DomeGuy, domeguy@lemmy.world

What stops a self-organizing collective from becoming racist, sexist, transohobic, and pro-rape?

I doubt you or I or anyone else here would join such a collective, but what would be our recourse when one forms and rapes my son or lynches your daughter?

Modern states at least have the benefit of a basic theory that they cannot simply un-person people who live within their borders. I dont see what the ewuivalenf mechabism would be to encourage a self-organized collective from doing so.

My guess is that you really just aren’t paying attention. Possibly because right-wing oligarchs keep buying traditional news rooms and turning them into weak propaganda factories.

Without control of even a single chamber of Congress the Democrats American Left has managed to:

1. Expand their state court lead in Wisconsin
2. Stop a bevy of abuse and chicainery by going to court.
3. Pickup control of Virginia, and get right to making that state better
4. Dominate in special elections to such an extent that a “blue wave” seems entirely achievable
5. Pick an actual Socialist for NYC mayor instead of a cop or sex pest, who is doing a great job by any metric
6. In Congress shut down the entire government and get the most out of any such shutdown in our nation’s history
7. Shutdown DHS to the point that the right caved to their demand to segregate ICE and non-ICE parts of the agency

Democrats and the rest of the left are fighting. But because the basic rules of American federalism and rule of law are still mostly being followed, that fighting is done by traditional peaceful channels rather than through violence.

(Apology accepted. Sorry if I was painfully American)

The (very British) definition of “nation” you used isn’t at all sensible with what the OP asked. To use meriam-Webster’s definition as a guide, you meant definition 1.a.1, but there are six other listed definitions.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nation

That being said, a “nationality’ (meaning the same thing you called a” nation") will inevitably arise within any soverign state (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/state, meaning 5.a) which persists for a long enough time. The most obvious example perhaps being my own country, in which a distinct “american” /nationality arose after our civil war, although the distnct non-British nationalities of “Canadian” and “Australian” in those respective countries would also be excellent examples. (As would “british” itself.)

While we’re on odd meanings of words, it’s probably worth mentioning that “race” is an archaic synonym for the same idea, although that usage fell out of common usage some time after the establishment of chattel slavery based on skin color.)

In common English nation, state, and nation-state are near-synonyms for the collectives created by people which exercise ultimate authortiy to enforce rules on conduct within a geographic area, with some variation due to the nominclature used by said collectives for their various subdivisions.

I’m not sealioning. I’d love to read either an actual answer to my questions, a treatise on your “non-anarchist” idea, or even just a passionate rant about terminology.

But quibbling over vocabulary instead of answering questions, without even offering a single link or reference and instead just saying " do your own reading”, is simply bad form.

We’re here on social media, and if you don’t want to have a discussion silence is always acceptable.

If there are no nation-states, how do we determine what amount of force is justified for self defense? Who enforces violations of that rule and what are the available punishments? What is our recourse when said enforcers decide to ignore any violence against people who deleted their reddit accounts?

Anarchy is a great ideal, but there are some things governments do that we shouldn’t trust to self-organizing collectives. Unless “union of transphobic gang rapists pedophiles” is something you want to defend.

(Bit snarky, but honestly curious as to your answer.)

Because US currency is absurdly widely accepted. There are whole nations who just use the US dollar instead of minting their own, and global industries such as oil that set their worldwide price in dollars even for transactions that have nothing to do with the USA.

There are also the “legal tender” and “debts shall not be questioned” issues. If you get a local tax bill for $100 and find a $100 bill from 1826, you can expect that if you walked down to the town clerk and just hand the note over for face value.

(Note that I’m too lazy to check either when the first $100 notes were issued, what the precise rules are about accepting cash in unusual form, or what clarifying rules Congress might have passed like when they banned private use of banknotes with higher face values.)

This coming from one of the jerks who wrote the tenth amendment out of the constitution is the rankest hypocrisy ever.

Denial of a prediction from the same techbros who said bitcoins would replace dollars and banks, or NFTs would be used for real estate,.or napster would launch the careers of new musicians, or.you wouldnt need a printer anymore,.or computers would lead to a.three day workweek,isn’t exactly Luddites complaining about weaving machines.

If LLMs are still economical after the bubble pops they’ll be tools that increase efficiency and in some cases help one human do your job and someone else’s. Which was exactly the trend for all jobs before the AI bubble started.

Remember three things when we talk about US taxes.

1. Most Americans pay three overlapping federal income taxes, two of which are not included on the April 15 return and are implicitly regressive (being paid on only the first 135,000 you make each year)
2. sales taxes are also regressive, in that you only pay when you buy goods or services.
3. the rich employ a whole industry to treat most of their wealth growth as “not income” so they dramatically minimize what they get taxed on

America has a pretend-progressive tax system, and it’s morally disgusting.

(Edited for markdown list; sorry)

Also:

Also fulfilling the obligation from over 100 years ago to give Indian nations voting members of Congress …

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this, specifically?

I’ve heard the same assertion you make elsewhere, that there was a treaty by either the pre-constitution federal congress or the modern constitution-and-president government that promised some form of representation in congress. But I can’t find any actual citation of when this treaty was actually made.

I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t only 100 years ago, since that would be 1926 and that’s about the time Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 which granted non-assimilated native Americans formal citizenship. Doing so included them (along with blacks, gays, jews, and other minorities) under the the aegis of general democracy. It would be very weird for Congress to promise a group of newly-declared citizens additional representation when they just did that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act

Maybe instead you’re alluding to the 1778 treaty of fort pitt, which by all accounts did include an overt offer of recognizing a native state? (Although, if wikipedia’s text is accurate, that treaty would have been fatally invalidated when the Lenape joined the revolutionary war on the side of the British).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_Pitt

Unless you are just unfamiliar with the idea that the United States federal government was intended to be an experimental hybrid between [state] and federal interests.

The antecedents of the American legal system are nations and empires with a complex web of local and sovereign interests, going back at least to the Magna Carta and the immediate pre-indepndence relationship of the colonies with the British Parliament.

When the current US Constitution was written I suspect the more pressing interests were “not being abused by Europe” and “avoiding wars between the states over currency or slaves” rather than any high-minded experiment with federal democracy.

Anyway….

if we uncapped the house it would take some of that undo power away from the smaller states and states in general.

You’re making a correlation I just don’t see. Either direct election of the executive or dramatically increasing the membership in the house would make definitely make the federal government more equitably responsive to larger states. But I don’t see how this at all this would affects the balance of power between the state and federal governments.

The vertical separation of power between the federal government and the fifty sovereign states is not directly affected by how the federal government is chosen. One nationwide election, fifty statewide elections (plus DC), or just a vote by the governors or congress or teh various state legislators would all result in the same enumerated and interpreted power.

they think it should be revelatory, like the ten commandments….

Since you brought it up, it’s worthwhile that most Abrahamic churches include common folk arguing about the nitty gritty of what scripture means, what are the consequences of those meanings, and how to account for those consequences in their daily life.

Which is kinda exactly how we should treat scientific studies.

Right now the house has been capped. Thus the federal side of the government has more power than the national side.

What are you talking about?

The federalization of power over the last 250 years was in large part due to SCOTUS jurisprudence applying the bill of rights to the states, along with a fairly liberal reading of what counts as “interstate commerce”. Neither the electoral college nor the population of the house are directly related to the separation of power between the federal government and the 50 states.

You are right in noting that the US House is artificially capped at 435 members, although you don’t seem to realize that electoral college votes are exactly equal to congressional (senate + house) representation (Plus “the amount given to the smallest state” for DC, getting to 538). This cap leads to a less responsive legislature with uneven allocation of power, mostly by giving small states an unfair double-bump even though that’s what the senate is for, but that cap doesn’t really do a thing when it comes to centralization of power.

(And the whole “federation of separate democracies” was a zombie idea in the original constitution with a directly elected house, was mostly killed when the senate also became popularly elected, and only lingers on as a justification to give Wyoming and other small states way more power in choosing the president than their population deserves. Which is even dumber when we realize that the population of Republicans in NY and CA or Democrats in TX and FL is way larger than most small states, and yet they essentially don’t get a say anymore.)

Parenthood has taught me that anyone who thinks they don’t want kids should absolutely be free to follow that and not have kids.

It’s also taught me that all of the cringe goofball nonsense is 100% sincere. Being a parent changes the human brain in weird ways. Which is good, because babies need someone to clean them up after they puke on themselves and shit their plants so hard it gets in their hair.

(Parenthood can be considered a necessary mental illness.)

Space launches via catapult are entirely possible on earth. We don’t do it mostly because the engineering scale is dramatically larger, not because of how we math.

The laws of physics seem to be consistent throughout our universe, so any claim that an alien race could travel through space without math is what skeptics call “an extraordinary claim”.

I dont really see how a contrarian “what if they’re just too weird” stance is even helpful in a discussion about why math is the closest thing we have to a universal language. If an alien civilization is too weird to grok math, I dont see how we’d ever be able to communicate with them at all.

If the aliens have godlike powers I think we can presume that they would either be smart enough to figure us out or else weird enough that talking to them isn’t worthwhile.

Literally every civilization we have ever encountered evidence of has math and language. If an alien has neither, and is not smart enough to figure us out, then they’re likely not the sort we could communicate with on even the scale of our communication with plants and insects.

The sun is the big one. What we call “visible light” is just the band of the em spectrum right around Sol’s peak. A larger\hotter star would have that band shifted dramatically bluer, while a smaller/colder star would be redder.

For instance, what if they don’t have the concept of symbolic representation of objects/concepts in visual/auditory ways?

Then how did they manage space travel?

Rocket science demands math. You can’t get to orbit if you can’t figure out both the rocket equation, orbital dynamics, and sufficient chemistry to power your launch engine. And you don’t even realize that orbit is a thing if you don’t have enough math to realize that the lights in the sky are things you might be able to stand on.

We have sapient non-human life right here on earth that doesn’t have the concept of writing. And since they don’t they didn’t build cities or civilization and we keep them in zoos and nature preserves.

If a spacefaring race is so utterly alien they don’t even have a concept of counting how did they manage space travel?

And, like I said, math only works for the (presumably large) subset of aliens we could eventually talk to.

Counting is kind of basic. From one-two-three you can get fairly quicky to yes-no, and then comparisons, and with yes/no/more/less/same you have enough to fuzzle out whatever squak gigors.

Aliens we could talk to at all wouldn’t be cthulu or q. They would live in the same basic reality we do, with entropy and gravity and the same elemetnts and stars. (They WOULD likely see different colors than we do, unless their sun was the same temperature as Sol and their planet the same size as earth)