Fritz can continue enjoying their present thirty-year retirements, you're deluded.
~Defense spending and ISIS? More UK and Canadian Muslims have volunteered for the Islamic State than serve as soldiers of the Queen. As you can tell from their kid-glove treatment of returning jihadists, it's unlikely that these countries will still be willing to follow America into the sands of Araby as Islam becomes a bigger and bigger domestic and electoral consideration. As for the broader international order, two of the Big Five at the UN will be semi-Islamized (and, indeed, semi-Islamic nuclear powers).
~Abortion? Hispanics, we're told by Charles Krauthammer et al, are "natural conservatives", so in theory Latin-American immigration ought to be good for the pro-life lobby: After all, South America has some of the toughest anti-abortion regimes on the planet. Then again, once they get to the United States, Hispanics account for about a quarter of all abortions. So who knows?
To reprise an old line of mine from America Alone, the future belongs to those who show up for it. And, if those showing up in America, Britain, Sweden, Austria are dramatically different from the entire history of those polities, then the future will be something of a crap shoot. For example, this story from my old friends at The Spectator - "Is IQ Falling Across the West?"
According to Flynn's latest findings, the Nordic nations are projected to see national intelligence scores drop by a total of seven points by 2025.
You don't say. How'd that come about? After all, not so long ago everyone was gung-ho about 20th century upswings in IQ. Alas, Professor Timothy Bates is mystified:
What becomes of this optimism if it turns out that IQs are now falling across the developed world..? Something has happened in the last decade or so that has put progress into reverse in some countries and failed gifted children in others. We need to find out why and what to do to make sure its upward trajectory is restored.
"Something" has "happened", eh? In 1900 Sweden's foreign-born population was 0.07 per cent - or 35, 627, of whom all but 300 were from Europe or North America. By 2010 Sweden's foreign-born population was just under 15 per cent - or 1.33 million, of whom two-thirds were born outside the EU. In 2015, they admitted so many Muslim "refugees" that in the space of a single year they overtook China's "one child"-policy sex imbalance (119 boys for every 100 girls) and in their late-teen cohort now have 123 boys for every 100 girls. In the space of a century, from 1950 to 2050, Sweden will have gone from an homogeneous ethnic state with barely any visible minority population to a land in which ethnic Swedes will themselves be the minority.
You can't really do that sort of thing without upending everything - and I mean everything. For example, how does one observe Hanukkah in the new Gothenburg? With Molotov cocktails:
This past Saturday, a Hanukkah party at a synagogue in Goteborg, Sweden, was abruptly interrupted by Molotov cocktails. They were hurled by a gang of men in masks at the Jews, mostly teenagers, who had gathered to celebrate the holiday.
Would this be Sven and Inga heading to the Bring Your Own Molotov party? Or is it perhaps a different sort of Swede? Meanwhile, a couple of hours south:
Local police had made a much-criticised public statement advising women not to go out alone after darkness following the brutal rape of a 17-year old girl in central Malmö at the weekend.
It the third rape attack in the city in around a month, and occurred after midnight when the victim was walking through a playground area. On Sunday, the police officer leading the investigation was widely quoted in Swedish media advising women only go out in pairs or as part of a group after darkness.
So, in a country that boasts the world's first self-proclaimed "feminist government", it's unsafe for women to leave the house.
Would that be Björn and Anders after a couple of lagers and a Harvey Weinstein chick flick? Or is the sudden increase of rape due to factors more, um, vibrant and diverse?
In once boringly placid Sweden, all the indicators are going wacky. Whether or not you're in favor of wholesale demographic transformation as a matter of public policy, it would seem unlikely that you could accomplish such a thing in a couple of generations without it having some impact on IQ. In fact, it would render any comparative measure of IQ between 1950 Swedes and 2050 Swedes as completely pointless as comparing the IQ of whoever's passing through Gate Twelve at Heathrow with whoever's passing through Gate Twelve a century later from an arriving flight from an entirely different destination: The only constant is the real estate.
According to a 2007 study by the Rockwool Foundation, after ten years in the Danish school system, two-thirds of students with an Arabic background remain functionally illiterate. In Bradford, Yorkshire, 75 per cent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, many of whom are themselves the children of first cousins. In the new west, why even bother worrying about IQ? Professor Bates says he wants to get to the bottom of the "why" and the "what". But as I wrote eleven years ago in America Alone:
Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: The "who" is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why.
Which is why a gay bathhouse got nixed in Luton: The mosque has more muscle.
And the more demographic transformation transforms, the more ill-advised it becomes to mention it. Before 9/11, even the BBC was happy to discuss whether the resurgence of rickets in the United Kingdom is due to Muslim dress. Sixteen years later, when UKIP bring it up, it's cited as proof they're a laughingstock. A question for Professor Bates and his colleagues is whether a society in which more and more subjects are ruled out of public discourse should expect its measures of intelligence to do anything other than head south - for native and non-native alike. Thus:
The quality of what we called the student "clientele" had deteriorated so dramatically over the years that the classroom struck me as a barn full of ruminants and the curriculum as a stack of winter ensilage... The level of interest in and attention to the subjects was about as flat as a fallen arch. The ability to write a coherent English sentence was practically nonexistent; ordinary grammar was a traumatic ordeal. In fact, many native English-speakers could not produce a lucid verbal analysis of a text, let alone carry on an intelligible conversation, and some were even unable to properly pronounce common English words.
More from me on Sweden here:
~Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark joins the great John Oakley at Toronto's AM640 live at 5pm Eastern. We hope you'll tune in.
The days dwindle down to Christmas morn, but, if you're in need of something special, over at the Steyn store there are bargains galore among our Steynamite Yuletide offers. And for this holiday season only we have a special Mark Steyn Club Christmas Gift Membership that includes a welcome gift of a handsome Steyn hardback or a CD set personally autographed by Mark. More details here.
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"Love wins" is truly the most galling of the sentimentalist bromides. Lemme tell ya, "Love Victorious" is one mean, ugly, obnoxious monster, and it scares the hell out of me.
I met some Swedes in Egypt the other week - the most educated, polite, well traveled people you will ever encounter. There is so, so much I would have liked to ask them. They were quick to tell me that the stabbings of western women in Hurghada (where we were) in 2015, 2016, and 2017 weren't all terrorism; at least one was drug related (their Swedish friends who lived there told them), and how we can't always assume terrorism, no matter what the papers say.
I looked at them for a while. I wanted to ask what the chances are that random German women were stabbed by Muslim men because of DRUGS in a country where they cut your hands off and then kill you for having any. I wanted to ask if all the women in their country are also getting stabbed because of 'drugs.'
Mostly, I'd like to understand what is going on the in the universe that we all can't talk about this, even as it's happening.
The vacuum of godlessness, decadence, mal-education, the sweep of history, crowd mimetics, fear of being called racist, not wanting to cause wars of nationalism, belief in leftist doctrines like radical egalitarianism and radical individualism, etc.
The politicians and media figures are afraid for their lives: their hands, their throats, their__. You name the body part. They're in the public eye and they know they're targets. Open their hearts and their constituents neighborhoods to the immigrant Muslim population, have the chain immigration grow and they've created their own virtual bollard safe space. Just a hunch.
It must have been a senior moment, but for a second or two I thought I might have written this. Fascism, masking itself as leftism, is rampant and we are all victims - even, or perhaps especially, here in Australia.
If Islam is going to be the majority and they are all as thick as ten short planks, is not the latter a positive thing - I'd hate to think of nations of Muslims with intelligence and culture, although I suppose then they might have the sense to see how moronic and evil Islam is.
The only bigger threat, perhaps, is gay marriage - not because it is evil, though it is, but because of the activists who drove it and want more. The ink wasn't dry on the bill before they started talking about gender fluidity in schools etc, as we "no voters" predicted.
One almost despairs, although it might just presage the Second Coming, about the only thing that can save us.
Happy Christmas everyone - could just be your last chance.
So, I have a recent theory or hunch that these changes in Europe will lead to a lot more 'old' Europeans immigrating to America/Canada/Australia/New Zealand in the not so long for now, or maybe already. I'm wondering if there could be any evidence of this as of yet.
Ah, Joseph, I sense a touch of naiveté. It's like people trying to run from a flash flood. Certainly Canada's political elites want nothing to do with those stodgy Euros, because, altogether now, "Our strength is diversity." Or the other way around if you wish.
They won't be choosing to escape to the US. Not while the evil troglodyte Trump is in the White House. They'd rather take their chances at the local bathhouses than humiliate themselves by submitting to the authority of a Trump regime.
They would have been better under the wicked witch of the west then?!
Please leave the name and star co-ordinates of your home planet.
I haven't read this yet, but the caption on the picture for this article is hilarious.
" If you think in France or Germany that young Mohammed and Ahmed will be willing to pay higher and higher taxes so that Jean-Pierre and Fritz can continue enjoying their present thirty-year retirements, you're deluded."
Mark, I think you may have possibly dropped the ball there in your analysis. My impression is that Mohammed and Ahmed (as you perceive them) will not be paying any taxes in future, or mostly even now, but rather will more likely be on the dole themselves, i.e. drawing the "jizya". Nice fanciful idea though, commercially industrious jihadists!!
I assumed the Solway quote at the end referred to middle or high school. Upon reading the article, I was shocked to learn that it was university students who are chewing their cuds. In Canada...
More nothing to see move along
The top four stories from thelocal.se whilst I type
Islamic leader criticizes Swedish minister's 'generalizations' on anti-Semitism
Swedish man arrested at Stansted airport for possession of terrorism-related material
Demonstrators call for Swedish government to do more to combat rape
Halt execution of US-based academic 'immediately', UN experts tell Iran
They certainly got the whole thing nailed down and buttoned up tightly ... This would seem to affirm all is good to go in Sweden...
St Lucia days are numbered... God Speed to all
Spectacular, Mr. Steyn!
Yes, I'll certainly be here next time.
If I understand correctly, Egypt, Turkey, and many others used to be Christian; but where are they now? I think Lebanon might be one of the most modern examples of Islam forcing Christianity and anything else out. One only needs to look at the fates of these countries to see where this is headed in the West. As has happened elsewhere once they move in history will be rewritten and there will be no Enlightened Western Culture to look back on and aspire to. Besides, if that Enlightened Western Culture didn't even have enough self-interest to save itself, why would future generations bother with it?
Christianity was in place throughout the Mediterranean and Europe long before Islam ever existed but because conversion to Islam is a one-way street enforced on the threat of death, Islam continues to spread relentlessly.
Unless we learn from the past, our future is history.
The fundamental cause of all this is the growth of welfare programs. They don't have to be smart to collect handouts. Subsidize incompetence and we get more of it. Basic economics. As long as enough people remain smart enough to support the incompetents, the downward spirals in competence and productivity will continue. Then a tipping point will be reached where the makers revolt and stop supporting the takers, and the takers will revolt for having to support themselves. The outcome of that inevitable conflict is predictable because we've seen this movie before - societal structures will swing back to feudalism and tribal wars. It's programmed in our genes. Average intelligence means some are smarter than others. The smarter ones will always control the others,
Hi Mark, re-the charming photograph accompanying this article of the excitable Abba fans. A better caption might be Abba Hu Akbar. Clearly all of us dirty, filthy infidels have been mishearing this quaint folkloric chant for some time. Some clarity on this is in order.
Mark replies:
That is an excellent joke. If Swedes still have any fight in them, they'll use that for the next all-star Mamma Mia gala: Abbahu Akbar!
I was always partial to Danzig Queen myself.
Is it possible that Western Europe is heaving a sigh, and saying "Oh well, we've had a good run for a few thousand years, maybe it's time we let others take over." Socialism tends to foster laziness, both intellectual and physical. Maybe they do not have the heart to fight the inevitable.
Since reading, "America Alone", years ago, I believe "demographics " is the most important word in our language. Every social construct hinges on population statistics. Boring subject for most, I guess.
One shudders to think Europe will become like the Mideast and North Africa with warring tribes and zero progress toward a modern civilization, one exception, they'll have nuclear bombs.
I agree with Joshua Passel, please save and protect the artifacts that prove humans once thrived and evolved.
We wouldn't want aliens who visit us in the future from distant planets to think civilized progress completely failed.
I've been married to a teacher for 48 years, she "touched the future" for all 48 years. An inner city environment was her stage. She watched as the "leader of the free world" tried and failed to educate the "yutes" of America how to be a success in the USA without mastering ENGLISH.
The policy makers in education and society agreed that we've failed to educate at least one generation of Americans on the basics of being successful so lets come up with Plan B.
Plan B is Your STUPID, We will help you get STONED. "STUPID & STONED"
What states has the highest NUMBERS of STUPID, what states have legalized marijuania? What does getting STONED do for you, it dulls your reality. Being STUPID doesn't hurt if your STONED. 60,000 Americans died last year of an overdose, more than all the men and women who died in Viet-Nam. Being DEAD was better than being STUPID.
"What does getting STONED do for you, it dulls your reality."
Agree. Substance abuse is a form of submission- a retreat to a "safe space"- and the problem is only going to get worse: a younger generation inculcated with the myth of individual uniqueness, and devoid of the resilience to deal with life's disappointments and the reality of individual ordinariness. The real world is a harsh place at the best of times; add in social decay, social media and strident ideologies that demand conformism, and is it any wonder people might want to escape (periodically, if not permanently). Addiction and other mental health problems are a big indicator of civilisational despair.
Europe is free to choose its future, however future-less that future may be. And the rest of us are free to let them enjoy/suffer the consequences. To paraphrase The Sun newspaper, "Will the last female, LGBTQWERTY pluralistic Christian in Europe (the Jews having long since made aliyah to Israel) please turn out the light?" But could you crate-up and send over the contents of the Louvre before you do? And maybe Chartes Cathedral? We could reassemble it in Lake Havasu, Arizona next to London Bridge.
It will be interesting. Look for unassimilating Muslims to Balkanize Europe and for Europe to consolidate and reconstitute itself for a turn at the economic helm after America sinks in debt.
The Current UK Prime Minister in 2015 said the following, which sounds almost far-right ....
"Because when immigration is too high (no figure given), when the pace of change is too fast, it's impossible to build a cohesive society. It's difficult for schools and hospitals and core infrastructure like housing and transport to cope. And we know that for people in low-paid jobs, wages are forced down even further while some people are forced out of work altogether. ... So there is no case, in the national interest, for immigration of the scale we have experienced over the last decade."
Theresa May as Home Secretary // Speech to the Conservative Party Conference / 06.10.2015
Take two systems - one that says religion is the state and one that says that religion should be separate from the state. Now try and join them together!
0. Islam asks you to have zero thought about it's origins and practices. And make zero comparisons with successful cultures.
1. Islam asks for one simple thing. Islam asks for everything – finance, religion, police, morals, schools, law, food, science, clothes, art and your body to be Islamic.
2. Islam only has two problems – Muhammed and Mohammed. Once the first problem has been solved then the second one can be solved easily.
3. Islam offers three things. In the Koran it offers Peace, War and then a Continuation of War. In your life Islam wants you to subjugate yourself, subjugate your family and then subjugate everyone else.
So, Islam is Invasion of the Body-Snatchers?
What a fantastic SteynPost.
Mark, you describe accurately the phenomenon known as inbreeding depression. Well known among animal breeders ancient and modern, the effects on humans of the practice was also well understood. Ancient societies recognized it and had different ways of dealing with it, some brutal (stealing young women and girls from neighboring tribes or societies to deepen the thieves' gene pool) and some common sensical, as in young men going off to far places to find a wife. The relatively unstructured western culture minimizes inbreeding depression because of our geographical and class mobility (at least until recently). That some societies deliberately cause inbreeding depression says much of them, none of it good.
I believe this might be contradicted by the most intelligent group, the Ashkenazi Jews.
With highest respect, wish M. Mark would not push so many buttons all at once!
First agree 100%. It's all inane talk about constructs, not real life. It's not just tedious, but a genuine waste of everyone's time to get dragged into it.
Second, the IQ stuff can get people running off in diversion directions. Every population has the normal 'Bell Curve" of IQ. What we're looking at is the refusal to learn.
Part of it is coming from cultures with current piss-poor education - and the best is always only for the higher castes. This creates narrow mindsets and also constrains belief that one can do better. Pakistan and India, since they were once India with all the caste structure that infuses every move people make, are very mentally-hobbled by it - it's psychological warfare from birth. Even though one may detest the low caste with few opportunities one was born in, over time one subconsciously accepts that one is inferior, and will be inferior in achievement. Classic psychology manipulation. The upper castes of course somehow are higher forms of intelligence, but the Bell Curve still applies - lots of 'high elites' are dumber than posts. Everyone can come up with plenty of examples to prove that truth. Not all - a few elites are geniuses or above average - most are average, just like everybody else.
No, the Left - philosophical agenda or bribes or who knows for what end goal because they won't admit it - dumped hordes of ill-equipped people into schools and foreign societies and instead of getting them up to speed, they've dumbed it all down. Overwhelmed the system.
The people involved in all this with origination in Pakistan or the very foggily-defined zone of 'North Africa' were pushed by their handlers because they'll stick to what they know no matter what. They have twenty-eight years-old pretending to be 15. Who's the dummy there? These are adults who are quite set in their ways and who have allegiance to their leaders - usually spiritual, who also got them jobs and benefits when they were loyal. The IQ problem is the Western idiots who created the IQ type tests who believe all this reality all somehow magically works because 'good.'
Now we're into full-bore superstition on one side which should know better, but which is an ideology that promotes 'things happen for no reason" instead of 'actions have consequences.' Superstition is popular as a belief system because it completely absolves the individual of responsibility for his or her actions. One blames the black cat, the ladder, the whatever, but not what little cheat they did that morning or the week before. In stark contrast, Western civilization is based on the idea that the Ultimate power, God, actively holds each individual responsible for what leaves his or her hand. This is very radical, and it created a radical thinking different from the majority of the world.
About reality: If it's North Africa - it's Islamic - Arab or Berber/Arab/Maur intermarriage who literally not just lord over but own many of the Blacks, that is Sub-Saharan Africans - if they don't own the bodies, they own most of the trade and business networks. The networks are 1,000 years old of who owns what, who owns who and who is beholden to who for jobs, opportunities, security and protection. Africans know all of this in detail, and will be happy to explain it, but who bothers to ask them?
I agree that the Nordics are the dumb ones here. IQ measures suitability in a modern technological society, not success in a primitive one, and in the new primitive world the Nordics do not have the advantage.
The collapse of western IQ is the result of the confluence of unrestricted chain migration and the debasement of educational standards. Urban school districts take great delight in the number of languages they "must support" in order to celebrate the diversity of their students. This is also a means of avoiding responsibility for the failure to prepare these students to find meaningful employment in our the workplace. Couple that with the inability of today's unionized and politicized teachers to teach simple mathematics (negative numbers and fractions defeat an alarmingly large fraction of elementary school teachers) and English with the increasingly inept curricula which is centered on therapeutic indoctrination, and failure is the norm. In our inner cities, minority graduation rates from high school are typically in the 60% range. The systemic solution to the IQ problem is likely to be along the lines of the collapse of the college boards in the early 1990s ... just add enough points to hide the decline. In the case of the SATs, the "correction" was to add about 200 points; and when that wasn't enough, they had to change to format of the tests so that it wasn't possible to compare earlier results to present practice.
"Diversity Rapes" might enrage the likes of Simon Schama and other high IQ types even more than "Diversity Bollards".... a good thing!
Will be interesting to see whether the combination of multicultural sex attacks and the dubious #metoo movement leads to a spike in conversions over the next year or so.
"..soapin' the old wedding tackle..." This is why I joined the Mark Steyn Club. But seriously, I can't think of a more important SteynPost. "The enemy within" has only doubled down since President's Day.
As a charter subscriber to Conrad Black's National Post in 1998, one of my few very modest claims to fame is having "discovered" Mark Steyn and introduced his writings to family and friends.
Nearly 20 years later, I regret that Mark has been proven to be prescient about the broad issues of immigration and demographics. I'm sure you'd have also preferred for the sake of your children to be wrong, Mark.
The first edition of the NP was breathtaking. It's been a downhill slide ever since.
Mark replies:
Not so. It peaked around late 2000.
Critical "typo":
119 boys for every [100] girls
and
123 boys for every [100] girls
For whatever it's worth:
119 boys for every 100 girls was the China stat.
123 boys for every 100 girls was the Sweden stat for the late teen demographic.
The left will bill us for the chain migration it binds us with.
As a minor note, the numbers in the ratios of boys are in correspondence to every 100 girls, or prom will get even more awkward.
It seems as if the News on a world-wide basis is all the same, created for the same mis-information, but to what purpose? To influence whom? Real facts are ignored, even if they are gathered, and I think they are gathered less and less. 24/7 "news" and virtually no hard facts. Regionalism is on the rise, everywhere. The rise of regional news might actually return too.
Mega-global-Corporate Headline News has become a snooze. The natural-born natives grow restless but that simmering volcano, or pressure along the fault line, is not reported. A collision with reality is imminent in some nations. But in Sweden? How did the land of the Vikings become the land of Sheeple? Is it the socialism? The faux feminism?
My friend and her husband (rank-and-file conservatives) took a trip to Sweden 2 years ago. Raved to me about how clean and orderly the places they saw were. I told them it's the Sweden They want them to see; not the real Sweden.
You've got an uphill battle, Mark, with well-made hiking boots.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, "A culture and common tradition, Sven, if you can keep it."
Well, I'm just guessing, but the neutrality route that Sweden took during World War I and II has come to haunt this nation. Also, the nations that were Kingdoms in Europe have gone full-hog socialist and degenerated into "libertarian" anarchy. Brexit is being sabotaged by the politicians who will soon get the chance to hang separately, to paraphrase Franklin who wisely was an Independent politically.
Western Europe has not gotten over the shredding of the social fabric from the Nazis and Germany has yet to re-unite post-Cold-War. The common tradition is now ignorance of your own culture.
We all know about the ravages of War and Time. Now we're getting a taste of the ravages of a whole new thing: Tolerance.