Sure, as soon as we all agree on what form of government to have and what actions it should take, or at least the point at which we are all willing to not take up arms in opposition against it, we can get rid of these artificially conceived borders.
He somehow managed to make border abolition sound uncool. Many people don’t agree with it for many reasons, none of which were it being uncool until this tweet
“ ‘Private property is the smallest unit of warfare’ - The Environmental Rescue Team Handbook”
— Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023), chapter 15
I think it actually is interesting if you're going to call out humans as a species of animal!
All across species from unicellular to megafauna, from plants to fungus, you can find mechanisms used to defend an individual's physical territory. Ants and bees from the same species will fight and kill others colony members of they stray into their territory. Bears will fight and kill other bears. Our closest relatives, chimps, will go to war with neighboring chimp bands.
Artificial borders are humans way of saying "this is my territory enter at your own risk". The REALLY interesting thing is that we have established systematic exceptions to the behaviors we see in nature. "Ask us before you come and you can visit and be safe here from those that enforce our territory."
The temporary nature is unique, many social animals will permanently adopt an outsider into their group on occasion, equivalent to immigration, but I'm not aware of any that have pre-agreed temporary violations of group territory.
I love all the posts calling him arrogant and elitist for pointing out something, in a critical manner, that by their nature are arrogant and elitist: nation state borders.
Those things that make people who've done nothing feel entitled to more resources than other people by virtue of where their mother was hanging out when she popped them out.
I think dwelling on their artifical, self-serving nature is healthier than taking them seriously in any other sense than the threat of state violence for failing to pretend that they're sacred.
Humanity, not to be confused with your own individual greed or birth lottery results, would be far better off abolishing them. They bring nothing to the table but dehumanization, death, and inequity. Most, even most who consider themselves to be on the privileged side of the imaginary line in the dirt, have far more in common with the people trying to get to the privileged side than the miniscule populations of sociopath humans that use them to secure and metastasize their ego score hoards, the entire point of them.
Wait til you learn that the reason you hate immigrants and immigration is that the wealthy conditioned you to hate them. Notice how capital can cross borders, but people can't? This allows the wealthy to profit off of international arbitrage, while regular citizens can't. A CEO can move a factory to a low cost country to save on labor, but you in a wealthy country can't move there to save on cost of living. And the citizens in a poor country can't move to a wealthy country to earn better wages. The corporations get to take advantage of international arbitrage, but you don't.
This needs one of those bell curve memes.
As if humans weren’t fiercely tribalistic forever. Other species beat each other to death, too.
The post may be right, but getting a bunch of homo sapiens from far away not to club each other to death is, historically, a hard problem, and countries and passports are kinda a stepping stone.
You think that's bad? Every April I have to hand the country I live in a bunch of papers with numbers on them just to exist. If I don't, they send men with guns. How crazy is that?
So deep, so wise.
Fuck you very much for making me read that.
