Dumb Nationalist Arguments:

One thing that bothers me is I see the nationalist blogosphere constantly making arguments they think are slam dunks, but to any leftist, or anyone with common sense, don't follow at all.

For example, the argument that overpopulation concerns mean we should prevent immigration. Why? If all people are interchangeable, we could solve overpopulation just as easily by forcing whites to emigrate, or forcing them to use birth control, or simply killing sufficient numbers of white people to allow the immigrants to continue flowing in. If there is some population ceiling, that says nothing about what the racial composition of the population beneath that ceiling should be. A darwinian would argue that the immigrants should be allowed to flow in and, in a thunderdome fashion, '100 million people enter, 60 million people leave!' '100 million people enter, 60 million people leave!' Those who survive the ecological disaster were the ones who should be allowed to stay in the country, those who died were the ones without the moral right to occupy the soil.

The same when people talk about all the costs to the infrastructure. It presupposes some divine right for the indigenous people to make use of the infrastructure. A libertarian could argue that anyone who didn't directly build the infrastructure has no more right to it than anyone else who didn't directly build the infrastructure. Therefore, immigrants, and newborns, would both equally have 'no right' to the buildings, roads, dams, etc that maintain our standard of living, and the solution wouldn't be to persecute immigrants, per se, it could just as easily be newborns. Furthermore, if immigrants paid a lump sum on entry to account for their future infrastructure use, the objection would just disappear. It's such a flimsy argument to deter immigration. Many immigrants are richer than the natives, pay higher taxes, and therefore support infrastructure better than we do.

One argument I keep see popping up is that our ancestors died for this land. But who cares? That was then, this is now. What have YOU done to deserve this land? It's apparent that we are not willing to die to defend our soil, so who cares if our ancestors were? The right to holding territory is dependent upon every single generation living upon it being willing to fight to hold it. If a single generation loses their courage, they have lost the right to their land and it should be given to some other people who are more serious about their future. It's all well and good that the british fought so many wars for England's liberty and power, but given how craven and useless they are today, that they cannot even stop unarmed Jamaicans from conquering their land, I don't see how any appeals to ancient martial heroism somehow reaches the present. Spooky action at a distance? Time travel? Maybe in the future these immigrants will also fight and die for this land. At that point, will they have just as valid a claim to the land as you? What about the immigrants who have served in the military of your country already? Doesn't that sort of prove they are just as capable of dying for this land as the natives? Again, it's a temporary and flimsy excuse to not allow immigrants. The left constantly talks about hispanic medal of honor winners and patriots who joined the military. Saying people didn't fight in the revolutionary war just doesn't work when they are fighting in the Iraq war.

Arguments that immigrants are net-tax eaters instead of tax providers could just as easily be extended to the majority of citizens in a country. Almost everyone except the super-rich is a tax eater, because the government is the only bastion and defense of the poor. Without government redistribution of wealth from the plutocrats to the 80% of the rest of the country, even our 100 - 1 imbalances of wealth and income would not exist. It would be 1,000:1, 1,000,000:1, if the price was set in the free market, fair and square. What's the difference between a poor immigrant coming here and getting health care and education, and a poor newborn being born here and getting health care and education? It always amuses me when poor people, making 30, 40, or 60 thousand a year, complain about how high their taxes are and how they have to support all those 'welfare bums.' First off, the tiny amount of taxes these people pay cannot even support the programs meant for themselves, much less anyone else. Second off, they never complain when they receive their government benefits from these taxes, like the size of the military, public schools, or the over 50% federal funding of our health care system. As for social security and medicare taxes, so far everyone who has payed for those has gotten a higher return than what they paid in, and in the most secure fashion possible -- a promise from the only organization that outlives a lifespan (not companies, which come and go in a matter of decades).

Perhaps people can worry about the fact that they don't see how their current social security and medicare taxes will ever be repaid to them upon reaching retirement, but again they never call for cuts in government spending elsewhere that might free up money to pay back their retirement funds. Do these people call for the military to be downsized from 1 trillion to 40 billion like me? Do they want to privatize health care except for catastrophic health care insurance like me? Would they be willing to end medicare services to the terminally ill who, in their last year, make up 1/2 the cost of health care in someone's entire life? Do you really want to go after food stamps and HUD housing? Do you really think welfare is bankrupting the system? Give me a break, all those programs are tiny compared to the cost of health care and the military. Completely inconsequential to a balanced budget. And it's not like you'd save money by ending food stamps. Just imagine the level of crime that would skyrocket if people could no longer afford to eat. Then you'd have to build prisons for them, where keeping them incarcerated (even if they work as slave laborers like people gleefully imagine) costs far more than they can ever repay. I suppose you could save tax dollars if you decided to kill all criminals, but if you don't have the political will to downsize obvious government waste like the military, where would you get the political will to kill millions of people over a tiny budget item like food stamps? It's absurd.

Many of the people complaining about how high their taxes are, are WORKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT. Many others are indirectly working for companies whose contracts and grants are paid for by the government, or are subsidized by the government. Practically no one is not somehow on the government payroll in this country, and yet they complain about their taxes. Since the source of their income is taxes, they should be thanking their lucky stars taxes are so high. The government taking back a portion of its gift of taxpayer money to said employee is not 'theft,' it's more like a lowering of your theft from others.

Another argument people use is that elites are committing 'suicide' by drowning their countries with foreign labor. But of course, elites don't even live in any particular country. They are at ease flying from here to China, to India, to Chile, and back again to the USA in a week, shaking hands and sharing dinners the whole way. Elites have no country, the whole world is their home, and they live luxuriously wherever they go. Money has power. Money has the power to create a safe, pleasant environment for people even in the midst of the most dire poverty and crime in the rest of the country. Feudalism always had enough money to fund castles for their kings and cathedrals for their bishops, no matter how much plague and famine struck the peasants. The Chinese had their forbidden palace. India had its rich palaces and temples, the Sultan had his harem. Get real. For the vast majority of human history, elites have lived in the midst of poverty and squalor, plague and famine, even constant war. They survived them all, they were rich the entire time, their children did quite well for themselves. Genetically, people are vastly disproportionately descended from nobility instead of the peasants who once tilled their ancient lands. Just look up Genghis Khan's number of descendants, or the Irish King's genome they once traced back. There is no evidence whatsoever, historically or in the present, that elites will not be able to thrive as a racial minority anywhere on Earth. The jews do it. The Chinese do it. Whites do it in Latin America and South Africa. From a jewish point of view, being surrounded by hapless and ignorant blacks and hispanics is probably far safer than being surrounded by the current majority, who at any moment could try to throw you into an oven again.

A proper appeal to elites would be describing to them a society they would prefer living in than the one they plan to create via the status quo. Another appeal would be to show them how many good poor people there are in the world that are worth saving. Appeals to greed and mercy are about all we have. What good are threats when they hold all the cards? Especially dumb threats like 'it's impossible to be rich in a poor country!' Isn't it all the easier to be rich when there's less competition in your IQ bracket? It's just the law of supply and demand.

Dumb right-wingers are saying that this year's cold winter proves global warming is false, when in fact this was the warmest decade in recorded history, completely consistent with the predictions of global warming. There are a variety of good arguments one can use against global warming, but absurd things like 'look, snow!' and 'this one unimportant factoid about the Himalayas was wrong!' are embarrassingly anti-scientific.

One dumb argument is that no multi-racial country has ever 'succeeded' or maintained civil peace. However, hundreds of countries today fit that description. All of North and South America are multi-racial countries with low levels of civil conflict for decades, if not centuries. Compare that to the past where people of the exact same race in Europe were warring with each other almost every year. The world has never been more racially mixed, or as peaceful as it is today. Europe is also a racial hodge-podge and it is the most peaceful time in its history. Predicting that inevitably there will be a civil war and the country will break apart is not rocket science. This would inevitably occur whether there were multiple races or not, due to human nature. If not over racial divides, it would just be over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Europe has already gone to war over questions like that. The question is whether multiculturalism dramatically increases the rate of civil wars. But given that Rome had one almost every succession, but the West hasn't had one in 50 years, there's just no statistical evidence to support this conclusion about the dangers of multi-racialism.

Nationalists are quick to cite horrendous murder cases of minority on white crime. They are horrendous, but this has to be taken in the context that crime is down to one of the lowest levels in recent history, and that the crime problem in America is more or less solved. We are back down to murder rates in the 1960's or so. The problem of crime has little to do with race and everything to do with enforcement. If cops enforce the laws and lock up criminals, crime goes down. If they don't, crime goes up. Virtually every criminal in America has already been caught and sentenced at least once within the judicial system. It is only our leniency that allows crime to even continue in this country, by releasing them over and over and over again until their criminal record really is unforgivable. A nationalist could argue that crime will go back up when minorities seize political power and lower the penalties on crime. But this is decades from now, and it isn't even assured. Minorities, after all, also benefit from crime-free neighborhoods. Plus even as a minority, whites may be able to wield power indirectly by using their money and media control to get the 'right' people elected even though the blacks and hispanics are the majority of the voters. If whites can be manipulated into voting against their own interests, why not blacks and hispanics too? I doubt elites fear the outcomes of any democracy, with the power they've already shown to have over it.

Nationalists can complain about feminism, but so long as women continue to prefer working to babysitting, and sleeping around to settling down, nothing will change. Within Islam, women are taught to prefer their way of life. Of course there are beatings and lashings, but the vast majority of their women police themselves, they do not need to be policed. A forceful solution is not possible without the voluntary compliance of women who overwhelmingly support the system they are entering. How can we convince women that the happiness and pride they take in their lives is all an illusion and really they'd prefer to be barefoot and pregnant? I suppose it is possible, the media can convince people of nearly anything, but the point is there's no reasonable time frame in which this can occur. The women raised to think they should be working and sleeping around will hold these values their entire lives. Most likely, they will impress these values on their kids too. This means for feminism to end, not only would men have to take power back from the current elites, who are all in favor of women working, but they'd have to wait a hundred years or so until all the people alive today died of old age and their values died with them. By then, the world will have changed so much as to make the project useless.

It makes you wonder whether nationalists ever try to approach their arguments from a liberal or libertarian perspective, instead of just their own. If they ever did, maybe they could start seeing things with a more nuanced, and thus more convincing, eye.