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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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No they haven't. There is no state for which that has ever been true.

Is there an example of a state not being allowed to do as it pleased, up to the point where one or more other states disagreed (by kinetic or economic force), or its own people decided to reform it? There's no World Police to arrest rogue states, and plenty of ongoing, if not universally agreed-upon, crimes against humanity.

or its own people decided to reform it

This is what I mean when I say they can't do whatever they want.

There was in the nineteenth century, although their jurisdiction only ran within gunboat range of navigable waterways.

There is currently a hilarious social media row going on in the UK, that began with Nigel Farage saying he would cut off visas to citizens of countries demanding slavery reparations. It turned out that the British Green party officer responsible for campaigning around reparations for slavery and colonialism is a direct descendent of the last Oba of Lagos, who was deposed in 1851 by the West Africa Squadron (with the dynasty retaining most of its wealth) because he wouldn't stop selling slaves (mostly to Brazil by this point).

So the Green Party's campaign for British taxpayers to pay reparations for slavery is led by the descendant of a slaver, who personally benefitted from slavery more directly than any white Briton now living.

This is the whole idea of a "failed state", no? How reliably have the states of Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, or Haiti been able to do as they please with their "own" people in their "own" territories? Just because our international order assumes the abstraction that every piece of territory belongs to some state with a monopoly on violence within it doesn't make it so. Plenty of places retain pre-state or non-state structures (tribes, clans, gangs, etc) that are more relevant to the individuals living there than the nominal state is. States are an emergent phenomenon, not the ground of political reality.

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