Man this is really getting into the weeds. I don’t have those histories in my head well enough to talk about specifics like that. (Though I do appreciate all that you wrote. It is interesting to read.)

If you’re an anarchist, I cannot imagine how a western religious institution propping up a fascist regime’s military dicatorship over half the old nation’s territory benefits you in any way.

Me either.

I’m pretty sure the main focus is just about the abstract idea of a group wanting to leave a larger group.

How on earth does this benefit any kind of anarchist cause?

Secession is anarchist in the sense that it rejects and fractures a dominant power in favor of one that better represents folks. So not full anarchist, but definitely more in that anarchist than restricting that ability.

Secession is a tool. Of course there are going to be bad examples, but that doesn’t mean it’s never justified and never a good way forward.

What if you had just been annexed? Not allowed to try and leave?

I would not call splitting the baby progress.

Not when you put it like that! Lol

Vietnam, for instance, wasn’t liberated through division. It had to be reunited before either half was free from civil war. Same with Germany. Or Korea, for that matter.

In those instances splitting may have been an important step forward even if it wasn’t the final step. (I don’t remember the context that well for those examples) (I looked it up, at least in Vietnam, idk how you expected them to go forward without splitting given all of the external pressure.)

I think the world will always be in flux. Do you think we’ll eventually just have a static set of countries with static borders and all of the people will be happy? If so, I’d love to hear why. If not, then by what actions do you suppose those nations change to deal with ever evolving groups, environment, genes, etc? Why would secession be particularly worse than other options?

For example, I’m not so sure the legitimacy of North Korea is affirmed by the existence of south Korea more than it is affirmed by their allies (China, Russia, etc). Why would we focus on South Korea seceding more than other countries supporting?

I really appreciate your tone. A lot of folks are (reasonably) offended with the framing.

I’m curious how those debates went. I see the utility of the union, but we’ve definitely also seen the tyranny of it. You definitely wouldn’t get the states to become the union if they were all split right now.

What proportion of Texan’s incarcerated population is forced to labour for next to no salary again?

This would be my first time actually.

Hint: no.

I always appreciate the hints.

Slavery is alive and well in the USA, and Texas is one of its largest users thereof now. So yes, I think the average modern Texan secessionist would be pro-slavery … because they already are.

Yeah I didn’t really consider their prison population, solid point. Prison slavary is bad. Though I think it is good to note scale differences. Both are bad, it’s just that slavery was much much worse in the past.

According to https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm

During slavery in the US about 1/3 of folks in the south were slaves. Compared to the 0.4% of today in Texas that’s pretty staggering.

So yeah, I’d go far enough to say that the average Texan isn’t pro-slavery in the sense that immediately hits my mind. Enough belive prison labor though, so you can’t say the aren’t pro slavery.

That is a strange project. It makes me uneasy. Thanks for sharing.

From the website:

For Texas by Texans, TXC is a fast & inexpensive mineable blockchain-based cryptocurrency designed for generations of honest trade.

Lmao, I’ve not seen any crypto do anything like “honest trade”. The main uses are rug pulls and drug purcheses from my understanding.

Rejecting the authority of a monarch is very different than putting up hard borders along an arbitrary line of demarcation and reinforcing residency by birthright.

I’d say progress is progress, even if it isn’t perfect. Large scale coordination is more difficult than smaller scale stuff.

Secession, in this instance, affirms the rights of the monarch at a distance.

I can see this, but it also relives the residents that succeeded. Gives them a safer place to build infrastructure.

Obviously it didn’t work. But more because neoliberalism valued trade over civil rights and private profit over public prosperity.

Yeah that kinda stuff is my lack of optimism. If inegalitarian systems come together to decide on law for the world, then we may not get good laws.

I think there is a lot of local work to do before I am confident in a global order. If we had systems that represent us well, then combining them to set global standards would rock.

This is the principle of Constitutional governance. Power isn’t embodied in an individual, it is a social contract between all residents.

Inequality is on the rise globally, and has been for a few decades. So that social contract is being negotiated by parties on increasingly uneven ground. Therefore this statement is not calming to me. Lots of people agree to bad deals every day.

Edit: BTW thanks for sharing your views, I know I can sound kinda spicy at times when debating. We both obviously just want folks to have comfortable lives.

(Disclaimer slavery bad, I think I haven’t spend enough time saying that in this post)

On the topic of secession and global citizenship: As an anarchist I disagree that secession is inherently problematic. It all depends on how governance works in the state. Leaving could make a lot of sense with a monarchy for example.

I think a central authority regulating global citizenship could work out. But to me centralization means having one big point of failure. Less people to bribe to make sweeping changes. (Ergo Trump)

If there isnt a centralized authority then ‘global citizenship’ would mean different things in different states, so it wouldn’t give everyone the same rights, and may not be followed at all. I can’t imagine coordinating the whole world, but maybe I’m not optimistic enough.

Yo that is curious. I see Russia pop up so much in reading about different secession movements.

I wish they weren’t all right wing movements. When do the anarchist get to run the secession.

Yeah totally. Do you think your average modern Texan secessionist would be pro-slavery? I imagined they were just hard core status quo preserving capitalists (so slavery light I’ll admit).

That scares the hell out of me too.

I just happened to read about the bill and had a thought and posted it.

I guess I’ll work on considering you and being more of a perfectionist. Lemmy needs that. There’s too much content as there is. /s

Edit: okay I get I was poking back pretty hard. Definitely a bit of a lash out. Sorry.

Well I have a vague understanding of it. I read through the Wiki and a lot of the reasoning in recent years seems to align

According to its website, the objective of the Texas Nationalist Movement is “the complete, total and unencumbered political, cultural and economic independence of Texas”.

During the rally, many in the crowd began to chant “secede, secede”, to which Perry remarked, “If Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?”

After US president Barack Obama won the 2012 US presidential election, bumper stickers and signs saying “secede” started to appear in Texas

Basically: we don’t like what’s going on with the federal government and would like to not be bound by them.

I mean I generally disagree with their specific politics, but I get wanting to leave when you feel bound up / forced to do things that you think near no one in your state would vote for.

I know I didn’t touch on original reasoning, but I really only care about what’s been going on recently. So I skipped to stuff in the last 25 years. I’m not trying to talk to folks from the past.

We all see inequality rising. So, yeah, the forces driving inequality are stronger than those driving equality right now.

I was paraphrasing Capital in the Twenty First Century. Knowledge diffusion is consistent, and it definitely decreses inequality. Its also been happening for all of history. As well, it is hard to remove diffused knowledge from a population.

That’s what I mean when I say:

… the diffusion of knowledge has been one of the most stable and powerful drivers of equality throughout history.

I left out that the drivers of inequality can be much stronger, but I wanted to talk about the part I was optimistic about. I am told from every friend and media outlet that inequality is rising. OP seemed to be more down lately so I wanted to share something nice.

I love how much knowledge we have at our disposal. If we can accumulate generational knowledge on how to navigate such a dense information landscape then I think we’ll be fine.

We just don’t know what to do with all this info and how to protect ourselves from needless outside influence.

My big optimism is that the diffusion of knowledge has been one of the most stable and powerful drivers of equality throughout history.