Ok, sounds like we don’t have to put so much energy into policing them then.
Most countries dont but there are exceptions to the norm
Call me smudges but I read that as “executioners on the moon” and I thought it was terrifying but also a bit metal
all the executioners failed because the moon ate them.
I imagine that the wolves put nonzero hours into it
Do they?
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wby always with the wolves?
I feel like theres a movie to be made about the yellow wolf that went deep into red territory.
Look you can either have borders or toilets. Pick one.
In that case, is it even a border if people aren’t frequently peeing all along it?
Surveyor stakes are the equivalent to peeing on a tree these days.
And at our core for millions of years we have been pack animals like the wolf or lion or sheep. Lemmy is filled with packs and tribes that will defend their “territory” by expulsion anyone that disagrees with the pack strongly enough. Just as humans have done for those same millions of years.
I read a study that showed that behavior varies by sex. Women are more likely to exclude an individual from a group while men are more likely to accept almost anyone into the group but just force the ones they view as undesirable to the bottom of the social hierarchy
I guess that’s why Parisians are so patriotic.
Why do you think I drink so much water?
The draft but you’re sent to the Canadian/Mexican border to pee on the border line
“… and that’s how I got arrested by border control.”
Checkmate, anarchists!
why?
It is a mutual agreement between wolves and other wolves, in order to manage territory and avoid over hunting. They don’t force other animals to comply. they don’t force other animals to pay taxes to maintain it. There isn’t one king wolf drawing those borders.
Borders are trees covered in pee.
Sigh Unzip. If that’s what I’ve got to do to carve out some space, then so be it!
Welcome to Border Peetrol.
Paw Peetrol
Maintaining healthy trees with urine covering with federal employee benefits and a government pension sounds like a dream job.
No doubt they’d find a way to make it a bureaucratic nightmare of a job. But I’m down.
those aren’t borders, those are territories arrived at by wolves interacting with each other and deciding to keep the peace. has nothing to do with formal borders imposed on us by states
You just described a border.
Hint : the important part here is deciding, instead of imposed. If i go camping in a field, there is no border between me and my neighbor, but we will tend to hang around our own tents more. This is built on nothing more than will, as opposed to borders.
Now imagine that 8.3 billion people are trying to pitch their tents all around you. You’re going to have to work out something formal with your neighbors to make sure all these tent groups fit.
Heh, debatable. Depends on the surface available, how many of them are already organized in campers groups, the definition of formal, etc. But i’ll concede you the point, for it’s not the matter here anyway, neither in the meme nor in the comment.
has nothing to do with formal borders imposed on us by states
You mean the territories arrived at by entities who interact with each other and decide to keep the peace as an abstract representation of those residing within them?
Yeah it’s the abstract representation that’s the problem. I didn’t consent to this BS.
so the borders of the US were agreed upon by entities who decided to keep the peace, not established by war and genocide? the borders of several African states were not set by colonial violence? the border between Russia and Ukraine is being “renegotiated” and not fought over? Israel “renegotiating” with Lebanon?
there’s a big difference between populations who come to agreements with each other and states who do things for power.
Why are you acting like I said the word “negotiate”? I said “arrived at”; the means – friendly cooperation, terrain, a myriad individualist agreements, threat of brutal violence – are irrelevant to the overall point that the wolves have very obviously formed borders. Israel and Russia are no longer keeping the peace, hence they’re actively dissolving the borders and redrawing them to whatever they can arrive at through military and geopolitical force.
I’ll be one of the first people who’ll tell you that animals experience real thoughts and emotions and have real, deep, complex bonds with their fellow animal. I’m sure these wolves’ borders developed along natural formations, inherent population limits, intimidation, etc., and you’d have to be delusional to think these are totally divorced from the means by which states form borders.
You’re treating this as an argument that borders are inherently good when the argument is that no true Scotsmanning the wolves is fucking bullshit. And if “keeping the peace” involves no (relatively) small-scale, cross-border violence, then I’d like to raise a point about wolves.
you said “decide to keep the peace” which I provided counterexamples against. I shorthanded that as “negotiate” but you can just sub in your exact language and the point stands.
i don’t deny the social abilities of wolves. i don’t even claim that there are zero similarities between social boundaries and formal borders. what im doing is pointing out that borders formed by the institution of the state are fundamentally different from social boundaries adopted by people, wolves, or any being capable of negotiating them.
my motivation here is to undermine the idea that national borders are “natural”, which tends to legitimate them in many people’s minds, like the meme in this post tries to do. I want to undermine that because i believe it isn’t true and because there are fundamentally better ways to organize society.
which I provided counterexamples against.
Your counterexample showed two countries deliberately not keeping the peace by actively disrespecting and changing the borders what the fuck are you talking about. Borders are dynamic (do I even need to say that? are we in 4th grade here?), and they’re extremely often created through violence; nevertheless, borders stabilize when the parties decide to stop fighting. Even the DMZ dividing North and South Korea is static on the basis that total war awaits the country that violates it. Two parties do not have to be content with a border for it to be a border.
If I meant “keeping the peace” in some kumbaya fantasy sense with no skirmishes or threat of violence, then there would be no parallel to the wolves, because need I reemphasize: we are talking about wolves.
my motivation here is to undermine the idea that national borders are “natural”
And clearly the fuck they are, because here we are in a reality where borders exist and are enforced. Humans are not separate from nature. The meme is making fun of an appeal to nature, but it’s nevertheless not accepting it as a precondition to support borders. It’s saying even if your argument is stupid enough as “it’s unnatural”, it still makes no sense on its own terms. If you want to argue borders are bad, make an argument that borders are bad; if you want to make an argument that they’re unnatural, 1) you’re provably wrong and 2) even if you weren’t, you’re doing nothing to support your case to anyone rational.
i cited wars as counterexamples against peace. if that doesn’t make sense to you, im not sure we can have a productive conversation.
i completely agree that humans are part of nature. So if you like, everything we do (and everything that occurs ever) is “natural” because everything is part of nature, but that’s a fairly useless definition. we also do some relatively unique stuff, too, that is not mirrored by other animals. Nation states are not the same as wolf packs or bonobo societies or whale pods.
the most important difference here is that nations have institutions (such as a border) that exist despite the actual relationship of the people on those borders. the people on both sides of the Berlin Wall didn’t want it to be there. The people who live in Beebe Plain, a town divided by the US-Canada border, have much more in common with their neighbors than the politicians in Washington DC and Ottawa who make decisions for them. this is not the same as pack membership setting territory boundaries, this is control from a distance by strangers.
anyway this has been interesting, im gonna get on with my day.
i cited wars as counterexamples against peace.
If your argument is that borders are unnatural because they’re dynamic according to a complex web of interactions, then I’d like to sample whatever meth your ecology professor has been sharing with you.
If your argument is that an uneasy peace enforced by threat of violence isn’t keeping the peace, then I’ll point you back to what the other person initially said about wolves “keeping the peace”.
LOL
While it is nice in theory to eliminate all national borders, it’s not one wolf but a wolf pack. The pack is deciding democratically to respect the border of another pack.
Saying borders are “imposed by the state” is like a cub who ignores the pack, wanders into America and gets torn apart by nasty Americans.
The “state” is people.
the state is an organization that includes a tiny minority of people who get to command and control the greater population. you can argue that its power is legitimate because of elections if you want, but it is not the same as the people. meanwhile, the wolves don’t experience that kind of government.
I mean we’re on Lemmy in /c/sciencememes, i.e. (pedantic fuckweasels)² 😆
well clearly someone is psyoped into believing wolves are part nature
“Territoriality” implies defense of an area, and many researchers create maps that help graphically illustrate the range, or territory, of a given wolf pack.
However, the area defended is not as clearly defined as a map may indicate. Territory shifts can occur seasonally or year to year.
Also notable is that neighboring territories may overlap. However, while the same area may be used by several packs, use will not occur at the same time.
In Prometheus Rising, the comparison between politicians eking out borders is compared to animals rubbing feces and piss on trees.
Borders defined by conflict, competition for resources, in-groups and out-groups. We’re all the same thing and evolution defines it.
The modern notion of nation States, with clearly defined borders, and mechanisms of violence to enforce them, only arose around the 17th century.
Wolves don’t build border walls, have customs checkpoints, or leave refugees to drown in the Mediterranean.
This isn’t a “science meme”, it’s a falacious attempt to cloak reactionary rhetoric in the garb of scientific rigor.
Wolves don’t build border walls, have customs checkpoints, or leave refugees to drown in the Mediterranean.
Might as well show plant tissues with defined cell walls and say “borders are natural”.
Only a half truth. Borders may have been loosely defined but they were absolutely defended with violence. You couldn’t wander in and hunt in your neighbors woods, take their timber or set up a farm too close. Hell, sometimes they even had well defined natural borders or walls (see: Hadrian’s wall, the great wall of China)
Moving through an area in large numbers might draw a violent response and you might be coerced to leave if you spoke the wrong language or dressed the wrong way. If you were an unknown group of strangers they may well let your boat sink or leave you to starve outside their walls. Modern states have simply codified these reactions into law.
Proto-states and the associated mechanisms developed extremely quickly once sedentary agriculture became dominant. If your entire livelihood is tied to a field of grain you no longer get to run or hide from conflict; controlling who can and can’t get near it becomes imperative.
But you absolutely could just move in to some village in Africa or North America or even some city in Mesopotamia or India for a very long time. At least according to The Dawn of Everything
Borders weren’t even loosely defined.
In 49 BC the Rubicon river was a clearly defined border between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy itself. Crossing the river was such a momentus decision that we now have the phrase “Crossing the Rubicon” to mean making a decision that you can’t go back on. So, borders have been clearly defined for at least 2000 years.
Only a half truth. Borders may have been loosely defined but they were absolutely defended with violence.
Yes, but the means by which that state violence was organized and carried out often looked very different. Obviously there was some sort of distinction between medieval lordships or what have you, but the organizational form of the modern nation state wasn’t codified until the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the 30 years war. This was co-constitutive with the enclosure of common land, and the birth of modern capitalist property relations.
But the nitty gritty details are besides the point. The main thing I’m stating in my comment is that OP is making a falacious appeal to nature. As though a dog pissing on a rock somewhere says anything at all about how humans should conduct border policy.
I pee on things when I walk around the farm
Is this what enlightenment is?
For the Things? Yes.
I’m so gassy I’m not allowed around open flames without an adult anymore.
