‘Overpopulated’? With Liberals, Perhaps

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It is never enough for a liberal to argue the point at issue, and generally, liberals never actually “argue” at all: They just lie, and when you catch them lying, they then accuse you of hate. “Never mind facts or logic — you’re a Nazi!” That’s a liberal “argument.”

Because they don’t care about logic or truth, and because they are arguing for bad policies that produce bad results, it is always necessary for liberals to distract from the most important fact in every argument, i.e., the disastrous wrongness of liberalism.

So when liberals are not using one distraction tactic (“Republicans are Nazis”) they are always using some other tactic of sophistry. For example, “Look How Smart I Am” is a distraction tactic intended to change the subject by inspiring awe at the liberal’s intelligence and erudition. However, this is never disputed by liberalism’s critics.

“Yes, Professor, we grant that you are both intelligent and highly educated. We acknowledge that you are fluent in the English language and resourceful in debate. The problem is that your intelligence, your education and your rhetorical skills — all of which we do not doubt — are being employed on behalf of policies that are destroying our country and ruining the world. You are not stupid, but you are still wrong, and America is going to hell in a handbasket because smart people like you spend so much time arguing in favor of bad policies and wrong ideas.”

At some point, we begin to consider the possibility that smart people who are so consistently wrong are not merely wrong, but evil.

However, the point I wish to make is that we inevitably reach that moment in an argument where the conservative has plainly demonstrated what he had intended to demonstrate, and where the only thing the liberal can do to “win” is to flaunt his imagined intellectual superiority. The purpose of such an ostentatious gesture is to salvage the prestige of liberalism, to convince the reader that, despite all the evidence adduced in support of a conservative argument, it’s still smarter to be liberal. “Look How Smart I Am!”

So, the subject was lesbian sorority girls and the correlation between that phenomenon and other facts, including the “humane values” of the “inclusive community” ballyhooed by a small liberal arts college in the 21st century. This was a formerly Christian college, and it was simple to deduce that (a) the abandonment of Christianity by the college was implicated in (b) the acceptance of lesbianism as a desirable lifestyle for students whose parents paid more than $30,000 a year in tuition to have their daughters permanently lesbianized.

Nothing particularly controversial in this, except for the fact that colleges nowadays try to conceal this reality behind a lot of feel-good rhetoric about “diversity,” blah blah blah, because they don’t want parents and alumni to figure out what is actually happening.

“What? You’re telling me that my alma mater has jettisoned the belief system to which I subscribe? They’ve hired a bunch of perverts and Marxists to brainwash kids into supporting a political agenda that involves homosexuality and socialism? And you expect me not only to pay to send my kids to this school but also make a generous contribution to the alumni fund to help you implement this program? Hell, no!”

The gap between public perception and campus reality must be maintained at all costs, you see. If ever parents and taxpayers caught on to what the administration and faculty are doing, the Higher Education Bubble would collapse like Lehman Brothers in 2008.

My item “Postmodern Education, Postmodern Love” was just a demonstration of the hidden truth of 21st-century higher education, and I think it was an adequate demonstration. Yet there showed up in the comments of that post a pseudonymous troll, using the moniker “Weedlord BonerHitler” and posting from the IP address 68.53.107.147, and he began to flaunt his erudition thus:

Here is a radically simple summation of the convoluted mess that conservatives find when it comes to women like these:
Now that people do not feel societal pressure to marry a member of the opposite sex (and stay married forever,) and now that people have new ways to experiment sexually, and now that they can raise children with any partner they wish (or no partner,) they really do want to “marry their best friend.” Marriage is becoming more about companionship and happiness, and less of a socially-enforced contract that people feel pressured to adopt and maintain for reasons apart from their own happiness. . . .

Blah blah blah. You’ve heard one pseudo-libertarian rationalization of perverse decadence, you’ve heard ’em all. But then we arrive at Weedlord BonerHitler’s neo-Malthusian conclusion:

“The earth is overpopulated as it is.
Seven billion people is plenty if you ask Weedlord.”

Really? You want us to believe that the choice facing us is between Lesbian Nation and Soylent Green? But never mind that: The earth is not “overpopulated.” This can be demonstrated easily.

England

Land area: 50,346 square miles
Population: 53,012,456
Population density: 1,054 per square mile

Texas

Land area: 268,581 square miles
Population: 26,448,193
Population density: 98.1 per square mile

Argentina

Land area: 1,073,518 square miles
Population: 42,669,500
Population density: 37.3 per square mile

The population density figures in the Wikipedia entries need to be adjusted by a few fractions, but we’ll use these rough numbers just for comparison, to make the following points:

1. Argentina would have to add more than 60 million people (reaching a total population of 106 million) in order to be as densely populated as Texas.
2. Texas is far from the most densely populated state in the U.S., ranking 26th in population density.
3. Texas would have to increase its population more than ten-fold — to about 275 million — in order to be as densely populated as England.
4. Argentina, which is nearly four times larger than Texas in land area, would need a population of nearly 1.2 billion — that’s billion, with a “b” — in order to be as densely populated as England.
5. The per capita income figures of England ($50,566), Texas ($19,617) and Argentina ($9,640) confirm a basic historical truth, i.e., that higher population density is associated with greater wealth.

Human beings are an economic resource. Manpower is also brain power. Ceteris parabus, more people means more wealth, more wealth means more education, and more education has an exponential effect on the wealth-creating power of a population. Capital investment (large reserves of accumulated value) combined with an educated work force is an amazing engine of wealth creation.

This is why big cities attract smart people who create wealth, which in turn explains why poor people move to big cities, seeking access to the wealth the smart rich people have created there.

What liberal economists bemoan as the “income gap” in big cities like San Francisco is mainly a function of (a) mobility and (b) welfare. Mobility enables people to go where the money is.

Welfare tends to act as a “glue” holding people in poverty by discouraging workforce participation and encouraging poor people to stay places where there are not good employment opportunites. Other than that, the “income gap” is just basic arithmetic. In big cities where wealth is generated and accumulated, (a) the rich will get richer and (b) the poor from other places will move there, hoping to get rich and to derive other socioeconomic benefits of proximity to wealth. If you’re poor, you’re better off being poor in a relatively rich place, like Seattle. Being poor in a poor place, like Somali, is much worse. If liberals understood the implications of this in terms of public policy, they wouldn’t be liberals (advocates of an expanding bureaucratic redistributionist system that punishes efficiency and rewards sloth), they’d be conservatives or maybe libertarians. But I digress . . .

The paranoid Chicken Little fears of anthropogenic global warming are merely the latest sky-is-falling theory by which doomsayers have tried to frighten Americans into not having babies. It’s fairly obvious that someone (maybe our foreign enemies, maybe the Democrat Party or perhaps Satan himself) really hates America and wants to kill our babies, so that we destroy our nation and evil can then rule the entire world unopposed. But the two most common liberal ideas about demographics — that (a) the earth is overpopulated and (b) overpopulation causes poverty — are both provably false.

“OK, you’ve convinced me,” says the skeptic. “But what about the billions of poor people in the world? How can we help them?”

Answer: HAVE MORE BABIES!

I explained this in reply to “Weedhead BonerHitler” :

“Total fertility rate” (TFR) is a demographic measurement describing the average number of lifetime births per woman that can be expected, based on current birth rates. Here are the Top 10 nations ranked by TFR:

1. Niger 6.89
2. Mali 6.16
3. Burundi 6.14
4. Somalia 6.08
5. Uganda 5.97
6. Burkina Faso 5.93
7. Zambia 5.76
8. Malawi 5.66
9. Afghanistan 5.43
10. Angola 5.43

All of these nations are desperately poor. The per-capita income of these nations:

Niger $800
Mali $1,100
Burundi $600
Somalia $600
Uganda $1,500
Burkina Faso $1,500
Zambia $1,800
Malawi $900
Afghanistan $1,100
Angola $6,300

As a mental exercise, imagine one average citizen from each of these countries, assembled together and placing on a table their per capita share of GDP.
The total amount on the table — the combined annual income of these 10 people — is $16,200.
Now, the total fertility rate (TFR) in the United States is 2.01 and the annual per capita income is $52,800. So, the average American’s annual income (every man, woman and child) is more than three times greater than the combined annual income of these 10 residents of these nations with the highest fertility rates in the world.
THE WORLD IS BECOMING POORER AS A RESULT OF THIS PHENOMENON.
The question before us is not whether 7 billion is “plenty,” nor is the question whether desperately poor people in foreign countries are having too many babies. The question is, “WHO WILL POPULATE THE FUTURE?”
How many children will we — the fortunate people with educations, running water, electricity and laptops, etc. — contribute to the future? Do we want the population of the future to be more prosperous, more educated, more democratic, more free? Because if that is what we want — to increase the share of human happiness in the world — the best way to do it is for educated, affluent, freedom-loving people to have lots of babies. Or, at least, more babies than we’re having right now.
In 1957, the U.S. total fertility rate hit its postwar Baby Boom peak at 3.74. That is to say that in 1957 (two years before I was born), the average American woman was more likely to be a mother of four children than to be a mother of “only” three. So we know, as a historical fact, that middle-class prosperity and relatively high birth rates are not incompatible. This was true quite recently, in my own lifetime, and could be true again.
However, the “overpopulation” hype of the 1960s (e.g., Paul Ehrlich) convinced many educated Americans that there was an urgent need to reduce birth rates, so smart people stopped having so many babies. Meanwhile, stupid Americans (who don’t read books or newspapers, anyway) continued having babies and (more importantly, in the big picture) poor people in distant foreign countries paid no attention at all to this “overpopulation” hype.
The result? An anti-natalist culture took hold in the West, particularly among the most affluent and highly educated segments of the population (the people who are the targeted consumers of the elite intelligentsia’s output), and so the population of the present (today is yesterday’s future) is LESS educated and LESS affluent because of this differential pressure (lower fertility for the affluent, relatively higher fertility for the poor).
This is not to say that there are no other factors influencing social, economic and demographic trends. It is to say that the false “overpopulation” myth has an overall negative impact on society. If you don’t understand this, you could read What to Expect When No One’s Expecting by Jonathan Last or America Alone by Mark Steyn.
How much can we (the affluent and educated citizens of democratic industrial nations) do to improve the lives of the poor, either here in our own nations or in distant impoverished places like Mali and Burundi? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that the more or us there are, the more we will be able to help. Why do I say this? It’s not just a matter of math, although it is obvious that 400 million Americans can offer 25% more manpower to the world than can 300 million Americans. It is also the fact that, generally, small families are both a result of selfishness and a breeding ground for selfish attitudes among children.
Parental love is sacrificial love, and the deliberate avoidance of parental responsibility is evidence of a selfish personality. Quod erat demonstrandum. Conversely and ironically, low birth rates are also a reflection of pessimism: “The world is an awful place. There is no hope for the future. I will be unable to provide for a child. I had better not have any kids.”
Selfish pessimism or generous optimism: Which attitude do you suppose is more beneficial to the world?
Me? I’ve got six children. You, Mr. Weedlord? I hope you practice in your own life the anti-natalist Death Cult beliefs you advocate, because obviously there are too many selfish anti-social assholes like you in the world already.

Like I say, when liberals continue being liberals even after confronted with the facts that refute the premises of their arguments — when they can see that liberalism is a ginormous lie based upon errors and falsehoods — the question is whether they are just wrong, or whether they are actually evil. When a liberal tries to flaunt his imagined intellectual superiority at me, this does not improve my opinion of him, you see. If you have proved yourself smart enough to understand the truth, and the truth is that your policies are destroying America and thus dooming the Last Best Hope on Earth, then you are not stupidly wrong. You are intelligently evil, in which case . . .

Fuck you, you hateful perverted satanic monsters.

 

76 comments

  2. I would urge everyone to go read the original thread. I have been unfailingly polite to Mr. McCain and his readers at every turn, and even though we clearly disagree on many matters, I wish him no ill will. If he is angry at my beliefs, I cannot help that.

  4. Weedlord did not mean to offend anyone with his opinions. This anger that Mr. McCain is displaying comes as quite a surprise.

  5. WeedB’s mindset also shows the perversity of “equality” as understood by Progs. To them, all 7 billion people are just fungible meat-puppets, no better or worse than the others. And the cultures they grow up in are no better or worse either. So it’s OK if the affluent West self-neuters and no affluent people are left for the Third World to soak.

  6. You are arguing in favor of, inter alia, sororities in which the president and the pledge are lesbian girlfriends. You claim that this is socially beneficial, because “7 billion people is enough” and, having made that argument, you become indignant that we characterize your argument as what it is, evil?

    You are making this argument behind a pseudonym, while my rebuttal is made under my own name, so that I publicly assume the responsibility for my arguments, whereas you — advocating lesbianism as a social benefit — wish to remain anonymous, perhaps because your neighbors might become alarmed to know what a dangerous amoral monster you are. So do not brag about your being “unfailingly polite,” you cowardly pervert. And do not presume that my goodwill and mercy are limitless.

  9. This isn’t the public school/university cocoon. You will be properly judged on the basis of your opinions here. “I didn’t mean to offend” isn’t a “safe word” phrase that somehow walks back your comments. If you don’t like being judged on the basis of your opinions, why do you express them? You’re conversing with people who take ideas and positions seriously, not as a play-time activity. Trying to walk away from your own comments by acting as if they had no meaning and you didn’t really take them seriously is Obama Rhetoric 101. Not flying with me.

  11. All right, WBH, let me offer my suppositions: You are a heterosexual male. You are neither gay, nor female. Your advocacy of lesbianism is not self-interested, and it is either (a) your hateful hostility to the normal family or (b) some sort of “white night” pose which inspires your arguments.

    Let me quote you, sir:

    Women, particularly, must put aside their shallow “wants” and “desires” and submit to a marriage, because the needs of the husband/children are more important.

    Here you insult me, you insult my wife and children, and you insult everyone who believes that marriage and motherhood are an authentic and natural expression of womanhood.

    Have I imposed this upon my wife? Has she been compelled to “submit,” as you so smugly suggest? Or, as I rather suppose, is it the case that you (a heterosexual male yourself) wish to think yourself morally superior by inverting the normal understanding of marriage, so that you are a sort of philanthropist by opposing normal marriage?

    You deliberately insult decent people and then act as if their anger at your insults is improper.

  12. Being “unfailingly polite” in the course of bad-faith argument is … still just bad-faith argument.

    And defending your bad-faith argument on the basis of your having been “unfailingly polite” is just more bad-faith argument.

  13. No one can fillet a liberal like Stacy McCain. This is expository writing at its best. Not only did I enjoy reading it, I gained a new perspective on the overpopulation myth.

  14. I’m just in awe of this statement:

    “you either love all things lgbt or you shut up. That’s tolerance baby.”

    It’s incredible to watch old reruns of “Dragnet” or “Adam-12.” Whenever the cops arrest (or simply question) some hippies, they are met with accusations of being “establishment pigs” and “conformists.”

    Who are the establishment pigs and conformists now?

  15. Calling disagreement “ranting,” a “screed” or “trolling” is partly shared human nature, but I’ve noticed it a lot more on the so-called “more reasonable” PC side. It’s what they use in place of an argument and why Ta-Nehisi Coates’ posts at The Atlantic are moderated by body guards or something. They have no argument and don’t like facts. Write accurately about the PC and you’re a terrorist or stalker or something. I’ve commonly seen a fiction-writing community attack non-fiction books with accurate quotes they don’t like for being too long, as if writing 200,000 words about elves is just fine. Disagreement with the PC is always an attack and inevitably portrayed as a racist or sexist one.

  17. Gender feminists and their “allies” don’t think in terms of shared intellectual and philosophical spaces. That’s why they can act like the KKK in principle and see their behavior as something totally different. Like all bigots of their sort, they are literalists addicted to identity.

    To the PC, there will never be something LIKE a modern neo-Nazi, only an actual neo-Nazi, a thing never to be replicated throughout all time and space, though bigots clearly pop up just like them all the time. Having different targets and using a different name is meaningless. It’s like saying burglary isn’t burglary if tall people do it and then adding burglary isn’t burglary if you call it something else and then invoking Godwin’s Burglary Law if anyone brings it up.

    Gender feminists either purposely lie about semantics or are themselves confused by them. They’re so daffy it’s hard to tell what they’re saying most of the time other than their own identities are in effect Hammurabi’s Code.

  18. It was even worse watching my friends children getting indoctrinated with that type of bullshit while they were in grade school. I still remember the pamphlet which said ” … every time another child is born the planet weeps …” or some such Gaia worshipping crap. It was peak hysteria after Teh Algore’s Hollywood movie tripe and the parents didn’t see anything wrong with it. Brave New World baby!

  20. It’s kind of solipsistic to orient your whole life around one aspect of yourself. There are gay activists who are straight, and gay people who keep their private lives private and lead full lives with many interests.

  22. I really do wish Stacy and everyone else would stop using the word liberal to describe leftists. There’s nothing liberal about them at best they’re progressives. Attempts to rehabilitate ”liberal” such as Andrew Klavan made yesterday at PJs are too little too late. Same thing trying to get classical liberal to catch on as a distinction. If you use the term classical liberal to most people but particularly proggies they just cock their heads to one side looking puzzled, you know like a Spaniel. Like the word ”gay” we’ve lost the word ”liberal”. Gay used to be synonym for happy now its a pseudonym for sodomy.

  23. As I pointed out in the other thread, people should just hop on the ol’ Google maps thingy, and turn on Google Earth. Then they should hover over these countries Stacy listed, as well as the Second-world/nearly-First-world country, India (which is headed to pass us on the way to First-world status as we continue toward banana-republic status here).

    Pick a random location. Zoom in. Unless you happened to pick a major city, you’ll notice what people see when they fly over India: open country. Lots of farms, yes, and waterways. But surprisingly enough, vast hectares of open country.

    It’s not nearly-empty of human occupation like much of the open country in the US and Canada, but it’s still a strong indication that most people live in cities.

    There aren’t “too many people” because food is still pretty cheap, worldwide (despite the left’s hard efforts to make it treble in cost over the past decade).

  26. Yep! What do people suppose is on the docket for the word ‘marriage?’

    Shudder to think.

    (It’s why I advocate an major convocation of the religious orders to define a Sanctified Union between a man and a woman, for the purpose of protecting the family unit.)

    But I use the term “Jeffersonian Liberal.” It describes my political philosophy in a way that makes many on the left and right go “huh?”

  27. I understand what you’re saying but it’s half a dozen of one and six of the other. It’s true the fundamental ability to fool people by gender feminists for example is their hijacking the word “feminist.” On the other hand there’s a question of ease of use in talking about these folks and how they self-describe.

  28. For men marriage has become a bad bet. The courts are stacked against you. You have no right to your children, or property in the case of a divorce. Modern women are no longer real partners, and much closer to competitors, or just down right resentful of men due to all their feminist indoctrination. If they’re not “fulfilled” meaning if you’re not meeting all their expectations, and needs, they leave to chase after some other phantom that they think can live up to what they want, and if that doesn’t work they blame men in general for how horrible their lives are. This is why birth rates are down. Feminism has destroyed the institution of marriage, and the male role.

  29. Well the overpopulation hype is obviously affecting the liberal demographic which is why they feel it’s necessary to increase their demographic through recruitment and importation of soon to be welfare recipients.

    I’ve heard ISIS referred to as the death cult, but they are simply another face of the true death cult – liberalism.

  30. I think you are confusing ruthless mocking with anger. I’m pretty sure our esteemed host wouldn’t be wasting an emotion such as anger on your good self.

  31. Unfortunately, the moment you make the mistake of calling yourself “gay”, you’ve bought into an ideology.

  33. It’s a good book. I read it in high school. I did like the idea that dead bodies were committed back to the soil as a source of phosphorus. That’s what I call recycling! And isn’t that really how it should be, and beyond all these archaic burial rites?

    On the subject of homosexuality: people have been getting their rocks off in same sex pairings for thousands of years. For some I suppose it feels like a very natural orientation, and for others it’s a variant of sex play. I see no evidence as to how it harms society though since it’s such a small percentage of the population that engage in it. Homosexual activism on the other hand is a new phenomenon, and when it’s tied to statism and the progressive agenda that can be destructive. I do not support sodomy laws, and gay people shouldnt be discriminated against, but the institutional acceptance of homosexuality in this era is wee bit odd, and over the top.

  35. That has been trashed by the Gay Mafia and the left.

    Also by weakening from within on the right (easy divorce, etc.)

    We need something that makes the governments pay attention.

  40. Gender feminist didn’t hijack the word feminist anymore than RINOs hijacked the Republican party.

    We shouldn’t let them self-describe, that’s how we lost the word ”liberal” in it’s true meaning in the first place. They started to call themselves liberals because they’d made the word progressive toxic. Socialists started calling themselves progressives because they realized that ”socialism” would never be acceptable here.

    When we let them use friendlier words and/or change a words meaning in order to deceive we are helping them.

    http://thecampofthesaints.org/2010/03/12/leftist-sleight-of-hand/

  42. Not sure where you got that. Has nothing to do with my point.

    We’re stuck with either giving in to the left or fighting back. It’s going to take something like such a council to fight back. There are of course more violent alternatives, but those don’t really bear analysis.

    (The long road of just voting in more conservatives has shown to be about as effective as the so-called “War on Poverty.” So I don’t even bother considering that as a solution.)

  43. ”But I use the term “Jeffersonian Liberal.” It describes my political philosophy in a way that makes many on the left and right go “huh?””
    I understand your point but most people won’t. Adding a qualifier to Liberal makes little sense to many on the right and only supports the esteem of the few proggies who may know who Jefferson is. In terms of political utility the best descriptor placed in front of liberal in the last half century was radical. Rather than elicit the response ”huh” wouldn’t it be better to have left or right respond ”oh okay”?

  44. I hadn’t really read the thread.

    Now that I have, I think that RSM has a point. You didn’t offer an alternative choice. You insisted that the conservative viewpoint must be removed because it’s obviously flawed.

    Why is it flawed? What harm does it do you and yours just by existing?

  45. I must be getting old. “This is what a [word I can’t read] looks like”
    What’s on the little moppet’s shirt?

  46. Whoops! Thought you meant the other topic. Sorry.

    Well, not exactly. Using ‘radical’ confuses the uneducated (i.e. “intellectuals”), which makes it hard to debate them at all. And leaving the word as the bare term ‘liberal’ causes most people to think of Rush Limbaugh (for some strange reason), which renders all conversation with leftists moot.

    The cool thing about referencing Jefferson is that many on the left pretend to understand him. People on the right who studied the founders know exactly what I mean. It just refocuses them on the “kind” of liberalism that evokes the enlightenment philosophers, and not just economics.

    By the time of John Stuart Mill (1830’s thru 60’s), “classical liberalism” was already undergoing severe debasement. Modern folks assume either Woody Wilson or FDR was responsible for damaging the concept as a useful term. But they (being shallow-minded and power-hungry) simply carried on their usual tendency to co-opt, rather than invent.

  47. I think it says “this is what a feminist looks like”.

    Hmmm.

    I think I’ve read somewhere that feminism is a journey to lesbianism, but that’s obviously Hatey McHate stuff, as our moral betters on Twitter and the fuhrer himself, Weedlord Bonerhitler, might explain.

    However, we have here a picture of an 11 year old girl who looks like a boy, being turned into a poster child for an LGBT campaign. And she’s wearing a feminist T-shirt.

    Hmmm again.

    Ever seen such a masculine-looking 11 year old girl? Ever seen a normal child wearing a “TIWAFLL” T-shirt? I’d say she’s being groomed to be a dyke.

  48. “Liberal” can also mean “doling out hefty portions,” which is what they do. It’s not so much of a perversion of the word at all.

    When a word is lost, it’s lost.

    I’m weary of all sorts of stupidity, like people saying “anxious” when they mean “eager.” “I’m really anxious to go to Disneyland!” Really? “Anxious” mean “worried,” NOT “impatiently enthusiastic.”

    “Enormity” refers to “something overwhelmingly evil.” The word for referring to something “of great size” is “enormousness.”

    The language just shifts around. “Fond” used to mean “stupid,” not “in love.” “Mad” used to mean “insane,” not “upset.”

  49. The writers of the Old Testament had seen sexual perversion in Sodom, and the writers of the New Testament had seen it in Rome.

    They knew what they were talking about.

    They knew: sexual perversion (or “getting your rocks off,” as you call it) is a mania, and people go outside the normal parameters because they are disturbed and damaged.

    To put those people in charge; to mainstream their madness, is to spread their madness.

  50. I think I’ve seen that phrase somewhere, too!

    If only there were some tool that you could, say, “plug in” some words, and then have it go off and do a big, table lookup or something.

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