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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion
A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"
The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.
Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.
Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.
I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.
I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.
Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.
Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.
I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.
I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
At risk of repeating what's been said downthread, your entire disposition towards the topic betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. Veganism isn't based on some argument. Either you care enough about animal suffering to do something about it or you don't. Factory farming is, in a lot of places, a torture farm. If you care a lot about animal suffering there is no "argument". There's just a fundamental factual truth about the nature of harvesting animals for food and from there on all else follows. Same is true for 'white nationalism'. Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.
You are not asking for an argument, you are asking for a bonk on the head that makes you see the world in a different light. For some that's videos on Facebook and documentaries, real world experiences or socialization. Whatever it is, you're not dealing with arguments and I think it would behoove you and people who talk like you to stop pretending you are a machine that digests paragraphs and sorts out the fact and logic. You're not.
There are many, many people who care about white people who aren't "white nationalist".
I feel like your sentence needs a little of defining before it holds any relevance.
If I say I care about X, but I wont lift a finger to help X, do I actually care?
If I say I care about X, but refuse to acknowledge that X can ever be at risk or in need of help, and constantly browbeat anyone who acts like there might be risk or need of help, do I care?
Most people are not "white nationalist" because the term is actively marginalized. Most people, in fact, don't like to label themselves as anything at all. They just have their beliefs and opinions and look for the best representation for those beliefs and opinions they can find. Sure, you can care about white people and not associate with some label, but to actually care about white people you have to act like a 'white nationalist', for a lack of a better term, in some form. Ingroup bias expresses itself very uniformly.
As a side note, it's very easy to make up bad faith arguments for what constitutes to 'care'. On that front I think we have a good example from a recent Tucker Carlson interview where he bites into Ben Shapiro a bit.
(A more relevant clip from the interview.)
Does Ben Shapiro care about Israel? Obviously he does. Does he care about America? Well... To an extent he has to, right? He lives there, after all. And he gets animated over various political things over there. Saying he does not care is kind of stupid. But that's also not really the point. Ben Shapiro obviously cares more about Israel than America. Same can be said for many voices in American politics who were happy to tell the world that the Oct. 7 event was equivalent to 10 9/11's. The numbers here, given we know the rough deathtoll of both, can only represent the emotional weight placed on the events by those who make such claims. Why else make a low brow comparison like that.
The point being made here is that you can care about a lot of things. Giving yourself an excuse to say you care is easy. But its how you prioritize things that allows us to see what you 'really' care about out of all the things you say and act like you care about.
White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).
It's not just a matter of prioritization but of beliefs about the world. There are plenty of normal people who genuinely think that racial diversity benefits everyone, including white people. Furthermore, even within the realm of people who both know about HBD and think it potentially justifies government discrimination on the basis of race, most are not white nationalists. For instance white nationalists have termed Emil Kirkegaard an "IQ nationalist", though in the linked post he ends up concluding that explicit IQ nationalism would just amount to much the same thing as skilled worker laws, and the important thing is keeping out the far-below-average immigrants without IQ tests or racial discrimination being nessesary. Even if you go to a more populist community like /pol/, there are both white nationalists who think each race should get its own ethnostates, but also plenty of people who only have an issue with specific races like black people and don't care about racial separation otherwise. If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.
If you have some way of maintaining white populations without borders or segregation laws I'd be interested to hear about it. Would be a new theory in a now rather dead school of thought called White Nationalism 2.0
How about "White people should breed more, for they certainly have the capacity to support more children. If they want. And if they don't care enough to proliferate, how can I?"?
But they are not breeding more, just like every other population group that's dealing with modernity right now. So people who actually care would seek solutions in the real world, rather than fiddling with rhetorical sneering to excuse their lack of care, like you are doing.
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There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.
I asked for policies that could maintain white populations. A constant stream of immigration is a constant dilution of the population that has to suffer it. That's not maintaining white populations but slowly eroding them.
No? That depends on birth rates, intermarriage rates, and the actual rate of immigration from different nations and races. Non-hispanic whites and asians currently have the same birth rate, which presumably means east-asians specifically are even lower. Furthermore, assuming you count people with 98% white and 2% east-asian ancestry as white, intermarriage is going to reduce the proportion of the minority demographic, and unlike with black people I don't know of any research indicating there's a disadvantage to having east-asian ancestry. (There was that one survey of online hapa communities where they seemed to do worse than average whites or asians, but that was obviously because of the selection bias of participating in those communities.) So even if your immigration policy ended up letting in more east-asians than white people, that doesn't mean the country would end up more east-asian over time. And of course there are plenty of hypothetical selective immigration policies where the end result would be the majority of immigrants being white without being an outright ethnostate, in which case the end result will be a higher proportion of white people than if there was no immigration at all.
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In fairness, there's certainly white nationalists who would consider mass migration from east Asia acceptable to their white ethnostate on the basis that they'll die out except for the women who marry white men and then have phenotypically white children.
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While I agree that one can be pro white without being a white nationalist, I strongly disagree with many of your other claims.
One could claim that anyone who supports anything that is destructive for a group, "cares" actually.
The reality is that people who particularly dislike intensely a group and it comes part and parcel with such dislike, tend to support its demographic replacement and abolishment/extinction. This is because it is genuinely harmful to the group as a group to become a minority in their own homeland, or go extinct. When Noel Ignatiev is saying that "abolishing the white race is so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that anyone other than committed white supremacists would oppose it." he was infact an anti-white racist. And this is me understating it. His agenda was genocidal.
If someone cares about a group but supports something that is genuinely destructive for them, we should consider whether it matters how much they care. It could also be the case that they aren't honest.
Conversely, people who support a group and are part of such group tend to oppose such replacement. Because it is beneficial to a group to not become a hated minority in its own land, or go extinct.
This way of thinking is definitely able to be understood when it comes to other ethnic/racial groups, and how colonization by foreigners or their replacement or even possible extinction is bad actually.
As for white nationalism in particular. The reality is that it is the boogieman, not because we have a rational society reacting to the greatest threat of racism by white people, because we see the dominant rhetoric and policy to be of an anti-white form, and president Biden to have made comments more in line with Ignatiev's comment than against it. Comments about how mass migration should happen to replace white Americans. The threat of its extremism is used as an excuse to promote an anti-white agenda and part of the denouncements have to do with fear and a desire to prove to be one of the good ones and not be cancelled and slandered. And it is in fact the case that a society that is hysteric no matter what about X group nationalists, tends to be racist against said group. More so the case when that group is actually mistreated in policy, and denounced in rhetoric. When it doesn't have representative organizations.
In reality, unconditional limitless nationalism for any group can be immoral and therefore white nationalism can be immoral in this manner but also a lack of any nationalism comes along with said ethnic group being oppressed and mistreated. It is a common aspect of the worst mistreatment and destruction of an ethnic group to attack its nation and denies its existence and legitimacy. To disallow it national self determination and to promote the tyranny of being governed without its interest being represented. Another aspect of this is toleration of other nationalisms to excess, and this is also something that is happening.
So if one group rights should ideally end where another group right's begin this necessitates a general broad quite different and more qualified and nuanced take on white nationalism, over the approach of treating it as the worst nationalism ever which brought things in the current anti-white racist situation. Nor should the correct approach be unconditional support of anything that could be pro white and anti non white groups and constant double down in that direction in a limitless fanatical manner.
The preferable way to frame things and a workable system for different groups is one of international justice that recognizes the reciprocal rights and limits of different nations, including white and not white nations.
Certainly there can be forms of white ethnostates that are analogous to zionism in behavior, and there can be imperialistic white nationalist behavior that can be rightfully opposed but the existence of european countries that wanted to remain european has a) been the dominant model b) population where political class moved away still support this in many cases like in France where they oppose the replacement of French by non French, including presumably non french whites c) we still have some white countries that the political establishment supports remaining such.
The change in attitude is recent. Even in the USA is from a couple of decades.
The idea of opposing being replaced is certainly less controversial than zionism in that it doesn't step over the rights of others in the way zionism did.
And has been treated as less controversial in general outside of the movement that Ignatiev represents. Ironically, allowing mass migration in turn made the accusations of racism more of a reality that the opposite. I would argue that opposing your own extinction and your nation's colonization is opposing anti native racism and in line with international justice. While having an agenda in favor of whites not having any homelands represents a very extreme form of racism.
This is in fact compatible with european countries not having their own people going extinct and a minority, but remaining majority, and the USA as multiethnic but again opposing mass migration explicitly because it is immoral for the white Americans who created historical USA, to become utterly disminished in the country they created and dominated. Although under this framework it was legitimate for Americans to have made a choice in the past to not open their borders to the rest of the world.
As we see with the results today, such migration was an important factor in the rise of anti-white racism.
If I could tinker with history, I'd really love to see what would have happened had Thomas Jefferson's early-1780s plan to free the slaves and then repatriate them all to their African homelands been adopted.
I'm picturing a time-traveler handing out to Southern (and other slaveholding) members of the Continental Congress Civil War histories and copies of Gone with the Wind , accompanied by unvarnished descriptions of the nation's demographics and race relations circa 2023, how they are viewed even by their own descendants, some footage of the 1992 Rodney King riots, and possibly selected clips from gangsta rap.
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