For your entertainment, I wanted to share this completely bizarre rant from somebody who is beyond clueless:
That said, it’s difficult to say that Francis is wrong about any of this. Virtually no European countries are replacing their populations through natural means, achieving a birth rate of 2.1 live children per woman to even maintain their populations, while several EU members are near the 1.2 rate signalling “death spiral,” i.e. the birth rate at which the population cannot recover. The reasons for this are many and varied — birth rates among native-born Americans are hardly better than in the EU, while the lowest rates on earth are found in East Asia, especially Singapore, Japan, and South Korea, indicating that there’s more than a European problem here — but it can be safely said that the Catholic Church’s ban on birth control is being widely ignored in countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, which have among the fewest babies in Europe, per capita, yet which a generation or two ago were still strongly Catholic and impressively fecund.
While Francis’s analysis of Europe’s population problem, which is really a deep crisis of civilizational pride, identity and meaning, manifesting in a lack of will to even reproduce, is difficult to refute, it was his proposed remedy that received the most comments.
Native-born Americans, deep crisis of civilizational pride – who is this sad fuck?
It’s a long rant, and every paragraph is more idiotic than the one before.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s always a happy thing to overpopulate an already exhausted planet. It shows all sorts of good qualities and determination.
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I wonder how long until these weirdos start accosting young white heterosexual couples in Europe and North America with pamphlets and propaganda encouraging them to reproduce.
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In Russia they already do. But it isn’t couples they badger. Only women. This is always and only about women. There are campaigns of publicly shaming women into having children in Russia. That’s the model this blogger admires.
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When put in that context, that explains so much about the mentality of cave trolls who screech at patients outside of abortion clinics.
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Surely Nicolae Ceaușescu was the ultimate “pro-life” politician.
http://vadamagazine.com/12/07/2014/opinions/ceausescus-children-follow
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“…a deep crisis of civilizational pride…” I’m not even sure what that means, if anything. Is civilizational even a word?
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The blogger is racist as hell. He is trying to express these racist ideas in a way that will make them sound better. And failing.
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Do you feel like the general quality of this blogger’s posts have fallen off since he resigned or just this post is stupid? You called the blogger “talented” before.
The post itself reads like nativist blabber with ten thousand dollar words with some language of security slathered on top.
People don’t reproduce so much because 1)the infant mortality rate has dropped and 2)it’s extremely costly in many ways to have even one child.
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Birth rates fall everywhere where women’s rights win. And that’s a great thing. There is nothing else to this issue.
I don’t track the careers of the bloggers in my enormous blog roll so closely. I always respond to a specific piece. This article was completely idiotic. But it is possible the blogger writes much better on other subjects.
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“Birth rates fall everywhere where women’s rights win. And that’s a great thing.”
Exactly. When women enjoy greater social, personal, and economic freedom, they logically want less children: many male “economists” seem to miss the fact that being perpetually and uncontrollably pregnant is miserable and unfulfilling. The desire to return to the halcyon days of gigantic “baby boomer” populations is generally nothing more than misogyny disguised as economic concern.
I also found the following blog post that presents the flip side of the traditional economic argument and suggests that there are economic advantages to a declining population. It makes a lot of sense to me.
http://letstalkbooksandpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/05/economic-advantages-of-declining.html
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The planet is obviously overpopulated, so any belly-aching about the “low birth-rates” is thinly disguised racism. I have no patience for it.
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“so any belly-aching about the “low birth-rates” is thinly disguised racism. I have no patience for it.”
Yes. Racism. And weird religious fervor: i.e. fundamentalists Catholics wanting to make sure they outnumber fundamentalist Muslims. (They are all terrible in my book.) But I honestly think the “low birth rate panic” is primarily misogynistic more than racist and belies a desire to remove women from the public sphere.
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“But I honestly think the “low birth rate panic” is primarily misogynistic more than racist and belies a desire to remove women from the public sphere.”
– Yes, I agree. The birth rates among immigrants drop dramatically and become the same as those of non-immigrants by the second generation. Women will not massively have 10 children if they have any choice in the matter. That’s just a fact.
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I left a comment with a link but it’s not appearing. Is it in moderation? 🙂
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Sorry, it went directly to Trash but now I recovered it. WordPress has been acting out.
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I think there is a real problem here (for a person in favor of western values, like me).
Falling populations are not, in and of themselves, a bad thing at all. But at the same time the traditional majority populations of many western european countries are experiencing falling birth rates they are experiencing an influx of newcomers with very high fertility rates. This would not be a problem except that very many of them (possibly a majority) despise the local culture and do everything they can to keep their children from assimilating to it (with predictable results – a feedback loop of failure in and withdrawal from the host culture).
I personally would like to see Dutch (and Swedish) culture survive into the indefinite future but a lot of residents of those country don’t (and they’ll probably be a majority in a few generations if current demographic patterns hold).
I read some years ago the idea that Western Eruope has never really recovered from the trauma of WWII which is one reason those countries do so badly at assimilating immigrants.
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“I personally would like to see Dutch (and Swedish) culture survive into the indefinite future”
– A strong culture will survive, a weak culture will not. Look at the culture of the Roman Empire. Students still study its dead language and its ancient philosophy and art. It is a myth that the survival of a culture hinges on turning women into bunnies. Birth rates are completely unrelated to the persistence of cultures.
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Or let’s look at the US. There are immigrants from all over the world but no immigrant community is managing to prevent its children of choosing the American culture and dropping the language and the culture of the parents.
Of course, it helps that the way the economy and the state are structured in the US doesn’t promote ghettoization. Still, the second generation is impossible to retain in the ghetto anywhere. Western Europe simply needs to wait for the second generation (meaning, the second generation born in the new countries.)
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Too many in western europe have forgotten how to act like a strong culture and have instead adopted supplicating attitudes toward newcomers with generally terrible results.
Since I generally prefer western values to middle eastern ones, I think it’s ufortunate.
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“Too many in western europe have forgotten how to act like a strong culture and have instead adopted supplicating attitudes toward newcomers with generally terrible results.”
– Yes. There is a lot of apologetic self-flagellation going on. AND I HATE THAT. Feminism, individualism, individual rights, the rights of child, gay rights, democracy, progress, technology, humanistic scholarship, the collapse of patriarchal mentality – these are only some of the amazing achievements of our Western Civilization. This is a lot to be proud of. This is a legacy worth preserving. And when I say all this in class, I can see it make an impact. This needs to be said, taught, and written.
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How do you think this works with cultures that have never had a lasting empire with impact?
By this logic, none of the major Western European nations should worry about their cultures disappearing and all of them are throwing ridiculous prissy fits. They all had major empires spanning centuries and lots of territory.
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“How do you think this works with cultures that have never had a lasting empire with impact?”
– Let’s ask the Jews. 🙂
“By this logic, none of the major Western European nations should worry about their cultures disappearing and all of them are throwing ridiculous prissy fits. They all had major empires spanning centuries and lots of territory.”
– This is not about empires or territory. This is about the strength and attractiveness of a culture. Look at Ukraine, a culture stuck between very aggressive empires, denied statehood, forbidden to use a print language, subjected to genocide and more genocide and then some more. But it’s still there, and even the language is being recovered from the ashes.
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“– Yes. There is a lot of apologetic self-flagellation going on. AND I HATE THAT. Feminism, individualism, individual rights, the rights of child, gay rights, democracy, progress, technology, humanistic scholarship, the collapse of patriarchal mentality – these are only some of the amazing achievements of our Western Civilization. This is a lot to be proud of. This is a legacy worth preserving.”
The weakeness of the current Western stance is its almost-worship of subjectivism. So someone like me who is deemed to be or have been right wing (because of my original cultural status, no matter that I am extremely libertarian) is subjectively squelshed. At the same time exotic identities, like Islamic ones, are made room for …..up to a point. You can’t preserve any legacy is you allow people to act on their inner prejudices including their inverted prejudices about foreigners. The worship of the exotic foreigner and demand that one becomes more and more sensitised to their needs is not right. Those foreigners are most of the time right wing and I am always libertarian, but because of subjectivist training (for instance postmodernist theorising and new left theorising in the universities) the so-called intellectual leaders act really nuts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Mt9B6iipI
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