Is advocating genocide ("if you can't outbreed 'em, cull 'em") now OK?
If not, why isn't Mark Steyn a pariah?
Update Steyn replies with injured innocence: since he lives in New Hampshire, he can't be for genocide. Or something. Anyway, he says, he wasn't calling for genocide, just predicting it. Andrew Sullivan, who's read the whole book, and who sympathizes with Steyn's demographic worries, thinks Steyn's objections to genocide are operational rather than moral. (As Steyn wrote elsewhere, "even if you're hot for a new Holocaust, demography tells. There are no Hitlers to hand.")
Glenn Reynolds finds my reading of Steyn "tendentious and purblind." Of course, Glenn previously wrote that sometimes genocide is "unavoidable" (when "provoked" when a weaker culture won't stop fighting a stronger one) and that (if we don't follow his advice) genocide may be "the military strategy we'll have to follow in five or ten years." Somehow I think all this talk of predictions and unavoidable actions leaves out the little question of right and wrong.
I'm delighted that Steyn and Reynolds want to distance themselves from genocide as a policy option. Who knows? They might even be sincere.
Even if they aren't, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and we need to make sure it's paid in full. When that tribute stops coming in, we all need to worry.