7 ms·

Idk why the seeming schadenfreude. There seems to be this ridiculous idea now that no nation can possibly grow or shrink and that no new nations can break off o

Idk why the seeming schadenfreude. There seems to be this ridiculous idea now that no nation can possibly grow or shrink and that no new nations can break off or form, but that we must stick with the current set of nations and their boundaries ad infinitum. I don't get it.

tetris11 3y ago
Would this not just bring about a new era of warring city states, usually acting as puppets to other larger foreign powers, a la Italy before Italy?
micwag 3y ago
That's only true for bigger changes, at least in europe borders are changing quite frequently on a microscopic level. For example the border between Switzerland and Germany changed by a couple of meters this year. The same happened with the German-Austrian and German-Czech(ian?) border in the last couple of years. 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
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> Idk why the seeming schadenfreude. There seems to be this ridiculous idea now that no nation can possibly grow or shrink and that no new nations can break off or form, but that we must stick with the current set of nations and their boundaries ad infinitum. I don't get it. What you wrote down was exactly a central thought behind the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War.
- ShrigmaMale 3y ago
  fair, but it's bullshit. amounts to elites deciding that The System is so good we should ossify it now. consent of the governed should be ongoing and enthusiastic.
cyanydeez 3y ago
It's more the ideology of just declaring you don't want to pay taxes and then pretend the surrounding government should abide by these declarations.
- ShrigmaMale 3y ago
  people should be able to disengage from society and not pay tax. income and property taxes are retarded and extortionate; we can create a model that fixes this with higher consumption taxes and much lower spending.
breakyerself 3y ago
[flagged]
sgt101 3y ago
Everything is decided with violence one way or another.
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Owning property is violence.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    Taking someone's property is violence.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      Is taking land you don't own also violence?
      - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
        Only if you deprive someone who was using from continuing to do so, or perhaps ruin the local ecology in so doing.
  - patrickaljord 3y ago
    Is owning your body violence? Is your body your property? It needs violence to defend a property, but simply owning it is not violence.
Jensson 3y ago
> I don't get it. Propaganda works, that is all there is to get here.
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  I don't need propaganda to be convinced: we tried the whole "borders can move, nations can break off" thing and it generally resulted in a lot of pain, death, and suffering in the previous century. 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".
  - Jensson 3y ago
    So you think that oppressed people should just continue to lived with the oppressor instead of getting self determination and independence? That doesn't work out well, see countless examples many that are still there today like Xinjiang or Tibet. Self-determination is a core principle of international law, people arguing against it are almost always repeating propaganda points.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > 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.
    - BoorishBears 3y ago
      Are you really naive enough to think the oppressed would gain from flexible borders more than the oppressors in the modern world? 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.
hyperpape 3y ago
I believe that national borders can change, and new states can form. 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.”
sangnoir 3y ago
> I don't get it. 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.
- anon84873628 3y ago
  I can't speak for Libertarians but I thought they were well aware of the coercive power of violence; the whole point is to build a state that does less of it...
  - pjc50 3y ago
    As has been discovered, that doesn't prevent some other state from doing violence to you. 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.
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      Again, this is surely not a new discovery for these people. TFA is obviously their biased explanation of events. But the behavior of the Croatian authorities could still be "surprising" if it was substantially different from past interactions. E.g. lack of formal written notice.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > the whole point is to build a state that does less of it 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).
  - toofy 3y ago
    [flagged]
jcranmer 3y ago
The international communities do recognize the independence of countries--Timor-Leste and South Sudan are two countries that declared independence in the 21st century. However, when independence isn't mutually recognized by the former parent country, you get reluctance from the wider community to recognize it. Kosovo, Palestine, Taiwan, and Western Sahara are functionally states with recognition issues best summed up as "it's complicated." 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.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  I'd argue that there's a fourth, even lower tier: the roleplay micronation, whose "borders" are typically the walls of its creator's apartment, which engages in "foreign relations" by arguing on online forums, and whose "foreign imports" are typically from the supermarket. 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 the real nations which they inhabit.
  - 3np 3y ago
    I guess Network States span the range between 3 and 4 for now. https://thenetworkstate.com/ https://thenetworkstate.com/ https://cocohub.io/manifesto https://cocohub.io/manifesto https://www.protocol.com/policy/srinivasan-network-state https://www.protocol.com/policy/srinivasan-network-state
mrtksn 3y ago
The problem with changing borders is that most of the time it happens with use of violence. Even if there is an ambiguity about the borders, it’s obviously that the land would be claimed by one of the neighbors. 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.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >Personally, I am very against borders(extremely unpopular position these days) How exactly do you not have borders, without eliminating modern nation-states and having a single global government?
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    The Schengen zone or the USA is a good example of how not to have borders between states. Obviously, I’m not talking about administrative borders used to define administrative responsibility zones.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      The USA is a single country with a federal government, so your suggestion there makes no sense. 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.
      - mrtksn 3y ago
        Schengen is not the same as EU, it’s a borders free zone. 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?
LAC-Tech 3y ago
Because the gravitational centre of HN politics has shifted massively. 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?
- pas 3y ago
  https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/where-does-libertarianism-go-from https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/where-does-libertarianism-go-f...
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Here's the 20 top sites from 2008 in the HN front-page archive: 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 ) The only one from your list that's missing would be PBS (ranked 93 for 2008). By 2010 you could add theatlantic.com (#11) and npr.org (#23). Source: own research based on the HN front-page archive.
paxys 3y ago
> There seems to be this ridiculous idea now that no nation can possibly grow or shrink and that no new nations can break off or form 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.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  As I like to point out about the US. The constitution totally provides a process for changing states borders and probably secession. California and Arizona exchanged some land on either side of the Colorado River fairly recently. Just needed legislation passed by congress and the two legislatures. So the sovereign types can cry me a river because they don't even try to do things the legit way.
  - ShrigmaMale 3y ago
    bad reasoning. e.g. catalonia wants to leave but other states want her to stay - majority rules, right? have to use the system, right? subregions should generally be able to secede. this is essential to maintain "consent of the governed"
yankput 3y ago
Well let’s see about Crimea

tetris11 3y ago

Would this not just bring about a new era of warring city states, usually acting as puppets to other larger foreign powers, a la Italy before Italy?

micwag 3y ago

That's only true for bigger changes, at least in europe borders are changing quite frequently on a microscopic level. For example the border between Switzerland and Germany changed by a couple of meters this year. The same happened with the German-Austrian and German-Czech(ian?) border in the last couple of years. 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

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> Idk why the seeming schadenfreude. There seems to be this ridiculous idea now that no nation can possibly grow or shrink and that no new nations can break off or form, but that we must stick with the current set of nations and their boundaries ad infinitum. I don't get it. What you wrote down was exactly a central thought behind the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War.

ShrigmaMale 3y ago
fair, but it's bullshit. amounts to elites deciding that The System is so good we should ossify it now. consent of the governed should be ongoing and enthusiastic.

cyanydeez 3y ago

It's more the ideology of just declaring you don't want to pay taxes and then pretend the surrounding government should abide by these declarations.

ShrigmaMale 3y ago
people should be able to disengage from society and not pay tax. income and property taxes are retarded and extortionate; we can create a model that fixes this with higher consumption taxes and much lower spending.

breakyerself 3y ago

[flagged]

sgt101 3y ago

Everything is decided with violence one way or another.

nathancahill 3y ago
Owning property is violence.
- logicchains 3y ago
  Taking someone's property is violence.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Is taking land you don't own also violence?
    - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
      Only if you deprive someone who was using from continuing to do so, or perhaps ruin the local ecology in so doing.
- patrickaljord 3y ago
  Is owning your body violence? Is your body your property? It needs violence to defend a property, but simply owning it is not violence.

Jensson 3y ago

> I don't get it. Propaganda works, that is all there is to get here.

BoorishBears 3y ago
I don't need propaganda to be convinced: we tried the whole "borders can move, nations can break off" thing and it generally resulted in a lot of pain, death, and suffering in the previous century. 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".
- Jensson 3y ago
  So you think that oppressed people should just continue to lived with the oppressor instead of getting self determination and independence? That doesn't work out well, see countless examples many that are still there today like Xinjiang or Tibet. Self-determination is a core principle of international law, people arguing against it are almost always repeating propaganda points.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > 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.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    Are you really naive enough to think the oppressed would gain from flexible borders more than the oppressors in the modern world? 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.

hyperpape 3y ago

I believe that national borders can change, and new states can form. 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.”

sangnoir 3y ago

> I don't get it. 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.

anon84873628 3y ago
I can't speak for Libertarians but I thought they were well aware of the coercive power of violence; the whole point is to build a state that does less of it...
- pjc50 3y ago
  As has been discovered, that doesn't prevent some other state from doing violence to you. 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.
  - anon84873628 3y ago
    Again, this is surely not a new discovery for these people. TFA is obviously their biased explanation of events. But the behavior of the Croatian authorities could still be "surprising" if it was substantially different from past interactions. E.g. lack of formal written notice.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > the whole point is to build a state that does less of it 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).
- toofy 3y ago
  [flagged]

jcranmer 3y ago

The international communities do recognize the independence of countries--Timor-Leste and South Sudan are two countries that declared independence in the 21st century. However, when independence isn't mutually recognized by the former parent country, you get reluctance from the wider community to recognize it. Kosovo, Palestine, Taiwan, and Western Sahara are functionally states with recognition issues best summed up as "it's complicated." 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.

duskwuff 3y ago
I'd argue that there's a fourth, even lower tier: the roleplay micronation, whose "borders" are typically the walls of its creator's apartment, which engages in "foreign relations" by arguing on online forums, and whose "foreign imports" are typically from the supermarket. 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 the real nations which they inhabit.
- 3np 3y ago
  I guess Network States span the range between 3 and 4 for now. https://thenetworkstate.com/ https://thenetworkstate.com/ https://cocohub.io/manifesto https://cocohub.io/manifesto https://www.protocol.com/policy/srinivasan-network-state https://www.protocol.com/policy/srinivasan-network-state

mrtksn 3y ago

The problem with changing borders is that most of the time it happens with use of violence. Even if there is an ambiguity about the borders, it’s obviously that the land would be claimed by one of the neighbors. 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.

midoridensha 3y ago
>Personally, I am very against borders(extremely unpopular position these days) How exactly do you not have borders, without eliminating modern nation-states and having a single global government?
- mrtksn 3y ago
  The Schengen zone or the USA is a good example of how not to have borders between states. Obviously, I’m not talking about administrative borders used to define administrative responsibility zones.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    The USA is a single country with a federal government, so your suggestion there makes no sense. 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.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      Schengen is not the same as EU, it’s a borders free zone. 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?

LAC-Tech 3y ago

Because the gravitational centre of HN politics has shifted massively. 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?

pas 3y ago
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/where-does-libertarianism-go-from https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/where-does-libertarianism-go-f...
dredmorbius 3y ago
Here's the 20 top sites from 2008 in the HN front-page archive: 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 ) The only one from your list that's missing would be PBS (ranked 93 for 2008). By 2010 you could add theatlantic.com (#11) and npr.org (#23). Source: own research based on the HN front-page archive.

paxys 3y ago

> There seems to be this ridiculous idea now that no nation can possibly grow or shrink and that no new nations can break off or form 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.

Gibbon1 3y ago
As I like to point out about the US. The constitution totally provides a process for changing states borders and probably secession. California and Arizona exchanged some land on either side of the Colorado River fairly recently. Just needed legislation passed by congress and the two legislatures. So the sovereign types can cry me a river because they don't even try to do things the legit way.
- ShrigmaMale 3y ago
  bad reasoning. e.g. catalonia wants to leave but other states want her to stay - majority rules, right? have to use the system, right? subregions should generally be able to secede. this is essential to maintain "consent of the governed"

yankput 3y ago

Well let’s see about Crimea