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Regarding large-scale non-state action. In the town where I spent my teens: 1. The biggest hotel and best restaurant was built by the teetotallers' association
by Arnt 3y ago
Regarding large-scale non-state action. In the town where I spent my teens:
1. The biggest hotel and best restaurant was built by the teetotallers' association, which gathered funding to ensure that a good meal could be had in a restaurant without wine. It founded at least several such things, maybe even many.
2. One of the two newspapers was founded by by a trade union, which founded several dozen.
3. A third NGO performed one the important emergency services, namely at sea. (This was a small town with a deepwater port.)
All of these had dozens of branches. One of the national NGOs had branches on all continents (this is a national NGO, not an international one). Yes, large-scale non-state organized action is possible.
- amadeuspagel 3y agoInteresting examples. I ask this question because the author tries to distinguish between "government or other large-scale organized action" which can be censorship and "cultural pressures or other non-state action" which can't be. To me these examples show that this distinction doesn't make sense.
- Arnt 3y agoWhat do you think of… say that a large political party enacts a law and uses state apparatus to censor something? What when a large political party uses its size to push publishers to form a self-censorship body like the CCA (mentioned in the text)? The boundaries of the state are blurry. Political parties are IMO in the blurry zone. That doesn't mean that the state has no boundaries or that distinguishing between state and nonstate is always meaningless, it means blurry.
- amadeuspagel 3y agoBut I'm not saying that the distinction between state and nonstate action is meaningless, I'm saying that the distinction between "large-scale organized action" and "non-state" action is meaningless.