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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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This reads like just reposting a news or summary article.

Do you have an original comment or thought, or question to ask?

Why does the US need 300 million people? Why does England need millions more people on its tiny landmass? Is it necessary to destroy the ethnic makeup of these countries to ensure the line always goes up?

I think the problem is that most of our economic systems are now predicated on growth occurring over time. The easiest way to keep the economy growing is to increase the population. The growth can't last forever, especially within the confines of a single planet, but no one seems terribly interested in moving to a sustainable model.

Is it? People say that but is it true? If growth is just the result of more people then we aren’t increasing wealth. Growth per capita is what our model is based on, no?

If we bring in ZMP or NMP, then that’s a problem.

he is advocating for the effective destruction of ethnic Europeans.

No he is not. There are numerous major(1 million plus) ethnic groups of north-western European descent who have fertility rates at replacement, and efforts to target or harm those ethnic groups are usually opposed by Musk.

What groups?

Ironically, Afrikaaners would likely be one- the white TFR in South Africa is just below replacement and while I can't find sources that differentiate by ethnic background, at least not in a language I read, the English language ones note Afrikaaners as having larger families than British whites. Dutch Calvinists also have a comfortably above replacement TFR. American republican whites have an overall replacement level fertility rate; this points to subgroups with comfortably above replacement TFR. Mormons are surely one, and southern Evangelicals also have an elevated TFR and are basically an ethnoreligious group at this point. I suspect confessional Lutherans would also qualify. I'm uncertain at the size of the Laestadian movement, because the data is hard to collect and I don't read any of the languages in question, but their fertility rate is very high. Of course, the highest fertility rates in the world are the Pennsylvania Dutch. The Faroes have been above replacement for decades, although low population size.

If you move into eastern Europe, the Byzantine Catholic belt has an elevated fertility rate compared to its neighbors, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in particular looks to have a fertility rate that at least pre-war was on track to reshape Ukraine's demographics. Certain Orthodox groups inside Russia claim a high fertility rate but might be lying. Orthodox Jewry famously has a high fertility rate as well. If you're willing to count southern European descent, a case can be made that Mexican whites are above replacement; Mexico refuses to publicize data on race, but it's knowable from the prevalence of the mongolian spot in Mexican hospital births that whites are increasing as a percentage of the population, and immigration to Mexico(as opposed to away from it) is overwhelmingly from brown countries.

Whites will shrink as a percentage of population basically everywhere in the world except for a few eastern Euro shitholes that no one wants to live in, which will see shrinking populations overall instead. That doesn't mean that white people are in danger of disappearing.

I guess when you said ethnic groups I wasn't expecting religious groups.

The boundary is, in fairness, pretty fuzzy.

I think you make a number of implausible assertions here?

You equate “unlimited immigration” with “the effective destruction of ethnic Europeans”. It is not at all clear that this is the case. Declining birthrates might lead to a numerical decline or even collapse of ethnic Europeans, but the presence of absence of immigrants doesn’t change that. You might argue that if the demographic balance of a European country changed so that there were very large numbers of ancestrally non-European people in it, that might effectively destroy what that nation once was – but again, that’s not the same thing as the destruction of ethnic Europeans. I think you need to be more precise here.

Likewise you just assert “the only legitimate purpose of the state is to guarantee the posterity of the people that constitute that state”. You don’t offer any argument for this – you seem to think it’s self-evident. That does not seem obvious to me. For instance, one might argue (and I am tempted to) that the creation of posterity is the proper responsibility of individual families and communities; the role of the state is in this process is to facilitate the conditions in which it is possible for families and communities to raise children. But the state itself is not the thing that guarantees posterity. We might reflect on the fact that communities have been successfully reproducing themselves since long before the state existed. Rather, the role of the state is not to guarantee certain activities that more properly belong to the private sphere, but rather to mediate interpersonal and inter-communal disagreements that would otherwise turn destructive. You can get most of this out of Hobbes. The state’s job isn’t to make sure you have kids. That’s up to you. The state’s job is to prevent a war of all against all.

Overall I think you just make a number of expansive claims that run past the available evidence. You say “replacing ethnic European majorities in order to mitigate identitarianism has been the stated policy of Western governments for 60 years now”, and that you have quotes or documents to prove it. I doubt you have those, particularly given the bolded part. It will be very easy to find quotes and documents arguing for more migration, but the purposive part of the statement is the controversial part. It’s, well, my theory of conspiracy theories – bundling the obviously true (lots of Western governments have been pro-immigration) with the obviously untrue (the purpose of this is “to mitigate identitarianism” or that this is a plot to destroy ethnic Europeans). The existence of alternative, more plausible motivations (such as just wanting more workers for obvious economic reasons) doesn’t get a look-in.