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.
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