Like most people here who read science fiction growing up, I was raised on the idea of the world-nation.
By the time I was in my twenties, I knew that wouldn’t work. Acculturating more than once (back and forth, really, after my year as an exchange student) had made it clear that countries don’t actually want to merge, no matter what idealists and crazy people want.
And yet, somehow, I managed to believe the “open borders” part of libertarianism well into my thirties. I really have no explanation for this other than “I wanted to believe.”
Look, the problem with the idea of open borders all over the world — which effectively means no countries, if you don’t get that, because you can’t keep governance cohesive nor honestly any traditions nor regional culture, is that the worst cultures prevail.
No, seriously, go back in history. Any time a more civilized nation is invaded by utter barbarians it becomes barbaric for generations. This is not because the barbaric behaviors are better, but because the bad drives out the good. If you’re predatory, those not being predatory get shut out. In a high trust society, enough predatory behaviors change the society.
I eventually got it, when I understood the importance of CULTURE.
Look, I do get the Libertarian philosophical position, and as a philosophy it is correct: individuals should be free to seek their best life, regardless of national borders.
The problem is that this is incomplete. It leaves out what nations are.
Nations are, roughly, a group of people inhabiting a region and sharing a culture. Nations have a right to determine their own best interests too. And their best interests might go against that of the immigrating individual.
Or put it another way: A nation at its most basic is a group of individuals with roughly the same idea of what makes a good life. And those individuals have rights too.
The other problem no one takes in account is culture.
But that’s because all of the modern age seems to be a really weird exercise in ignoring culture.
Yes, the rights of individuals are paramount. They have to be or we get the fun house of totalitarian ideologies.
BUT individuals have cultures. And cultures are weird, and no one has studied them very well. Cultures are the other half of “what makes a human.” Sure, nature. But culture is the other half. Culture is nurture. And humans being social apes you ALWAYS have culture.
And culture is tricky and complicated.
Take it from someone who has MOSTLY acculturated. There’s always five percent you will fight the rest of your life, because it’s stuff embedded at the back of your brain when you were an infant or barely more.
The problem is that not all cultures are equally functional. There is a balance between the individual and the group that most cultures have chosen the side of the group on. Which not only makes them vulnerable to tyranny, but also weak on innovation, creativity and the other motors of prosperity.
You can’t import a lot of individuals from one culture together without importing the culture. And it takes time to integrate them into your culture.
So, open borders are a suicide pact.
As is open trade, to an extent. Sorry. Don’t throw things at me. We cannot, cannot, cannot be dependent on trade with slave states. You can’t have FREE trade with slave states.
Our relationship with China the last 20 years illustrates this. And no, we don’t know if China’s turn to the authoritarian over what they already were was mitigated or DRIVEN by free trade with us.
Until we know how to navigate that we can’t do it.
Until we figure out this conundrum, I remain philosophically for free trade and free individual movement. And deeply aware how impossible that is right now. Because philosophy shouldn’t be a suicide pact.
I think there is a path to where we can have the philosophical good. But it’s going to be a long, long time.
Until then we need to protect our own, in our country. And each country has to look to its own best vision. Not some mocha-choca kumbaya the whole world is one bs.
Look, Heinlein believed in one world government, at least in his early books. Every writer of the period did.
The thing is that his one-world-government was essentially “America everywhere.”
Would that work? Yes, yes, it would. If we could export America everywhere it would work. Because America is ridiculously tolerant of different origin, different religion, and — unless handicapped, which it’s been the last few decades — very good at assimilating the stranger.
But the problem is that we can’t assimilate the world.
Or rather, we can, but it involves conquering it and killing everyone over the age of three. Which is a monstrous idea.
After his tour of the world Heinlein himself understood this and the emphasis on world governance in his books shifted.
Philosophically, I long for a world in which both open borders and open trade are possible. It is literally the best for mankind.
In this workaday world of ours, I know that culture and tradition, and the “nurture” that is half of what makes us human makes them both impossible. Or at least deeply dangerous for our country, the last best hope of mankind.
So — I’ll work towards a world in which the rest of the world is more like America. Incrementally. Slowly.
And not destroy the hope of tomorrow for the inflexible philosophy today.
According To Hoyt 
Thank you – very cogent. The question about just how free trade with China actually affected that country is haunting. And “America Everywhere” is a pipe dream – we can barely make America America. But that’s what our grandchildren deserve.
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It began with claims that free trade would make them more like us.
It is ending with claims that their social credit system is really cool.
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And at no point does the other side ever reciprocate the Free Trade.
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Which is the brilliant part of Trump’s tariff strategy: he is saying “reciprocate or else”.
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He’s going beyond that. He’s putting in tariffs on every other country, but the tariffs are much lower if the other country removes its own tariffs.
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Oddly enough, one of my contacts posted only today about their beliefs that passports and immigration controls are tyrannical. AFAIK, they have never lived outside of the US and potentially never even visited overseas. (It’s a low-drama poster, so the pushback on their post is pretty mild and phrased as “I think you are incorrect because XYZ.”)
So—interesting timing on that.
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Actually, there is something to that. Prior to World War I, there were no passports or immigration controls, anywhere in the world, in any kind of modern sense. Yes, you can point to exceptions: Japan was closed to outsiders until 1864; China was hostile to foreigners, but had to open up after losing multiple wars (and these were not wars in the modern sense, but that’s a different lecture); the US had anti-Chinese immigration laws; etc. But those were exceptions, not an international regime.
Prior to 1920, if you wanted to hop a tramp steamer to anywhere in the world, there was no government Karen to stop you.
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And it required more time and proportionally more resources to do that, with few safety-nets when you got to wherever you were going. Who needed passports and vetting processes (aside from disease and mental illness if you came through Ellis Island) when the costs of relocating were so high, and the risks also high?
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When my dad’s family came through, they had to have $100 cash in hand or they weren’t allowed through.
It came up because the strict requirement was cash in hand.
….so you didn’t all come through at once.
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Yes!
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“Few safety nets” is a feature, not a bug, in my view. I’m not really ever going to go with “things are too easy now, let’s let government and bureaucrats think they own us document us, track us, and micromanage us to make it all better!” But that’s just me.
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I don’t have the full story (those who did are long gone), but Grampa Pete avoided Ellis Island by first going from Denmark to Canada, then coming into the US from there. (Looking for work, he told a farmer that he was a carpenter. Midway to the farm, Grampa admitted he wasn’t. Quoth the farmer: “You will be, son.” Farmer was right.)
He worked at an ordinance plant during WW1, making the happy ‘splody stuff. The reaction was done in wooden towers, with a slide to bug out if/when the reaction went out of control. Sounds like he had occasion to do so at least once. [Maybe that’s why he never rode rollercoasters at Kiddyland… He had fun watching us have fun, though.]
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So, “What’s the point, if it’s not exploding behind you?” :-D
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Great Grandpa (married granddaughter of Applegates), and his brother did the same. Came to Canada from Scotland, traveled across Canada, and then came south into the US and Oregon.
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But travel was far more difficult, which placed some limitations.
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Agreed. Giving government the idea that it owns its citizens and has a right to track them and monitor them forever and ever amen, however, is not my idea of a good solution.
(I am possibly just ornery today.)
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Actually there were passports. But they were sort of the equivalent of today’s diplomatic passport and said things like “His Britannic Majesty requests that the bearer be afforded all assistance …” and meant it. In that if some petty official did not render appropriate assistance the next ship in port would be a Royal Navy gun boat
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I suppose I should have said “there were not required-to-travel passports for everybody”. The current passport regime did not exist prior to 1920. There were documents called passports, but it was an entirely different animal.
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Before the days of mass international travel with trip times of a day or less. Before it was possible to nip off to Rome or Monte Carlo for a weekend.
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And yet, there were railways across Europe that people used to go for a weekend in a neighboring country for decades before WWI. Yes, it is easier now, barring bureaucratic fuckery, but it was remarkably easy then, too, in terms of history up to that point.
There are good reasons to be cautious about borders right now, in particular. But “things are too easy, therefore you must surrender to leviathan government, peasant” continues to fail to impress me as a solution. Putting busybody Karens in charge of everybody has not been notably successful in any regard.
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It’s the difference between traveling 200 miles in a few hours, or 2,000 miles in the same time. Greatly expands the number of people able to make the trip. 2,000 miles on a 19th century train took two days or more.
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“Everything is easier” is STILL a lousy argument for surrendering freedom to centralized government, no matter how many times you repeat it. Rephrasing, reiterating, and restating it does not make it any stronger an argument than it was the first time around.
Next up, you’re going to say “but without muh gubmint, who will build duh roads?” and just keep repeating it ad nauseam.
Yes, things are easier now. In no way does that require Big Brother control of every individual.
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Way to be an a-hole, dude. Who builds roads has nothing to do with who crosses borders. That is a non sequitur, a well known logical fallacy. For shame!
If borders are to mean anything, there has to be control over who crosses them. That is a much, much bigger job today than it was 1,000 years ago, or even 100. You don’t want governments to do that job? OK, then who?
Just today the Polish government exerted control over their border to prevent the German government from dumping their illegal alien problem on Poland. Are they wrong?
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It was not a non sequitur, it was a comparison to throw light on how retarded your argument was. Which, obviously, went over your head.
At no point, ever, is “but things are easier now” a good argument for “you must surrender your rights to the government.” To repeat the same thing ad nauseam as if it is somehow magic, or altered, or enhanced by the repetition, is retarded.
See, now, you verge upon making a new and slightly different argument, while still failing the crit check on understanding what I’m saying.
I did not say, ever, in even the slightest degree, that governments should not control borders. Never happened.
What I did say, which you missed, is that I do not cede to any government the right to document and catalog and track me, as that is an abomination to individual liberty which will be abused by any government that gets that power. This, since you don’t seem sharp enough to follow, is not the same thing as saying governments have no right to control their borders.
Can you grasp the difference, or do you need me to draw you a picture, scooter?
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Let me put this in a way that even you can comprehend. Every government on Earth in the late 1930s enabled the Holocaust, because literally every government on Earth denied German and European Jews visas to escape Nazi Germany. The one place, the singular place to which Jews could escape, and a few thousand did, was Japanese-occupied Shanghai which, for complicated internal political reasons that involved the need to pretend that they did not control the city, Shanghai allowed immigration without visas for a short time.
That is the result of “governments have a right to control you and track you and document you”. That is what I object to.
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Coffs. Portugal didn’t refuse Jews visas. Even at the risk of becoming overwhelmed. But the ambassador got expelled from Germany.
Look, Portugal sucks and sucked worse back then. But fair is fair.
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So tell me, since you are so all-knowing, how can there be any control over who crosses borders unless they can be positively identified? What form of identification do you propose, if not passports (or something functionally equivalent to passports even if you call them something else)?
Your demands for absolute privacy and autonomy are in opposition to the fact that in any group too large for everybody to personally know everybody else, there must be some form of identification. The larger the number, the more important that requirement becomes. Who provides that identification, and guarantees it? So that anybody and everybody can accept that you are you, and not some nefarious rando running a scam in your name? So you can be confident that anybody presenting their identification is really who they say they are?
Breaking Godwin’s Law doesn’t help your case, either. Who is going to force sovereign nations to take in ‘refugees’ they don’t want? No matter how morally justified you think that would be? There have been other atrocities and purges, some even worse. Where is the line to be drawn? Who should have taken in the Ukrainians, or the Armenians, or the 60 million Chinese? How should they have been compelled to do so?
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Dude. Little Bro. Imaginos is one of my wild-eyed Libertarians. He and I have had set tos due to my being an OWL. No, he’s not going to say that.
Do I need to come over and mix you a cocktail or something?
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Gee, I didn’t know I’d been promoted to Wild-Eyed Libertarian! When did that happen? Is there a badge, or a ribbon for that? :-D
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if there were you’d chew it or something. Wild Eyed Libertarians (es)chew official ribbons.
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No, the government does not need to build infrastructure. It does need to define standards for building it that meet reasonable minimums. Otherwise, you have things like private railroad owners building tracks to proprietary track gauges so you can’t transport goods without using their trains.
“If all men were angels, no government would be needed” overlooks the fact that even Lucifer rebelled, so the Lord had to appoint Michael Sheriff.
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Keeping foreigners from nicking your stuff, undercutting your labor, or imposing their beliefs has been a basic responsibility of government since at least the treaty of Westphalia, and arguably since Leviticus.
If you don’t like the way it’s been done for the last century, feel free to suggest workable alternatives. (And “Lay back and think of the utilitarian greater good” Is not workable, as it ends with foreigners dead in a very messy fashion.)
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Yeah, but in Europe one needed dual citizenship to swing anything bigger than a kitten!
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It is relatively simple to go across the Canadian border into Canada and back into the US. It is the country you are heading into responsibility to vet you coming in. US doesn’t ask people when leaving “why are you leaving”. Canada doesn’t either.
Did get a kick out of coming back in to the US on our last trip. Asked “Why were you in Canada?” The answer was “Vacation. Spring bear trip. Got pictures.” Held up laptop. Border guard handed back passports and said “Have a good trip home.” You’d have thought I was pulling out the grandchildren (which we don’t have) pictures. I mean, really! They have no sense of humor.
The crossing we came through they are usually hazing bears out of the line of vehicles as often as not, Piegan Port of Entry (Montana). Porthill-Rykerts Port of Entry (Idaho), probably does too (port we used to go into Canada that trip). Yes, we’d be taking pictures.
Don’t know about Mexico. Haven’t walked across the border into Mexico and back more than twice, and that was 45 years ago. Hubby grew up in San Diego, he’s been across and back more than he can count. But not for 45 years.
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I’ve done the Canadian crossing many times. Coming back, it’s a very good idea to act like a meek slave to the border patrol agent, because they have power and know they can abuse it with impunity.
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We’ve seen. Our answers always are short initially. Only after connection made (where some levity allowed) do we add anything “extra”. Which the smaller ports of entry, less traffic, seem to happen. Before the “bears” comment, the answer to “where are you going” was “Home, via Yellowstone and Tetons.” Then it was “Why the detour?”, and the correct answer to that was “Because it is spring and we expect to see Bears, for once.” Then the quip. (Because the bears head to the high country in the fall and, while possible to see one, between the two parks, we have. But we also have had trips with zero bears …. Our same response on a similar Fall trip would be “Rack, lots of Racks … of the Elk, Moose, and Deer, kind.” Bison? Gone enough that “Oh, bison, again …” is the response.)
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Aye. Had that in 1977, when traveling back. Friend dating back to elementary school. Officer Nosey wanted to know why we were traveling together, since I lived in San Jose and Dave lived in San Diego. He barely accepted our explanation.
Glad I skipped buying Cuban cigars… Going into Victoria, a “Jesus Hippy” (from his embroidered denim shirt) driving a seriously dirty 911 got special attention at the ferry terminal. The customs people were happily taking the interior apart.
A few years previous, I heard from the brother of a guy who thought the Canadian authorities wouldn’t mind if he had some marijuana on him. Wrong. Figuring out how to bail an out-of-country perp was best left as an exercise for the student.
$SPOUSE says when her family left Canada, the outgoing busybody was offended that someone would leave Canada (With Family!). Circa early 1950s, so no idea if it’s relevant any longer.
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Actually, I believe it read that his Majesty *requires* that all aid snd assistance be provided.
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One nation world might work if it started out as a single entity that was governed as intended by our COTUS/Bill O’ Rights (our current form would fall short of that) and would need a rather homogenous population (in culture and education), but like true full Libertarianism, or true communism. isn’t going to work in the real world.
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I would argue that open borders, properly understood, are not a libertarian philosophical ideal. In an ideal libertarian society, every landowner is entitled to decide who is allowed on their land. Public (i.e. government-owned) land, to the extent it exists in such a society, is collectively owned by the members of that society, who have the right to determine whether, and under what conditions, non-members are allowed there.
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The Reader came across this today; it seems relevant. https://rmx.news/article/poland-to-introduce-border-controls-with-germany-as-migration-crisis-grows/
“Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced the measure on Tuesday, stating: “We have decided that we are restoring temporary control on the border of Poland with Germany and Poland with Lithuania,” adding that the Polish Ministry of the Interior and Administration is currently preparing the necessary implementation of the law.
He said the new border controls are designed to “limit and reduce the uncontrolled flow of migrants back and forth.”
The Reader sees this as the first notable crack in the EU ‘no borders’ facade. He suspects that there will be more in the coming months.
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I saw a news item someone linked on X that civilian volunteer groups are policing Poland’s border because Germany (and possibly one other country, but I don’t recall) is taking some of its own illegal immigrants and dumping them across the border in Poland.
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Since the FSB has been transporting and dumping “migrants” into all the eastern-edge NATO countries for years, including Poland via their border with Belarus, one can see why getting the same treatment from the Germans would seriously annoy the Poles.
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The Poles are steamed at the EU for trying to undo the recent election. They were furious last summer when a Belorussian “migrant” managed to kill a Polish soldier on the border. (I could hear the snarl from Estonia.)
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I’m guessing Belorus wasn’t the “migrant’s” country of birth, either…
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Geee, how’d you guess?
Syria, Chechenia, a few other equally lovely locales, almost all males of military age. Belorussians seem to stay away from that border, unless they were military.
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I know it’s his real name but “Donald Tusk” sounds like some leftie writer trying to create a thinly-veiled strawman of Bad Orange Man and Bad Rocket Man.
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Our Hostess has long maintained that Himself needs a writer’s group.
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It’s far too late for that. There is a prominent geographical feature on our planet that is clearly a booted foot kicking a ball. Any attempts at “realism” went out the door after that.
:P
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Not only that, but most of the inhabitants of that country are passionate about a sport that is all about kicking a ball with your feet.
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LOL. This. But I’ve been told not to yell it at the sky because it causes talk.
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Ah, but if the sky yells back you’ve got real problems. :-D
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I’d pay good money to watch your version of Stranger Than Fiction.
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I double dog dare you to revise His manuscript.
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If he teams up with the Donald will we have the DTs?
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The Author needs a writers’ group. I keep telling Him.
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…there’s a story in here somewhere. God/a god recruits writers to help with the next chapter of history. Maybe a Douglas Adams or a Terry Pratchett type gets sent to write a nice, orderly succession in a nice, peaceful little monarchy somewhere, and it all spirals horribly out of control because the “characters” just. Don’t. Behave.
…maybe Cervantes was a sleeper angel sent down to popularize the novel and make more writers for God to recruit. I need to stop there before I think of anything more.
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LOL
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I understand why most SF writers make future earth one-government (without realizing or emphasizing that they also make it one culture). World building is much easier if you pretend every planet has a single government and a single culture. JMS is one of the few who confronted this idea honestly in his Parliament of Dreams episode of Babylon 5.
Culture can be viewed as Chesterton’s fence, and Orthodox Christians enshrine that as Tradition. Of course the Christian tradition is only 2,000 years old, and it took both 1700 years of that, 500 years of legal limits on rulers within the concept of peerage, and an open frontier to create America. Of course we’re still building on that despite such setbacks as the Great Society and its reactionary spawn just as we were grasping for the gold ring. The last best hope of man on earth may yet prevail.
You cannot convert an “honor” culture based on tribalism into a culture based on individual responsibility overnight, but you can import individuals into our culture and convert them over a generation or two.
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Convert them or kill them. In a society capable of conversion the people that don’t convert fast enough try to rob a 7-11 and are shot.
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And the people who do work at that 7-11. :)
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Yes, and their kids are engineers.
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Of course, B5 also made the point that humans are damn near unique in this regard. Which, at the very least, was economical from a world-building standpoint.
And even then, the Terrans still had a world government, even if some of the off-world colonies eventually achieved independence.
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My Biggest Question concerning a World Government is “Why”.
IE What is the Need for a World Government?
Fictionally, the Best Need is protecting Earth from an outside Threat or Potential Threat.
Even in that situation, the “cultural/governmental” differences can be a major problem.
No way could we (or should we) become part of a World government that include China or Russia.
David Weber and Chris Kennedy created a World Government for the “Out Of The Dark” series that might work.
Of course, there was a Major Outside Threat and everybody realized that.
Their World Government was a Federal System (similar to the US system). They went back to the beginning of the US Constitution as model (with some corrections).
But the biggest factor for it working was the destruction caused by the aliens in the First Book.
China was gone (ie there was no Chinese government) and Russia was also basically gone.
So the “Earth Alliance” could say “if you want to join, here are the conditions you need to meet”.
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And how long would that system work after the outside threat was eliminated? Human nature says, “not too long,” but I’m a wee bit biased.
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Well that’s a problem but I doubt that the authors are concerned about that as it’s fiction and “in story universe” it’s going be centuries before the outside threat is gone. 😉
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There would have to be a long enough time – due to the outside threat – for the various local cultures to gradually get smothered under the blanket of the overall government. i.e. multiple generations of kids are raised and taught by flunkies from the “core” culture of the overall government.
Outside of that, it wouldn’t have a prayer of working.
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Even there, there were some very rough spots with Pakistan, and a strong suspicion that even after the Pakistani people overthrew their extremely fundamentalist government, they probably didn’t get as active as the rest of the world.
Weber made the point also in the Mutineer’s Moon trilogy, where, again, you have a genuine existential threat to Earth to act as a unifying factor.
Of course, Weber is a bit subversive in general since he frequently re-fights the ACW with whoever is standing in for the South as the good guys.
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Pakistan was the “Bad Example”. [Crazy Grin]
And yes, nobody “in story” thought that Pakistan would be joining the “Alliance” soon.
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Even there, there were some very rough spots with Pakistan, and a strong suspicion that even after the Pakistani people overthrew their extremely fundamentalist government, they probably didn’t get as active as the rest of the world.
Weber made the point also in the Mutineer’s Moon trilogy, where, again, you have a genuine existential threat to Earth to act as a unifying factor.
Of course, Weber is a bit subversive in general since he frequently re-fights the ACW with whoever is standing in for the South as the good guys.
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Crime. Escaping jurisdiction is bad. In the Lensmen series, the graduation ceremony had the explanation of needing to pursue criminals as why they had to be Galaxy-wide.
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Extradition treaties would handle most of those situations IMO without the fun-and-games of trying to “merge” different cultures into a single government.
Of course, Doc Smith was writing in a time when “one world governments” were talked about.
But in the Lensmen universe, the Lensmen seemed to focus on crimes or other threats that endangered “Civilization” as a whole.
For most crimes, the “local” authorities handled such things without calling on the Lensmen.
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The Patrol and the Lensmen handled interstellar crime, especially drug-running. Local governments handled local crime and local folks were supposed to handle local corruption. Supposed to. See The Vortex Blaster for an example of a corrupt local government getting it’s comeuppance, with a little help from some friends.
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From what I remember of the Lensman series pretty much all drug smuggling and sales were controlled by the Eddorians, the alien villain organization that the Lensmen were fighting against.
So the real problem was subversion and treason against civilization; drug smuggling was the cover.
Hm. Perhaps it’s more relevant to today’s problems than I thought.
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I also think the “one world government” makes sense in something like the Honorverse, with thousands of inhabited planets. First, that level of colonial expansion will get all the people who want single culture societies out creating their own single culture societies. Second, even if the planetary government is very limited, there will still be a need for some kind of planetary government to negotiate things like interplanetary defense and trade.
Ultimately, the only way to have a planetary government, limited or powerful, is for most people on the planet to believe they have more in common with each other than with people not from their planet. That requires either an alien species or so many human worlds that all the people who won’t agree to a one-Earth government to not live on Earth.
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I have world governments in colonies. The entire world was colonized by Y. They’re a Y world. (Whether Y is race, culture, or belief)
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Which seems to be the secret. The horribilia, in both the Honorverse, and especially in Drake’s Slammerverse, happen when you dump two or more cultures that can’t stand one another on the same colony world. See the next to last story in “Hammer’s Slammers” vol 1, where you dump French and Dutch on the same world, as an example.
The Lensverse avoids that problem essentially by having a deus ex machina in the Arisians and especially the Lensmen, who can’t lie mind-to mind. Look at First Lensmen, where Virgil Samms and Rod Kinnison set up a standard that if you have a Lensman chief executive, you can demand that he answer the question “Are you a crook” on his Lens and you KNOW he isn’t lying.
What I’m not sure David Weber is aware of is that he’s in the process of setting up a similar mechanism with the treecats and possibly the Harrington genome. They can tell when people are lying, and I can easily see someone who knows they didn’t commit a crime demanding a hearing before a treecat to establish that. And how does the criminal justice system refuse it?
But to bring this back around to the original point, the best part about finding other planets to go to is that you CAN set up a single culture planet to flee to. However, when dealing with the Left, they are eventually going to pursue you, because a prime tenet of Leftism is that they CAN’T just leave people alone. What then?
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Of course, there’s the problem in Pournelle’s CoDominium where people would set up one culture colonies but the CoDominium (Earth’s Government) would send transportees to those one-culture colonies.
Those transportees would include “regular” criminals, political prisoners or “welfare citizens”.
Not exactly the sort of people that would fit into the original population.
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“And how does the criminal justice system refuse it?”
Why would they ever want to refuse it? It’s like a body camera: it’s far more likely to help the state than the defendants, and in the rare case it helps the defendant, that’s the outcome the state wants. (The good prosecutors want to know if they’ve got a bad cop. And just like it’s only bad cops who don’t want body camera, it would only be bad cops who don’t want to know that someone is telling the truth when they’re actually innocent.
Heck, I can even imagine a “treecat” effect where the jury expects the state to call a treecat expert witness to reveal who is telling the truth and who is lying, and the jury rules not guilty if the state can’t provide one.
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That’s a plot point in Diana Duane’s Stealing the Elf King’s Roses. IIRC, the courts count on magic to help discern the truth, and when things start to go wrong, the protagonist has to sort out why.
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The biggest reason is that there’s lots more criminal cases than available ‘cats, and even with wormhole junctions, travel time is a factor.
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There’s another aspect of “One World Governments on Colony Planets”.
Even if the original colonization ship/ships started several communities on the Colony Planet, they’d have set up a single government covering all of the communities.
As settlers expanded from the starting communities, the government would expand to cover all of the new communities.
IE There would be One Government on the planet from the start. Not several governments “forced” to become a Single Government.
Note, if several different groups colonized a planet, there could easily be several different governments on the planet.
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I agree with most of what you said. again Maybe this is what you are saying, in a perfect world everyone is tolerant and accepting of all other cultures. But that presupposes 2 things all cultures are equal, and frankly they’re not. Secondly that’s also ignoring the role of religion. Again if you religion is just to go to the bible, giving you’re child to Molech, or like that Temple of some Aztec type religion in central America where they had human sacrifices. Exaggerations, but we should be able to insist on some basic ideas. Even though we have been very tolerant.
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That is not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that in an ideal world all cultures are functional enough that they can be accepted.
This is not true, has never been true and there’s a good chance it will never be true. it’s something to work towards, while suspecting it can’t happen.
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I will admit I probably misunderstood. Wont’t be the first time.
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I think its a “human beings don’t work that way” problem. Cultures can be functional while also being utterly insane at the same time. Does the culture form one complete unit, such that babies can be born and raised to adulthood? Congrats, that’s all it really takes.
Outside pressures such as war, trade, and faith can (and usually do) stress a culture, causing internal change to better deal with external “threat.” Cultures naturally compete, causing the threat response. Plus remnant tribalism.
Working towards that end, all cultures on an equal playing field is laudable in theory. Reward and risk, tough but fair policies can take you far. But there will always be amoral assholes. That’s human nature. The kind of human nature that properly civilizing a child while raising them can fix, sometimes. Bandity types are universal, but not universally hated. Some cultures value them.
This with cultures, as with people, it’d be nice if we could all get along. But the ones that cannot fathom that they won’t eventually be cut down whilst in the process of armed robbery aren’t really reasonable in the first place. When one culture is unwilling to live and let live, you stomp on them until they change their mind or are unable to cause trouble in the first place.
To put it another way, peace is nice. But if you can’t have peace because someone won’t let you, give them so much conflict that they choke on it. Then maybe you can go back to being peaceful again.
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Yes. That.
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Clarification –
We have never had free trade with the PRC. Free trade means no restrictions on either side. But the PRC is a heavily protectionist country. Even a foreign company building a factory in China comes with a host of restrictions.
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Indeed.
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The woman who tried to get Adolf Hitler deported out of Bavaria:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Ammann
Geez, talk about your Cassandra-accuracy.
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Your image-fu has grown quite strong. Plus, you did not spare a single word to explain the title of your post (assuming, hopefully rightly, that we’d all get it). You are bold and confident today, Sarah.
I cannot really dispute your thesis, as attractive a notion as a World America is. It’s been said that the Thirteen Colonies were all different cultures from each other, that still managed to coalesce into one country under the Constitution (the Articles of Confederation were too ineffective to count). But they were offshoots of the same mother country, with the same language and the same base culture, with regional and societal variations. Fusing the disparate nations of the world together, even with the genius for negotiation and compromise of the Constitutional Convention at work, would be a hundred times harder. And remember, our constitutional system made it only about seventy years before the Civil War. It wasn’t perfect, merely the best ever seen.
Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.
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…and in almost 250 years since, nobody has come up with anything better. Every attempt has turned out worse, most of them much worse.
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The 13 colonies once committed faced a powerful common foe (if we do not hang together, we will all hang separately). In sci-fi, there is unity in a common threat. “Invader” (1981) when the world’s major powers unite against an alien invasion. A critical item in their defense weapon was beryllium, supplied by Brazil that had jacked the price 4x with no delivery guarantee. A couple days after, Russian transports delivered a mass airdrop of two Russian airborne divisions to seize the mines and airport, where American transports began landing heavy armor and artillery, all escorted by US Navy fighters. The UN almost went mad, but there was nothing they could do about it.
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Happy Early July 4th.
And. BBB Passed the House. Will be signed by President Trump on July 4th, 2025. While it isn’t everything everyone wanted (never are) it does hit highlights. Now go after the recommended cuts. Let the usual suspects beat up themselves for 2026 mid-elections. They’ve already created quite the adds for the republicans already.
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If all men were brothers would you let one of them marry your sister? But all men are not brothers and all men are not “good” people. This is a fallen world and the majority of people are tribal and xenophobic. There is no “one world” paradise. The least bad system is a government big enough to defend my rights but small enough that it doesn’t try and conquer the world.
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Oh, well beyond tribal and xenophobic. From our POV most cultures are horrific.
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And so it begins.
Amazon published my first horrible attempt two days ago. I got the second uploaded today. And America will be 250 years old tomorrow.
[intentional run-on sentence follows] Now all I need are roughly 100,000 of you to buy the books and I’ll be able to remodel the bathroom, replace the windows, replace the circuit-breaker box, pay off mortgage and car and visit the in-laws.
Why do I feel like I need to start writing the third book now?
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The standard count is from the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July, 1776, which only makes the nation two hundred forty-nine tomorrow.
One can start counting from 1775, but Washington’s enumeration of the colonist’s rights as English subjects isn’t usually considered the beginning of the United States.
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I’ve seen it said that tomorrow starts the count down to the 250th year.
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No. Next year. America will be 250 years old next year.
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Congrats!
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Nations are each a peace shaped insanity.
Evidence of a sort follows.
There are a couple of theoretical ideals for peace that do not entirely hold.
One is top down, some dude somewhere holds a position that means he has the kign magic, and therefore peace in the kingdom is assured.
Another theoretical ideal is more true, at least for soem cases. That is bottom up, where the extreme formulation is every person in a population is individually at peace with every other person. But, well, Dunbar’s number, folks are actually not thinking that way.
For one, lotta folks are traveling around without the ability to harm others beyond the reach of their own sword.
For another, you can think of yourself at peace with folks outside of stabbing range, but the idea of individually at peace must fade out a bit with distance, through simple inability to distinguish individuals at range.
Anyway, the real mixture of ideas about peace in the rest of the population will be varied, and one does not really have much control about any slice of the idea space but one’s own.
If we cannot control it, can we describe it, or predict it?
Sometimes.
The distribution of ideas held by others is not deterministic, and statistics also may not hold; they each can make intelligent decisions depending on what they see, hear, or feel.
If you want to combine them in groups they did not pick for themselves, coercive force.
If you want to determine that they do not pick war, with you adjusting other terms for them, coercive force.
If you want to cheat on the basic details of the prior deal, coercive force.
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Peace is not default, war is.
Peace is always a choice. It involves perceptions about whether you are harmed by others, about own actions, about possible courses of action, and about what other possible actors might prefer, or might act on.
There are patterns and there are influences, but no perfect control of perception.
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Peace is an ideal whose existence we infer from the fact that there have been intervals between wars.
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Unlikely to even boot up the computer tomorrow (very busy day, probably won’t even watch the bill signing at five o’clock) – so thought I’d better wish all my fellow USAINS a happy and joyous High Holy Day of Freedom’s Ring tomorrow.
On the fifth, I need to start planning for next year – I expect that we will have even more to celebrate then!
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One of the places that makes Colonial-Era clothes for reenactors (museum type, not die-hard do it from scratch types) is asking that people get orders in early, because they anticipate being very busy after January.
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I didn’t originate this aphorism, but I believe it sums it up best.
“You can have democracy, immigration, and multiculturalism….pick two”
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we don’t thank heavens have democracy but a representative republic.
BUT all immigration should always be dependent on Fit In or F*ck Off.
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“Until we figure out this conundrum, I remain philosophically for free trade and free individual movement. And deeply aware how impossible that is right now. Because philosophy shouldn’t be a suicide pact.”
Prioritization doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves in politics and philosophy, especially since it comes up everywhere. Cicero (IIRC) talked about the order of duties, and how there are no moral conflicts as long as you honor your duties in the right order. Vance brought up the ordo amoris a few months ago. Devon Eriksen’s been talking around similar ideas with “libertarianism is not a suicide pact”. Then you’ve got practical examples like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and “Put on your own mask before helping the person next to you.”
I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a through-line here, and having the vocabulary to talk about it would make certain political discussions a lot easier. To run with the libertarian example, you could say “Open borders are a Stage 5 concept, and we’re still at Stage 3, so you shouldn’t expect them to work because the foundation isn’t there.” Ditto gun rights in support of free speech, whether to prioritize illegal immigration or the debt, etc.
But since we don’t have a common vocabulary for this, we end up arguing these points in isolation, without a broader theory of why it has to be this way or where our priorities might differ.
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There are logical certainties, though. If they take our gun rights, they’ll take all the rest in short order. How would we stop them?
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That’s what I mean. It’s a good argument, but it’s isolated. There’s no specific name for that type of hierarchy/precedence in common use, so we basically have to reinvent it each time it comes up, instead of pointing at the common pattern. So stuff like, say, immigration vs. debt looks like an either/or instead of a first/then. Explaining it works, but it’s slower and gets lower penetration than a good meme/vocabulary term/concept that hits the nail on the head.
I don’t have a good solution for this. Generic terms like “hierarchy” fit just well enough to hide the need for a more specific term that captures the sense of obligation to tackle the lower levels before the higher ones and gives the impression that, yes, there is a plan.
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Listing all goals, and then ordering them in a structured way might tend to break Libertarianism.
Those decisions by other people to prefer peace, and control thereof over their choices.
So, if you exclude tribalist libertarians, libertarians are theory obsessives trying to realize a theory of behavior.
Being a theory obsessive is not an inherently evil thing, and seeking to realize theories are not inherently evil, but tactics and strategies do wind up mattering.
Communists and NSDAP/fascists are also theory obsessives, but the theory pursued is definitely evil, and also the means selected were and are evil.
The test cases wind up being Libertarians pursuing policy goals for which there is a libertarian case, but for which parallel cases in other philosophies, ideologies or way of knowing do not exist. Which philosophies or religions? The ones in that population that is involved with the policy.
If the policy impact is weak, it does not impact things like peace consensus with the rest of the population.
But, you know, if a libertarian is resting a lot of weight on inherent tyranny of professional policing bureaucracies, or of intelligence bureaucracies, that can be true, but those may weigh heavily in the peace and war calculations that others do.
Black Lives Matter and anti-Fa were /not/ Libertarian organizations, but if a Libertarian organization had implicated itself with similar policy preferences, enabling a bunch of robberies or murders, that fact or appearance could be important to someone. (Note, the libertarians are not responsible for the tactics of the communists, but individually are responsible for the tactics and strategy of individual libertarians. I’m not blaming libertarians for criminal justice reform, as much as I am considering a hypothetical combination of seemingly libertarian goals with policy tactics that others have used.)
Libertarianism does not break if you have a correlation in weights and/or perceptions, so you might always have a series of trials where those are correlated enough that libertarianism works.
But, it does not seem like a non-tyrannical libertarianism includes a way to control or compel such a correlation of perceptions. IE, if there is something controlling or causing the correlation that allows libertarianism, it is outside of the system of libertarianism.
The less contentious explanation may be that this is a combination of religion and culture, and like many other ways of knowing breaks past the national scale, nations are essentially where we have cultural based and religious based peace agreements more or less working.
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It’s not so much an inherent tyranny of this or that organization; it’s the fact that such bureaucracies represent a path to power over people. Those obsessed with having power over people will be drawn to that path, and tend to push out anyone less obsessed than themselves. Thus do bureaucracies turn evil.
It’s not so much that power corrupts; it’s that the corrupt, and the corruptible, seek power, and the mechanisms of power reinforce their corruption as the most corrupt gain the most power.
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Rather like the dependency relationships in a makefile. Which objects depend on which sources and headers. I’d put the Second Amendment very near the top. Almost everything else depends on it.
To all the Leftroids and Eurotrash that go “What are you so afraid of that you need to own a gun? Neener neener!”
My answer is “I’m not the one afraid of my fellow citizens owning guns. You are.”
I am much more concerned about the government having guns.
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Makefile is a fantastic analogy, but sadly limited in reach. “Prerequisite” sort of works, but it’s cumbersome and doesn’t convey that it’s part of a larger system. The best I’ve got so far is “stack”, paired with some simple pyramid diagrams. So the Libertarian Stack would show the makefile dependencies for a libertarian state, the America First Stack would lay out the order of operations in Trump’s platform, and so on. You could use “stacking” to refer to pursuing one goal to prepare for another one down the line (goal stacking?).
But the metaphor isn’t perfect, and you’d have to work to make the diagrams clean and catchy.
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Stan, you’re definitely onto something here. It seems like the very lowest levels might be some familiar concepts like “all men are created equal.” And “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the right to defend same. It’s hard to believe that nobody in the whole history of political philosophy has thought about the ordering of axioms before, but nothing comes to mind.
Unrelated, except to the title: has it escaped everyone’s notice that we are in fact sitting on a more or less uniform spherical ball of countries rotating in a frictionless vacuum? The assumptions of “uniform” and “spherical” hold to better than one percent, and the assumptions of “frictionless” and “vacuum” hold to many orders of magnitude. It’s only the countries that aren’t uniform. Which, to be fair, was our hostess’ point.
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
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Yeah, I’d love it if there was an essay or blog post everyone could point to, like ESR coining the term “kafkatrap” or Larry Correia’s dial/switch analogy for political violence. If one exists, I haven’t bumped into it. The closest meme relatives are hierarchy of needs pyramids, tier lists, and various cycle diagrams.
Regarding your second point, does that imply we have a perfect world but we’re just looking at it too closely? Feels like there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
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Prerequisites
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Sarah wrote: “because the bad drives out the good.”
Made me think of: “In economics, Gresham’s law is a monetary principle stating that “bad money drives out good”.”
Which is an accepted fact. Thought maybe others would be interested to see the parallel.
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Sarah has some small background in Austrian economics, and through Austrian economics we can understand much of the generalized phenomena of bad driving out good.
I think she meant that as a short hand, but sometimes I fail to unpack her shorthands.
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It’s a fact for imports from China. it’s a fact for H1B visas which are often inferior, but are cheaper. It’s a fact for behavior. i think at this point it’s a fact.
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OK, since I left one comment, let me add my perspective.
Fascism always requires two things: (a) A common identity for the people — something to be proud of, defend, and believe in, and (b) an enemy.
This is just human nature. The USA was a great success after WWII because we spent a lot of time defining ourselves as Americans – something different from the Europeans, commies, etc. It was something to be proud of and believe in, and it bound everyone together regardless of race, class, state, etc. *That* is what did all the assimilation heavy lifting in the past.
(Well, except blacks who were segregated and often seen as a laborer second class in the war effort. How did that work out?)
By the 60s we were all so assimilated that everyone foolishly assumed the USA had some kind of magic in the soil that integrated all cultures to become Americans. They overlooked the war and the power of putting thousands of men from every race and creed into the same trench fighting nazis. I remember relatives talking about men they fought with of ethnicities we seldom saw in our town at the time, but they would point out what “good men” they were, and I sensed that a lot of tolerance and mutual understanding was created by fighting nazis together.
The point is though that the (a) and (b) mentioned above of identity and enemy are not powered by something conjured out of thin air by fascism, the energy is always present like sunlight and wind and only harnessed by fascism. If patriotism and nazis aren’t around then there is great risk that some other evil idea will harness that energy.
Combine these thoughts together and you see that we are going to struggle to ever assimilate post Hart–Celler immigrants and now that patriotism is bad-think we are in for a lot of bad ideas to bind together subgroups to fight each other on our magic soil.
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no. That’s bullshit. Sorry.
There are reasons to have an identity that have nothing to do with ethnicity.
We can elevate the beliefs of America and our funding documents to a civic religion. Yes, it will bring other stuff along, like “Christmas trees even if you’re Jewish.” Who cares?
What we need is Fit in or Fuck off.
As an immigrant, I had to fight TO assimilate. And fight even harder for them not to fill my kids’ heads with hatred for America.
The problem is in the Education Establishment. That’s it.
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You do this every time I comment here, it seems.
I did not mention ethnicity in my general statements. I only said that assimilation seemed so easy pre Hart-Cellar because the war effort had everyone working to a common goal as well as interacting. That seems to be self evident (if commonly overlooked) so I doubt that is what you considered BS.
My other point is that without the war, and with tens of millions of new immigrants, assimilation is going to be a hard slog if it is even possible.
I think my main point is that if you put people of different subgroups together there is an energy inherent in humans that makes them want to separate and divide themselves. Does not have to be ethnicity or race or class, it can be longbows v. cross bows, or Yankees v. Dodgers, or which end of the egg to eat first.
I really was not talking about ethnicity, and I agree that we need civic pride, as that was my point that if people are not proud be be Americans, they might be proud to be “a wise latino,” or EV driver, or vegan, or lgmnop, or vaxed. So I agree with you.
Gosh I did not want to make this long. I hate back and forths, but felt I had to respond to being slapped down by the boss. OK, not sure what you thought was BS, but I agree that the education “estate” (pseudo clergy) is the main problem now, but I don’t think the only problem. I agree with FIorFO, but not just FI, I want people to *americanize* and *westernize* and honestly I am scared that that is not possible when there are so many from one culture that they can take over entire industries or cities. Also I do not think some cultures can ever be assimilated into the West so for those people they better come one by one and lose that culture by the 2nd generation. (Something Canada tried with the Residential Schools…)
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Unfortunately your writing is….. not clear, at best.
Well, again, your writing isn’t clear enough to be sure, but you did start talking about magic dirt, so if you weren’t then you’ve clearly been rubbing shoulders with those who do.
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If we want immigrants we should get Hindus and Sikhs. (There aren’t enough South Koreans to go around.) They fit in. There are plenty of them. They’re smarter than most people. They work. They don’t stab people. They don’t blow stuff up. And their food is way better. There, I fixed it for you.
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No. We really really shouldn’t. “They come with a very strong caste culture.” BIG NO.
See Vivek Ramswamy. (sp?)
Like everyone else they can FIFO. We’ll take people with qualifications we need, who are willing to put up money and not ask for assistance for x time.
AND WHO WILL FUCKING FIT IN OR FUCK OFF.
No ethnicity or culture should come in en mass. They’re all ill.
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Yep, folks that belong here come from, well anywhere and they show they belong by…belonging. Like this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjw2r0IAi10
He’s not from India.
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heck. Yesterday after seeing Dan Vasc on youtube singing the Star Spangled Banner I wanted to sponsor an effort to import him.
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Tell me you don’t work in Information Technology or STEM without telling me you don’t work in Information Technology or STEM.
No. We have enough. We have MORE than enough. I am reasonably OK with Sikhs but in general I have had far more than my fill of folks from the Indian subcontinent, for many many reasons. Hint: They only assimilate outwardly.
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Exactly.
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Wags hands. I was in tech, and never dealt with anyone from India. But then mostly only worked smaller firms. The large international firm I did work for, I can only relate the regional small division (essentially “small” firm vibe).
I’m prejudice against at least one who come from India and marry US citizen. I saw what that one did to my cousin and their sons. Luckily he tucked tail to run home (India) to mommy and daddy to get out of paying child support when the boys were very young (psychological, if he’d been physical he wouldn’t have lived to run home. Pretty sure a hunting or fishing accident, “told him there were rattlers there”, would have happened.) A good man stepped in to patch the wounds caused. Together cousin and he raised 8 well adjusted children (his six and her two). Her two legally changed their surnames to his on their 18th birthdays.
Ex looked down on cousin as lesser, and same with their children. He didn’t take much to the rest of the family either. Probably because we didn’t take his BS.
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One of the issues I have with hardcore feminists is that they constantly scream about how oppressed women are here in the First World…have they ever taken any sort of look at India? This is ostensibly a country on the move and advancing at an incredibly rapid pace…and it’s also a country that is incredibly unsafe for women.
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They’re free to screech about it here. Nothing will happen to them. There? One way or another, they’d only screech once. So they direct their hate at the ‘safe’ target.
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As a woman? I feel the same way as what you said. The US is the safest place for women, 100%. Are there unsafe places? Well yes. Wouldn’t want my husband, son, or any man, caught alone there either.
If the screamers are so oppressed, they should move where they aren’t oppressed (especially the middle east). Oh, wait. There isn’t anywhere else to go, for one. And second, women are not oppressed in the US. The idiots.
Not too long ago one of the View’s guest women speakers, one that fled Iran got in a shouting match with Whoopie regarding her statement that women, especially black women, are better off in Iran than in the US. Whoopie was flat out called a naive idiot. The guest might not have used those words, but that was the intent. (I don’t watch the View. Others do that for me and report on it … I caught one of the reports.)
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Sikhs … some are great people. Others… Ask The Phantom about the Sikh politics and truckers in Canada (and the US).
Whenever I see one of the big rigs with Khalistan signs all over it, I try to get away as quickly as is legal. I do not like people who try to drag the US into private family fights.
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No. I’m a Vietnam veteran and retired law enforcement.
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People who are for open borders are ignorant of the physics of why they put surge baffles in liquid shipping containers.
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