I never really understood, but now that that house bill passed that may end up blocking AI regulation from individual States. I get it. I don’t like knowing that even if everyone in my state wanted to stop companies from using AI for hiring decisions, we couldn’t.
Texans, I feel you.
Edit: I’m learning a lot about Texas in this thread. Thanks for all the context folks.
Seceding was never wrong per se, the issue is the ‘why’. Seceding for slavery is still an asshole move.
Seceding is a problem on its face, because it functionally strips citizenship from dissenting residents.
The slavery fight was an extension of this problem, as emancipation grants an individual full citizenship.
What we ultimately need is a global citizenship that doesn’t bottle any population cohort up in a single territory or deny civil rights based on place of birth. Secession functionally moves us away from universal human liberty.
What if the state you secede from also strips citizen rights from dissenting residents?
Then you’re fucked coming and going, and what you need is an internationalist revolution.
(Disclaimer slavery bad, I think I haven’t spend enough time saying that in this post)
On the topic of secession and global citizenship: As an anarchist I disagree that secession is inherently problematic. It all depends on how governance works in the state. Leaving could make a lot of sense with a monarchy for example.
I think a central authority regulating global citizenship could work out. But to me centralization means having one big point of failure. Less people to bribe to make sweeping changes. (Ergo Trump)
If there isnt a centralized authority then ‘global citizenship’ would mean different things in different states, so it wouldn’t give everyone the same rights, and may not be followed at all. I can’t imagine coordinating the whole world, but maybe I’m not optimistic enough.
Rejecting the authority of a monarch is very different than putting up hard borders along an arbitrary line of demarcation and reinforcing residency by birthright.
Secession, in this instance, affirms the rights of the monarch at a distance.
The legal concept of global citizenship does not require a single capital city. Just look at the EU. No one country rules all of Europe. No one politician dictates residency. You have a confederacy of democratic(ish) states operating under a single rule of law.
This is the principle of Constitutional governance. Power isn’t embodied in an individual, it is a social contract between all residents.
We have a piecemeal arrangement via the old NATO alliance and the various international trade agreements. You can travel without visas between various states. You can conduct business without doing more than declaring what that business entails. You can change residency (temporarily) with minimal hassle to pursue work or education.
We have a number of frameworks already in effect. The OG neoliberal dream was to expand that system globally.
Obviously it didn’t work. But more because neoliberalism valued trade over civil rights and private profit over public prosperity.
I’d say progress is progress, even if it isn’t perfect. Large scale coordination is more difficult than smaller scale stuff.
I can see this, but it also relives the residents that succeeded. Gives them a safer place to build infrastructure.
Yeah that kinda stuff is my lack of optimism. If inegalitarian systems come together to decide on law for the world, then we may not get good laws.
I think there is a lot of local work to do before I am confident in a global order. If we had systems that represent us well, then combining them to set global standards would rock.
Inequality is on the rise globally, and has been for a few decades. So that social contract is being negotiated by parties on increasingly uneven ground. Therefore this statement is not calming to me. Lots of people agree to bad deals every day.
Edit: BTW thanks for sharing your views, I know I can sound kinda spicy at times when debating. We both obviously just want folks to have comfortable lives.
I would not call splitting the baby progress. Vietnam, for instance, wasn’t liberated through division. It had to be reunited before either half was free from civil war. Same with Germany. Or Korea, for that matter.
But that’s just my perspective
Not when you put it like that! Lol
In those instances splitting may have been an important step forward even if it wasn’t the final step. (I don’t remember the context that well for those examples) (I looked it up, at least in Vietnam, idk how you expected them to go forward without splitting given all of the external pressure.)
I think the world will always be in flux. Do you think we’ll eventually just have a static set of countries with static borders and all of the people will be happy? If so, I’d love to hear why. If not, then by what actions do you suppose those nations change to deal with ever evolving groups, environment, genes, etc? Why would secession be particularly worse than other options?
For example, I’m not so sure the legitimacy of North Korea is affirmed by the existence of south Korea more than it is affirmed by their allies (China, Russia, etc). Why would we focus on South Korea seceding more than other countries supporting?
Again, particularly with regard to Vietnam, you had a country that was fully embracing independence against the French colonialists and Japanese invaders, when the US stepped in an installed a coup government in the south that leveraged a large Catholic population to resist de-colonialization. And what followed was some of the most horrifying years of the decades-long war. A war that spilled into neighboring Laos and Cambodia thanks to machinations by the Kissinger state department and Helms CIA.
Similarly, the Korean peninsula - which had liberated itself from Japanese occupation only years prior - was spit under the same model. Catholics in the south were galvenized into a coup government to resist anti-colonial forces allied with China in the north. In Japan and Indonesia and the Phillipines, the island was fully dominated by a cartel of Opus Dei affiliated business leaders and junior officers.
Germany’s division was maintained by splitting the old Nazi military into competing fascist regimes on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.
If you’re an anarchist, I cannot imagine how a western religious institution propping up a fascist regime’s military dicatorship over half the old nation’s territory benefits you in any way. It’s not as though the Cold War was kind to either side of the border.
I think that conglomerates like the USSR, the EU, the US, the BRICS, and the nascent African Union demonstrate paths out of the rigidly policed micro-states and their endless boarder feuds. We’ll always have some degree of flux, but there is a huge difference between Bush v Gore and Lincoln v Jefferson.
The US intervention in Korea and the militarization of the 38th parallel has dragged out what could have been a post-WW2 era decolonialization period into nearly a century of clandestine warfare and bigoted propaganda. A country that should be comfortably on par with its unified neighbors is trapped in a state of suspended hyper-policing and dominated by a handful of oligarchical interests in the name of national security.
FFS, the Far-Right South Korean President just tried to have Parliamentarians arrested on the accusation they were North Korean spies last December.
How on earth does this benefit any kind of anarchist cause?
Yeah totally. Do you think your average modern Texan secessionist would be pro-slavery? I imagined they were just hard core status quo preserving capitalists (so slavery light I’ll admit).