I disagree vehemently with the assertion that the state is a modern invention. Humans have organised themselves into states for the vast majority of human history. The earliest examples of writing were state records. In fact, to my knowledge, there are no ancient civilisations who (1) have developed writing and (2) did not organise themselves into states. Ancient Egypt, Sumner and Mesopotamia, Ancient China—all of the earliest known civilisations in recorded history—had states, the basic function of which has remained unchanged throughout history. They had rulers or bodies that created laws, collected taxes, raised armies to maintain their power and fight other states, and enforced their laws on their subjects.

While the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois Confederacy was certainly known to the writers of the US Constitution, we know for a fact what their inspirations were, without needing to speculate, because they produced a large body of essays defending and explaining their reasoning. These are the Federalist Papers. You may have heard of them. We know that the writers draw inspiration from primarily European sources, such as the English Bill of Rights, the operation of the Roman Republic and of Athenian democracy, and of documents like the Magna Carta.

Do you believe we are at or past that point?

It is not, but I think that discussion about democracy in cultures that don’t organise themselves into states is very informative because those societies basically have to be democratic. A state apparatus that can enforce its will is what allows a state to be non-democratic in the first place. If there is no state, people who don’t like it can just leave.

Have not learned about the four stages of human population growth rukd

Background: The US Constitution was a document that united thirteen different countries into a single one. Previously, the thirteen colonies turned states banded together to fight the British but the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation, wasn’t really a constitution; it was a treaty establishing an organisation to coordinate them. That organisation was the “United States in Congress Assembled”, which functioned more as a diplomatic conference than a legislature, hence the term “congress”, also used in terms like “Congress of Vienna”. This organisation had no executive or judicial power. Compliance with its decrees was essentially voluntary. The Declaration of Independence is titled “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America…”. Note that “united” is not capitalised, because it is not part of a proper noun (“Declaration” and “States” are capitalised following an old English convention that capitlaises every noun). They are thirteen independent states that happen to be united for the purpose of this declaration.

That being said, the Philadelphia Convention that wrote the US Constitution did so clandestinely. The Convention was called to suggest changes to the Articles of Confederation, not write a new constitution and establish a new federal state. To keep their work secret, they shut the windows to the State House where they worked despite it being in the middle of summer in a time before air conditioning.

As the thirteen states were, at the time, functionally independent countries, they could not be forced to abide by a constitution that they did not agree to. Many southern states had agricultural economies that relied on slave labour. Slaves were valuable property to those who owned them and the men who did were usually rich, powerful, and influential. It’s understandable why they were not willing to give that up, even if it meant defying the idea of “liberty” that they fought for.

This was a cause of much squabbling in the Philadelphia Convention between delegates from northern states, which were not reliant on slave labour, and delegates from southern ones, which were. This resulted in the infamous three-fifths compromise, allocating representation in the US House of Representatives according to population, counted as the number of free people plus three-fifths of the number of slaves (the used the term “other persons” as a euphemism for this). Indigenous people were explicitly excluded from the count as well. Franchise was determined according to state law, which gave southern states the power to withhold suffrage from slaves.

This was considered agreeable to southern states and acceptable to northern states. Thus, when all thirteen states ratified the US Constitution, they permanently signed away their sovereignty and became a part of the United States of America, a new country.

You are correct, actually. Not sure why you are downvoted. Several traditional tribal government structures of indigenous peoples were much more democratic in form.

However, besides the Iroquois Confederacy, it’s hard to consider them as being sufficiently organised to be considered a state in the traditional sense. This isn’t meant to exclude all indigenous governments; the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca civilisations were all examples of (non-democratic) highly organised states, especially in comparison to the North American tribes around and after European contact.

The best and most effective way to break people out of the fascist doom-spiral is to block all channels of information that make them mad and whose purpose is to arouse feelings of rage, as you have suggested, and instead push them towards things that make them happy.

I remember one Reddit user said that they blocked all the right-wing Facebook groups on their grandfather’s computer, and then subscribed him to golfing and fishing groups instead, which over several months caused him to be a happier and less politically extreme person, whereas before, politics was all he thought about.

…which was remarkably liberal for its time.

You’ve basically just excluded ninety per cent of the Internet from being used. And it’s not surprising that this is coming from someone with an account on the lemmynsfw instance.

If everyone followed your logic, you wouldn’t even be posting this because your instance would have been defederated a long time ago to not lose users.

Work culture, especially in the US, is very conservative. The fact that you don’t understand that it’s better to be more conservative here regardless of consensus is astounding. Understand that the NSFW flag is a curation tool. You seem to think it’s a form of censorship. It’s purpose is to deal with the ten per cent on the far end of the spectrum who would take offence. And if your retort is that the majority shouldn’t have to accommodate the minority, that’s just a terminally online opinion that fails to recognise the fragility of real human interaction. It’s analogous to saying that bridge engineers shouldn’t have to accommodate the heaviest ten per cent of vehicles when figuring out what its maximum load should be when accomodating “most” vehicles is enough and that those vehicles should either lighten their load or find an alternate route.

I’m not going to argue with you over this because I don’t believe you have the foundational understanding of why things are what they are.

This is a facetious argument and you know it.

The scenario you described would not be breaking in.

Terms and conditions being agreed to are not relevant for this purpose. An exposed API is one that is welcome to be exploited. If you’re not requiring an API key, you’re essentially saying “This API is free for anyone to use” for security purposes, regardless of what you say in the terms and conditions.

Try showing it off at work. Set it as the wallpaper on your work computer and see how “safe for work” it is then.

Still clearly not safe for work.

Of course it’s stealing. But they didn’t break in.

Hacking = breaking in

Data breach = stealing stuff

For normal users with a sufficient amount of RAM, is there any real reason to even have a swap file or swap partition? Or why shouldn’t they have one and set the swappiness to zero?

Breaking off diplomatic relations is usually a very extreme measure. In the tradition of diplomacy, it is the most serious action a country can take to express its disapproval of another besides declaring war. It might be justified but it won’t be taken because the Chinese government offends extremely easily and would retaliate in kind with trade sanctions and embargoes.

If world leaders actually had the stock to stand up to China, their next move would be to say “One more fuck up and we recognise the Republic of China on Taiwan as the legitimate government of China”.

Daily reminder to check out some local credit unions. They offer the same services as banks and are run as a not-for-profit charity. Most US credit unions are members of the Co-Op ATM network which allows you to use any other credit union’s ATMs for no fee as if they were your own. Some also reimburse out-of-network ATM fees and even pay interest on checking/current accounts. Their fees are usually the same or lower than banks.

Finally, something for the Americans to laugh at Europeans about

Intelligence agents usually enter on diplomatic passports solely so that their country can claim diplomatic immunity to fish them back out.