Monthly Archives: April 2014

The voting class and the working class

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Watching Q&A last night, and especially the discussion on stopping the boats, reminded me of a post I put up in 2012. I repeat it here.

Ann Coulter does the numbers and it is now a demographic battle in the US about who comes and who votes. It wasn’t the young after all who had voted to subvert the America of individual effort and personal responsibility. Ann tells a quite disturbing story:

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones. . . .

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception.

There is even this, which does seem to show there is a way out, as difficult as it may be:

Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.

It is working and paying taxes that may be the divide that matters. As she points out, it is immigration policy that is in the middle. And it will be the big issue of the future as the US does or does not submerge itself under a flood of migrants from places where no one can even conceivably be employed in a high tech, English speaking nation as the US for the time being now is. This is how she concludes:

Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just not enough anymore.

Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a ‘RINO’ were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.

The parties of the left are actively ruining their countries for political advantage. Many of these people will never pay more in taxes than they take in welfare. But they’re not being brought here to work. They are being brought here to vote.

Living life to the fullest

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There is an article today in the Wall Street Journal with the intriguing title, “Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray” that has as its sub-title, “Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch ‘Groundhog Day’ (again). Advice on how to live to the fullest”. Sensible all the way through but I will just highlight one of the five and you can read the rest for yourself, which you should do. You might then be interested in the book he’s written, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, which I assume expands on the five points made in the article. This is Point 4:

Take Religion Seriously

Don’t bother to read this one if you’re already satisfyingly engaged with a religious tradition.

Now that we’re alone, here’s where a lot of you stand when it comes to religion: It isn’t for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.

I can be sure that is what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ, college-educated young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as your counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who weren’t religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you followed the religion of your parents as children but left religion behind as you were socialized by college.

By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who persuaded you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist.

I am describing my own religious life from the time I went to Harvard until my late 40s. At that point, my wife, prompted by the birth of our first child, had found a religious tradition in which she was comfortable, Quakerism, and had been attending Quaker meetings for several years. I began keeping her company and started reading on religion. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but my unbelief is getting shaky.

Taking religion seriously means work. If you’re waiting for a road-to-Damascus experience, you’re kidding yourself. Getting inside the wisdom of the great religions doesn’t happen by sitting on beaches, watching sunsets and waiting for enlightenment. It can easily require as much intellectual effort as a law degree.

Even dabbling at the edges has demonstrated to me the depths of Judaism, Buddhism and Taoism. I assume that I would find similar depths in Islam and Hinduism as well. I certainly have developed a far greater appreciation for Christianity, the tradition with which I’m most familiar. The Sunday school stories I learned as a child bear no resemblance to Christianity taken seriously. You’ve got to grapple with the real thing.

Start by jarring yourself out of unreflective atheism or agnosticism. A good way to do that is to read about contemporary cosmology. The universe isn’t only stranger than we knew; it is stranger and vastly more unlikely than we could have imagined, and we aren’t even close to discovering its last mysteries. That reading won’t lead you to religion, but it may stop you from being unreflective.

Find ways to put yourself around people who are profoundly religious. You will encounter individuals whose intelligence, judgment and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends—and who also possess a disquieting confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas.

They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment.

Start reading religious literature. You don’t have to go back to Aquinas (though that wouldn’t be a bad idea). The past hundred years have produced excellent and accessible work, much of it written by people who came to adulthood as uninvolved in religion as you are.

A Canadian view of Australian girls

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shaidle - confessions of a failed slut

I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.