WaPo: "Flood of Asylum Seekers Could Help Defuse a Demographic Time Bomb"—But What About Real Bombs?
09/10/2015
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
Above is from the front page of the Washington Post.

When I was in the market research business back in the last century, the word “demographics” was understood to have a multidimensional meaning. It referred to things like sex, race, religion, age, education level, marital status, income, language, own or rent, and so forth, almost ad infinitum.

I’ve noticed, however, that as part of the Narrowing of the Western Mind, the word “demographics” increasingly means only “age,” and with that the assumption that young is better. Without that intellectual impoverishment of the term “demographics,” the phrase “defuse a demographic time bomb” would strike editors as obviously comic, if not sinister.

Refugee helping host society defuse demographic time bomb at 2013 Boston Marathon (too bad about Martin Richard, age 8, but as Stalin, or maybe The Economist, said: you can’t defuse a demographic time bomb without blowing up a few Little Leaguers)

As Orwell noted in his appendix on Newspeak, the more restricted your conceptual vocabulary, the more preordained your concepts.

[Comment at Unz.com.]

Print Friendly and PDF