• Raphaël A. Costeau@lemmy.mlEnglish
    345·
    5 months ago

    CN lawmakers pass bill that questions US’s claims over Hawaii

    Imagine if that was the headline…

    The problem is that any claim by the United States to any territory is infinitely more absurd than China’s claim to Tibet. I used Hawaii as an example, but it could be Puerto Rico, Alaska, Texas, California, New Mexico, all the way to the entire country that has been despoiled of its indigenous population.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
      124·
      5 months ago

      Imagine if that was the headline…

      Well that headline would be pretty damn accurate!

      all the way to the entire country

      China is no different. In fact there are NO countries in the world immune to the “you displaced a previous civilization” argument. They’ve all done it.

      • Raphaël A. Costeau@lemmy.mlEnglish
        101·
        5 months ago

        In fact there are NO countries in the world immune to the “you displaced a previous civilization” argument. They’ve all done it.

        Yet, some did it much more recently than others, and many of the peoples they stole from still exist and are still being exploited (not China-Tibet case). At the very least, one would expect countries not to go around questioning the legitimacy of other countries’ territories when their own have no legitimacy at all.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
      71·
      5 months ago

      Nation states are memetic egregor, they only exist as long as we believe in them.

      Like Santa Claus

      Creating disbelief can be as functionallity effective at state dissolution as cracking open the skulls of those who believe in it

      • Raphaël A. Costeau@lemmy.mlEnglish
        71·
        5 months ago

        Every aspect of human society exists because we, as a society, believe in them, including society itself. The very tools we use to measure the world beyond man are human fabrications. However, the maintenance of a social model does not necessarily depend on all its members believing in or agreeing with it, only on continuing to work for it. Cultural, social, and physical constraints exist and are very real. For example, it was common a few years ago in the “Free Palestine” online community to say that Israel is not real, but this statement has never stopped any of Israel’s oppressive actions from happening. Understanding that all systems are fabricated is a fundamental step towards the possibility of replacing them with better systems, but for this to happen, realization needs to evolve into organized action: the only tool capable of changing the world. And yes, it is only possible to replace one system with another, and it is not possible to live without a system, because what makes us human is precisely this characteristic: we created the social system to overcome the evolutionary system.

        And to rationalize the world we live in, we create rules to legitimize our other creations. We can use any factors to generate these rules, but to avoid chaos, we agree, in materialism, to use historical, cultural, and economic factors to justify the control of a territory by a nation state. Considering these factors, in a comparative sense, the control of the United States over any of its constituent territories is much more illegitimate than the control of Tibet by China. Does this mean that we should dismember the United States and return its territories to their original owners? No, it means that someone who believes that China should grant independence to Tibet should also advocate for the dismemberment of the United States. Since in this case the decision came from the United States government, which, I imagine, has no intention whatsoever of dismembering the United States, we can conclude that the only motivation for this is to antagonize China, and it does not stem from a concern for the right of peoples to self-determination.

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
          1·
          5 months ago

          This a fantastic nuanced answer. It does start to go off the rails near the part where you assert china territorial claim over USA’s. And when you say collective action is the only way, which, if I am not mistaken is a core authleft belief.

          I think all states and cancerous egregors on the human psyche with varying levels of malignancy.

          Even as they make my living conditions possible, I despise them. Especially the part where you correctly identify that not all humans under the egregor’s control are required to believe abd support it for it to continue existing and imposing its will on humanity.

          Yes, as long as enough believers enacts its decrees it will endure.

          I think what I meant earlier, is that ideas that can dispell this state if belief, can be as effective at cause the egregor’s remission as bombs are at kinetically dismantling it. Maybe even more.

          I do take special exception with your notion that these egregors come into being out of conscious and renewed informed consent. Rather I believe they arise out of historical and material contingency and persist through friction, self-reinforcement and passive failure of imagination for an alternative by the population.

          • Raphaël A. Costeau@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            And when you say collective action is the only way, which, if I am not mistaken is a core authleft belief.

            It’s a core Marxist observation, based in history. Every system that has ever fallen has fallen because of the organized action of a class or a set of classes, not necessarily in a party, since the very notion of a party is extremely recent, but organization in some form. It’s a process that is always violent, usually doesn’t happen all at once and may not be definitive, but that’s how things have happened so far. There’s no evidence that it will happen the way you think it will, but honestly, good luck with that. It would be great if we could move to a fairer system without all the burden of having to organize and having to respond to reactionary violence in the same level.

            I do take special exception with your notion that these egregors come into being out of conscious and renewed informed consent.

            I don’t know exactly what in my answer led you to the conclusion that I think so, but that’s not the case. In my opinion, these “egregors”, which I call ideologies, arise according to the need that material conditions require. As material conditions change, mainly because of the sophistication of the means of production, new ideologies emerge from the new socioeconomic conditions produced by this change.