Society and culture: April 2009 Archives

Proof (with the provisos below) that Muslims are going to win the demographic war.

This is your culture. This is your culture on contraception. Any questions?

Can you say self-extinction? Did anyone even bother to think this one through? Hello! May never be any more Italian popes, unless we can squeeze them in right after Benedict.

Anyway there are some provisos. The video says the U. S. fertility rate in 1.6; according to the sources I consulted it's around 2.1. I seem to remember a rate for whites of 1.9 if you wish to exclude Middle Easterners but it's still higher. Numbers for Europe were more on target but still slightly higher. I think their fertility rate for Muslims is way off — I checked several Muslim countries, one had 6.5, the rest were much lower (some much lower than us).

Here are some good sites on fertility rates:

Index Mundi

CIA Factbook

A 21 year-old English major at Brown, Kevin Roose, enrolled in Jerry Falwell's Liberty University to see what life on the other side was like. He wrote a book, The Unlikely Disciple, describing his experience. It seems he was pretty open-minded about the whole thing, and the article is refreshing insofar as it talks more about exploding prejudices against Christians than it does reinforcing them. "But Liberty students aren't hostile demagogues... We think of evangelicals as unflinching, but Liberty students spend a lot of time thinking critically..."

In the interview he makes a curious statement. He says, "I went on a few Christian dates, and I even had a quasi girlfriend. But at Liberty you can barely hug, so it was like, what am I supposed to do on these dates?"

Maybe he's just being cheeky. I want to say, "Umm ... talk?" Is he really so shallow that he sees dates as nothing more than a progression of hope to have sex, securing sex, having sex, had sex, and planning for more sex next time? Or is he just trying to be funny? Hard to say. I'm not good at figuring this stuff out.

But the article is worth a read.

Broadcasters were defeated by the Supreme Court in a ruling that the FCC can impose fines for "fleeting expletives" committed during prime time, the first case such decided in over 30 years.

Of course, who knows whether this will mean anything in the new administration — whether they'll even bother enforcing prime-time broadcast rules like Bush did.

Broadcasters have been trying very hard to get these rules struck down. I am glad to see them fail.