It is my intention to suggest that Americans, including many historians, tend to accord race a transhistorical, almost metaphysical, status that removes it from all possibility of analysis and understanding. Ideologies, including those of race, can be properly analyzed only at a safe distance from their terrain. To assume, by intention or default: that race is a phenomenon outside history, is to take a position within the terrain of racialist ideology and to become its unknowing -and therefore uncontesting- victim. (Barbara Fields, Ideology and Race in American History)
The idea that you should put complete freedom above all else has been a disaster for the human race. No, you cannot do whatever you want. No, it does not mean you are a prisoner.
Lol “anarchistic country” If a people were ever to have anarchy it would require there be no country. You’re like asking them to find an incel that isn’t a misogynist
Technically you can have an incel who isn’t a misogynist. Incel just means involuntarily celibate, most incels are misogynists, but some aren’t, and just don’t talk to people at all because of other mental health issues that don’t get treated making that person completely solitary and unable to communicate with others.
The term incel was coined by a woman who has been involuntarily celibate and saught to create a supportive community for people like her. The problem arrose later.
No problem. I just thought it was an important distinction because an anarchist country cannot exist by definition, while there is nothing in the definition of incel that requires them to be misogynistic. Though considering how meaning of words change over time, you could make the case that by the modern way we use the word incel, we don’t mean to include all who are involuntarily celibate, but only the toxic people who blame their situation on external factors. Even then, there surely are at least a handful of gay incels who blame other men for not being interested in them, and therefore wouldn’t be necessarily misogynistic.
Lol I could if I was desperate to be right but I think I used the wrong word to describe what I intended and you can clearly see that. It’s so difficult to pin down meaning on culturally developing words just due to how fluid languages can be. I intended for it to be a clear-cut example of things that can’t exist but you’ve clearly shown it isn’t so clear cut.
Yeah, it’s not easy to come up with something that is absolute like that, and also make it immediately understandable to a wide audience without needing to explain it.
For example I can say “an anarchist country is like saying an unarmed interstellar spaceship”, a lot of people wouldn’t know that it’s actually impossible to have an unarmed interstellar spaceship, so this defeats the purpose of the comparison because it requires an additional explanation.
I can’t think of any example right now that is absolute and that is also ubiquitous knowledge to be immediately understood without relying of specialised interest knowledge or explanation…
it’s actually impossible to have an unarmed interstellar spaceship
Since this subthread had already stepped into the realm of sidetracked internet debate, I’d like to challenge that claim.
I understand that the reasoning behind this statement is that interstellar travel requires some properties that disqualify the ship from being considered “unarmed”:
Interstellar travel requires ridiculous speed, which makes the ship itself a kinetic weapon.
The ship will need formidable defensive mechanism to survive cosmic radiation and impact with particles at the speed it is traveling.
I see two problems with this argument:
The spaceship could use some sort of FTL travel, which may or may not bypass these requirements entirely.
Regular cars have enough kinetic energy to kill people, and they are reinforced to a certain degree so that they won’t break from the strains of the speeds they travel in. Would you also say that it is impossible to have an unarmed car? One could certainly make such a claim, but that kind of drains the meaning out of the term “unarmed”…
About cars, road injuries are responsible for about 1.2 million deaths per year, they are extremely dangerous death machines, so I think it is reasonable to say that a car can’t be unarmed, though I agree that it would stretch it. By that definition, a large wrench can be a weapon, so I am hesitant to just call anything that can be used as a tool for violence as a weapon, because almost anything can be… I have a pretty heavy keyboard which could be used as a weapon if I really wanted to.
If you consider a weapon as an instrument that increases the attack potency or range of the wielder, a car is certainly can be used as a weapon… We even require people to have a license because of how dangerous they are, just like weapons.
If you consider only something that was designed for the purpose of increasing the attack potency or range of the wielder, then a car isn’t one. It all boils down to how you define a weapon.
And about the FTL thing, assuming it is possible, I can still think of a couple of ways any relativistic/FTL ship can be used as a weapon even without using it’s kinetic energy for impacts.
Blue shift of electromagnetic radiation. If you are getting closer to the target at either relativistic or FTL speeds and you release electromagnetic radiation (not necessarily visible light, even a powerful radio, which I’d imagine all interstellar ships would need in order to communicate over enormous distances), or even just a regular thruster… the blue shift would turn it into extremely lethal, short wavelength, somewhere in the deep X ray.
If the FTL system works by stretching and compressing spacetime around it to travel distances with some kind of field… It would be theoretically possible to asymmetrically stretch space in a way that would wreck a target’s structural integrity, and depending how aggressive you can take it, go full blown spaghettification like black holes do.
My point about the FTL thing is that this question is in the realm of science fiction. Sci-fi authors can come up with whatever physics they want, and in real life we are so far from being able to do it that we can’t tell how it’d look like. So I wouldn’t rule out that it’d be based on some physical principles that allow a non-weaponizable spaceships.
Regarding the comparison to cars - I agree that it all depends on definition, but while there is some merit to the philosophy that “there are no wrong definitions” - bad definitions are certainly a thing. And a definition of “weapon” that includes regular cars is a bad one, because it misses out the important distinction between regular cars and armored vehicles with mounted guns.
And as for cars, like I said earlier, I am pretty much on the fence about it. I think we can look back into prehistoric times when people would throw rocks, and I think that it’s fair to say that these rocks were also weapons, but not that every rock is a weapon, but any rock can be a weapon if someone grabs it.
The same can be said for a spaceship; even if it isn’t it’s primary purpose, much like the rock, it has a high potential for destruction that can’t be ignored. A single interstellar spaceship probably has enough energy to boil all the water on earth without even pushing it.
it has a high potential for destruction that can’t be ignored.
I agree about that part, but only from a modern human’s perspective. We don’t have interstellar spaceships (even intrastellar travel is still a huge feat for humanity as a collective) so if such a spaceship from an alien civilization arrives here tomorrow, even if it’s a civilian one that was never intended to be a weapon - its operators could still cause us tremendous damage if they decide to use its power against us.
But let’s go back to cars. If you take a regular car to a small village of some lost tribe completely detached from civilization (for the sake of the argument, let’s assume that the ground is flat enough and solid enough to drive), you could probably use it to destroy the village. Take the same car to a modern city - and while you can still cause damage with it, it wouldn’t be as devastating since they know how to deal with cars and have the infrastructures and rules to safely deal with them. Bring a tank, however, and it’d be a different story.
I imagine a type 3 civilization would know how to deal with interstellar vehicles. Bring such a spaceship to one of its outposts - and it won’t be considered a weapon. Unless, of course, it happens to be one that’s actually designed to be a weapon.
Take the same car to a modern city - and while you can still cause damage with it, it wouldn’t be as devastating since they know how to deal with cars and have the infrastructures and rules to safely deal with them. Bring a tank, however, and it’d be a different story.
Just because a tank is a more powerful weapon than a car doesn’t invalidates a car as a weapon. You can take a brick and go on a smashing spree in a populated city, and they will stop you fairly quickly, take a machine gun and you will be able to hurt a lot more people with it. That doesn’t mean the brick isn’t a weapon when someone uses it to kill people, it’s just a different level of weapon.
And yes, a K3 civilization will not consider a 10^15 watt ship trying to attack it as an existential threat like a sub K1 civilisation will, but a modern military won’t find a guy with bow and arrow as a threat (unless he is Rambo), still, a bow is a weapon regardless. It won’t win a war, but it can still kill.
A bow is usually considered a weapon while a car isn’t, but the car has much more destructive power than the bow. It’s not the destructive power that makes something a weapon.
And a soft piece of sponge is also a weapon when you force it in someone’s throat. If you define “weapon” like this, almost anything is a weapon. You lose the distinction between a bow that was designed for killing and a brick which was designed for building.
But more importantly - if everything can be a weapon when used as such, then saying that an interstellar capable spaceship is a weapon says nothing about spaceships themselves or interstellar travel itself.
The Human OS is not ready to be without borders unfortunately. One day, after the last smog-filled breath of air is forcefully exhumed, and all the world’s treasures fail the last baron of wealth, we will be ready. As long as our hearts are wholly material, the world will stay the same.
We literally didn’t have borders as they exist today until a century ago lmao, they literally solidified around the formation of what we consider modern nation-states.
The human os isn’t ready for a borderless world my entire ass, the issue is the systems currently in place.
Go ahead and remove their states and countries. Most people would explode. Eventually thats the way. But take an honest look around. It wont happen today
Literally the free movement of people? Borders used to be “the zone of control of a government” and couldnt really exist as checkpoints for people moving back and forth over the border.
That feels like a distinction without a difference? The vast vast majority of physical land borders are effectively open everywhere worldwide still today.
The zone of control of a government just kicks you out if they don’t want you?
They couldn’t effectively police borders, so they didn’t. Technology and population density influences the way the state works and whether they could do borders as they existed in the 20th century and exist in the 21st century.
The argument isn’t against technology, it is saying borders as they are understood here are a relatively recent technology relying on other technologies
They’d kick you out and burn down your house or kill you for being an invader?
That is a complete anachronism, unless you actually were an invader. Have you actually researched this or are you just taking your assumptions and trying to apply them to history?
Presumably even though there were no border controls, they would kill you if you returned.
Honestly, I’m not sure what the fixation with a guy in a booth is about. Whether you get denied entry and they throw you out, or if they exile or ostracize you, what’s the difference?
Honestly, it seems the same. If a bar doesn’t want Jews in it and the bartender asks everyone if they’re Jewish or a bouncer at the door feels like a distinction without a difference.
There’s no additional liberty, the people who own the bar set the rules.
A light form was tribalism. If you didn’t go with the flow, you were expelled. With enough expelled ones, new tribes were formed. It kinda created human diversity for a while. There was only so much room on the river, so at some point more elaborate systems emerged. And the people with the biggest huts made those rules. Rules were made so that they could keep those huts. Extremely simplified.
We now don’t have places to banish people to. That’s why the cry for housing is emerging. Someone took the wild away. They should provide an alternative. I believe that’s the whole idea behind wanting the rich to pay. For some reason they were allowed to own everything. Often for centuries.
It makes little sense to people today. How was anyone allowed to walk somewhere, stake a claim, and own it forever? Even defending it with lethal force? Why aren’t we anymore?
We didn’t then either. The real issue is scale. What worked when the entire population of the human race was 100,000 doesn’t work when it’s 8,500,000,000.
You’re right that there are no wilds no, no one is getting 40 acres and a mule, and you can just inhabit a new area.
But let’s not forget that a lot of the stake a claim and defend with lethal force was literally colonialism. So many of those wilds were owned by other people, but the stronger guy with the bigger rock can kill him, take his land, take his wife.
Exactly the point I apparently failed to make. It never worked. Yet we are holding on to it. Just with the added caveat that the weapons are now money, and the wilds are gone.
Free to be poor (Includes: Threat of starvation, social shunning, homelessness, your entire life collapsing and you can be sure the state is still gonna put you into even more debt. Then put you into prison because you couldn’t pay up where you are coerced into slave labor)
Maybe they don’t live off of benefits, but they get massive tax benefits. In fact, the government loses way more revenue by not taxing billionaires properly than by helping homeless people.
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