Respectful of Otters has a fine, fine post up on the Brooks/Sailer bigotry. I'll also mention here some of my objections.

One problem is that Sailer's argument is selective. If "natality" or birth rate is the key criterion, why throw out a sizable chunk of the sample by explicitly disregarding the entire non-white population? There is a casual disregard of African-Americans that is simply appalling: all of the issues that Sailer claims are so important—security and education—are equally important to all of us. Blacks are excluded simply because they do not fit his predetermined hypothesis.

Once he has filtered his data to get the result he wants, he then uses that result to draw unwarranted and odious conclusions. Take, for example, this comment:

Focusing on children, insulation, and population density reveals that blue-region white Democrats’ positions on vouchers, gun control, and environmentalism are motivated partly by fear of urban minorities.

Look at that. He has "revealed" that we white Democrats are motivated by fear...but notice how he arrived at that conclusion: from the fact that birth rates are low and population density is high in urban regions. I presume everyone with any perception at all is able to see that he has not in any sense measured "fear"…that is simply his unjustified interpretation.

He continues this pattern of drawing absurd conclusions throught the piece. Why have Democrats historically been rather more supportive of gun control?

The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety.

Mr Sailer is certainly projecting here, isn't he? Yeah, all those white Democrats are quivering in terror at the murderous black mobs out to slaughter their children. As a white liberal who worked and lived in Philadelphia, it's just nonsense. I was concerned about urban crime, but I was also quite aware that the city slums were more than just lairs for those dangerous black people—there are brutal white neighborhoods, too, and safe middle-class black neighborhoods. I would have liked criminals to be disarmed, sure; but unlike Sailer, I did not have this biased preconception that they were all black. And now that I'm living in one of those thinly-populated lily-white parts of the country, I still have the same feeling that some moderate gun control is a good idea (but I probably think it less important than people like Sailer believe I do).

He continues to claim to speak for us, and continues to play the race card in a ridiculous way.

White liberals, angered by white conservatives’ lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in “Bowling for Columbine,” thus further enraging red-region Republicans.

That first bit is just bizarre beyond words. I don't understand how anyone can come to that conclusion—does he really believe that we white liberals are sitting around, fearing the black mob that surrounds us, and resenting the white Republicans for not coming to our rescue? Our neighbors are our friends and colleagues and fellow voters, people we work with and with whom we share common cause. We really aren't secretly pining away for the redeeming love of white racists, I swear.

I don't think I ever heard a Philly denizen confess to worrying about our country cousins coming to town and shooting us, either. There were plenty of guns in the city itself, so the redneck rampage scenario would be just…laughable. Besides, I thought Sailer was claiming we were afraid of "dangerous urban minorities." I guess when you are busy flinging baseless stereotypes around, you don't have time for consistency.

I don't even see why people think Sailer's odd little correlation is even interesting. It just doesn't explain anything. It looks to me that the racialists saw some of their favorite buzzwords ("white breeders vote Bush") in close proximity and had a creepy kind of orgasm, nothing more significant than that.

Rivka comes far closer to the truth than Sailer. It isn't an issue of black or white, it's a matter of a common, universal human response that has been observed all around the world. Give people a choice, give them an education and economic opportunity, and they voluntarily limit the number of children they have. In thinly populated regions where religion and ignorance reduce people's liberty, birthrates go up. In urban areas where people are more diverse and less limited in their views, people choose to have fewer children—rather than spreading their resources thin over many, they prefer to invest heavily in a few. And you don't have to arbitrarily look at only white people to see the phenomenon in action. All Sailer has done is to take socioeconomic and historical facts about the distribution of people in this country, and painted them with a simplistic black vs. white brush.