Sweet, delicious wingnuttery!
Over at Opinion Journal, the Ole Perfesser tries his hand at playing a smart guy with a lot of insights:
But Mr. Gibson’s [oh oh!] slogan unwittingly captures an important aspect of the problem, in the U.S. and other industrial societies, at least: We’ve taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Mr. Longman, the “social costs” of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the “social returns” continue to decline.
That probably explains why the crude birth rate in the US in 1975 was 14.0, before reaching a low point of 14.1 in 2005.
As for “Mr. Gibson” — can the Ole Perfesser really be so obtuse as to not know what Gibson was talking about?
You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.
Shorter Ole Perfesser: I have some theories about babies and parenthood, and my wife, my mother and a woman with a full time nanny agree with me.
The reason for the child shortage is really pretty simple – would you want to bring a child into a world where people like Glenn Reynolds and John Gibson are repected public figures?
Maybe if Glenn Reynolds and John Gibson had a baby together…
The only thing that scares me more than Joss Whedon’s Reavers is the idea of having a kid in the last years of the Roman Empire.
A world filled with the spawn of John Gibson is a terrible image to filly ones head this early in the morning. Something like the cover of Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy only scarier.
And from all over the land comes the cry: “Ovulate, woman! Another 48,034 potential illegals were born in the last hour and we pasty-faced white guys must beat that total!”
(filly = fill + sully)
I was struck by this line:
Children used to provide cheap labor and retirement security, all in one.
If only those days would come back, then I’d breed me a sweatshop.
I’d just like to point out that the world comma shortage of 2007 will be traced directly to that Perfessor quote. I mean really – that last sentence is downright Groganesque!
not to criticize but…
i’m really stupid. and i’ve found, of late, that you are underwriting your posts. not writing insurance on them, but just not really explaining your points clearly. i’m lazy as well.
please add some flesh and don’t assume idiots (like me) just know what the hell you are talking about. show me.
don’t assume idiots (like me) just know what the hell you are talking about.
No, no, this is the FUN part. See, what I do, is I am careful not to follow any of the links and I just guess what the whole thing’s about. Or just pick one line and make a crack about that–sometimes you can change the whole direction of a thread!!
mikey
what a wanker.
alternate shorter G.R:
while the “safety fascists” are wrong for scaring you into using car seats, my own scare attempts – such as asserting that parents face jail time for spanking – are completely reasonable.
I don’t get it – why *should* we want to see Americans have more children? Last time I checked, we don’t have a severly negative birth rate, and we’re doing a pretty shitty job of caring for all the children now. Maybe when we eliminate poverty, hunger, illiteracy, neglect, etc. AND balance the population with environmental sustainability (should be any day now, right?) then we can think about ramping up the birth rate. Instead, it seems like births are the new ‘arms race’ – we can’t let those foreigners outbreed us! All I know is I’m not donating my womb to the cause.
They’ll never succeed without my precious white-boy sperm! Muah-ha-ha-haaaaa!!!1!2!!
My favorite thing about the right is all “global warming is a big scam that’ll take a hundred years even if it’s happening and it’s in the future so who cares” and then in the same breatth “OMG IN 25 YEARS WE’LL BE GAY MEXLAMONAZIS OMG OMG OMGOMGOMGOGJMOGM”
Well, not really my favorite but it’s in there. The future’s climate change, no problem, whatevs. The future’s English being slightly less dominant and a taco stand being on the corner is call out the troops awful.