It was! The Workingmen's Party of California was explicitly after the Chinese for "stealing their jobs" (that they refused to work).

In fairness, developed countries (the US, France, etc) had much higher birthrates even in the 2000s and 2010s - and it's not as though the French were subsistence farming in 2015. So while industrialization and wealth explain part of the picture, they can't explain *all* of it.

It's less about bro-ing and more about not doing whatever this is, which your typical straight man will immediately flag as "can we just not?" but your typical non-straight-man might think was vaguely charming:

It's much larger a fraction in PPP terms (around 40%). But even with nominal figures and ignoring smaller states (<5 million people) you get a similar picture. GDP is squarely correlated with population. And 70% of all countries with a GDP exceeding $1 trillion have at least 60 million people.

This comes down to the fractured nature of European polities - there was exactly one giant imperial power that endured for any length of time in medieval Europe, and that was the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. But Europe *as a whole* was enormous.

It's actually more that medieval European cities were small. Imperial Rome had a population of around 1 million and dwarfed Chang'an. This fell off in the Middle Ages, but Europe itself still had a population roughly the same size as China until the 1700s, and converged again circa 1880.

As late as 2019, the UN's Population Prospects report was still forecasting roughly 1 billion people in China in 2100, hoping that it would rebound. It hasn't.

What's odd about Chinese demography is that while the One-Child Policy lowered the birthrate to ~replacement, it didn't lead to demographic collapse. Today's decline is something stranger, beginning in the late 2010s. For instance, below are UN forecasts released in 2010 (above) vs 2024 (below):

He seems to want 19th century birthrates in a developed country, and laments the past 150 years of US demography. This is not the work of a sober analyst, this is the work of a reactionary hack.

The ending of the article makes it very clear that Stone isn't talking about a return to "normalcy" (that is, fertility rates of around 1.8-2.1, which the US had from roughly 1970-2018). He wants something reactionary and insane: birthrates like in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Similarly, he's trying to strike a balance between the explicit "I have serious moral qualms about IVF" and the implicit "without IVF population will crash even harder and restricting it is hard", while making himself seem sympathetic. Again, though, it's vile, heinous opinions he's expressing here

It's likely incorrect to read Stone's writing here as being anti-immigrant or IVF (he seems to be throwing Somalis under the bus to avoid a nativist turn). Which is actually worse, because: a) It won't work, nativists will generalize what one immigrant group does to all of them b) It's vile stuff

This is an extraordinarily brittle arrangement, and it's hard to see it outliving the two primary partners (Rubio and Rodriguez). It's also so controlling a successor would have a hard time acceding to it even if they wanted to.

The issue is that this creates similar incentives to countless US client regimes throughout the 20th century: it makes intervention much more tempting, and means the US is functionally the ultimate backer behind whatever horrors the Venezuelan regime inflicts on its population.

Yes, German plans for Mandatory Palestine were truly frightening. As was already visible with the mass murder of Jewish communities in North Africa, a German drive to the Middle East would still have resulted in a Holocaust.

But China doesn't care about AI to the monomaniacal extent that Silicon Valley does. China isn't in a "race" with the US to build superintelligence - Chinese AI companies receive a fraction of their US counterparts' funding and the CCP certainly doesn't think it's an existential threat.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how much *Islam* (and not Christianity) surged in the colonial period, despite the fact that the colonial authorities were Christian themselves. (NB - "French Sudan" in the 19th century context refers to the Sahel)

It's a recent phenomenon (as in, post-1950s and decolonization), but we all know the real reason for this is generic racism. READ THEORY:

The EU isn't Russia's biggest customer in terms of overall volume, but even a modest reduction in Russian revenues would be enough to do substantial harm to its budget, especially since pipelines can't easily be repurposed.

The EU figures here for Russian LNG and Pipeline Gas are a huge chunk of Russian revenues, can only imagine if the EU exited the market prices would fall and other buyers would swoop in, but the changeover to renewables really is a national security issue for Europe.

This is the cost of being a high-income country. Labor is expensive, and it's certainly gotten more expensive since the 1990s:

It's hard to decide whether or not this is more racist or more unrealistic, given Europe *lost* its colonial struggle against Africa when it had *double Africa's population* in the 1970s, a figure that has since inverted.

Since it's happened in virtually every country at around the same time (around the mid-2010s or so) the best theory that we have is probably smartphones and other distractions being more engaging than sexual activity. China's economy has boomed in relative terms and it saw fertility crashes too.

It's probably not even the economy - traditionally birthrates do go down in bad economies and recover when they get better, but the economy has not been completely terrible since 2008 while fertility has almost monotonically collapsed. You'd at least expect to see a bounce-back in 2015-2019.

"I want to RETVRN to the 1950s [or possibly the 1550s]" is what they want, they are leveraging a much more recent issue to accomplish that. It's putting the cart before the horse when for the entirety of the 1990s and 2000s fertility was right around replacement:

For what it's worth, atonality being associated with Marxism and "cultural degeneracy" also goes back to the Third Reich, which attacked Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils for writing "Jewish music" that supposedly undermined the foundations of Western civilization.

It's also utterly *glorious* in how badly Karp mangles Tolkien, I always knew Palantir was a misunderstanding but it's an inversion of Tolkien's meaning so precise it almost has to be intentional:

Today, India is growing twice as fast as China, isn't hated by most of the world, and most important of all is not facing the demographic nightmare planners in Beijing must confront due to their own stupidity (chiefly the One-Child Policy, but also various immigration restrictions).

The end of the License Raj and the fall of Indian socialism in the 1990s lifted 500 million people out of extreme poverty, the only reason it didn't exceed the figure for China was that China simply had more people impoverished. And the reason for *that* was almost entirely Maoism.

East Germany's greenhouse gas emissions *collapsed* after its reunification with the (neoliberal austerity capitalist) West, falling by 30% almost immediately. The same is true of the rest of Eastern Europe - Poland, despite growing its real GDP by a factor of 4 since 1991 has seen large reductions!