6 ms·

An Australian citizen is an Ecuadorian embassy in England, in order to protect himself from multiple governments that are trying to jail him who coincidentally

An Australian citizen is an Ecuadorian embassy in England, in order to protect himself from multiple governments that are trying to jail him who coincidentally have been hurt by information he's published as a journalist. Allegedly, a politician who was quite powerful and stood to become even more powerful asked why he couldn't just be assassinated (I think there was never a reliable source for this last bit). Nation states are the only thing that can protect us from the powerful. Eliminating nation states would be like having one lawyer arguing both sides of a criminal case. We need nation states to advocate for their citizens and we need nation states working against each other and competing to ensure the best outcome for everyone. Support your nation state that supports you. In a world without nation states, when the government turns against you, you'll have nowhere left to go. > The Nation State is too large a unit for good experiments. Take education as an example. Having a national policy makes little sense at a time when technology is fundamentally changing how learning can occur. So just run those experiments at a smaller scale than the federal government. Nice to see everyone finally catching onto the idea of States' Rights. > Information technology allows new approaches to regulation through transparency. In many instances what the federal level role should be is provide requirements for transparency of and interoperability between local/regional policies. This means we could have a significantly smaller Federal Government in terms of the number of direct employees, size of agencies and body of regulations. Again, this has nothing to do with the existence of nation states.

whoInvited 9y ago
it's the 🇪🇨 Ecuadorian Embassy, if were thinking of the same Australian
- ethanhunt_ 9y ago
  I think we are. Fixed.
nostrademons 9y ago
Your example is kinda ironic, given that this Australian citizen is in an Ecuadorian embassy in England, and the politician who wanted to drone him is an American, and the reason he's still alive isn't actually any guns or tanks protecting him, it's the PR outcry that would happen if an assassination took place. His own nation state isn't doing a very good job of protecting him, considering he is taking shelter in another nation-state's property, and that the resources that would attack him are owned by yet another nation-state, and for a significant portion of the world's population, this latter nation-state has conducted quasi-military operations against them with no interference by their own governments. He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him. I see your point, and I get that there's a common-defense argument for the existence of nations. But realistically, if anyone not an American finds themself opposed to the U.S's interests, their national government isn't going to be of much help to them. Realistically, the invisible hand that prevents the U.S. from bullying the whole rest of the world (even moreso than they do) is that the U.S. as a nation has fairly little interest in being the boss of 7 million people, and oftentimes struggles with being the boss of 300 million people, and the popular outcry over wars abroad tends to stop them within 8 years or so after they get started. It has nothing to do with other nations being an effective check on U.S. power.
- ethanhunt_ 9y ago
  > It has nothing to do with other nation's being an effective check on U.S. power. The example proves you wrong. Without another gov't protecting him, Assange would absolutely be in a US jail right now, or dead. I didn't say that the Ecuadorian military kept him safe. It is the nation states playing against each other that has kept him safe. Whether that play is social or economic or militaristic is just a minor footnote. > He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him. Not an acceptable alternative. Gov't would find him. Very unlikely he would make it out of the airport. You have to have the power of the nation state to play against the other nation state. Ecuador provides that in this case. It doesn't always work (US rolls over nations in middle east all the time), but it does work most of the time most of the people (for some definition of "most of the people" which would be people who live in nations that play the nation state game).
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    He wouldn't, though, because with no nations, the U.S. wouldn't exist as a nation, nor would it have jails, nor would there be an "it" to have them. You can't take one side of the thought experiment, eliminate it, and then assume that the other side will run amok without it, because the whole point of the thought experiment was to imagine what would happen if we eliminate the concept of nation-states. The bigger question is "Is there some person or organization who would cause harm to Assange that he would not be able to protect himself against?" I don't know the answer to that. Go back to the Middle Ages and the answer would be that Assange would pledge his loyalty to one particular lord, who he agreed not to spill the beans on, and he would get protection from them in return. With city-states (popular in antiquity, and perhaps rising again), he would reside in a city, and (assuming he wasn't exiled), that city would provide for his defense and refuse to extradite him, and all the other cities can go to hell. The complexity today is that we have this whole other level of trans-national organizations: multinational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, Internet communities, hacker collectives, etc. Many of the "attacks" on these organizations can't be stopped by a national border; for example, Assange can continue releasing damaging information against the U.S. from within the Ecuadorian embassy, and he has done nothing to physically violate U.S. territory, and yet this doesn't matter because our lives are half lived in cyberspace anyway. The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories, and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with physical force.
pjc50 9y ago
Well, he probably could be assassinated if he annoyed the wrong government: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-police-evidence-russian-assassins-behind-14-suspicious-deaths-british-soil-boris-berezovsky-scot-a7793151.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-police-evi...
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Nation-states are not necessarily the optimal site of democracy, but eliminating them without implementing some other site of democracy is lunacy.
someonewhocar3s 9y ago
> why he couldn't just be assassinated He could be. Don't you realise how suspicious that is? He apparently didn't present a big enough threat. There's the martyr factor, and the political difficulty given it's pretty obvious who'd be responsible, but very fancy assassinations have happened. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...)

whoInvited 9y ago

it's the 🇪🇨 Ecuadorian Embassy, if were thinking of the same Australian

ethanhunt_ 9y ago
I think we are. Fixed.

nostrademons 9y ago

Your example is kinda ironic, given that this Australian citizen is in an Ecuadorian embassy in England, and the politician who wanted to drone him is an American, and the reason he's still alive isn't actually any guns or tanks protecting him, it's the PR outcry that would happen if an assassination took place. His own nation state isn't doing a very good job of protecting him, considering he is taking shelter in another nation-state's property, and that the resources that would attack him are owned by yet another nation-state, and for a significant portion of the world's population, this latter nation-state has conducted quasi-military operations against them with no interference by their own governments. He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him. I see your point, and I get that there's a common-defense argument for the existence of nations. But realistically, if anyone not an American finds themself opposed to the U.S's interests, their national government isn't going to be of much help to them. Realistically, the invisible hand that prevents the U.S. from bullying the whole rest of the world (even moreso than they do) is that the U.S. as a nation has fairly little interest in being the boss of 7 million people, and oftentimes struggles with being the boss of 300 million people, and the popular outcry over wars abroad tends to stop them within 8 years or so after they get started. It has nothing to do with other nations being an effective check on U.S. power.

ethanhunt_ 9y ago
> It has nothing to do with other nation's being an effective check on U.S. power. The example proves you wrong. Without another gov't protecting him, Assange would absolutely be in a US jail right now, or dead. I didn't say that the Ecuadorian military kept him safe. It is the nation states playing against each other that has kept him safe. Whether that play is social or economic or militaristic is just a minor footnote. > He might as well be holed up in a private citizen's condo in California, if he could find a private citizen who was willing to take him. Not an acceptable alternative. Gov't would find him. Very unlikely he would make it out of the airport. You have to have the power of the nation state to play against the other nation state. Ecuador provides that in this case. It doesn't always work (US rolls over nations in middle east all the time), but it does work most of the time most of the people (for some definition of "most of the people" which would be people who live in nations that play the nation state game).
- nostrademons 9y ago
  He wouldn't, though, because with no nations, the U.S. wouldn't exist as a nation, nor would it have jails, nor would there be an "it" to have them. You can't take one side of the thought experiment, eliminate it, and then assume that the other side will run amok without it, because the whole point of the thought experiment was to imagine what would happen if we eliminate the concept of nation-states. The bigger question is "Is there some person or organization who would cause harm to Assange that he would not be able to protect himself against?" I don't know the answer to that. Go back to the Middle Ages and the answer would be that Assange would pledge his loyalty to one particular lord, who he agreed not to spill the beans on, and he would get protection from them in return. With city-states (popular in antiquity, and perhaps rising again), he would reside in a city, and (assuming he wasn't exiled), that city would provide for his defense and refuse to extradite him, and all the other cities can go to hell. The complexity today is that we have this whole other level of trans-national organizations: multinational corporations, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, Internet communities, hacker collectives, etc. Many of the "attacks" on these organizations can't be stopped by a national border; for example, Assange can continue releasing damaging information against the U.S. from within the Ecuadorian embassy, and he has done nothing to physically violate U.S. territory, and yet this doesn't matter because our lives are half lived in cyberspace anyway. The nation-state arose as a protective force to ensure that violence occurred only within well-defined wars at the edges of their territories, and citizens could basically count on peace when not at war. It basically succeeded at that, but it succeeded so well that the "battlegrounds" now have nothing to do with physical location and often little to do with physical force.

pjc50 9y ago

Well, he probably could be assassinated if he annoyed the wrong government: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-police-evidence-russian-assassins-behind-14-suspicious-deaths-british-soil-boris-berezovsky-scot-a7793151.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-police-evi...

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

Nation-states are not necessarily the optimal site of democracy, but eliminating them without implementing some other site of democracy is lunacy.

someonewhocar3s 9y ago

> why he couldn't just be assassinated He could be. Don't you realise how suspicious that is? He apparently didn't present a big enough threat. There's the martyr factor, and the political difficulty given it's pretty obvious who'd be responsible, but very fancy assassinations have happened. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...)