Propaganda works, that is all there is to get here.
It seems especially tone-deaf calling it propaganda when we're currently experiencing how it usually plays out with what started as a small scale conflict over borders in "Donbas".
Self-determination is a core principle of international law, people arguing against it are almost always repeating propaganda points.
Arguably, the core principle of international law is, "everyone's got some slice of the planet, now let us all agree that past is past, and stick to the borders as they are now, so we can all focus on something more useful and mutually beneficial, instead of continuing to spend blood to adjust them". Attempts to change borders, or to create or remove countries, are quite a big deal.
Self-determination at the level of the existing countries is a core principle, not the individual: that's literally the reason we formed international law.
It didn't start as small scale fighting over borders in the Donbas.
The large scale invasion from leased bases in Crimea occurred in 2014.
This is that kind of nitpicking where you just make yourself seem lost in the conversation by taking an argumentative tone: Crimea and Donbas are both just examples of my point that pining for a world where borders are seen as flexible and flowing isn't really logical. Arguing that they were even larger just furthers my point.
We're in a fully globalized world. Things are past the stage where anyone besides large countries looking to bully will actually be able to move borders and keep them there. It doesn't really take propaganda to understand why that is: just looking at the current world is enough.
I don’t see how that prohibits me from looking at this particular “state” and thinking “its chances are bad and there’s no reason to hope it succeeds.”
The schadenfreude is because libertarians seem unwilling or unable to acknowledge the fact that violence trumps rules or contracts.
When their pie-in-the-sky "micronations" face this unsurprising fact - typically at the hands of real nations, they act surprised every single time.
The irony of doing this in former Yugoslavia is astonishing. Yes, states can fragment and borders can move .. at a considerable cost in human life. You can see it happening today in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as the much more visible attempt by Russia to move the borders of Ukraine.
A state is only a state when it can defend its territory.
At the individual level, the praxis of property rights is that something belongs to you if the person with the biggest stick says it is - this is typically the state (libertarian utopia's excluded).
in reality, in the real world, with all its immense complexity, their very very simplistic ideology leads directly to a hyper winner take all, i got mine everyone else can go die anti-social clusterfuck with significantly more violence towards everyone but those at the top.
the only people who believe their hyper selfish ideology would somehow magically lead to less violence are typically young teenagers who haven’t yet studied much human history, emotionally stunted adults, or folks who just haven’t really yet thought through most of the implications.
One reason for this support, is perhaps the explicit acknowledgment that violence trumps rules or contracts.
One of the funniest experiments with this kind of thing I ever read was a small town in the US being overtaken by libertarians, only to succumb to... bears. (as the citizens could neither organize waste regulations, public garbage disposal, or prevent one crazy guy from feeding the bears in the first place)
And protected and funded by the US ;)
That's a double-misrepresentation popularized by Russian propaganda proxies seeking to sow discord in the West.
Nonsense. That's not how reality works. Countries like Luxembourg or Portugal aren't "subsidized" because they don't spend 2% of their GDP in dissuading Russia from invading other NATO members.
Also, military spending per GDP is set as a line in the sand. Germany doesn't meet the 2% mark but still is the second biggest supporter of Ukraine's defense against Russia's invasion, which is the whole reason of existence of NATO.
The next clade of states are those formed during civil wars or other breakdowns of states, such as Somaliland or competing governments in Libya and Yemen. There's a preference by the international community to stitch countries back together rather than admit their dissolution. Partially, it should be recognized that states fracturing up this way tend not to produce stability--turning internal administrative boundaries into international boundaries makes life very bad for people on the wrong side of the border, and there's usually no easy solution to that. Partially, too, there's a desire to discourage wars. For similar reasons, there's also a clutch of unrecognized states that are essentially frozen conflicts being perpetuated by a third party (not uncoincidentally, most of these are in the former Soviet Union--see previous note about international borders).
The final clutch of stuff is the performative micronation (cases like the state at question here), which is almost invariably about trying to evade the authority of existing states. And that should immediately explain why there is very little desire on the part of those states to sanction their existence.
These are clearly of even less significance than the performative micronations in your classification. But at least their creators typically recognize this, and don't make claims which get them noticed by actual nations.
Consequently they like to style themselves as royalty. The most well known even had a crowning ceremony, later bought an abandoned hospital (with accompanying scam), tried to declare independence and got swiftly removed by the very real German Police.
Personally, I am very against borders(extremely unpopular position these days) and at the same time I’m very against changing borders.
They should have entered politics, and create a community there, Within the framework of the current state. Or find a real unclaimed land that they can defend.
That is what they did here, they still got bullied by other countries. International politics is mostly the strong bullying the weak, that is life but don't applaud it when it happens.
1. Croatia does claim the land: Croatia actively and persistently treats the land as part of Croatia; it e.g. sends Croatian cops to enforce Croatian immigration law and Croatian land use regulations.
2. Croatia signals it would be happy to relinquish its claim to Serbia in exchange for certain other land elsewhere, but that does nothing to invalidate the claim in the here and now. The scammers' invocation of terra nullius is ahistorical and silly; their invocation of bona vacantia is violently dumb.
How exactly do you not have borders, without eliminating modern nation-states and having a single global government?
Obviously, I’m not talking about administrative borders used to define administrative responsibility zones.
The Schengen zone is basically the same as the EU, which isn't a single government, but it's acting a lot like one in many ways. Either way, what you seem to be advocating is a single global government. There's no way to have no borders without having a single government controlling everything.
Anyway, what does it mean global government? Is WTO or UN a global government? Why do you need this “global government” to let people travel around?
Don’t forget that travel restrictions on people is a very new phenomenon, not too long ago people were able to travel wherever they wanted without visa or passport or anything like that.
Why do you think that we should keep those restrictions?
No, because they have no ability enforce any policy.
>Why do you need this “global government” to let people travel around?
You said you don't want borders. That's different than just letting people travel freely. National borders entail much more than freedom of travel.
>not too long ago people were able to travel wherever they wanted without visa or passport
Yeah, because it was really difficult to travel anywhere except maybe between neighboring countries. When travel became cheap and easy and countless millions of people starting doing it, they made more restrictions because some people were taking advantage of it.
>Why do you think that we should keep those restrictions?
Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country? In those wonderful olden days you speak of, that's what happened: people committed terrible crimes, and then evaded capture and fled to other places where no one knew who they were or what they did. Understandably, people don't really want that any more.
We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them. In those olden days, when people moved to a new country, they either figured out how to make a living, or they starved to death, or maybe were exiled or killed if the people there didn't like them for some reason.
Yeah, I think I clarified that a few messages ago. I'm not against administrative borders, cities have borders too and I'm completely fine with it - governments can claim control over regions and that's fine. Feel free to load all kind of meanings to borders as long as you don't guard them with people that control who can pass and who can't based on bureaucratic paperwork.
And for the "bad people will come" claim, I think you are too trusting for the abilities of your visa department of detecting bad people.
And for the economic migrants, yep that happens all the time and it's very normal. Have you heard of H-2B visa? It's based on this ridiculous idea that the government employees can choose the workers better than the companies that want to employ them. It's so bezire. There's this strange idea that companies will employ unskilled people if you let foreigners come. Can you imagine Apple employing an Afghani shepherd as a product designer because didn't have to go through the immigration procedures and vetted by the government first? Completely ridiculous.
No one is asking you to provide people with free money or anything, just let anyone travel anywhere and do anything legal. Don't worry, you don't waste resources when someone they come over and find a work. On the contrary, the more people working the more wealthy the society is going to be.
If you look closely, the people who cause disturbance are those who are rich enough to travel anywhere and simply consume the resources there without working. Cities like London are suffering from the super rich who just buy properties and consume resources there. The numbers can go up, but the life quality of the natives go down as those who have no involvement in the society start to dominate the economy and compete for the resources with their wast fortunes.
The main cause for the non-working rich causing problems is again the borders. Money means dept, when someone has $1M, it means the society owns him that much worth of services and if that person made that money somewhere else normally when he spends his money the natural flow will quickly reach equilibrium as services and resources will travel to the money. However, when you artificially restrict flow of people and resources without restricting the flow of money you end up with people inflating the demand when restricting the supply causing huge issues to the local people because they will have to compete for resources and provide services tho those who accumulated money somewhere with restricted flow.
And as for the criminals? Deal with them regardless of their paperwork, it doesn't matter if someone is French, British or Pakistani, this should't be relevant.
Yet most of the inhabitants of the United States are descended from people who immigrated during the time period you're talking about. Why was it ok for them but not for people immigrating today?
> Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country?
Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? No, but that doesn't justify banning everyone from coming to your town. The normal standard is that to stop someone on the basis that they might be a criminal, law enforcement has to have some reasonable cause for suspicion. But for some reason, in the case of national borders (and not state, province, etc), the burden of proof is reversed. Everyone is guilty by default and has to prove to the state's satisfaction that they aren't dangerous. Why? If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
> We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them.
Immigrants pay taxes, and the state doesn't need to pay for their education. It's not clear that the mean additional immigrant under an open-borders policy would have a higher net cost to the state than a native citizen. But whatever, let's just assume they would. Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel, but it's way crueler to not even offer them that.
Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
>Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? >If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily. That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel (since they agreed together not to give these out to serious criminals).
>Immigrants pay taxes
Some do, some don't. Some go to Germany expecting a free ride, passing through all the poorer countries along the way.
>Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel
Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
In 1776, the population of the United States was mostly British. Most of the population of the United States today is descended from non-British European immigrants. But they didn't wipe out the existing British population – they just assimilated into it. The genocide of indigenous people was not a consequence of "immigration," it was a consequence of conquest. I'm against immigrants waging war against and driving out existing populations of the countries they come to, but that is not what is being discussed.
> Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily.
Ok, so then countries should work to start sharing criminal records and then they can have open borders, right?
> That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel
A passport effectively only allows you to travel if you come from a rich country. If you come from a poor country, you need to apply for a visa. But in either case, you still need to go through a controlled border, and you're only allowed in the country for a limited time. If the concern is really about letting in criminals, and a passport or visa alleviates that, why is it so limited? And why aren't countries working to share criminal records so they don't have to do this song and dance? Hint: it's not really about crime.
> Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
Andorra is part of the Schengen Area – there's no reason why they would all stick around in Andorra. If 100 million people came into the Schengen Area, they would get jobs and pay taxes to fund social services just like everyone else. But you ignored my main point – if you're convinced that immigrants will consume more social services than they pay taxes, why not just let them in but make them ineligible for social services? It's not really about social services either.
The reason that first-worlders don't want third-worlders coming to their countries is because (a) they don't like their skin color, (b) they don't like their culture, and (c) they'd rather have people live in extreme poverty far away than in a reduced level of poverty where they can see it, the same reason they're against building affordable housing in their own neighborhoods. When Western countries started implementing immigration controls, they were very open about this, but since the 1960s it's become fashionable for them to pretend otherwise.
Now, you might object: if that's the reason, why don't all the rich Western countries have open borders with each other? I mean, most of them do (Schengen), but still, why doesn't the USA have open borders with Canada? And the answer is: there's no reason at all. I can't think of any argument against open borders with Canada. The only reason it's not the case is because if all the white countries had open borders with each other, they wouldn't be able to lie about the reason anymore.
But yes, the core reason is obviously selfish, but also understandable.
most of the people entering America right now are not doing so under passports or visas.
and actually i have no problem with opening up immigration contingent on ineligibility for all social services. that way, people will be forced to leave if there is no work and can easily come if there are open jobs.
that said, i think practically this would harm our quality of life. our cities are already breaking. look at how poorly the yankees handled the few thousand illegals we shipped to their "sanctuary cities".
and it was more okay for prior immigrants because we had systems like sponsorship. you couldn't show up and get on the dole. this has changed, which is why central american refugees will skip mexico (a closer country they MUST instead stay in to be legitimate refugees) and come through to here.
there are hordes of people who would come here and take advantage of social programs if we let them. those programs effectively keep people here - you can't argue for supply and demand if you tip things such that people are never forced to go elsewhere to look for work, support a family.
That's probably what GP means.
This seems a way where you can have localized governments and distinct legal jurisdictions, without "PAPERS PLEAZE!" for people exercising their right to vote with their feet.
In effect, borders plus freedom is a way to get a more ideal world without necessitating a global government. That it may require or be improved by a bit more global cooperation and coordination among nevertheless distinct jurisdictions is a not a bad thing tho.
Tho maybe I haven't thought this through. What do you think the problems are with this permeable borders approach are?
Look at the news sites that make it to the front page of hacker news. As of writing there's:
- New York Times
- PBS
- The Guardian
Do you expect the people that upvote these things to be sympathetic to libertarianism?
2008: Distinct sites: 3458
Site Stories Points ( mean ) Comments ( mean )
------------------------------ ------- ------ ---------- -------- ----------
n/a 1304 33699 ( 25.82 ) 44937 ( 34.43 )
techcrunch.com 440 12437 ( 28.20 ) 6954 ( 15.77 )
nytimes.com 333 7457 ( 22.33 ) 4817 ( 14.42 )
wired.com 124 3166 ( 25.33 ) 1818 ( 14.54 )
readwriteweb.com 103 1794 ( 17.25 ) 889 ( 8.55 )
37signals.com 101 3794 ( 37.20 ) 2079 ( 20.38 )
economist.com 82 1686 ( 20.31 ) 858 ( 10.34 )
wsj.com 76 2329 ( 30.25 ) 2047 ( 26.58 )
alleyinsider.com 75 1597 ( 21.01 ) 980 ( 12.89 )
arstechnica.com 74 1602 ( 21.36 ) 672 ( 8.96 )
codinghorror.com 68 2284 ( 33.10 ) 1578 ( 22.87 )
cnn.com 64 1620 ( 24.92 ) 1249 ( 19.22 )
gigaom.com 58 1147 ( 19.44 ) 562 ( 9.53 )
sethgodin.typepad.com 57 1548 ( 26.69 ) 841 ( 14.50 )
youtube.com 57 1915 ( 33.02 ) 760 ( 13.10 )
guardian.co.uk 53 1410 ( 26.11 ) 914 ( 16.93 )
businessweek.com 52 1248 ( 23.55 ) 809 ( 15.26 )
cnet.com 52 1108 ( 20.91 ) 630 ( 11.89 )
bbc.co.uk 49 1059 ( 21.18 ) 757 ( 15.14 )
yahoo.com 47 1070 ( 22.29 ) 880 ( 18.33 )
mattmaroon.com 45 1762 ( 38.30 ) 1880 ( 40.87 )
By 2010 you could add theatlantic.com (#11) and npr.org (#23).
Source: own research based on the HN front-page archive.
There is no such idea. Nations are created, destroyed, grow, shrink, break off etc. on a very regular basis. The difference is that the process happens via guns and blood, not a twitter account and "sovereign citizen" bullshit.
So the sovereign types can cry me a river because they don't even try to do things the legit way.
subregions should generally be able to secede. this is essential to maintain "consent of the governed"
Germany has border "disagreements" with half of its neighbours. Some are bigger like lake constance (Switzerland&Austria) and the ems delta (Netherlands). Some are smaller like the Vennbahn (Belgium).
Some of Germanys border is also shared as a Condominium with its neighbours (Switzerland, Austria, Luxemburg).
And finally Denmark and Germany have a land border but not a sea border
What you wrote down was exactly a central thought behind the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War.