America Alone
It's the end of the world as we know it... Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are. And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"--while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy. If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn--the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world--shows to devastating effect. The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope. Mark Steyn's America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny--but it will also change the way you look at the world.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2010–2013years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Sure, you're thinking of Mark Steyn's "America Alone". Great book, and not at all fringe material. Christopher Hitchens had a favorable review, here: http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_urbanities-steyn.html
The book itself was not found to be hate speech. The Canadian Islamic Congress made a human-rights complaint about an excerpt from it, which was published in Macleans, at both the federal and (multiple) provincial levels. They never should've been brought in the first place, but all cases were eventually dismissed.
- You are a being very pessimistic. Europe and Japan declining in population? I find that hard to believe. Do you have figures to back that up?
I'm not the you responded to, but here goes:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Mark Steyn's book America Alone has much more on the implications, written in a rather witty style.
http://www.amazon.com/America-Alone-End-World-Know/dp/159698...
The only European country that is maintaining its population is France, and it only barely. In the Euro-Med countries the average number of births per female is about 1.3, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. In Japan (which has the oldest mean age in the world), pop is dropping so fast that they are permanently closing almost one primary school per day.
Greece bankrupt? Even if it were true, any negative consequences of that will be mitigated by the EU.
Technically not bankrupt yet, but Greece and most other European countries (and the US, at our current rate of debt growth) had better hope like hell for an AI breakthrough that pushes productivity rates thru the roof. Welfare states are pay-as-you-go plans, with the younger generation paying for retirement of the much smaller number of elderly. That only works as long as there are lots of young people and not many older folks. In other words, the cutbacks and riots in Greece and California these last few days are just the beginning w/o huge productivity breakthroughs. Let's hope that Ray Kurzweil is right.
And a country in turmoil will only have a positive effect on birthrate.
Evidence???
