Comment on Borders
the_abecedarian@piefed.social 2 weeks agoyou said “decide to keep the peace” which I provided counterexamples against. I shorthanded that as “negotiate” but you can just sub in your exact language and the point stands.
i don’t deny the social abilities of wolves. i don’t even claim that there are zero similarities between social boundaries and formal borders. what im doing is pointing out that borders formed by the institution of the state are fundamentally different from social boundaries adopted by people, wolves, or any being capable of negotiating them.
my motivation here is to undermine the idea that national borders are “natural”, which tends to legitimate them in many people’s minds, like the meme in this post tries to do. I want to undermine that because i believe it isn’t true and because there are fundamentally better ways to organize society.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Your counterexample showed two countries deliberately not keeping the peace by actively disrespecting and changing the borders what the fuck are you talking about. Borders are dynamic (do I even need to say that? are we in 4th grade here?), and they’re extremely often created through violence; nevertheless, borders stabilize when the parties decide to stop fighting. Even the DMZ dividing North and South Korea is static on the basis that total war awaits the country that violates it.
If I meant “keeping the peace” in some kumbaya fantasy sense with no skirmishes or threat of violence, then there would be no parallel to the wolves, because need I reemphasize: we are talking about wolves.
And clearly the fuck they are, because here we are in a reality where borders exist and are enforced. The meme is making fun of an appeal to nature, but it’s nevertheless not accepting it as a precondition to support borders. It’s saying even if your argument is stupid enough as “it’s unnatural”, it still makes no sense on its own terms. If you want to argue borders are bad, make an argument that borders are bad; if you want to make an argument that they’re unnatural, 1) you’re provably wrong and 2) even if you weren’t, you’re doing nothing to support your case to anyone rational.
the_abecedarian@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
i cited wars as counterexamples against peace. if that doesn’t make sense to you, im not sure we can have a productive conversation.
i completely agree that humans are part of nature. So if you like, everything we do (and everything that occurs ever) is “natural” because everything is part of nature, but that’s a fairly useless definition. we also do some relatively unique stuff, too, that is not mirrored by other animals. Nation states are not the same as wolf packs or bonobo societies or whale pods.
the most important difference here is that nations have institutions (such as a border) that exist despite the actual relationship of the people on those borders. the people on both sides of the Berlin Wall didn’t want it to be there. The people who live in Beebe Plain, a town divided by the US-Canada border, have much more in common with their neighbors than the politicians in Washington DC and Ottawa who make decisions for them. this is not the same as pack membership setting territory boundaries, this is control from a distance by strangers.
anyway this has been interesting, im gonna get on with my day.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If your argument is that borders are unnatural because they’re dynamic according to a complex web of interactions, then I’d like to sample whatever meth your ecology professor has been sharing with you.
If your argument is that an uneasy peace enforced by threat of violence isn’t keeping the peace, then I’ll point you back to what the other person initially said about wolves “keeping the peace”.