4 ms·

Do you think nations are a bad thing? What's your alternative? City states? Planet-wide government?

sneak 6y ago
I left it intentionally ambiguous about my own opinions on the topic, as I am not interested in a nationalistic debate about my own views, as they aren't relevant here. (If you'd like to take an easy guess at them and discuss further, my email's in my profile.) I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.
dkdk8283 6y ago
Nations are great. Not everyone agrees on all policies. My personal opinion is that I do not want to live in a censored or communist country (Such as China). Having borders and different countries allows multiple ideas to exist and folks can choose where to live.
- sneak 6y ago
  > folks can choose where to live. This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options. For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.
  - pharke 6y ago
    That doesn't appear to be a defect inherent to nations since there seems to be a pretty even split between free and non-free nations[0] Rather, it seems to be a problem of bad governance, corruption, ineffective or non-existent institutions, etc. My reason for favouring a world with many nations is that failures of those varieties are generally limited by the borders of the nations in which they occur. A world with a single governing body is a world with a single point of failure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:text=The%20Economic%20Freedom%20of%20the,90%20nations%20and%20territories%20worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....

I left it intentionally ambiguous about my own opinions on the topic, as I am not interested in a nationalistic debate about my own views, as they aren't relevant here. (If you'd like to take an easy guess at them and discuss further, my email's in my profile.) I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.

dkdk8283 6y ago

Nations are great. Not everyone agrees on all policies. My personal opinion is that I do not want to live in a censored or communist country (Such as China). Having borders and different countries allows multiple ideas to exist and folks can choose where to live.

sneak 6y ago
> folks can choose where to live. This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options. For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.
- pharke 6y ago
  That doesn't appear to be a defect inherent to nations since there seems to be a pretty even split between free and non-free nations[0] Rather, it seems to be a problem of bad governance, corruption, ineffective or non-existent institutions, etc. My reason for favouring a world with many nations is that failures of those varieties are generally limited by the borders of the nations in which they occur. A world with a single governing body is a world with a single point of failure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:text=The%20Economic%20Freedom%20of%20the,90%20nations%20and%20territories%20worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....