On the other hand, watching western actors grovel in public because they had the temerity to call Taiwan a nation makes me inclined to think that there's something actually perilous here.

But Taiwan isn't an independent country. Nobody of note recognises it as such, and heck, they barely claim to be one! It's a vastly complex subject with tons of history, you can't just reduce it to "Taiwan should be called a nation". (they should ideally become an independent nation, but that's besides the point)

Taiwan is self-governing, has its own armed forces, passports, and fully controls its own borders. That makes it a nation, no matter what you want to call it.

A nation requires none of those to be a nation, look at indigenous nations in the US and Canada.

A country needs to be self-governing, autonomous, and recognised by the majority of UN members. Taiwan isn't recognised by any country of note, including the US, so they fail the country test.

> A country needs to be ... recognised by the majority of UN members.

Are you trying to be funny? Because that's hilarious.

Also, nobody (including the residents) considers the reservations in north america to be "nations". I'm guessing you've never actually been here.

Do tell what you think is the criteria for a country being one. Is Transnistria one? South Ossetia? Taiwan? A native American tribe? The US? An American state? It's a trick question!

A native American tribe is a nation, by definition [1]. Heck, the Canadians call theirs "First Nations".

A country requires sovereignty over some land, people, and international recognition. Without the last part, Sealand was a country. Funnily enough, depending on how strict you're with the criteria, some native American tribes are countries, and the US isn't always one due to reservations and states sovereignties.

1 - `a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory` Oxford English dictionary

And to me its seems the antidote in part is hyper decentralized, cross nation state jurisdictional distributed, and transparent structures of power and wealth that seeks to cannibalize and eventually obsolete the existing financial system.

Only on a few servers in the world where I can see users speaking mandarin, english, farsi, turkish, etc where their wealth goes up as their leaders in their respective countries increase their malfeasance…

It's not being perilist if you really are in peril.