Monday, March 10, 2008

Bullcrit

Wow. I clicked on through from Mark Steyn to read this guy's tirade, and I've got to say -- clearly this guy's never read or listened to any Mark Steyn unless it was little clips and soundbytes taken out of context on purpose.

I, for one, have read the book this guy claims (at first) to be critiquing cover to cover. At the end after adjusting slightly for some of Mark's criticisms of his Bullcrit (that's when you critique someone's work based on other reviews of the work rather than bothering to read it for yourself) goes on to say that since he read someone else's review and things that other people had to say about Steyn in other publications ... and "oh yeah, America Alone" (probably excerpts from it in the "sources" he hand-wavingly cites) that it's really no big deal that he didn't actually read the book -- because he's just expressing his opinion...

... about a book he clearly didn't read. Which makes his opinion worth less than the electrons used to transmit it over the net.

If he had, many of his snarky questions would easily have been answered, particularly the ones concerning demographics. It's math, man. If cultural Europeans are not breeding at a replacement rate and Muslim immigrants are breeding at baby boomer rates, a couple of generations is all it will take. And to be fair, he wasn't "claiming" (in the article, not the book -- I think the book puts it farther into the next century) that it was definitely 40% by 2025. The quote is:
By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025.

Not excactly a ringing endorsement that the claim will be borne out. It's obviously a "high ball" estimate - and not one he made himself. I wonder if this guy buys Al Gore's 20 foot sea-level rise projections?

I've never read anything by Mark Steyn that would lead me to believe he's any sort of bigot -- quite the contrary. And I've read quite a bit of Steyn. He sounds like a perfectly reasonable, open-minded, well-read person who isn't averse to saying things that hyper-sensitive politically correct-ologists might find out of line with their doctrine.

And doctrine it is. Progressivism has become a religion in and of itself with dogma that is not to be questioned and comes with all of the self-righteous indignation that the worst religious zealot ever dreamed of.

Read the book, dude. Steyn's no bigot no matter what you've read. But he won't sugar-coat facts, either.

And if you think people like Steyn are the only people a new Caliphate would send packing, Islam has even less tolerance for athiests than it has for Christians.

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