Angela Shanahan, the family, fecundity, feminists, the arrogant young, and the fecund way forward

(Above: a Boschian nightmare).

Where once she was preternaturally fecund as a commentariat columnist, lately Angela Shanahan has inclined to be infertile.

It was way back in 2006 that Shanahan was dumped as columnist for The Canberra Times, the most apparent reason being her views on the ACT's gay marriage bill. It was, she asserted at the time, an act of censorship.

But there are signs that this corner of loon pond are now stirring, and where else but at the family home The Australian.

Not so long ago in September there was her vigorous celebration of censorship under the header Poor filter a test of morality.

Well there's censorship and then there's righteous morality, as she brooded over a world of wickedness so grotesque Hieronymus Bosch couldn't have thought it up (and please explain why we're allowed to view that evil minded medievalist in these right thinking days!)

Back then she was showing her usual inimitable brand of logic. First all porn is bad and so is the nanny state:

Of course some of us are against all porn, even legal porn, as being inherently exploitive. The idea that there is good and bad porn is morally repugnant and really just a blurring of any boundaries to make the public generally more apathetic to pornography and leave the pornography industry less open to scrutiny.

Then there's the pragmatic approach - nanny state regulation and censorship of the Internet:

If we accept that for the good of others who are exploited by the pornography trade that we should have some sensible base-line limitations, as exist for any other form of communication, such as books, DVDs and films, then there is no reason the internet should be an exception.

It was a roundabout way of praising the currently strangely silent Senator Conroy and his internet filter list, though of course Conroy's name never hit Shanahan's keyboard, since Shanahan is also against the nanny state socialist government currently ruling in Canberra.

Who to blame then for the dire predicament of internet porn? Why the young of course:

Anarchy is rather good for you when youare young. We need a bit of anarchy and we certainly don't need the government breathing down our necks about everything. But what happened to the sense of proportion? The young computer geeks who are against censoring even the vilest pornography live in an oddly disassociated, amoral universe. That is partly born of the virtual world, and partly encouraged by an education that doesn't encourage true mentoring but merely facilitation of the young's subjective feelings, producing a breathtaking level of self-referential arrogance.

It almost goes without saying that Shanahan understands self-referential arrogance, so what is she up to these days? Well in the usual familiar turf, as she offered up yet another of her interminable rants about "the family" for Quadrant in late September, under the header Left Forum: Care on the Left, My parents were Welsh, and other Left excuses:

Neither the left nor the right are willing to support the family as a unit. Both want to diminish mothers to units of production. But care is not something we can really “outsource”. Care is an OBLIGATION. Care can only be a real concept if it is based on the desire to give of one’s self to care. That is what a family is based on, mutual obligation to care. The family should be supported in its mutual obligations as a unit. Policies designed to separate mothers from children are usually nothing more than a clever ploy under the guise of “freedom”, to split the unity of the family and force mothers into the workforce, often against their will. If the left want to get into the debate on the family they should dump the militant individualism of old feminism and realise that the family operates as a unit. Consequently there is no “right” to have the state care for your children. Parents care for each other and they in turn care for their children. That is a parent’s privilege and right, and if you surrender that right to the state you have abrogated the most important thing you have to the Moloch of the new state whether it is a left or right wing one – your child.

Yep, if it's not the young, it's the feminists, because the family is the only bulwark for the gullible young against bullshit.

Choice became a paradigm in itself. Now “choice”, the buzz word of feminism, of a generation, that hallmark of left progressive thinking is representative of a hideous immoral barbarism, 100,000 abortions a year, not some sign of progress. This new morality cannot distinguish between right or wrong, because the choice is not informed by an overarching morality; the choice is the morality, one choice as valid as any other choice, never mind if it is a right or wrong choice.

Feeling exhausted yet?

Well steady, because this week there's yet another new rant on the family and fertility from the fecund Shanahan, the lord save us from the inexplicable ways of the Catholic church and its messengers (yep even Dan Brown begins to make sense if not good literature).

It's October, spring, mating and breeding season in loon pond, and Future demands fecundity:

So we may ask: What is all the fuss about infertility and, with numbers such as that, should we still be trying to increase our population naturally or, as the worst doomsayers recommend, should we be aiming not to have babies?

Of the two population variables, fertility, unlike immigration, is fragile. It is not predictable. What is more, under the Rudd government there are predictions of the cost of living rising with an emissions trading scheme. The government is tweeting on about working families and tax reform but will not do anything radical to encourage natural fertility, which may fall back. So perhaps we should just rely on immigration? That is the problem; we can't.

The myth that society having many babies is a bad thing is very powerful. It is a hangover from the Malthusian logic of the old zero population growth nuts of the 1960s, which taught a generation that there is a population bomb about to blow up in our faces.

It almost goes without saying that Shanahan has nine children - in her various outings we're regularly reminded of this (here) - but what's the logic here in her headlong desire to see the world's population build up to nine billion or so and Australia to get way larger?

Well it's a breeding war you see, and immigration is a blunt weapon:

... most people don't understand that although you can increase population by tweaking the immigration rates, now up to 190,000 a year, immigration alone will not produce the right sort of age profile so the disproportionate demands of a dependent, ageing population are cancelled by a steady inflow of newborns to sustain the economy. We need both natural increase and immigration to do this.

Yes, yes, we need the right sort of age profile. But what's the real benefit of fecundity and fertility. Why all the fuss about infertility and why on earth should we not be still trying to increase our population naturally and having more babies, even if that means there'll be lots more alarmingly arrogant young people? (And no, it's not just because it'll teach all those vile feminists a lesson):

Furthermore, we need immigration of the right sort: immigration of people who will have families.

Ah hah, the right sort of people!

In general, immigrants tend not to have any more children than the native-born, although there are some notable exceptions. Some immigrants, such as the Chinese, have a lot less, with a birthrate of only 0.9. Remember we are talking about the average number of births during a woman's lifetime.

So it can't be the feckless, useless Chinese. Not fecund! Who else is traveling? Oh no:

Lebanese Muslims have on average more than four times the overall rate of native births and, unusually, that pattern persists into the second generation. Pacific Islanders also have higher birthrates. Without immigrants who will have children to contribute to the social fabric, Australia's future, with an overall birthrate of 1.93, could be a lot grimmer. In Europe, the imbalance of the population because of very low native birthrates and over-reliance on immigration threatens the social and economic stability of society.

Uh oh, the Islamics are fecund. And so are the Pacific islanders! That's why at least one third of the professional players in rugby league are islanders. They breed like rabbits, and then come over here to threaten our social and economic stability.

Quick, we have to breed like rabbits, unthinking mindless rabbits ourselves if we're to win the breeding war, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the fecund Shanahan. Never mind if that means we'll be growing faster than the fecund Indians:

... the news that Australia is growing faster than most other developed countries, with a predicted population of about 35 million in 40 years, has caused an illogical panic. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, our growth will be higher than India's, code for: "We'll end up working in call centres." It has also prompted an outcry from those old zero population growth fanatics who, as I predicted nearly two years ago, are reinventing themselves under the banner of the climate movement.

Oh yes, a world of nine billion will be something to see, as will an Australia saddled with 35 million. Silly panic merchants. The only problem will be if it's full of Islamics and Islanders.

Kelvin Thompson, the federal Labor member for Wills in Victoria, expressed concern about Melbourne "having five million in a relatively short time", adding: "I don't think that is the right thing for Melbourne ... I don't want to see Melbourne become a city like Mumbai or Shanghai or Mexico City."

Or Indians or Mexicans or Chinese.

Oh come on Kelvin, pull yourself together. Next thing you'll be suggesting that Melbourne will be the perfect place to set up a call centre full of the pulsating poor.

You see it's not population that's the problem, it's population that's the problem. Well let me re-phrase that if I'm not sounding perfectly clear, it's not the presence of more native born currency lads and lasses, genuine skippies that's the issue, it's the bloody Chinese:

None of these people will bother to pause in their panic about our carbon footprint to think of a couple of facts about population and consumption. Consumption is the main factor governing world carbon emissions. Our emissions are minuscule compared with those of China, which, despite its ruthless population program, has increased its consumption to account for 44.5 per cent of the growth in global emissions.

And the more children you have, the more efficient you become. Why it's actually all the fault of those gays and singles that we might have a problem:

Density of population, not rate of population growth, is the main problem in Australia and abroad. Within cities, smaller households, not large family households, account for a disproportionate share per capita of carbon emissions.

Yes, we all need to live in a yellow submarine, or at least a kibbutz, crammed into high rises. It's already working a treat for those indolent NIMBY-ists out in Ku-ring-gai as they try to herd apartment dwellers back to the west.

Or perhaps we could control any emissions problem by shipping Shanahann - sorry meant to type all those losers - to a gulag somewhere, and that and a little tweaking of immigration should see us right:

... Australia's population is so reliant on immigration that none of the predictions of 30 million or 40 million matter anyway.

You see, we're never going to get there, even if it mattered that we did, not that it matters, and not that we should be alarmed about hitting 22 million, and always on the grow, so it's on with the tweaking to set things right:

We can tweak our population growth as we have done in the past, as the US has done, because we can control immigration levels. As far as Australia is concerned, the important thing is achieving a balance between immigration and our birthrate. This government seems more intent on encouraging immigration than natural fertility.

How strange then that the US is predicted to grow 400 million and is profound turmoil about illegal immigration in a country which has always celebrated immigration. Because it can't control it. Oh the blithe spirit of conservatives, at once paranoid and unnervingly eerily optimistic about the future.

Risk management? Show me the risk and I'll show you the fecund way to manage it.

And how strange to be blathering on about 'natural fertility' in a country which in just a couple of hundred years has been entirely based on immigration (allowing that the original inhabitants did their immigration forty or so thousand years ago).

But at least, even in her own way, Shanahan gets down to admitting where she's at:

It is the legacy of that imbalance that we will have to face in the future. Part of that, of course, in a multicultural society is the cultural balance. That is the real question most people want to address. It is the big question, beyond the simplistic numbers of the doomsayers.

Isn't that such a sweet, coy expression: "the cultural balance". Yep, Islamics and Islanders out now, so the native born rabbits can get on with their breeding.

It's October, spring, and the squawking as the mating rituals get under way are louder, more urgent and frenetic. Futuristic fecund warriors do battle like bighorn sheep butting heavyweight horns in Yellowstone park.

Fecundity and a mindless rutting stupidity are in the air, and Angela Shanahan makes a welcome return to loon pond ...

(Below: bighorn sheep, migrants of course, who strangely enough underwent a population crisis in their new home in the United States - here - plus a few more Bosch for fun).