Should we be frightened about this?

[Chesapeake]

CBN is the acronym for the Christian Broadcasting Network, founded by televangelist Pat Roberts. So, should we dismiss this as anti-Muslim propaganda?

Shia coming to Belgium?

[brucemacneill]

If it's gonna take them 25 years to take over Belgium, I'm not gonna worry. The Germans did it in weeks. Is Europe going to fall to Muslims? Sure but the Mexicans running the U.S. by then should be able to handle it here. El Cid, you'll remember.

[Doug]

Here in the US there is competition in the breed to power race.  

One fix is to change kids from a tax benefit to a tax liability.  Per capita tax.  Couple has a baby taxes go up 50% of what they were paying.  The idea of a tax benefit for kids is to build population after a war.  By the end of the "baby boom" that had been accomplished and the child deduction should have been repealed. 

Tax kids and the breed your way to power plan gets real expensive. 

[theevan]

Doug, you may have just lost my vote. That's it...now it's Kinky Friedman all the way.

[AlanC]

You really wouldn't like my ideas then. Almost all of the world's ills can be filtered down to: Just too damn many people.

[Deleted]

Mar 26, 2015 7:37:40 GMT -5 AlanC said:

You really wouldn't like my ideas then. Almost all of the world's ills can be filtered down to: Just too damn many people.

Amen!

[millring]

Ironically, the "Christian Right" in the US is so obsessed with banning sharia law that it doesn't see that by doing so it is calling for an end to its own precariously held religious freedom. We've already (in the US) used the courts to protect individuals 'legally' created "civil rights" at the cost of the explicitly drawn Constitutional right to religious freedom. The step isn't going to be a giant one to get to true religious persecution here.

[kenlarsson]

[Russell Letson]

Demographics are indeed powerful, and population dynamics can change the world (pace Doug's assertion that no human activity can affect climate), but the yowling from the right about Chrustians and white folks being bred out of power is one of those fever-dreams beloved of paranoids in general. It also makes some curious assumptions about the nexus between ethnic/national background and religion as new generations adjust to their cultural environments. I've followed Somali teenagers--born here of immigrant parents--around the mall, and while some of the girls wear veils or full traditional dress, they sound and even behave exactly like their white Minnesotan classmates. And their kids, I suspect, will be even closer to wherever the center of Minnesota culture is in the future--they'll be tall, brown, some almost certainly of mixed race, and with names like Brittney and Chad or whatever fashion dictates in 2035. It happens to every immigrant group that doesn't wall itself off from 'Murican culture. (I strongly recommend Five Points, a history of the famous 19th-century NYC neighborhood through which passed the Irish, Jews, Italians, and Chinese [among others] on their way to joining the casts of every WW2 movie.)

[millring]

Mar 26, 2015 10:41:16 GMT -5 Russell Letson said:

Demographics are indeed powerful, and population dynamics can change the world (pace Doug's assertion that no human activity can affect climate), but the yowling from the right about Chrustians and white folks being bred out of power is one of those fever-dreams beloved of paranoids in general.

What kind of idiot would ever rid the world of crustaceans? No shrimp? No lobster? WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!!

[Russell Letson]

It's a food-sensitivity issue--you know, like no peanut products in elementary schools.

[Doug]

I think in US history the Irish, (Jews?), Italians, and Chinese all bred themselves into political power but not majority, because with the coming of political power came assimilation as Russell was talking about.  Currently the Latino and Muslim population seems to be resisting assimilation.  Previously the Latino population was assimilating.  Until I was an adult the Latinos and Orientals were classed as white, going back to when schools and society were segregated. 

I'm guessing the big family rise to political power is stacked against the Muslim population vs the Latino population. 



Edit: I don't think the Jews did as much of the breeding for political power.  

[Russell Letson]

I'm within a few pages of the end of Five Points, and the dynamic I've seen there is less about breeding up a population than gaining economic stability, which leads to respectability, which parallels (especially among the NYC Irish) the gaining of political clout in and through their enclaves. Within three generations, those enclaves became less physical (neighborhoods) than cultural (preservation of Old Country cooking, folkways, sentiments and sentimentalities). The Chinese faced the highest barriers, some of which were built specifically by nativists and the recently-assimilated to isolate them and chase them back to China. The longer it's possible to remain physically and linguistically apart (as it has been in south Florida and parts of California), the longer it takes to become integrated into the national mosaic/stewpot/choose-your-metaphor.

I'm the grandson of immigrants (on the side that didn't immigrate 300 years ago) and married to an immigrant, so I've seen something of this process, which is one reason I don't worry much about the latest waves lapping up on our shores--as long as we don't make it harder for human nature to take its course by building political and cultural barriers.

[Deleted]

In answer to your original question, no, it isn't something you should be frightened about.

[epaul]

Two points:

One, I'm not worried about Belgium. Belgium is Belgium business, not mine. I have nothing to do with Belgium or what Belgium does (which is how both Belgium and I want it).

Two, in what I thought was a cute irony (and perhaps a telling one), early in the clip when the severe and very fundamental Islamist nutso [editorial comment] was being interviewed, did you notice how his chubby kid was intently clicking away on his gameboy or smart phone in total absorption. (starts at the 1:27 mark and continues through most of the discussion about the importance of Allah and stuff.

Word for the day: Ironic Juxtaposition. Wait, that's two words. Two words for the day: Ironic Juxtaposition. Make it four: Probably telling ironic juxtaposition.

[millring]

Maybe you've forgotten how close Belgium is to Norway?

[Doug]

I've been thinking (big problem) but wouldn't sharia law out law bacon.   

[Chesapeake]

Both ends of the political spectrum, left and right, like to put up straw men to get the troops riled up. I detect a little bit of that here. The narrator acknowledges that few take this group of radicals very seriously. But if the figures are right about European Muslims having such higher birth rates, it could be cause for the same kind of concern Israelis have about someday being outnumbered by Arabs in their own country.

[patrick]

"Shia coming to Belgium?"

Why is everyone so upset about this? In fact, he's probably been there before this, I mean, that's how actors are.



Sure, he's got that silly hipster beard thing going on, but is that really so frightening?

I'm not exactly a fan, but, c'mon, apparently he wasn't half bad in those Transformer movies. He got his start on the Disney Channel, how dangerous can he be?

[patrick]

Now, if we're talking about SHARIA coming to Belgium, that's different.


I just don't see it, especially if it requires that their offspring continue to adhere to strict religious law for decades.

Each succeeding wave of immigration into the US has been met with this sort of hysteria. When the southern Irish (i.e., the Catholics, not the Scots-Irish from the north) started flooding into the country, there was hysteria about that from the English Protestants already here. They wondered how the "Irish race" would ever successfully integrate into America, especially since, as Catholics, they all took orders directly from the Pope and therefore couldn't understand democracy.

(In fact, they understood democracy quite well. The origin of St. Paddy's Day being a big deal in the US but not in Ireland is because of the St. Patrick's Day parade in NYC. At the turn of the last century, Irish immigrants or their offspring made up more than 50% of the population in NYC. On SPD, the politicians had to stand there for hours at a time watching the massed Irish marching by, the firemen, the policemen, everyone. A reminder that the Irish put them in power and the Irish could take them out.)

Then there was the Yellow Peril as Chinese immigrants came to work the railroads, and more hysteria about the southern Europeans. In WWII we locked up a few million Japanese for a few years. Only more recently have we started obsessing about the Mexicans, because of large numbers, but they've been here all along. The first Muslims probably came in the 1600's, we just don't like to admit it.

America will get over it, Muslims are among the most assimilated groups in America. I wouldn't worry about it in Europe either.