Abortion bans inevitably fail in unsuitable milieux

Although I have long known that East Asia has suffered from the threat of a population implosion, it is really shocking to notice that the government of birth-starved South Korea wants to enforce laws against abortion.

Although I have known for a very long time that South Korea has had major demographic problems and a fertility rate lower even than that of Japan, it really chocks me to know that its abortion laws are so strict. However, when one looks at the models provided by Richard Nisbett, Dov Cohen and Bruce Lerro, it is no surprise that South Korea suffers from lowest-low fertility.

South Korea’s total supply of usable land is only thirty thousand square kilometres, or around one two hundred and thirtieth the supply of Australia. Yet, it has to fit twice the population onto that area. Even with more efficient use of housing space, it becomes almost impossible to fit a family into the average-sized home in South Korea. Then, the absence of resources encourages very rapid innovation and change in production, because skilled labour is the only area where these mineral- and land-starved nations have any chance of competing with nations like Australia and South Africa that possess enormous gluts thereof. Rapid innovation is of itself a handicap to family raising because people have to spend money buying new products too often to be able to spend them on their children (it is no coincidence Australia, the most socially conservative developed nation, has the oldest average age for its private car fleet, simply because with lower turnover people have more to spend on families).

In such conditions, governments have a natural tendency to try to do something to prevent fertility rates falling to lowest-low levels through punitive laws on birth control. However, the experience of twentieth-century “Catholic” Europe shows how badly this works. Expecting women to have large families or refrain entirely from sexual pleasure during their age of procreation simply is impossible when the costs financial and personal are psychologically as high as they are in land- and mineral-starved regions. Italy and Spain – seen until recently as the heart of Catholicism – were throughout the twentieth century (at least their urban areas) actually atheist (Marxist) nations ruled by devoutly Catholic ruling classes. Laws against artificial birth control were simply ignored before the atheistic masses felt there was little enough risk challenging the conservative ruling class and force alterations of the laws.

Although South Korea has never had the marianismo of Italy, Spain and Portugal, there is no reason to assume that tougher laws against abortion will not lead to ignorance or violent protest rather than the desired higher birth rates. Only when South Korea’s natural land and fisheries resources can be made economically usable will fertility increase and attitudes change.

Rhino horn: a precious, marketable commodity?

In an article from Sind Today, it says that (Indian) rhino horn is more expensive than gold for the first time in a decade.

The present prices, according to Sind Today, are:

• Indian rhino horn: $65.46 per gram
• gold: $44.36 per gram

What is really shocking, though, is the revelation that Communist politicians in Vietnam actually support rhino poaching! I had always assumed that the wealth of politicians would eliminate the incentives provided by poverty to poach rhinos - but apparently this is not the case even though Vietnam's economy has recovered from 1980s hyperinflation.

Although political support for poaching of rhinos is not in my opinion as criminal as Australia's politicians support for wasteful freeways to appease a dictatorial road lobby, it is still something which the international community should take seriously. Even if sanctions against Vietnam are not justified, people should be wary of buying Vietnamese goods or visiting the country.

A surprising revelation about tiger and giant panda parts

Although my main focus in studying endangered species has always been the poaching of rhinos for their horn, I have long known that trading in tiger parts has been just as much a threat to tigers as rhino horn is to rhinos. However, tiger bone is much less expensive than rhino horn, costing as little as 38¢ per gram.

This cheapness has a mixed impact:

• on one hand it discourages sellers from killing tigers
• on the other hand it gives less incentive and money to conserve them

I discovered surprising news today searching for information of the current rhino poaching epidemic: that China alone - not including Taiwan or Hong Kong - is responsible for over 90 percent of trade in tiger bone and skins.

What this article reveals much more surprisingly, and which the average person interested in wildlife conservation would never have been told, is that for a time giant panda parts were sold as regularly as tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine. However, under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the Chinese government cracked down on panda poachers to the point of even executing people for poaching giant pandas. It says that, despite Deng's crackdown, lack of habitat has prevented the giant panda from recovering.

However, the article shows that orders of magnitude more tigers could be supported in the available habitat without numbers kept very low by poaching. It also says that tigers are just as endangered as even Asiatic rhinos as a result of such poaching.

What is really interesting and even more surprising in this context is that the article argues that tiger farming is likely to make the problem worse. This is opposed to the argument of Robert P. Murphy in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, where he says that if tigers were completely privatised and deregulated incentive to conserve them would appear. Private owners would - and Murphy does not exclude violent means - stop poaching because they would be interested in long-term financial gain from tigers. This quest for long term financial gain would stop tigers becoming extinct and allow them to breed sufficiently to reach something approaching their carrying capacity. People like Hans Hoppe argue that private ownership without any government regulation will eliminate incentives to waste resources. However, the fact that animals like the passenger pigeon became extinct before the first Progressive wave makes one question the strictest interpretation of what Hoppe says.

The misnamed "Nanny State" should be called "Daddy State"

One of the most typical criticisms of Europe by the American Right is that Europe’s big governments constitute a “nanny state” that serves to cause:

1. regulation of every aspect of people’s lives, including trivial matters like obesity of parents or the beliefs of children
2. lack of responsibility
3. dependence of the elderly on the young
4. inability to innovate due to a “sedating cocoon” protecting people
5. people being told what they can and cannot think, in order to exclude traditional values of Western Civilisation regarding sexuality, marriage, traditional culture and the unregulated market
6. a point where it is impossible for people to “live free” because of government regulation and the State gives people exactly what they want - at the cost of responsibility and commitment to the point of total self-interest

Although I am aware that an unrestricted free market can have very undesirable ecological effects in fragile environments like Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa and of itself encourage things like mass migration (and I presume mass tourism) often criticised by conservatives, I have long had sympathy for direct action rather than relying on government to deal with problems and so can be very suspicious of the situation Steyn says Europe is in.

There is one issue here I have long been wanting to speak about, that being the misuse by Steyn of the terminology “nanny state”. Steyn and too many other conservatives often speak wrongly of “feminising the males”. Whilst on the surface the low levels of violence and conflict in European cultures can give an impression of a gentle, compassionate society, Arthur Brooks completely annihilates that idea with his research in Who Really Cares, showing that Europe is an extremely tough society in which compassion is more or less viewed as a sin. In the process he confirms a long held suspicion of mine that “secularisation” and “masculinisation” are synonyms for one process. It is in fact the hatred of passive acceptance and helping others voluntarily that makes Europeans unwilling to accept even a small pruning of from their huge welfare states. Politicians in nations like Sweden would know there is the potential for enormous bloodshed if they carried out policies recommended by the likes of Hans Hoppe or Thomas Woods. Following upon Europe’s working-class radicalism after the earliest Industrial Revolution, governments have been forced to develop generous welfare states even where, as in Italy and Spain, they were long resistant to secularisation and their policies created entirely false impressions of strongly Catholic and traditional cultures.

The very essence of the welfare state is not gentle and soft, but tough, even manly. It should thus not be called a “Nanny State” but a “Daddy State”, to show the reality of a culture where being gentle and nurturing is effectively viewed as sinful.

The term “nanny state” can be far more accurately used to describe the traditional Australian state with its limited subsidies to help people in the dire trouble that Australia's erratic climate and rivers cause. A “nanny state” would never interfere in the personal affairs of its citizens as most European states (and those of Canada and New Zealand) do today. It would allow for general freedom in education, religion and development, quite unlike the “Daddy States” of Europe today. One can see such a true “Nanny State” in Australia’s combination of unsubsidised farming with drought subsidies that are of themselves destructive because they stop farmers from suing ecologically vandalous car and fossil fuel corporations for the changes they have caused to our climate.

It really is time people see that even the intention of the big governments of Europe, Canada and New Zealand is in no way gentleness but responding to working-class (and student) militancy that is the opposite of the gentle marianismo that is the essential value preached by the Right. A writer who uses mistaken terminology should be properly criticised.

Two disasters in two projects

Today, a terrible accident occurred when I was painting a desk I had bought as early as January, on the same day I began to visit my eldest half-sister. I have always wanted to have a good solid timber desk for the computer because the old kitchen table I have used since I had a computer does not have the necessary space for those things I need to keep near the computer.

Between February and October, I left the desk alone. I did not know how I could work on the desk in the garage. Whilst Mummy was away I thought I could work in the kitchen, but a major paint spill doing a bookcase for my bedroom made her extremely angry. I had to use writing paper to clean up the kitchen, and she said it would be possible to do my work in the crowded garage once the desk was put there.

Although I bought the sandpaper and paint to repair the desk during the winter, it was not until the beginning of this month that I seriously started to sand and re-paint the desk. Moreover, when I did so I consistently had to work slowly because the paint was so wet and the desk's outside constituted only a small portion of the surface needing painting.

Nonetheless, I had been working well enough to paint three-quarters of the outside of the desk by today, and was hoping dearly to have it finished before I leave for a major holiday in Asia, Helsinki and the United States on the nineteenth of December. Them this morning, I had a serious disaster. In order to allow for a much better coverage of the desk, I diluted the paint with mineral turpentine, but this mixture spilt everywhere on not only the desk, but also on the floor of the garage and on my shorts!

I felt extremely angry that this had happened for the second successive time I was doing a major project painting furniture. I admitted to my mother that the accident occurred because the tin of paint was not placed perfectly horizontally on one of the desk's drawers. She was horrified, and I had a slight tantrum saying as usual that I could not be more careful. Still, I was really horrified that I had spilt a full tin of paint, and was, despite the opposition of Mummy, desperate to waste absolutely the minimum quantity of paint. As a result, I immediately spread the paint over unpainted or poorly-covered areas of the desk, and I felt did a good job of losing as little paint as possible. Nonetheless, I still had a harrowing time removing the large amount of paint that accumulated on my body and especially on my shorts. Though they were an old pair, they were still in very good condition but Mummy said I would never wear them outside again even after soaking them for days with Sard - a soaker which she seems to keep in a secret place.

One thing I have learned is how awfully I prepared for this difficult job! There was on the floor no newspaper , and books of potential (though very unlikely) value were almost touching the desk as I was sanding it. I was really angry and said I could not do anything more to create space in the cluttered garage but now I realise I can at least store some of the books in a cardboard box - though it will still be hard to create real space when I fear Mummy won;t have the time to help me to continue.

Koalas dying out, but no hard solution

According to this article, oddly published by a newspaper in Iran, koala numbers have fallen by as much as fifty percent since 2003. The article calls for their listing as an endangered species.

Whilst the article admits climate change is the problem, it simply fails to deal with discussion of how Australia must be at the very least punished by a total ban on trade unless its greenhouse emissions are reduced to a respectable level of around one percent the per capita world average. Alternatively, given Iran's oil resources, it could consider whether it is fair, owing to the high climate sensitivity of Australia's water resources and its unique flora and fauna, that oil be sold to Australia at greatly higher prices than it is to Europe or North America or New Zealand.

Nor does it discuss – a little strangely given Iran has itself had to deal with sanctions –- whether Australia's appalling greenhouse emissions justify something like trade sanctions (they certainly do). Nor does it consider that the majority of Australians have much less incentive to preserve koalas than Europeans or North Americans do to preserve their own “iconic” species.

Nor does it discuss how paleoclimate data collected no later than 2004 show that even Tasmania will be within the descending limb of the Hadley circulation as soon as 2020 under present climate trends, so that even the dry schlerophyll forests in which koalas live will die out.

In such a scene of ignorance, the koala will go extinct. What Tim Flannery showed in The Future Eaters about how koalas are adopted to a food source that is reasonably typical of most plants in the three hundred and thirty million years since the land first became vegetated will be lost forever if they die out. This is vital knowledge that we must fight the corporate polluters for the zero-emissions Australia that should have been the first thing demanded by any climate change conference.

Explaining why Australia has not produced scientific or artistic genius

Ever since I began to study Australia culture, I have always been curious about the lock of internationally known Australian scientists and artists. Though I first read about this in an EG article back in 1996, it is only recently with the absorption of more serious writing on the topic that this absence becomes so obvious.

Having read a good deal about how unique the achievements of Western Civilisation are, I have wondered even more why Australia has produced so few important artists and scientists (or for that matter social activists or economists). If what is said by people like Anthony Esolen and Charles Murray is at all correct, one might expect Australia to have been a hotbed of creativity in science and the arts. In fact, Australia has produced far fewer important figures than many European nations with lesser populations, and continues to fail to produce really important artists or scientists.

If one looks through the factors Murray says prevent creativity in science and the arts, the only one that might rule out Australia is low population density. Murray does give some suggestion that even urban Australia was and remains much too sparsely populated to develop cities in which intellectual creativity can flourish. His argument could also be applied to White South Africa, the American South and Mountain West, and even to Canada and New Zealand.

He does little to explain why extremely high population densities are so important a prerequisite, however. More than that, Murray cannot contradict my explanation in terms of Australia's extreme resource abundance stifling creative thinking through eliminating incentives to develop new technologies even with a metaphysical basis that is very effective at producing creativity. It also explains why even as people are drawn by Australia's abundant housing space and slow pace of life, how Australia fails to greatly increase the number of awards it wins.

The fact that the only exception to this rule lies in sporting talent, where with the like of Bradman, Clarrie Grimmett and in more recent times the likes of Peter Sterling Australia has long had a prominence far above its population size is itself revealing. Because sport originated as a form of recreation, the mass of Australians tended to have more time for it than people in other nations. The result seems to be an extraordinary number of talented sportsmen relative to popualtion size.

Is Australia's lack of critical conservative thinking something very deep?

One thing about Australia that I have noticed differentiates it especially from most of the United States, but also from at least those parts of Europe between the “European Divide” (those areas that do not drain to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic west of the Basque Country) and the Baltic is the absence of thinking that is both critical and conservative.

As Robert Inchausti shows in Subversive Orthodoxy, between the French Revolution and the emergence of punk rock conservative Christians offered quite a number of highly interesting critiques of society that were to have a significant impact on political thinking through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. However, Inchausti’s book gives no example from Australia, and related writers like Allan Carlson give very few. It is noteworthy how, despite the conservatism and religiousity of Australia working class and the dominance of large sections thereof by the Catholic Democratic Labor Party, the kind of "antipolitical politics" described by Inchausti is completely absent. So is conservative criticism of Australian lifestyle and culture a là Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful (to which Australia, with its flatness and natural unity, is the purest antithesis).

Other area where critical, but conservative and religious, thinking is absent

1. are the forestry-dominated economies of Scandinavia, the Pacific Northwest (Joel Garreau’s "Ecotopia") and New Zealand. Here religion has never been remotely strong owing to the scarcity of resources inherent in an economy where harvesting occurs only once in a lifetime - as opposed to every year with farming, herding or most hunter/gatherer economies. Moreover, since timber is easier to steal than food, forest owners can concentrate wealth very strongly, which leads to militant unions that encourage big government and secularism. In such a society religion is seen as irrelevant and highly orthodox, disciplined faith as a means of pacifying the masses, especially as big government encourages women to masculinise.
2. Europe south of the “Divide” (Italy, Spain, Portugal) is a very different case, but “subversive orthodoxy” is equally absent because the Catholic Church was so closely tied to the ruling classes that offering any sort of criticism of the social order meant challenging Church authority and orthodoxy. This could be argued of Latin America and perhaps Germanophone Europe as well.

What this may reflect, as I, following Rod Dreher, say in my previous post, is that Australia’s low-density suburban lifestyle is simply not a threat to religious practice as the hectic, high-density lifestyle of European and Asian cities certainly is.

The result is that in suburban Australia people can be devoutly religious whilst still socialising within a culture generally rather sceptical about religion. This is simply impossible in the cities of Europe, East Asia, and even much of North America. As Rod Dreher and Sara Maitland say, to practice religion in such environments requires extraordinary levels of self-discipline and the self-enforced exclusion of many conveniences most people desire.

In the absence of such requirements, critical thinking, even if Christian and conservative, naturally loses its entire purpose.

Thoughts on riding from Belgrave to Pakenham

Today I set myself a challenge I had desired for a long time: to ride by myself in the ranges east of Belgrave Station - which I felt would provide some sort of challenge for me and maybe even help myself to improve my grossly obese body mass.

I had hoped that I would be able to travel to Belgrave earlier when the weather was much better, but it was only today, on a day hotter than average for November but the coolest day for many weeks ahead it seems, that I got out of the house early enough to be able to take a train to Belgrave at a reasonable hour.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take my water bottle, which I certainly would have needed on a day of 25˚C with blazing sunshine - and I knew it was to become hotter and hotter all through the remainder of the month. I bought two discounted bottles of Diet Coke, but as my mother and dentist had told me, the drink could not quench my thirst at all adequately. the train trip to Belgrave was trouble-free and there was little problem with my behaviour: accostings of other people, whilst not completely absent, were much fewer than normal. However, once I began cycling on the road to Gembrook with the expectation I might be able to go even beyond Gembrook towards Tonimbuk and the Black Snake Range, I realised that I was not well-prepared. I was having to push my bike on the side of the road except on downhill stretches, and took over two hours to travel the eleven kilometres from Belgrave to Emerald.

The striking thing, though, was how much safer I felt on the road than I ever have riding suburban laneways! In the entire ride, I never failed to hear a vehicle coming in either direction and consequently could always stay far off the road to avoid being hit. That I was never in danger is the more remarkable when one considers that the whole road was listed as a blackspot zone for people on bicycles! It does reveal, as I have been studying lately, the influence of an environment as quiet as the Dandenongs - which I can tell you is by no means as far towards a silent environment as one can go.

During the trip towards Gembrook, I stopped at Emerald Library for an hour to refresh myself, after having a donut and cream lamington at the local bakery. I then went onto Cockatoo, but when I realised I was only halfway to Pakenham I felt it would be a ridiculous idea to follow my original plan to reach Gembrook and beyond. Thus, without hesitation, I turned my bike towards Pakenham. It was an easier, mostly downhill, ride to Pakenham, but it took longer to find the station than I expected. Worse than that, by the time I reached the station I was so tired that I fell asleep on the train - even with my iPod in my ears! It was also hard to keep the bike stable on the train. Moreover, when I reached the city and transferred to a train to Rushall Station (so that I would be mostly riding downhill instead of uphill) I found that I had strained myself in the chest region and was worried about how difficult it would be to ride even from Rushall to my home in Carlton. When I did reach home, I was so tired that - very unusually for me - I went straight to bed after having a bit of fruit to eat.

All in all, I feel as though I do want to repeat the trip - even though the climate is changing so fast that it will be from now on very hard to do this sort of cycling outside of a short period in the winter and I will have to wait until long after returning home from Europe for weather cool enough to try it again!

First step to solve Melbourne's urban crisis

In today’s Age, Brian Buckley shows that devastation is threatened by Melbourne having a projected population of seven million by 2049 – and this in a city with no fresh water and a climate as hot and dry as that of Arabia!

Buckley is right to be appalled that Melbourne emits more carbon than London – a city twice the size and living on soils with an order of magnitude more soil nutrients per unit area.

If ecological justice remotely existed, the average resident of Melbourne would emit no more than one thousandth the carbon of the average European city, simply because the ancient Australian environments are so fragile.

To achieve ecological justice Australia must:

1. put an absolute ban on new non-residential roads
2. tranfer a rail:road spending ratio of 1:4 to at the very least a situation where rail spending exceeds road and air combined
3. make car, mining and fossil fuel corporations pay the entire cost of climate-related disasters like bushfires and the Queensland floods
4. phase out irrigation in at least the southern Murray-Darling Basin (which global warming models strong suggest will soon become desert)
5. aim to revegetate as much farmland as possible with native flora
6. use fuel taxes to pay for rail as well as road construction

The trouble with achieving any of these goals is that Buckley cannot understand the emotional benefits a sprawling city has, viz:

1. at least three times as much housing space (or, as much space per person for a four-child family as for a one-child family in Europe or Asia)
2. because larger families build deeper emotional ties, people become more compassionate and sensitive
3. lower mean house prices in suburbs add to the increased possibility of family formation
4. the much slower pace of life vis-à-vis densely settled European and Asian cities (I can testify to this from living even a few days in London how incredibly fast-paced it was compared even with inner Melbourne)

A fast-paced and hectic lifestyle, as Rod Dreher wrote in his excellent book Crunchy Cons, encourages a shallow, highly materialistic and unemotional lifestyle in which satisfaction of the ego overrides everything.
Dreher argues that the lifestyle of noisy cities is of itself as force against tradition. Sprawling suburbs, as I can testify living in Ashwood and Keilor Downs, are much quieter and slower-paced, giving people much more time for reflection. The slower pace also offers, according to Dreher, opportunities for socialisation that are hard in the inner city. E. Michael Jones (a writer whom I have definite distaste for) apparently made a similar argument in his book Living Machines.

That selfish materialism dominates the culture of Europe, Asia, Canada and New Zealand there can be no doubt. David D. Kirkpatrick shows people in those nations to be obsessed with individual choice to the complete exclusion of tradition or morality. They wish to have the highest-quality and most individual records and books in a manner that serves, if you will, to build bigger and bigger egos and leave no room for relationships. (Those on welfare tend to be even more materialistic in this way, as Arthur Brooks shows).

For the majority who are not autistic or otherwise lacking empathy, such a culture and lieftstyle is extremely repellant. Like a magnet, even modestly empathetic people are lured to Melbourne's sprawling suburbs, and want conditions under which their way of life is not threatened. Buckley does not consider that sustainable development in Australia would require a severe effort both

1. at home by not pandering to a powerful road lobby and
2. abroad by sanctioning Australia for its exceptionally bad environmental standards and realising that its living costs are, ecologically, untenably low

The Janjawid and rhinos

Long interested in poaching of rhinos because of their rarity and the knowledge of how their horns are used to make ceremonial daggers in Yemen and medicines in now-affluent nations of East Asia, it is terrifying to know that in the present economic downturn rhino poaching is increasing after efforts to stabilise rhino populations in the eighties and nineties.

What is surprising is that, in Sudan and Chad, poaching of the now extinct Northern White Rhino constituted a major source of funding for Muslim terrorist groups known as the Janjawid. The Janjawid are camel-herding tribes of the eastern Sahel who have been the major force kiling non-Muslims in southern Sudan and adjacent Chad over the past decade. The price of rhino horn is so high that the Janjawid, even with no more rhinos to kill, still have a good deal of money from their operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the last Northern White Rhinos were found. More than that, the Janjawid also have elephants to poach for ivory if they run out of rhino horn.

What is more revealing still is that Janjawid insiders admit that the Sudanese government sponsors poaching. Doing such a thing is terrifying even for a country that is not a signatory to CITES (neither is Yemen) but is shows extremely bad behaviour on the part of the Asian dealers who buy rhino horn and who are signatories to CITES.

How will the media view the Nineties?

In dissecting Jonathan Leaf's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties, I have noticed how commentators note here that

The media has always seemed to look down its collective nose at the Fifties, and the Seventies, and even the Eighties. (How could the media, with its usual biases, not despise a decade dominated by Reagan - and at its end - by the collapse of communism?)

What I have been thinking about lately is the question of how the media will come to view the Nineties.

The first thing I considered analysing this question is whether the media will support the Nineties simply because for most of the decade a Democrat was President - something that occurred in the Sixties but not in any of the decades said to be criticised by the left-wing media. The spread of democracy in poorer nations and the end of (at least outside the Middle East) US-sponsored overthrows of governments for moving too close to Communism is another reason for praising the Nineties. The efforts to deal with the ecological crisis (though Mariana Trench-level petrol prices prevented anything from being done in the US at least) are another reason for praising the 1990s. The related Kyoto Protocol and successful phase-out of CFCs and halons will make the 1990s, despite the radical climate changes which are too little-known outside Australia's scientific community, possibly further praised.

Although Nirvana and other grunge bands have not maintained the critical reputation they once had, there remains the popular viewpoint that the 1990s saw the demise of many of the worst moments in music history, such as the middle-of-the-road muzak that dominated 1980s America.

There is also the point of the PMRC being largely overthrown and bans on politically correct rap and metal being eliminated.

On the other hand, there are many serious issues about the Nineties that would make support for it difficult. One of course is the fact that teen pop and nu-metal, which the fashionable hate. I would also say that the Nineties stand as the only decade since 1950 where, in Jonathan Leaf's words,

the most important (new) intellectuals were on the political Right.

The Nineties saw a major reaction to the radicalism of the Bush Senior era. Even though it was led by Silent like Pat Buchanan, Robert Bork, Peter Kreeft, Donna Steichen and Judith Reisman, it soon grew to encompass younger writers like E. Michael Jones, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza. Another big conservative moment in the Nineties was the publication in 1996 of Michael J. Behe's Darwin's Black Box, whose theory of "intelligent design" has become a clarion call for many people who find Darwinism inherently radically nihilistic. I must say that "intelligent design" is a less convincing argument that most things coming from Regnery.

All in all, it is hard to tell if the Nineties will be remembered more favourably by "politically correct" media than the Seventies or Eighties. My brother has even said that it is unlikely there will be such strong emotions about the Nineties as exist about the Sixties and even the Eighties (both of which are actually similar in that they began conservative and ended with a radical cultural revolution).