Wednesday, January 04, 2006

The Future is in the Past

Wow, the Editorial It's the Demography Stupid by Mark Steyn is very impressive. I don't know if this is particularly of Mormon interest, although it mentions Mormons and deals with a very Book of Mormon subject. I have been having the same ideas for some time about the ultimate defeat of liberalism by its own sword of human-hatred and bread and circuses in the name of human rights. Ironic that the ones that are screaming "human rights" and "diversity" will ultimately be the ones that usher in the exact opposite.

For conservative religions that will be both good and bad. Good, because the liberals will finally lose the culture war by fiate. The morality of the Godfearing will be back in world wide vogue. Bad, because the ones they are opening the doors to are not interested in any kind of human rights. And that is what Mormons will have to face in the next 50 to 100 years. Why must societies either become libertine godless immorals or absolutist god fearing hoards? Zion will definantly be born in pain, tears, and blood.

Some fine gems to quote:

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.


Read this one and think of the Gadianton Robbers who could only be destroyed when the society rejected them without accomidation:

That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.


And Satan slowlyand carefully leads us down to Hell. We worry about the world environment decay and don't see our own personal moral decay:

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.


I think the first half and the last sentence are significant. As much as I dislike Clinton and his kind, I don't think its important to the main point:

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

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