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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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The problem is that with that line of thinking, just about nowhere on the planet has a right to exist.
No country or government has a "right" to exist. They're given that ability to exist by the people they're supposed to serve. If the system is not serving the people, it shouldn't exist.
Supreme executive power is derived from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical electoral ceremony.
If I declared myself chancellor because a bunch of my friends voted for me they'd put me a way.
What if some watery tart threw a sword at you?
That depends. How watery are we talking?
Drenched.
The problem is, it's a practical impossibility for the masses to mandate anything. There are way over 300 million people in the U.S. (for example), there is no practical way for a majority of them to mandate anything without going through channels put there by those in power which limit the scope of conversation as well as choices.
Anyone claiming a mandate from the people is really claiming successful control of oppressive systems.
Totally agree. Government starts getting worse the bigger a population it tries to govern.
But if I say "who wants pizza" and an entire kindergarten class says "Me!" then I'd call that a mandate from the masses.
Agreed. The United States is doing a piss-poor job serving the people, and while that may be due how the country was shaped during colonialism, it is not due to its ongoing colonialism. It's a totally different situation than Israel.
For established states like the US, it's more due to neocolonialism now
A world without borders sounds like a dream 😍
I was watching the falcon and winter soldier and I was thinking the flag smashers had a good point and were doing good for the world. They wanted no borders and no more nationalism. At one point they randomly had the flagsmashers kill some innocents to make them the antagonists
Propaganda is everywhere. Especially in super hero movies where they can remove ambiguity by writing actions that make bad guys unambiguously bad. They justify the heroes with these clear cut good and evil situations. Like in Batman when he kidnaps the guy from Hong Kong because Joker is making his points using grand displays that kill a bunch of people. Or in 24 when they carefully craft a situation where torture looks sensible (and maybe even pays off? It's been a long time, I can't remember if they show torture as a "justifiable" but ultimately useless act, or if they portray torture as an effective way of obtaining information when the tortured knows they only have to hold out for 24 hours).
The Boys does a better job with this by making the idea of heroes saving the day itself the villain and highlighting the corruption that would likely go along with such power and reputation.
Just finished watching “Death and other Details.” Same thing happened. Victor Sams did nothing wrong. 😑
Big difference between nowhere and no state.
You're beginning to get the point of anarchism.
No I'm not. Anarchism keeps getting stupider and less likely to ever be a workable solution to anything the more I look into it. It's at best a nice thought experiment.
“Hey look at that disorganized group of people, I bet if we organized we could take them over”
It's the state that has no right to exist, not the people or the place.
Now what is a state?
Look it up, but it's basically a formalized group of people who believe themselves entitled to power and claim they can use violence to get their way and you are not allowed to defend yourself against it.
The state is a cultural pandemic, this is the real mind virus, our species existed for like 200,000 years in complex societies without the state, 500 years with ubiquitous state (look up enclosure acts that forced everyone into a state) is all it's taken to destroy the entire planet.
By your definition of "state", states have existed for all of human history. The only thing that has changed over the years is that human population and areas of control have expanded to encompass the whole planet, instead of having huge areas that are outside of anyone's control.
That is more correct than what he said
Now you're getting it
They have the "right" to exist but no mandate to exist. They're allowed to exist and just as allowed to collapse and dissolve
How is that a problem?
That's just not true. You just never learned what a nation is. Before there were nation-states, there were city-states. City-states were states that were confined to a city, geographically. So what is a nation then? It's not, as people think, an arbitrary border, a nation is a people with a shared history. French is a nation-state, a state that emerges from the nation of the French people, people who have a long history of being born in the same location, sharing the same language, and sharing many many cultural aspects.
America is not a nation, but it is a state. There are no American people. The land was inhabited by 100s of nations that did not organize themselves into states. That land was given the name of an Italian (Amerigo), and then a bunch of people of different nationalities invaded and occupied it. Same with all of the "Latin American" states, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the colonial world. There is no Australian nation, there is an Australian state populated by people of many different nations (the English nation, the Italian nation, the German nation, etc).
As far as I know, there are no nationless-states that aren't violent genocidal colonial projects. All of these states are illegitimate, based only on dominance with absolutely no other foundation.
All states should ultimately be dismantled, but the colonial states will need to go first, because otherwise the colonial states, history's most violent states, will be empowered by the dismantling of other states. There is an order to these things.
Everywhere on the planet has the right to exist, with the possible exception of Fresno, ca. And anywhere named after the political entity it exists in(new York city since the name change, California city, etc)
The regimes terrorizing the people into obedience, however; largely do not.