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France's baby bust

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Re: France's baby bust

#121

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

inawarminister wrote: post #97
Retric wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line of thinking only goes so far, industry also allows one to simply buy resources from foreign locations without the bother of conquest and administration. It’s really a combination of many factors including Europe’s relatively high population that made it both viable and desirable.

And tbh the European demographics expansion between 1500-1800, before industrialization properly spread out from Britain [0], was the Columbian Exchange. Potatoes unlocked lots of land in the northern part. And the other unsung botany, too. And the ability to send surplus men (and women) to an empty (because of disease) continent instead of having them warring against each other like pre-Columbian Europe and East Asi…

Britain was mostly able to fight because the French fleet was sunk which shielded them from a massive invasion and Russia weakened France. By themselves they wouldn’t have done much.

Re: France's baby bust

#122

Post by AlchemistCamp »

lalopalota wrote: post #111
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does religion play a major rile in politics in the rest of the western world? Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade? France in particular has had lot of debates about religious clothing at schools, what kind of criticism of religious ideas is and isn’t acceptable, etc. From my POV, it looks like religion is a bigger deal in European than American politics.…

> marrying across political lines now carries more opposition than across religious ones, for the majority of people Where can I learn more about this? I find it difficult to believe this is true for "the majority of people".

You can check out Pew Research's related publications:

- https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/02/interfaith-...

- https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/3-partisan-e...

Re: France's baby bust

#123

Post by nwatson »

lalopalota wrote: post #111
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does religion play a major rile in politics in the rest of the western world? Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade? France in particular has had lot of debates about religious clothing at schools, what kind of criticism of religious ideas is and isn’t acceptable, etc. From my POV, it looks like religion is a bigger deal in European than American politics.…

> marrying across political lines now carries more opposition than across religious ones, for the majority of people Where can I learn more about this? I find it difficult to believe this is true for "the majority of people".

Religion is increasingly a political signifier in the USA now. Many MAGA Trump supporters who claim to be Evangelical don't even go to church on any regular basis. "Secular Evangelicalism" is huge in the USA South.

This trend started with William Branham (progenitor of Latter Rain cult, The Message cult, prosperity gospel, healing-campaign revivalism ... leading to the current New Apostolic Reformation) and his mentor Roy E. Davis (Klan leader) in the 1930s. They started a political white supremacist cult with a religious bent. These two spawned a plethora of "heretical" movements still going strong today, a fusion of supremacist, new age ideas from the late 1800s, anti-communist, and evangelical/pentecostal ideas.

(Refer to the "Leaving The Message" YouTube channel. These guys, Branham and Davis, spawned the hydra.)

Edit: clarity, additional points

Re: France's baby bust

#124

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

rayiner wrote: post #108
mtts wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade? Probably more like two decades by now :-) The political parties in Europe that pride themselves on anti-Islamism are themselves not religious all. And no one (of any significance) in Western Europe is arguing for a return to Christianity. Some parties advocate “Judeo-Christian values” but the various incarnations of t…

Those political parties in France talk about “western culture” instead of “Christianity,” but western culture is fundamentally an outgrowth of Christianity. Even if you strip out the supernatural parts, a religion provides all sorts of notions about fairness, justice, forgiveness, family life, the rules and order, etc. People in Europe are still socialized into all that, even if they stop going to church. This is app…

No one in France talks about western culture. The main parties which have made Islam a theme are staunchly anti-American.

France has had a strong separation between the state and religion for a century. It’s one of the less religious country in the world and a significant part of the population is still strongly against any kind of religion especially the Catholic Church.

Re: France's baby bust

#125

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #45
ookdatnog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you're getting to this enormous generalization. Seems to me that for the past century or so, liberal societies have been the dominant societies on the world stage. Which conservative, traditionalist societies are you thinking of that are more successful or have "higher fitness" than liberal societies? When I think of an archetypal "conservative, traditional" society, the first countries that spring t…

The United States was a conservative country at least until the 1960s

When did the US stop being a conservative country?

From my European point of view you have a two parties system allowing you to chose between conservative and more conservative.

Re: France's baby bust

#127

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

inawarminister wrote: post #104
inglor_cz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate." Weren't pretty much all societies on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s "traditional and conservative"? Yet most of them weren't particularly successful against the British, who, on aggregate, weren't that much traditional (superficially, yes, but behind the visible old-school clergy and nobility, ruthless modernizati…

Well Germany with it's much more conservative population and petty kings and nobles were able to outgrew liberal Britain and republican France between 1870-1918, and so did Archconservative Russia post-1900 or so. Of course both fell in WW1 but the period just before it was quite interesting to ponder about.

I don’t want to rain on your parade but Germany had just been unified and was quickly liberalising and Russia was so conservative the communist party would successfully take control of the state in 1917.

Re: France's baby bust

#128

Post by inglor_cz »

inawarminister wrote: post #104
inglor_cz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate." Weren't pretty much all societies on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s "traditional and conservative"? Yet most of them weren't particularly successful against the British, who, on aggregate, weren't that much traditional (superficially, yes, but behind the visible old-school clergy and nobility, ruthless modernizati…

Well Germany with it's much more conservative population and petty kings and nobles were able to outgrew liberal Britain and republican France between 1870-1918, and so did Archconservative Russia post-1900 or so. Of course both fell in WW1 but the period just before it was quite interesting to ponder about.

I am not so sure about your claim that Germany in the indicated period was "much more conservative" than Britain.

The heart of German economic development was in industrial Prussia, resulting in enormous growth of left-wing politics. Bismarck's anti-socialist laws were repealed in 1890 and the SPD since then got the plurality of votes cast in every election to the Reichstag.

Rural Bavaria was much more conservative, yes, but back then it was an economic backwater. Bavaria only started industrializing after 1950.

Re: France's baby bust

#129

Post by rayiner »

mtts wrote: post #120
rayiner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those political parties in France talk about “western culture” instead of “Christianity,” but western culture is fundamentally an outgrowth of Christianity. Even if you strip out the supernatural parts, a religion provides all sorts of notions about fairness, justice, forgiveness, family life, the rules and order, etc. People in Europe are still socialized into all that, even if they stop going to church. This is app…

> Even if you strip out the supernatural parts, a religion provides all sorts of notions about fairness, justice, forgiveness, family life, the rules and order, etc. Most people would call that a culture. One were most people do not go to church on Sunday and politicians, even if they’re from a religious background, like Angela Merkel, don’t ever talk about God. And one that is very different from the one across the…

> Most people would call that a culture.

Sure. But in Europe that culture co-evolved with more than a 1,000 years of Christianity being central to society. The cultural inheritance of Christianity survives whether people go to church or not. The same is true for those Muslim immigrants. They are culturally Muslim. It’s those differences in culture, rooted in religion, that are the source of the conflict, not theology in the abstract.

> One were most people do not go to church on Sunday and politicians, even if they’re from a religious background, like Angela Merkel, don’t ever talk about God.

The German system of offering education in Christianity in public schools would be illegal in America. In Germany abortion is still technically illegal, and is restricted after 12 weeks, whereas in most of America it’s available up to 24 weeks. In Bavaria the government can require Christian crosses to be displayed in all public buildings. In America that would be illegal.

So why doesn’t Merkel talk about Christianity? Is it because Christianity has less influence on government and society in Germany? Or is it because Germany secularism carved out a sphere for Christianity in society, and, unlike in America, nobody is trying to eliminate that sphere?

Re: France's baby bust

#130

Post by vitus »

dmurray wrote: post #36
swarnie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this is an America-centric forum but does religion play a major role in politics in the rest of the western world? I'm counting back though prime ministers and i can't recall one who made religion a major part of their platform in my lifetime.

I don't see American presidents making religion "a major part of their platform" either. They get some photo ops in church just like British leaders, and they side with their voters on things like abortion, which breaks down roughly along religious lines without being explicitly so. But a major policy decision directly targeting religion? The closest I can think of in the US is Trump banning immigration from majority…

> The closest I can think of in the US is Trump banning immigration from majority-Muslim countries under the pretext of links to terror.

The Trump travel ban is weird in its various iterations. On one hand Trump was on the record during his campaign as wanting to ban Muslims from entering the country entirely, but on the other hand the ban completely omitted the largest predominantly-Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh). For a sense of scale, those three countries make up about a third of the world's Muslim population. (Add on India and Nigeria and you're looking at half of the global Muslim population.) There was also criticism for omitting places like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Lebanon (and Egypt, in earlier iterations) which actually had demonstrable ties to 9/11.

But, the original list was mostly consistent with restrictions on the visa waiver program, which is to say the administration probably wanted to start small with the most legally defensible subset before expanding it more broadly. In practice, said restrictions were uniformly blocked by the judicial system.

Ostensibly the first amendment's establishment cause prevents Congress from passing laws that are overly religious, although that doesn't entirely stop them from, say, passing the Defense of Marriage Act or attempting to explicitly opt out churches from COVID restrictions.

These days it's mostly about putting ideologically-aligned judges on the courts and letting them choose which laws to block or precedent to overturn.

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