> They were detained by Russian border troop officers while they were crossing the Russian border near the Chukotkan village of Uelen, for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry.
Illegal border crossing is absolutely not bureaucratic BS in any country.
I'm laughing at the lack of nuance in laws in general. Some guy crossed the Bering Straight on foot as part of a 27 year quest to walk around the world and the law makes no exception.
I remember as a teen being hauled into a police station because a friend and I had been exploring the storm drains ("sewers") with a home-made flame thrower (okay, so the movie "Alien" had recently come out… Yeah, we left the flamethrower behind in the sewer when we popped our heads out and saw police).
Someone in the neighborhood had called the police because she had seen us going down the manhole opening. (The police said the report came through that some kids had "fallen" into the sewers.)
So I'm sitting in the police station with good cop and bad cop sitting there musing over my case. "How about 'Failure to use a sidewalk when a sidewalk was available'," bad cop said as he read from a book he was paging through. That got a laugh all around…
To be completely fair, Russia did decide to make an exception in this case, although it took a couple of months (during which Bushby was detained) to get there.
I am a little bit torn in this case. From our vantage point it's obvious that Bushby wasn't running an elaborate long scam to get into Russia. In the moment... I don't know, former UK special forces guy? Long history of espionage between UK and Russia? Two months seems too long; it's also not as easy as your case of a teenager in the sewer.
Fair enough, but I interpreted "for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry" as he had a visa to enter the country, but he just didn't land at a recognized "port of entry", which given he walked/swam across the Being Strait, is unsurprising. But I don't know the full details of the situation.
This might be a little broad for most, but I find the whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty kinda tired. Who cares? We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
I'm saying this as someone who enlisted in the defense of said nations once. Most of the structures that make up a country these days are for the birds - let a guy hike for chrissake. I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense. We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history, and I don't see it petering out anytime soon. Plenty of people care, for all sorts of reasons, many of which I would say, are good!
> The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history,
Quite the opposite. The modern concept of "border sovereignty" as intertwined with the nation-state is a Westphalian construction. (Students of world history will recognize why this timing is not a coincidence). And even then, they didn't exactly catch on immediately.
Sovereign nation-states are a tiny piece of human history. They're not even the majority of recorded human history.
Not really. Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation, and neighboring tribes understanding which area was whose. Even nomadic tribes would be nomadic within a certain area, and jealously protect the area they would go to at the start of every spring, for example.
Even modern primates establish territories for their groups, and warn off and fight other primates attempting to encroach. So this general behavior is quite natural. The concept of open borders where anyone can just waltz in and live somewhere where they're not from or didn't marry into and haven't been invited -- that's actually the relatively newer idea, historically speaking.
I'm not arguing for more closed borders today, but I don't think we're should pretend that the historical human condition has somehow been "open".
If you're talking about "the freedom to escape one's surroundings and move away", the book has been widely criticized for that assertion, as Graeber is extremely ideologically motivated.
If you left your tribe without being accepted into another (whether through marriage or some kinds of previous personal alliances you'd made), life would be pretty rough if you survived at all.
Sure tribes would split sometimes when they got too big or disagreements split them. But that's not about the individual level. That's akin to nation-state secession today.
There's no evidence that people were just regularly packing things up and going off and joining whatever neighboring tribe they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And this is the type of thing where the book has come under such heavy criticism:
Been awhile since I've listened to the book (all cards on the table), so I can't be specific. Nor am I an expert in anyway. My takeaway is that the pre-historical Americas had many diverse ways of organizing people that doesn't quite match up to the implied-risk-game of territory that I was responding too.
In starting to read through some of the criticism's of the book just now, I was reminded of the seasonal hunting parties where many smaller groups would band together for better kills. That's what I mean with "tribal fluidity".
And by freedom of movement, the impression that I had coming away from the listen was that there were many ways in which someone could find themselves in a role where the could migrate through several communities and still live. looking at things again presently, I stumbled across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_tradition, which I think illustrates what I was trying to convey. "Border sovereignty" doesn't make much sense to me as a concept in that world... i think things were much more fluid. There weren't border checkpoints throughout prehistory.
I honestly have no idea what on earth the "fluidity" of groups banding together on hunting expeditions has to do with the notion of tribes occupying recognized geographic areas that they don't allow strangers to invade? I don't see any connection at all between the two.
There are definitely a lot of diverse ways of organizing people within a tribe.
And you're absolutely right that tribes could join forces to accomplish objectives. And the Hopewell tradition is mainly about trade and cultural dissemination -- of course trade involves traveling with goods to other tribes.
But none of that changes my point. Even if tribes allied for a purposes, they still had their distinct geographic areas. If if people traveled to other tribes to exchange goods, they were just visitors traveling through.
"Border sovereignty" was absolutely real, just as it is in primates. There weren't literal manned border "checkpoints", but you can be sure that as soon as a tribe got wind of a stranger approaching, they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary. The idea that the norm was that some stranger could just waltz in with their family and they'd be welcomed to stay and share the land is not supported by evidence.
(Even though that's definitely the anarchist ideology that Graeber was trying to push in his book, because that's exactly where he gets criticized for ignoring most of the evidence and cherry-picking examples.)
I don't think we will agree here. The statement that "The whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty has been with us for essentially all of human history" is not something I can get down with unless its better supported. The territory you are describing is not all the same thing as national territory to my mind, and your arguments are not convincing.
> they'd immediately investigate and either allow them in (if e.g. someone friendly temporarily traveling through) or send them back in the opposite direction with force if necessary.
Was there never the case that they investigated, saw that the strangers were floating down a river on the border of "their territory" and simply let them pass through unmolested? That doesn't happen today, and my intuition is that was simply so much space in the americas before recorded history that it happened often then.
I didn't say that the nationalism and border sovereignty that exist in 2025 are exactly what prehistoric humans practiced. That would obviously be absurd.
What I said was:
> Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation
In other words, we have the same instincts operating whether it's with a group of 300 people or 300,000,000. People occupy a geographic area and call it theirs and control who can live there. Many primates do the same.
And is your case of someone traveling down a river trying to contradict me? My example was of that being allowed if they weren't threatening. And the modern equivalent would be something like like a transit visa or connecting international airports.
I really don't know what you're arguing. We're not talking about people traveling anyways, the subject is whether tribes would just let random people come in and share their land. They didn't. They had a concept of group sovereignty, the same idea as national sovereignty, and of land they occupied.
If you want to insist that modern national sovereignty and borders drawn on maps are completely and utterly unrelated to tribal sovereignty and tribal borders -- if you don't see the obvious similarity, the same human group instinct and human territorial instinct -- then I really don't know what to tell you.
No, really. You could make a city be defended but there was no great way to make a nation state before gunpowder without natural barriers in place.
Further, trade goods are found over large distances, which doesn't work over large distances and many alleged single-tribe-lands unless the good is extremely valuable and defensible from theft.
Your claim that great powers style organization is specifically refuted.
Who said anything about nation-states or "great powers organization"? You're changing the subject entirely.
The original comment was about nationalism and borders, not nation-states and great powers.
I explained that the same concepts are found at the tribal level and even in primates. To occupy and defend your territory, and territory is defined by borders, even if they're just a river or the edge of a forest. And gunpowder has nothing to do with anything.
And I don't have the slightest idea what you're trying to say with trade goods.
So no, nothing I said is refuted. It would be helpful if you stuck to the subject at hand, however, without going off track entirely to modern nation-states. Nations are not the same thing as nation-states.
It's not just a human thing; people who study wolves find they maintain surprisingly strict borders between different packs, and this behavior continues though a lot of other mammals and even some smaller animals like certain birds and insects.
That's partially true; the bit about borders and human history (so long as you sequester 'history' to 'recorded history') - but nationalism is actually newer than you'd think, and there were human societies for thousands of years before there were borders. More recent if you go by the current definition of border (formalized, surveyed borders are also relatively modern).
Is nationalism going to peter out? No, of course not. Do some people care for reasons that are important to them? Sure, I don't want to tell anyone how to feel. I am just another jerk with an opinion like the rest of us.
But if you were to ask me, it's take it or leave it. I'd be more than happy to see free movement in the world. Just another set of rules I'm not using.
Yes, hard borders are far more recent than people think. As late as the First World War you could travel the world without so much as a passport.
But: back then only a handful of very rich people had the means to do that, and taxation and social protection were much lower than today. Those things are related. They (IMO of course!) are what make borders a pragmatic necessity.
The most obvious one is that the modern welfare state relies for its legitimacy on social cohesion, i.e. a certain base of shared values and identity. You will not get people to consent to heavy taxation and redistribution if they feel that their society is full of foreigners. This observation is perhaps more relevant to Europe than the USA.
And that's before mentioning the economics of funding a welfare state with a relatively static/shrinking tax base and growing, imported, welfare recipient class - the latter being practically unbounded in the case of illegal immigration.
The US (where “open borders” are often characterized as national “suicide” by right-wing figures) had open borders well within living memory.
By ship? No. But you’re from Argentina and made it all the way up to the Rio and want to cross to work on US farms or whatever? Yeah whatever man, totally fine, just walk in. Anyone from the Americas was welcome, no waiting, no la migra hunting them, no nothin’
We didn’t change that until the ‘60s, and the only reason it didn’t cause a ton of problems immediately (farms at that time were already heavily dependent on migrant labor operating a bit under the table, and their lobbies were not quiet on the issue) was that enforcement was and has been, at times (and especially at first) mostly rather half-assed.
> We were nomads before we settled in cities, and it's only the designs of the empowered few that ever made the idea compulsory.
Reasoning from pre-agrarian living patterns is, quite frankly, hippy nonsense. And no, we didn't settle in cities because of "the designs of the empowered few", but because agriculture leads to more permanent, prosperous settlements, which attract raiders, and settling close together allowed for common defense. In other words, as soon as people earned a living by their own planning and sustained effort, (as opposed to merely collecting the bounty of the earth) they settled down and drew borders to protect what they had built from people who wanted to just show up and reap the rewards of their effort, at their expense!
> I also lived where I could see Tijuana from my back yard and all the pearl clutching and self-fanning over "illegal immigrants" is a giant crock of blustery nonsense.
We can't have borders because you could see Tijuana from your back yard?
> We have bigger problems than normal folks just trying to live their lives.
Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
> Defending borders is the most basic function of the state. It quite literally does not have anything better to do than to defend its borders.
Fundamentally, everything in your post down to this ending boils down to whether or not you think that immigrants coming into the country is a good thing or not. People will try to split hairs over "doing it the right way," when until the 1900s doing it the right way was basically just having enough financial stability to make it here - many states had nothing beyond 'means testing' that would easily be passed if you could afford to make it to America rather than stowing away, and many states had less than that. For most of American history, immigrating properly was literally just showing up.
For the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants, the only difference between them and the legal immigrant is the amount of paperwork on file. And many of us arguing that that paperwork matters are beneficiaries of a time where that paperwork wasn't necessary.
It's very explicitly a case of "Fuck you, got mine."
You know, ideological differences aside, there are some brass-tacks reasons that this particular brand of rhetoric does you no good, and actually hurts you.
Bought groceries lately? Kind of expensive, no? A significant portion of that is due to the central valley labor shortage. Which is a direct result of ICE enforcement. Same goes for price increases in restaurants across the country. Those increases in prices at the grocery store also translate to inflationary pressure across the board. People have to spend more to eat, so they demand bigger salaries, so their companies raise prices. Not rocket science.
Which makes me wonder - what exactly do you think the value prop is, here? Are you directly benefitting from this or is it just a balm for some vague jingoist need to feel superior? I'm genuinely curious. The common arguments like 'they're importing rapists' is... well I don't even know where to start with that one it's just preposterous and demonstrably false. Immigrants aren't taking your job, are they? Like what is it?
> Which makes me wonder - what exactly do you think the value prop is, here?
I want to leave my country to my children and theirs. Whatever America would be after the endless waves of third world immigrants (most of whom are grasping collectivists who value none of the things that have made America worth preserving, and would happily neuter the bill of rights and tax every dollar out of my pocket) it would not be my country. Bored cat ladies and wishcasting liberals are apparently happy to roll the dice with the futures of our children on the line, but I'm not. Let Canada or the UK or whoever carry the experiment to its conclusion, and if it works, then by golly let's jump in with both feet. But a blind gamble? Hard pass.
Perhaps it would be different if I thought we had good faith partners on the other side, but I don't. Biden tried to bum-rush millions of illegals into the country with the full stated intent to amnesty them, enfranchise them, and use them to control the congress, admit new states (DC/PR), and cement permanent demographic-guaranteed progressive/collectivist majority. The democrats attempted most of these steps during his tenure, but were 1 vote short in the senate.
I was hesitant to even support deportations before the Biden regime jumped the shark. (Remember when they said we needed to pass a new law to "seal" the border--and explicit lie--when the law actually codified mass, unvetted illegal immigration at ~10X historical levels? I doubt it.) Knowing now that the left (the leadership, if not the rank and file) clearly intended to weaponize demographic change for their political benefit, of course I oppose them.
"I find the whole concept of nationalism and border sovereignty kinda tired."
Well, it looks we'll have some kind of global government within a couple of decades. It won't be better than what we have now, in fact it will be even less accountable.
That depends on your values. I think it's bureaucratic BS in every country. The world hasn't been like this forever, and still isn't like this for other animals.
If you enter a bear's den, especially if it has cubs, the bear will likely attack you.
If you enter the territory of a swan, especially during nesting season, the swan might attack you.
If a foreign object enters some animal's body, the immune system may attack that object.[0] Allergy might be related to the immune system misidentifying allergens.
Squirrels can be surprisingly territorial.
Ants have wars. [1]
This is not surprising, since the consequences of territory being compromised can be severe. For instance, in this case [2], the territory was compromised through deception, like pretending to be one of them, and it led to the severe weakening or death of the whole colony through the mass devouring of their offspring.
I agree, and one of their great concerns is keeping foreign spies from getting in. Even though Russia isn't in good graces with the world currently, I think it's I'll advised to go off-script with any nation's border checkpoints.
There are cases of pet dogs, having great relationships with their owners, eating the corpses of their owners after the owners died of some unrelated reasons. Possibly due to starvation in some cases.
In that video, was the ewe and lion cub pets or wild animals?
It was clearly a response to the grandparent's "... isn't like this for other animals". It's a fine thing to aspire to be better, but we just shouldn't be claiming that human behavior is any way less natural than that of all other animals.
One definition of "better" could be to seek to avoid the extinction of the human species and of civilization. With that definition, in the current situation, taking measures to help avoid nuclear weapon usage, could be considered in depth and genuinely "better".
You can also consider the subject in terms of IT. Firewalls can be argued to delimit territory, as can login systems. Sandboxes are probably the reverse, in terms of keeping something in instead of keeping it out.
Some cells have cell walls, and viruses as I understand it have to penetrate that wall.
Nuts and fruit sometimes have protective shells.
An argument could be made that borders and territory are fundamental.
For an agent that seeks to defeat border control mechanisms, it can potentially be effective to convince the target parties that border control mechanisms generally or specifically are harmful, are useless, or have drawbacks. This is not always completely false in all cases, for instance regarding immune systems misidentifying harmless allergens as harmful, causing potentially significant harm as allergy. However, if an agent uses such approaches, they have to be careful not to buy into that idea themselves, lest matters may become strange and weird. And, in the modern day, if an agent is especially successful and competent with defeating border control mechanisms, considering the extreme power that the human species holds these days, such as with nuclear weapons, it puts an extreme responsibility on such successful agents, at least in the current systems. Otherwise, the consequences might be extremely detrimental to the human species as a whole.
What an interesting set of increasingly bad metaphors.
IT defenses are just an existing human cognitive bias carried forward into a new realm… a bad idea carried forward is still a bad idea.
The cell wall of the vascular plants doesn’t exist to keep viruses (or anything) out, it exists to provide structural rigidity and keep water pressure in… in fact any plant without a sufficiently permeable cell wall dies as a consequence.
The virus in turn isn’t an agent at all, it just passively exploits the permeability of cell walls and membranes in order to replicate. In doing so it helps drive the cell’s evolution, by both acting as a pressure and a mutagen. Life, again, depends on information transfer across permeable membranes.
Nuts and other fruits, by the way, are the sexual apparatus of the plant… they don’t even begin to develop until a migration has occurred, and once they’ve developed their primary purpose is, again, to keep energy and water in more than they’re to keep anything out… in fact they universally fail to function if they’re too good at keeping the outside out.
People didn't receive handouts from governments in centuries past for just showing up and performing no contributory function. Kill all entitlements and let's open em' back up!
> still isn't like this for other animals
What reality are you living in where countless animal species aren't territorial? This is common sense.
I think many are tagged, but otherwise they have a lot of surveillance and fences. They probably track them after breeches as well. The point is to control disease.
In English it's "have enforced their borders for millennia"; the phrase "since [length of time]" is almost always grammatically incorrect and a giveaway that someone's not a native English speaker.
"Borders didn't exist before the treaty of Westphalia" is a hell of a take. If you want to stretch the State Sovereignty / Non-Interference aspect of it to that definition you're going to have to make your case properly, because I don't see how such a position could be defensible.
I am not convinced that the idea is recent, or rather, related ideas are not recent, going back thousands of years. It can be extremely complex, to put it very mildly. How well people that put their trust in some of those ideas fare, can likewise be an extremely complex topic, and can also be political. In some cases in some ways some of them might have fared well, in some other cases in some ways, maybe less so.
A group of men crossing the border into another country was (usually) automatically considered invaders if its size exceeded a certain number.
Eg Iberian Peninsula (Reconquista and later): Foreign parties >10 armed men could not cross without permission between christians and muslims.
Chinese frontier zones, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks etc all had similar rules. If you want to go back further, then Assyria, Egypt, Hittites, Greece had such limits.
You are correct that there are many examples of border control mechanisms, in different levels and ways. Maybe even usually the vast majority for many levels and ways.
Some nations, countries or groups, or other levels, did play with some of those mentioned ideas of less border control mechanisms in some ways or levels, also going back thousands of years.
Countries that were not successful with border control mechanisms, sometimes ceased to exist.
But there are many different levels and ways, and the whole topic is, to put it very mildly, extremely complex.
One must distinguish between "classical" communism (Stalinism, which is dead except in North Korea) and the modern variety, which is alive and well and I think is what you mean.
There are many that think themselves "cosmopolitan", when it is a delusion and coping mechanism about being a parochial hicklib. A chip on their shoulder that makes them especially fervent acolytes of liberalism (as in: Obama flavoured, not the other kind), hoping it offsets their humble origins after moving to the big city, so folks won't get the idea that they are flyover country chuds that vote the wrong way.
A cosmopolitan, as in one that truly knows the different cultures and people of the world because he has deep first hand experience, or has read so much that it allows to draw some independent form of conclusion, is either a strong proponent of borders or a fool.
The core tenet that makes this communism-adjacent is the denial of differences: everyone is equal, "no one is illegal" etc pp. Ignorance of history and the nature of man is a must to take this position.
> A cosmopolitan, as in one that truly knows the different cultures and people of the world because he has deep first hand experience, or has read so much that it allows to draw some independent form of conclusion, is either a strong proponent of borders or a fool.
This is the most incredible No-True-Scotsman fallacy I've ever read.
This is not "how I feel" or my actual opinion of liberals in general. It is a certain archetype that I unfortunately know all too well.
> This but unironically.
You can just say you're a communist, you know. The core tenet will always be some appeal to equality, no matter how you like to describe yourself ("socialist", "liberal", "a decent heckin' human being" in Reddit speech or what have you).
Yeah, although it used to be that if you were legal to enter the US you actually could do it anywhere, just report to the local officials as soon as practical. That's still how ships work, you have to enter a country's territorial waters before you can speak to an official.
Neither the US nor Canada does that now, effectively slicing the Pacific Coast Trail at the border. And now we have the scumbags for no good reason blocking off access to the southern terminus of the Continental Divide Trail. That fence isn't going to stop someone trying to sneak into the country!
> They were detained by Russian border troop officers while they were crossing the Russian border near the Chukotkan village of Uelen, for not entering Russia at a correct port of entry.
Illegal border crossing is absolutely not bureaucratic BS in any country.