Religiosity is correlated with fertility, the most extreme example being ‘quiverfull’ people having 8 kids each, with Mormons in a close second.
Religiosity is about 50% genetically heritable, and also mimetically heritable, the extent depending upon the situation.
The secularisation of Europe might have gone as far as it can go, while if anything the US seems to be getting more religious. In the long run, won’t genes win out?
Therefore, it seems likely that the world is going to keep on getting more religious. And I’m sure we are all aware that exponential growth curves can cause very rapid changes. Trying to put an exact time-frame is difficult, because of immigration, questions of how long communities can remain isolated from the rest of the country, positive feedback where immigrants vote for more immigration, negated feedback from backlashes, birthrates decreasing in a demographic transition, and so forth.
I did a calculation and decided that within around 100 years many secular countries would be run by religious fanatics, and then I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn’t buy all that more time.
The problem isn’t that ISIS take over. They don’t have the weapons, they don’t have the numbers, they don’t control any tank factories. The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn’t happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France’s nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.
Obviously that is just one hypothetical. But as the average religiosity rises, and when both Islam and Christianity have a serious history of violence, it seems likely to end in disaster, if baseline humans are still the dominant force at that point in time.
So, a couple of hundred years ago the West was 95%+ religious. Not so much now. Why is that and why genes are not winning out? And why are there so many irreligious Chinese?
Well, firstly I think the correlation between religion and fertility is probably a lot more relevant after the invention of medicine, sanitation and contraceptives. A couple of hundred years ago a lot of people didn’t survive to adulthood. Certain religious groups such as Mormons have massively increased in proportion over the last hundred years.
As for the Chinese, over short time periods memes win over genes, and Mao stamped down on religion. Does Confusianism/Taoism/Buddism have any sort of similar teaching about being fruitful? Are these even religions in the same sense, or are they legal codes, an early attempt at science and a philosophy respectively?
You’re neglecting a different factor that is more highly (and negatively) correlated with fertility than religiosity: level of education in mothers. Religious families significantly outreproduce nonreligious ones only where their level of education is also significantly lower. (Quiverfulls homeschool, ultra-orthodox jews in Israel have their own schools, muslims in Europe and Russia tend to live in poor areas with comparatively bad schools.) Of course these two factors are causally linked: lots of religions have explicit or implicit norms against girls’ education. But to neglect the stronger one of the two is to mistakenly see an unassailable problem.
I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn’t buy all that more time.
Typo? If each pair of Quiverfull parents produces 8 children, and 8⁄5 = 1.6 of those grow up to become Quiverfull themselves, then the movement needs to proselytize aggressively just to hit replacement.
Also, anecdotally, my friends who are true-believer evangelicals don’t think the demographic strategy is going to work; they think they’re losing too many to the world.
Well, if 1% of Christians in general become Quiverfull, and 8/5=1.6 Quiverfull children per mother remain Quiverfull, you get 1% first generation converts, 0.99 x 0.01 + 0.01 x 0.8 = 1.79% second generation …
Of course its more complex than that, and many of the children who do not remain Quiverfull will still be ‘carriers’. But without working out the equations, it still seems clear that genes that predispose people towards Quiverfull will have higher fitness, but its not going to quadruple every generation.
Essentially, the quiverfull people aren’t spreading memes well, but are spreading genes that predispose religiosity.
And sure, your evangelical friends might not think it would work, but then they probably don’t believe in evolution.
I wish I could pin it down. Some Big Think or similar forum talk. They discussed exactly the issue you bring up—the large differential birth rates between the very religious and the secular.
The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn’t happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France’s nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.
I think you’re basically correct that in democracies, and even quasi democracies, it doesn’t take long for differential birth rates to transform a society, but you are in fact underestimating the effect. The shit will hit the fan long before 2100.
Russia is already approximately 15% muslim, with huge differential birth rates between christians and muslims. And that 15% understates the real issue for violence and control—who has the most young men. I’ve seen numbers that by 2020 (!) half the Russian army will be muslim, and that majority will only grow from there.
EDIT: Speaking of the shit hitting the fan, there’s an article about the potential for Putin to lose power, and what could replace him.
But Navalny certainly seems to have demonstrated racist attitudes in the past. And he could play the “we Russians are being bled and exploited by the people from North Caucasus, by the people from Central Asia” card. That plays to a depressingly powerful strand of common Russian public opinion, and it’s something against which Putin has surprisingly little defense. That could conceivably build a wider public constituency quite quickly if Navalny is willing to play that card.
Putin has been stoking the fires of “the international world is holding us down” for a long time. We are Great and Imperial, but we have been Betrayed. Add the demographic threat to christian ethnic Russians, and they can really get that party started.
In Moscow, Tatar women have six children and Chechen and Ingush women have ten on average.
!
Look at the Ukraine—part of the population identified as Ukrainian, part as Russian, and it lead to a civil war. That was just nationality, this is nationality and religion and ethnicity. Is there going to be a civil war in the world’s most heavly-armed nuclear state? Will they start sneaking suitcase nukes out?
Look at the Ukraine—part of the population identified as Ukrainian, part as Russian, and it lead to a civil war.
Look, this is a live issue. People are dying. People are dying in my hometown. Please don’t just repeat things you may have heard “somewhere,” because there is an information war, and if you repeat lies, you help perpetuate a bad thing by bad people. I think it is better to either say nothing about that conflict, or try to use local sources only if you really want to talk about it.
I’m not trying to say that I know better then someone from the Ukraine, but I’m not just repeating stuff I read “somewhere”: I’ve checked just now and both wikipedia and bbc news, which I would expect to be impartial or partially anti-Russia, say that this is at least partially a civil war.
To clarify, I know there are Russian troops fighting too. I’m also not saying that Russia didn’t engineer the crisis somehow. I’m not saying that the Russian intervention is justified. I’m not saying that the rebels are justified. But if the BBC mentions “Pro-Russian rebels” then it looks like this is a civil war with support from Russia, rather than a pure Russian invasion, unless the BBC is a pro-Russian propaganda tool.
Wikipedia is not reliable for these sorts of things, for what I hope are obvious reasons. BBC is more so, but even Western news editors operate on their own set of incentives that the good folks over in .ru study very carefully.
What I was trying to say wasn’t “I know better than you,” but “if there are big players with a strong incentive + a lot of money and people to paint an incorrect picture of what is happening to you, how would you be able to tell?” See also: “Russia is a democracy.”
One of the interesting things about the Ukraine crisis is that it is a live fire exercise for propaganda and opinion engineering in the internet age.
My opinion, for the record: I am sure there are people originally from eastern Ukraine currently fighting. But the entire thing is basically entirely engineered and ran from Moscow, with Russian military expertise and hardware. Rebel commanding officers are all Russian special ops people. I suppose if you can find a hundred people originally from that part of the world to fight on the rebel side that would be enough to call it a “civil war.”
It is a “civil war” in the sense that Russian-speaking people are killing each other. It is not a “civil war” in the sense of “inherent ethnic tensions exploded into a war in a way we always knew they would” as would be the case in the former Yugoslavia, say. That is not what is happening, what is happening is Russia using “continuation of politics by other means” to reassert its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
A Russian speaking Ukraine that is a part of EU with a growing economy a la Poland would have been enormously bad news for the Russian political establishment. It is a matter of survival for them (note: not for Russia, for them).
[The eastern Ukraine conflict] is not a “civil war” in the sense of “inherent ethnic tensions exploded into a war in a way we always knew they would” as would be the case in the former Yugoslavia, say.
I think that’s wrong, but wrong in an interesting and ultimately informative way!
While diplomats, politicians & journalists at the time did sometimes explain the Yugoslav wars of succession as an outburst of long-standing ethnic tensions, Western scholars regard such tensions as only a minor cause of the wars. (I can dig up a range of quotations to back that up but, as you might be the only person to read this, I won’t bother unless someone asks.)
What did cause the wars? A combination of things: chauvinist nationalisms, struggles between centralist & anti-centralist Yugoslav leaders, economic stagnation, the dwindling credibility of Communism at the end of the 1980s, and yes, deeply rooted ethnic antagonisms to a limited degree. But foremost among the causes was a coalition drawn loosely together by Slobodan Milošević to further Serb nationalism, which included other politicians, intellectuals, militaries, state media, and irredentists in republics adjacent to Serbia.
By manoeuvring actors in the coalition into fighting for them, Milošević and other Serbian politicians helped engineer the wars, first by allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia when Slovenia declared independence, then by arming irredentist Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina and nudging them to secede, generating a pretext to (1) attempt to disarm Croatia and B&H, and (2) send the increasingly Serbified army into Croatia and B&H, all in the guise of peacekeeping.
Why do I delve into all that? Because it actually has an uncanny resemblance to the eastern Ukraine conflict, as I understand it. As in ex-Yugoslavia, people overblow the ethno-linguistic uniformity of the regions involved when seeking to explain the violence. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the leaders of a large republic prop up a rebellion in an adjacent smaller republic. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the fighting seems to involve a mixture of units from a neighbour’s army and small bands of undisciplined irregulars, as opposed to a sweeping war of all against all. As in ex-Yugoslavia, state-controlled media outlets stir the shit and skew their coverage of the conflict.
As best as I can tell as a distant layperson, the eastern Ukrainian conflict indeed isn’t a “‘civil war’ in the sense of ’inherent ethnic tensions explod[ing] into a war in a way we always knew they would” — but neither were the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, and partly for this reason the two conflicts turn out to be surprisingly apposite analogues of each other.
July 2015 edit: changed “sending the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia” to “allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia”; although the Serb-nationalist coalition did not block the army’s entry to Slovenia, it was Ante Marković (the Yugoslav federal prime minister, who was not a member of that coalition and indeed increasingly isolated by it) whoinitiatedthe attempted invasion.
Look at the Ukraine—part of the population identified as Ukrainian, part as Russian, and it lead to a civil war.
As far as I know, this is how one side of the conflict explains it. The other side has a different opinion on what actually happened. Specifically, that the reason for starting the war was Russian soldiers (soldiers coming from Russia, not the local minorities) crossing the border and, well, starting the war.
A priori, an average of 6 is in the realm of possibility if it’s a total fertility rate. Two decades ago the highest national-level European TFR was in Kosovo, where Albanian women had a TFR around 6.5. So Muscovite Tatar women having a TFR of 6 nowadays could be just about possible.
I have a hard time, though, believing that Muscovite Chechen & Ingush women are breaking double digits; that’d be off the national charts. One miiiiight be able to bend over backwards to explain that away as a Moscow-and-ethnicity-specific anomaly, but I’m not sure how.
I poked around a bit to try uncovering more data on Tatar women in Moscow, but couldn’t find anything quickly on Google Scholar which had Moscow-specific TFRs by ethnicity. One paper does use 1989 census data to find that in Russia as a whole, ethnic Russian & Tatar women aged 50-54 averaged 1.88 & 2.65 “children ever born” respectively. 2.65 is a lot lower than 6, so either (1) Moscow Tatars are astoundingly prolific compared to Tatars elsewhere in Russia; (2) Russian Tatar women have most of their babies post-menopause; (3) Russian Tatar women, reversing their earlier demographic transition, have more than doubled their TFR in the last 25 years; or (4) “In Moscow, Tatar women have six children [...] on average” is BS. A blog post with blunter but more recent data is suggestive of (4).
Russia is already approximately 15% muslim, with huge differential birth rates between christians and muslims. And that 15% understates the real issue for violence and control—who has the most young men. I’ve seen numbers that by 2020 (!) half the Russian army will be muslim, and that majority will only grow from there.
Doesn’t this analysis depend on army technology not changing? 100 years ago this would be spot on but if in the next decade we continue to see smaller armies of people being more and more effective you could have a Russia with an even smaller army without muslim leadership.
The same is true for the civilian side. Even with large numbers of disaffected young males—near term technological surveillance could prevent them from organizing in any meaningful way.
But since Russia is a democracy, any majority group can simply vote themselves into power. Realistically, people are not going to bar Muslims from entering the army.
Well, its my understanding that Russia is generally described as ‘partially democratic’ meaning something along the line of there are elections, but state control of parts of the media and other factors mean that the ruling party hasn’t lost any elections. But, state control of the media only goes so far. Japan’s ruling party didn’t lose any elections for over 50 years, and then following the financial crash of 2008 they did.
I don’t think Russia is really democratic in any meaningful sense we understand in the West. Putin et al just find it useful to maintain this as a polite fiction. In particular, my prediction is that changing demographics will have no effect whatsoever on the distribution of political power in Russia without other drastic changes (e.g. a coup d’etat)
Interestingly, The LOR -see 1 and 2 democratically elect their own officers. It’s almost like extreme authoritarian salafism of the ISIL brings out extreme democratic libertarian fighters out of the woodwork (nb. many of them are actually marxist, but at least they can get along for the time being).
What do Neoreactionaries think of the Islamic State? After all, it’s an exemplar case of the reactionaries in those areas winning big. I know it’s only a surface comparison, I’m sincerely curious about what a NR think of the situation.
While this is an interesting question—my take on the NRx was it was more anti-democracy then pro-Monarchy. So I think a better question for them would be: if fundamentalist Muslims become a democratic majority (via demographics) and vote in IS or the Muslim Brotherhood would that be a “big win” too? A less hypothetical question might be NRx’s take on the state of Iraq’s fledgling democracy.
I think you meant this as a reply to the original post, not to my reply.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure virtually all NRxers would prefer democracy to islamofasism—indeed, many argue that fasism is closely related to democracy, or that all democracies will inevitably become either fasist or communist. I think the NRxers are worried that ISIS have a better civilisation than us in certain key respects, largely involving demographics, which will eventually allow them to defeat us.
I also think the important difference is that NRxers generally claim to want to be left alone, and would probably be content to, at most, exile gays for instance. ISIS, OTOH, is following an old principle that states they can never sign peace treaties with infidels, and will kill rather than exile those it hates.
In general:
Religiosity is correlated with fertility, the most extreme example being ‘quiverfull’ people having 8 kids each, with Mormons in a close second.
Religiosity is about 50% genetically heritable, and also mimetically heritable, the extent depending upon the situation.
The secularisation of Europe might have gone as far as it can go, while if anything the US seems to be getting more religious. In the long run, won’t genes win out?
Therefore, it seems likely that the world is going to keep on getting more religious. And I’m sure we are all aware that exponential growth curves can cause very rapid changes. Trying to put an exact time-frame is difficult, because of immigration, questions of how long communities can remain isolated from the rest of the country, positive feedback where immigrants vote for more immigration, negated feedback from backlashes, birthrates decreasing in a demographic transition, and so forth.
I did a calculation and decided that within around 100 years many secular countries would be run by religious fanatics, and then I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn’t buy all that more time.
The problem isn’t that ISIS take over. They don’t have the weapons, they don’t have the numbers, they don’t control any tank factories. The worry is that in 2100 or 2200, if for some reason the singularity hasn’t happened, fundamentalist Muslims are a democratic majority in France and evangelicals are a majority in the US, and now there is a far more serious threat than that of ISIS, and the question of whether, with the technology of 2200, the US can disable France’s nuclear weapons in a first strike is raised.
Obviously that is just one hypothetical. But as the average religiosity rises, and when both Islam and Christianity have a serious history of violence, it seems likely to end in disaster, if baseline humans are still the dominant force at that point in time.
So, a couple of hundred years ago the West was 95%+ religious. Not so much now. Why is that and why genes are not winning out? And why are there so many irreligious Chinese?
Well, firstly I think the correlation between religion and fertility is probably a lot more relevant after the invention of medicine, sanitation and contraceptives. A couple of hundred years ago a lot of people didn’t survive to adulthood. Certain religious groups such as Mormons have massively increased in proportion over the last hundred years.
As for the Chinese, over short time periods memes win over genes, and Mao stamped down on religion. Does Confusianism/Taoism/Buddism have any sort of similar teaching about being fruitful? Are these even religions in the same sense, or are they legal codes, an early attempt at science and a philosophy respectively?
You’re neglecting a different factor that is more highly (and negatively) correlated with fertility than religiosity: level of education in mothers. Religious families significantly outreproduce nonreligious ones only where their level of education is also significantly lower. (Quiverfulls homeschool, ultra-orthodox jews in Israel have their own schools, muslims in Europe and Russia tend to live in poor areas with comparatively bad schools.) Of course these two factors are causally linked: lots of religions have explicit or implicit norms against girls’ education. But to neglect the stronger one of the two is to mistakenly see an unassailable problem.
Typo? If each pair of Quiverfull parents produces 8 children, and 8⁄5 = 1.6 of those grow up to become Quiverfull themselves, then the movement needs to proselytize aggressively just to hit replacement.
Also, anecdotally, my friends who are true-believer evangelicals don’t think the demographic strategy is going to work; they think they’re losing too many to the world.
Well, if 1% of Christians in general become Quiverfull, and 8/5=1.6 Quiverfull children per mother remain Quiverfull, you get 1% first generation converts, 0.99 x 0.01 + 0.01 x 0.8 = 1.79% second generation …
Of course its more complex than that, and many of the children who do not remain Quiverfull will still be ‘carriers’. But without working out the equations, it still seems clear that genes that predispose people towards Quiverfull will have higher fitness, but its not going to quadruple every generation.
Essentially, the quiverfull people aren’t spreading memes well, but are spreading genes that predispose religiosity.
And sure, your evangelical friends might not think it would work, but then they probably don’t believe in evolution.
I wish I could pin it down. Some Big Think or similar forum talk. They discussed exactly the issue you bring up—the large differential birth rates between the very religious and the secular.
EDIT: Ha! Found it. “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?”, byt Eric Kaufman
See http://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448
and youtube talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYEyv5a_3LM
I think you’re basically correct that in democracies, and even quasi democracies, it doesn’t take long for differential birth rates to transform a society, but you are in fact underestimating the effect. The shit will hit the fan long before 2100.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361804/russias-demographic-revolution-daniel-pipes
Russia is already approximately 15% muslim, with huge differential birth rates between christians and muslims. And that 15% understates the real issue for violence and control—who has the most young men. I’ve seen numbers that by 2020 (!) half the Russian army will be muslim, and that majority will only grow from there.
EDIT: Speaking of the shit hitting the fan, there’s an article about the potential for Putin to lose power, and what could replace him.
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7482441/how-putin-lose-power
Putin has been stoking the fires of “the international world is holding us down” for a long time. We are Great and Imperial, but we have been Betrayed. Add the demographic threat to christian ethnic Russians, and they can really get that party started.
!
Look at the Ukraine—part of the population identified as Ukrainian, part as Russian, and it lead to a civil war. That was just nationality, this is nationality and religion and ethnicity. Is there going to be a civil war in the world’s most heavly-armed nuclear state? Will they start sneaking suitcase nukes out?
Look, this is a live issue. People are dying. People are dying in my hometown. Please don’t just repeat things you may have heard “somewhere,” because there is an information war, and if you repeat lies, you help perpetuate a bad thing by bad people. I think it is better to either say nothing about that conflict, or try to use local sources only if you really want to talk about it.
I’m not trying to say that I know better then someone from the Ukraine, but I’m not just repeating stuff I read “somewhere”: I’ve checked just now and both wikipedia and bbc news, which I would expect to be impartial or partially anti-Russia, say that this is at least partially a civil war.
To clarify, I know there are Russian troops fighting too. I’m also not saying that Russia didn’t engineer the crisis somehow. I’m not saying that the Russian intervention is justified. I’m not saying that the rebels are justified. But if the BBC mentions “Pro-Russian rebels” then it looks like this is a civil war with support from Russia, rather than a pure Russian invasion, unless the BBC is a pro-Russian propaganda tool.
Sorry if I touched a nerve btw.
Wikipedia is not reliable for these sorts of things, for what I hope are obvious reasons. BBC is more so, but even Western news editors operate on their own set of incentives that the good folks over in .ru study very carefully.
What I was trying to say wasn’t “I know better than you,” but “if there are big players with a strong incentive + a lot of money and people to paint an incorrect picture of what is happening to you, how would you be able to tell?” See also: “Russia is a democracy.”
One of the interesting things about the Ukraine crisis is that it is a live fire exercise for propaganda and opinion engineering in the internet age.
My opinion, for the record: I am sure there are people originally from eastern Ukraine currently fighting. But the entire thing is basically entirely engineered and ran from Moscow, with Russian military expertise and hardware. Rebel commanding officers are all Russian special ops people. I suppose if you can find a hundred people originally from that part of the world to fight on the rebel side that would be enough to call it a “civil war.”
It is a “civil war” in the sense that Russian-speaking people are killing each other. It is not a “civil war” in the sense of “inherent ethnic tensions exploded into a war in a way we always knew they would” as would be the case in the former Yugoslavia, say. That is not what is happening, what is happening is Russia using “continuation of politics by other means” to reassert its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
A Russian speaking Ukraine that is a part of EU with a growing economy a la Poland would have been enormously bad news for the Russian political establishment. It is a matter of survival for them (note: not for Russia, for them).
I think that’s wrong, but wrong in an interesting and ultimately informative way!
While diplomats, politicians & journalists at the time did sometimes explain the Yugoslav wars of succession as an outburst of long-standing ethnic tensions, Western scholars regard such tensions as only a minor cause of the wars. (I can dig up a range of quotations to back that up but, as you might be the only person to read this, I won’t bother unless someone asks.)
What did cause the wars? A combination of things: chauvinist nationalisms, struggles between centralist & anti-centralist Yugoslav leaders, economic stagnation, the dwindling credibility of Communism at the end of the 1980s, and yes, deeply rooted ethnic antagonisms to a limited degree. But foremost among the causes was a coalition drawn loosely together by Slobodan Milošević to further Serb nationalism, which included other politicians, intellectuals, militaries, state media, and irredentists in republics adjacent to Serbia.
By manoeuvring actors in the coalition into fighting for them, Milošević and other Serbian politicians helped engineer the wars, first by allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia when Slovenia declared independence, then by arming irredentist Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina and nudging them to secede, generating a pretext to (1) attempt to disarm Croatia and B&H, and (2) send the increasingly Serbified army into Croatia and B&H, all in the guise of peacekeeping.
Why do I delve into all that? Because it actually has an uncanny resemblance to the eastern Ukraine conflict, as I understand it. As in ex-Yugoslavia, people overblow the ethno-linguistic uniformity of the regions involved when seeking to explain the violence. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the leaders of a large republic prop up a rebellion in an adjacent smaller republic. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the fighting seems to involve a mixture of units from a neighbour’s army and small bands of undisciplined irregulars, as opposed to a sweeping war of all against all. As in ex-Yugoslavia, state-controlled media outlets stir the shit and skew their coverage of the conflict.
As best as I can tell as a distant layperson, the eastern Ukrainian conflict indeed isn’t a “‘civil war’ in the sense of ’inherent ethnic tensions explod[ing] into a war in a way we always knew they would” — but neither were the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, and partly for this reason the two conflicts turn out to be surprisingly apposite analogues of each other.
July 2015 edit: changed “sending the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia” to “allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia”; although the Serb-nationalist coalition did not block the army’s entry to Slovenia, it was Ante Marković (the Yugoslav federal prime minister, who was not a member of that coalition and indeed increasingly isolated by it) who initiated the attempted invasion.
Yes, there is.
As far as I know, this is how one side of the conflict explains it. The other side has a different opinion on what actually happened. Specifically, that the reason for starting the war was Russian soldiers (soldiers coming from Russia, not the local minorities) crossing the border and, well, starting the war.
On average? Sorry, this is obvious bullshit. Or someone doesn’t know what “average” means.
Its only slightly higher than the quiverfull people, so I’d say its only a little implausible, rather than total bullshit.
A priori, an average of 6 is in the realm of possibility if it’s a total fertility rate. Two decades ago the highest national-level European TFR was in Kosovo, where Albanian women had a TFR around 6.5. So Muscovite Tatar women having a TFR of 6 nowadays could be just about possible.
I have a hard time, though, believing that Muscovite Chechen & Ingush women are breaking double digits; that’d be off the national charts. One miiiiight be able to bend over backwards to explain that away as a Moscow-and-ethnicity-specific anomaly, but I’m not sure how.
I poked around a bit to try uncovering more data on Tatar women in Moscow, but couldn’t find anything quickly on Google Scholar which had Moscow-specific TFRs by ethnicity. One paper does use 1989 census data to find that in Russia as a whole, ethnic Russian & Tatar women aged 50-54 averaged 1.88 & 2.65 “children ever born” respectively. 2.65 is a lot lower than 6, so either (1) Moscow Tatars are astoundingly prolific compared to Tatars elsewhere in Russia; (2) Russian Tatar women have most of their babies post-menopause; (3) Russian Tatar women, reversing their earlier demographic transition, have more than doubled their TFR in the last 25 years; or (4) “In Moscow, Tatar women have six children [...] on average” is BS. A blog post with blunter but more recent data is suggestive of (4).
Quiverfull people self-select into having lots of children. Women of a particular ethnic background do not.
I agree with Viliam_Bur:
Look at the Ukraine—Putin wants a small victorious war, so little green men go into Ukraine and start a “civil” war.
Doesn’t this analysis depend on army technology not changing? 100 years ago this would be spot on but if in the next decade we continue to see smaller armies of people being more and more effective you could have a Russia with an even smaller army without muslim leadership.
The same is true for the civilian side. Even with large numbers of disaffected young males—near term technological surveillance could prevent them from organizing in any meaningful way.
But since Russia is a democracy, any majority group can simply vote themselves into power. Realistically, people are not going to bar Muslims from entering the army.
???
Well, its my understanding that Russia is generally described as ‘partially democratic’ meaning something along the line of there are elections, but state control of parts of the media and other factors mean that the ruling party hasn’t lost any elections. But, state control of the media only goes so far. Japan’s ruling party didn’t lose any elections for over 50 years, and then following the financial crash of 2008 they did.
I don’t think Russia is really democratic in any meaningful sense we understand in the West. Putin et al just find it useful to maintain this as a polite fiction. In particular, my prediction is that changing demographics will have no effect whatsoever on the distribution of political power in Russia without other drastic changes (e.g. a coup d’etat)
Do you think Russia was democratic at any recent point? Mid-1990s, maybe?
Interestingly, The LOR -see 1 and 2 democratically elect their own officers. It’s almost like extreme authoritarian salafism of the ISIL brings out extreme democratic libertarian fighters out of the woodwork (nb. many of them are actually marxist, but at least they can get along for the time being).
While this is an interesting question—my take on the NRx was it was more anti-democracy then pro-Monarchy. So I think a better question for them would be: if fundamentalist Muslims become a democratic majority (via demographics) and vote in IS or the Muslim Brotherhood would that be a “big win” too? A less hypothetical question might be NRx’s take on the state of Iraq’s fledgling democracy.
I’ve seen some NRx support for Saudi Arabia as a Muslim version of their principles, but nothing about the Islamic state.
Yet another case of ideals over loyalties.
I think you meant this as a reply to the original post, not to my reply.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure virtually all NRxers would prefer democracy to islamofasism—indeed, many argue that fasism is closely related to democracy, or that all democracies will inevitably become either fasist or communist. I think the NRxers are worried that ISIS have a better civilisation than us in certain key respects, largely involving demographics, which will eventually allow them to defeat us.
I also think the important difference is that NRxers generally claim to want to be left alone, and would probably be content to, at most, exile gays for instance. ISIS, OTOH, is following an old principle that states they can never sign peace treaties with infidels, and will kill rather than exile those it hates.