07/12/2024
00:42 Doomsters and Boomsters. (What kind of people?)
07:15 Civilization, barbarism, and borders. (Lessons from the Emperors.)
14:25 Voting unfairness. (Hard to avoid.)
20:50 Britain’s Muslim MPs. (From 19 to 25.)
22:24 The Hindu crush. (National styles of stampede.)
25:10 Japan’s biggest robot yet. (Hey, Home Depot …)
27:28 The Starmer border rush. (They've run out of life jackets.)
29:06 Brits to legalize crime. (Learning from California.)
31:03 Remembering my Member. (Reggie Paget, RIP.)
34:30 Signoff. (A homesick miner.)
1 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your persuasively genial host John Derbyshire, taking a glance at the week’s news.
To begin with, an observance — one that received no media coverage at all that I noticed.
02 — Doomsters and Boomsters. Yesterday, Thursday July 11th, was World Population Day. I bet you didn’t know that.
Explanatory quote from a "sustainable development" website, quote:
World Population Day is celebrated annually on 11 July to focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.In 1989, the then-Governing Council of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) established the Day as an outgrowth of the interest generated by the Day of Five Billion, which was observed on 11 July 1987.
End quote.
So the Day of Five Billion was 37 years ago. What’s the number now? Our own Census Bureau says eight billion and change. Is that good or bad? It depends who you ask.
People with opinions about demographics fall into two well-populated groups: Doomsters and Boomsters. Doomsters have been more prominent: the names Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich come to mind unbidden.
Malthus — the Reverend Thomas Malthus, to give him his proper title — was the English gent who, back in 1798, published a book arguing that the increase in population would always outpace the increase in the food supply.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich, 170 years later, in collaboration with his wife Anne, published a book titled The Population Bomb telling us — this was in 1968 — that we were on the brink of a Malthusian catastrophe caused by overpopulation and resource depletion, and that, famous quote: "in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death," end quote.
There are the classic Doomsters. The Rev. Malthus is of course long departed. Paul Ehrlich is still with us, last time I looked, at age 92, and still ringing the alarm for an overpopulation disaster any day now.
Boomsters haven’t left such a deep imprint on the general consciousness. Forty years ago economist the late Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich on resource depletion, and won the bet, but nobody much remembers that.
The public sphere has recently acquired an outspoken Boomster, though: Elon Musk. Having himself fathered a number of children variously reported as somewhere between eight and twelve, Musk wants us all to emulate him and prophesies — yes! — disaster if we don’t.
[Clip of Musk speaking: People have no idea how fast population’s going to collapse. Y'know, basically civilization will die with a whimper in adult diapers.]
Paul Ehrlich, I note by way of contrast, had only one child; Thomas Malthus had three.
Where does Radio Derb stand on this, the world wants to know? Put me down as a qualified Boomster, on the same side as Elon Musk but willing to voice some reservations that Musk, for the sake of his many business enterprises, is wise to keep silent about.
My sentiments are all for high fertility. I cherish fond memories of my 1950s English childhood, growing up in a street teeming with kids. I adore my own family, wish I had more kids myself, and I nod along in approval when someone says or writes that the family is the foundation of civilizecd life.
Yeah, yeah: the family is also the Mafia, the Borgias, and gangster-despots like the Kims in North Korea. I've covered that elsewhere; go to my website, Opinions, Straggler Number 66. I concluded then, and reaffirm now, that, quote:
In our civilization, the Anglo-Saxon civilization, we care for our families, but not too much. This works well, much better than any other arrangement, for both the individual and the larger society.
End quote.
Note that the word "civilization" turned up in my last two quotes there, the one from Elon Musk and the one from myself. I described myself as "a qualified Boomster." Musk seems to be of the same kidney; and it’s on that word "civilization" that our qualifications turn. Next segment.
03 — Civilization, barbarism, and borders. We're thinking about a world with way more people in it than it currently has. That of course raises issues of resource depletion, which we can argue about dispassionately.
However, it also raises another issue; one that, under what Bill Buckley called "the stucture of prevailing taboos," is hard to argue about dispassionately.
"A world with way more people in it than it currently has"? OK, but what kind of people? Yes, we just climbed over the fence into the minefield. I'll tread as carefully as I can, but those little suckers are everywhere.
Just to get you oriented, here are some random fertility rates, children per woman, from the CIA World Factbook. These are all 2024 estimates. Remember that for a stable population, neither increasing nor decreasing, you want 2.1 children per woman.
Spain 1.3, Japan 1.4, China 1.55, Hungary 1.6, Australia 1.73, U.S.A. 1.84, France 1.9, India 2.03, Haiti 2.44, Syria 2.7, Yemen 2.82, Israel 2.92, Libya 3, Pakistan 3.32, Tajikistan 3.56, Liberia 3.93, Senegal 4.06, Afghanistan 4.43, Somalia 5.12, Niger 6.64.
You get the idea, and I'm sure this is nothing new to you. There are some surprises there in the middle of the range: Is Haiti really that low? Is Israel really that high? The general pattern is plain enough, though. Stable societies under rational government have mostly low fertility; trashcan countries under gangster rule have mostly high fertility.
Another way of putting it: countries with high levels of illegal immigration — countries that are a preferred destination for boat people and border-jumpers — are mostly low fertility; countries of origin of the boat people and border-jumpers, mostly high fertility.
Having got this far without stepping on a mine, I'll get even bolder: race and religion are major issues here. It’s all very well for us Boomsters to smile fondly thinking about streets full of little children at play; but currently most of those streets are in Afghanistan and the Congo and similar locales. Doesn’t that dim our enthusiasm?
Yes, it sure dims mine. So what’s my answer? Borders!
Where the world at large is concerned, I have a longstanding belief that there are zones of civilization and zones of barbarism. When I said that to a friend once, he said I'd been reading too much Chinese history.
There might be something in that. Yes: I can relate to Chinese people of the strong, stable dynasties always looking warily across the borders of the Empire to the illiterate nomadic barbarians beyond.
We of the Western world are civilized. Elsewhere there are zones of barbarism. Sub-Saharan Africa is mostly a zone of barbaraism. [Explosion] … darn it, I stepped on a mine. Never mind, I still have both legs … A fair part of the Islamic world can also be counted as barbaric.
It’s a modern style of barbarism. These people are not illiterate. They don’t eat their meat raw after tenderizing it under their horses' saddles. I get that. And of course some individuals in those zones could, after proper scrutiny, be admitted for settlement into our civilized societies and become useful, law-abiding members thereof.
Collectively, though, the barbarian zones add nothing to humanity, to the arts and sciences, to advancing the general good. I don’t want them flooding in unrestrained across our borders.
If we in the civilized world have fertility issues, which we surely do, let’s dedicate ourselves to finding solutions. Surely our politics and our technology are up to the task. Plenty of affordable housing for young people would be a good start. We just need to buy the land and build on it. Why is this difficult?
Meanwhile I want the borders of civilization defended at all points, the barbarians fenced off in their own stinking, corrupt, chaotic countries to sort out their own destinies.
The emperors of old China got it right; and when they relaxed their vigilance, they suffered dire consequences.
04 — Voting unfairness. Speaking of politics, there’s been a lot going on recently. The Euros, Britain, France, and of course the U.S.A.: it’s politics all over.
An upside of all the politics news is that we've been getting a look at different styles of democratic politics, different ways of filling those assemblies with legislators.
The Brits have come in for some mockery here. Their July 4th election is reported as a landslide for the hard left Labour Party. What kind of landslide was it? Well, on an overall turnout of a tad less than sixty percent, Labour got a tad less than 34 percent of the vote. That means that a tad more than one in five eligible voters turned out to vote for them — 20.24 percent on my calculator.
Twenty percent, huh? I guess there are landslides, and landslides.
And then there’s Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which we at VDARE.com naturally favor. They got 14.3 percent of the vote, which has won them five seats in the House of Commons. Meanwhile the soft-left Liberal Democrats got 12.2 percent of the vote, placing fourth behind Labour, the Conservatives, and Reform. So how many seats did they get in the House? Seventy-two!
Did you hear that right? Reform placed third in the vote count with 14.3 percent; they got five seats; The Liberal Democrats placed fourth in the vote count with 12.2 percent; they got 72 seats.
Once again: the fourth-placed party by vote share got fourteen times as many seats as the third-placed.
These are the peculiarities of voting systems. A well-read student of psephology could give you a two-hour lecture on the topic. Straightforward, it ain’t.
The particular peculiarity in play here is the one called "first past the post voting." You have a list of candidates people can vote for. The people vote, the votes are counted. Whichever candidate got the most votes gets the seat.
It’s easy to see how it can have odd results. Suppose there are just three parties putting up candidates in every constituency; and suppose that in every single constituency the Party A candidate got 34 percent of the vote, Party B got 33 percent, and Party C also got 33 percent. The resulting Assembly would consist entirely of Party A members, even though two-thirds of voters rejected them.
And that’s just the kind of anomaly you can get — and, as the U.K. July 4th results illustrate, do get — with first-past-the-post, which is one of the simpler voting systems.
Google "Types of Voting System." I just did, and there they are: First Past the Post, Single Transferable Vote, Additional Member System, Alternative Vote Plus, Two-Round System (where there’s a runoff), Alternative Vote, Proportional Representation, … Hoo-ee.
You might just want to pause here and recall the last time — it wasn’t very long ago, if you pay attention at all to American politics — the last time you heard or read some politician or pundit, most likely a lefty, telling you that our Electoral College system is unfair and makes a travesty of democracy.
The speaker should try telling that to Nigel Farage, or to Nigel’s equivalents in nations using one of the other electoral systems. They all have little anomalies, little traps and paradoxes in them. Human ingenuity has not yet devised an electoral system totally free of all unfairness.
The founders of our Republic worked hard on this. Is the system they came up with — the Electoral College and so on, the system they wrote into our Constitution — totally fair in all its aspects to all concerned? Possibly not, but neither is any other system. Our system has served us well for a quarter of a millennium. Let’s leave it alone.
05 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
Imprimis: A thing that we ex-Brits like to follow as the Motherland sinks into oblivion is, how many Muslim MPs are there in the House of Commons?
Answer, after the July 4th election: twenty-five.
I know; you may have heard — I think we posted something about it at VDARE — that four Muslims got elected on independent tickets. That was news in itself. The fact that 21 other Muslims got elected on regular Party tickets did not get so much publicity.
The actual party breakdown for those 21 Muslims was: Labour 18, Conservative 2, Liberal Democrat 1.
Prior to the election there were only 19 Muslims in the House. Let’s see … 25 divided by 19 gives 1.316, so that’s nearly a 32 percent increase. On a compound interest basis, that should mean total Muslim control after another 13 elections. Insh-allah.
Item: Also on the religion beat: July 2nd more than 100 people died in a stampede of enthusiasts at a Hindu religious ceremony in Northern India. ABC News tells us that, quote:
Thousands had gathered at a makeshift tent for a religious event led by a Hindu preacher in Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh state. The victims were crushed to death as they rushed to leave. Video of the aftermath showed the structure appeared to have collapsed, and authorities said heat, overcrowding and suffocation may have been factors.
End quote.
ABC News adds a helpful list of fatal Hindu stampedes the past few years:
With all due respect to the deities, it looks as though Hinduism is not for the faint of heart.
This story also brought to mind something I read somewhere decades ago, I think in the London Spectator, although I can’t remember the writer, and that’s annoying me.
So, he wrote, you've read or heard an item about people being crushed to death in an enthusiasm stampede. If it happened in Europe it was a sporting event; if it happened in China it was something commercial — a bargain sale, or perhaps a lottery; if it happened in India the cause was religious.
Is that a well-known observation? If so, who made it? If anyone knows, I'd like to be reassured that I didn’t imagine it.
Item: An item from Japan, reported in the London Guardian.
This keys in to my comments about World Population Day. As you likely know, Japan has a quite severe population problem — of the Boomster, not the Doomster variety. That is to say that the problem is not too many people but too few.
In particular, Japan has too few of the young, healthy, rugged kind of workers you need for big infrastructure projects, construction and maintenance. Solution: robots.
Here’s a magnificent one. It doesn’t seem to have a name, but the pictures and description are impressive. Edited quote from the Guardian:
Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck — which can drive on rails — will be put to use for maintenance work on [West Japan Railways] network.Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, "seeing" through the robot’s eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely.
With a vertical reach of … 40ft, the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as …88lb, hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw.
End quote.
Use a chainsaw, huh? I have a big old tree that needs trimming in my back yard. When will Home Depot have this thing out for rental? Suburban homeowners want to know.
Item: So the Brits have a lefty government — an actively lefty government, not one that’s just passively lefty by default, like the Conservative Party in its 14 years of supremacy.
The word has gone out. It’s certainly crossed the English Channel. The hordes from Africa and Islamia are piling into boats, laughing and cheering, for their trip across the Channel to the land of free food, accommodation, healthcare, education, and cell phones — not to mention subteen white girls who can be groomed for prostitution.
The invaders are supposed to wear life jackets — the more so, I imagine, now that their boats will be overpopulated by not just ten or twenty percent, but fifty or a hundred.
However, demand has been so great that in and around the Dunkirk embarkation area, life jackets are sold out. The wetbacks are having to improvise. Tuesday this week two dinghies were seen headed to England from that area with the occupants on board one of the boats holding toy rubber tyre rings in lieu of life jackets.
Item: It’s not just vastly increased numbers of Third World spongers, either. Sir Keir Starmer and his mates have other changes in store for the Brits, too. Like the DAs in our big blue cities, they want to legalize crime.
Sir Keir’s Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood, peace be upon her!, told a gathering in my birth county, Northamptonshire, that offenders will henceforth be automatically freed after serving 40 per cent of their sentence, rather than the current 50 per cent.
Why? Because, mumbled the lady from under her veil, Britain’s prisons are full, operating at 99 per cent capacity since the start of last year. Quote from the July 12th Daily Mail, quote:
If prisons ran out of cell space, she warned, the country faced the prospect of [inner quote] "van-loads of dangerous people circling the country with nowhere to go," [end inner quote] police officers unable to arrest criminals and [inner quote] "looters running amok." [End inner quote.]
End quote.
Could some Brit please step up and do his country a service: Introduce Shabana Mahmood to President Bukele of El Salvador.
Item: Finally, just another of those personal, sentimental, and entirely inconsequential notes. This one came to mind when I was talking about Britain’s voting system back there.
Whatever the faults of that system, it gives a great many British people a local figurehead — their Member of Parliament — to whom, if he does his job as it should be done, they can develop loyalty and even affection. Yes! — affection for a politician is possible: I can testify.
All through my growing-up years, in fact from the year of my birth until I was nearly thirty, the Parliamentary seat for my home town of Northampton was held by a chap named Reginald Thomas Guy Des Voeux Paget. After standing down as an MP in 1974 he was ennobled by the Queen as Lord Paget of Northampton.
As you might have surmised from his name, Paget was upper-crust. Wikipedia tells us that his family had produced five generations of Conservative Members of Parliament. I did not know that.
He was educated at Eton, England’s toniest boys' boarding school, and Cambridge University. That I did know. I also knew an even more indisputably upper-crust thing about him: He was a keen fox hunter, and in his sixties he was master of a famous local hunt, the Pytchley.
After all that upper-crustiness, you may be surprised to know that Paget was a lifelong member of the Labour Party, and sat in Parliament for that party. Upper-class lefties are not altogether rare, of course; we have plenty of them here in the States. Paget was one of the better sort, though, with no component of guilt that I could detect. He had, as the English say, "no side."
At my own school, he would show up every year to spend a couple of hours chatting informally with the senior boys in their common room. He wasn’t particularly witty or sharp, just good-natured and sensible. All of us, of all political persuasions, liked him. We called him "Reggie" and addressed him thus, at his own request.
Reggie of course died years ago: 1990, says Wikipedia, at age 81; so he had a good innings. I remember him with quiet affection. Rest in peace, Reggie.
06 — Signoff. That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention. I await, as I'm sure you do, the latest chapter in the 2024 Presidential Election Saga; if I can think of anything original or interesting to say about it, I promise you I shall.
For signoff music, may I please indulge myself in some further brief sentimentality? Thank you.
Today is my father’s birthday. John Robert Derbyshire was born 125 years ago today: on July 12th 1899.
In his late twenties Dad got restless and took off across the world looking for adventure. There may be something genetic there: I did the same thing at the same age.
Dad spent his wandering years in the antipodes, in Australia and New Zealand. I doubt he was ever homesick for England. He wasn’t the type; and, falling back on the genetic hypothesis again, I never was in my wanderings.
He did, though, acquire a love of the popular concert songs of that time, especially as sung by the great Australian baritone Peter Dawson. This was one of his favorites: The Miner’s Dream of Home.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Peter Dawson, The Miner’s Dream of Home.]
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