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.
