this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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Why do you say that?
Borders are intrinsic to humanity? Citation extremely needed.
In the US, we had open borders for a long time, and there are many places in the world currently that don’t have border controls. Capital flows freely around the world, why shouldn’t people be allowed to?
And respectfully, you don’t know the extent of my activism based on one meme I shared. I advocate for many things. And for what it’s worth, I think it’s more likely that strict borders would be a contributing factor leading to a WWIII. All the more reason to get rid of them.
Ellis Island opens in 1892, over a century after the USA were created. There were no federal immigration controls before that. States handled arrivals loosely, if it all. Most migrants simply got off their boat and stayed.
During its first decades, Ellis Island was not a modern border control but rather a filter for contagious disease and extreme incapacity (eg. they didn't want sick or handicapped people, only able bodied workers). Admission rate was 98%, it was triage motivated by stopping the recurring pandemics in the dense urban environment of NYC.
US border control starts in 1921-1924 with the quota acts, although you could arguably say the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act is the real birth of it (that act did not come with the means to enforce it though).
Aristide Zolberg's "A Nation by Design" goes through all of this. Read it and educate yourself instead of making a fool of yourself on the Internet. I must once again insist that you stop discussing history online. You will get clowned for it.
Apparently they're successfully deploying Cunningham's Law to get their education.
Would be the case if they were able to read/understand.
They seem to just be stubborn and dumb.
Oh friend. I suggest you educate yourself, you don’t know how wrong you are.
The Wikipedia article on “ History of immigration and nationality law in the United States”
"Give me your" immigration guards.
That's how it went, right?
/s
I suggest dropping the fallacies that bind you in such a tizzy. I suggest cease creating self-sabotaging pre-requisites to progress.
There's a BIG gap between open borders and "no borders and world in harmony". The U.S. had relatively open borders with Canada and Mexico, like, 50 years ago.
Also, why did you believe that borders are intrinsic to humanity? To my knowledge we've managed to live without them for the VAST majority of human history
Being tribal is intrinsic to humanity, but that doesn't imply borders. Borders are a social construct and product of the state, they aren't just some natural thing. A coyote doesn't give a shit about the border, and neither should you. How are you so willing to let others tell you what to do and how to do it?
I'm not sure being tribal is intrinsic. Merely situationally emergent. ... and abused.
Borders are a recent enough invention that two of my grandparents migrated before passports were a requirement when they were young newlyweds (showing my age lol). They traveled from Austria-Hungary to France though Germany, it was a normal migrant journey, you were casually welcomed and given citizenship by your new country as long as you had money to spend and/or could provide labor. Another one of my grandparents was a vagabond (vagrant) who just walked from place to place, changed countries often, he stopped when most countries adopted anti-vagrancy laws. This happened a century ago. It's recent history.
WWI, colonialism, and the rise of nationalism and fascism in early XXth century europe are what caused borders to become strictly enforced. You have a very poor understanding of geopolitical history, and likely have been brainwashed by modern heinous discourses on immigration, like too many people sadly.
You don't have to reply twice to the same comment.
You already made it clear that you do not understand the difference between military and civilian structures, and have a negative understanding of political history. Don't need to clarify, we all saw it and understood.
That fetish of yours for public humiliation is not my kink, sorry. You'll have to find someone else to continue the roleplay with.
You're talking about power and territory, not borders.
Roman, persian, egyptian frontiers were zones of influence, not fixed borders. Some of their frontiers contained fortifications ( like the Roman limes), but they were aimed at stopping armies of invaders, not individual migrants. A peasant or merchant could move across countries without having to go through border control or anything resembling a border. They were not able to join the local ruling class in most cases, due to being an outsider, but were still welcomed for their labor or money in the territory they had entered.
Ages ago, for some political history courses, I had to read CR Whittaker's book called "Frontiers of the Roman Empire". As the title implies it touches on this very topic. I wouldn't recommend reading it, it's quite dull. Anyway, one of the first things it touches on is that trying to understand history requires shedding modern concepts. Borders are the first one he asks the reader to shed.
Once again, you have a very poor understanding of geopolitical history. I don't think you should be talking so confidently about a topic you are completely out of your depth in. It makes you look like a dunce.
The Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall both served the same purposes:
They were not designed to stop individual peasants or merchants. Those walls all had gates to let them in and out. In Frontiers of the Roman Empire, CR Whittaker goes through archaeological records to better understand Hadrian's Wall and its role, and did not find any form of deterrence against migrants or any historical record showing any individual border control.
I am being condescending because you are being stubborn. I see no reason to be nice when you are speaking confidently about a topic you very clearly know nothing about, which happens to be one of my fields of expertise. You'd probably do the same if you were in my shoes, it is very frustrating to see misinformation spread on something you have academic knowledge of. If you are unwilling to learn and want to cling to your modern preconceptions of what a border is, then I must ask you to get the fuck out off radical leftist spaces and stop spreading your racist propaganda. You will never be welcome there as long as you hold those views.
Random thing but thanks for writing all this. The other person is probably beyond saving, but the history trivia is nice.
People will stop calling you a racist when you stop acting like one by repeating racist talking points. It's in your hands.
We have the means to feed everyone on the planet. We decided not to. You are this close to understanding imperialism and capitalism, but I'm afraid that from what we've witnessed so far, you don't have the ability to work both of your neurons hard enough to understand it.
Is it that important to you that we ourselves live to see it?
Your previous comment here also mentioned “it won’t be anytime soon” somehow assuming that that means we can neglect to express the ideals of it?
Either humanity gets there, or we won’t. Some people will do whatever they can to make sure we get a closer. Because if we don’t ever get there, why even continue the species at all?
Is to me.
The potential exists to sublimate to it in the duration of an afternoon or so.
And I do mean in a healthy way... not a tyrannical terrorising totalitarian way of "united". No more of the divide-and-conquer ploys necessary, once sublimating to an egalitarian emancipation paradigm of abundance.
Whether it's soon, later, or never, may depend on how many (and who) of us who cease seeing this as a spectator sport just washing over them. We can still mend this.
I hope you are right but i find that the desire to benefit can distract from thinking things trough.
Something i have also considered is that, if we somehow did it and can retire in a real enlightened human world, i would no longer belong. I was born and matured under the current system and that will continue to affect how i think and perceive the world even with my best intentions in mind.
I suspect that as long as we live we will carry some of the toxicity within us and only those born in the new world will truly be able to be free of it.
This too can mend.
Call me realist but our sun will die in about 5 billion years taking earth with it.
The chance that the human species or any of our constructs/ideas wil survive that long or longer is immensely small considering we have only been around for 300.000 years. The chance we do that and somehow still care to divide ourselves into different nations and cultures is 0.
Call me a dreamer, but in that time, maybe we can figure out how to preserve Sol as a type G main sequence yellow star. Not saying we necessarily should, nor that we would necessarily even have any need or want to. Just saying, that's a long time, and a big enough margin for uncertainty in that natural fate not succumbing to some yet-to-be-invented intervention. ;)
Some evidence suggests we[homo-sapiens]'ve been around far longer. And what of who we were before that, and who we may become yet, in the branchy continuum of evolution. What we yet may manage to preserve remains to be seen. Even trans-temporal conscious/technological shenanigans, transcends this mere "chance". Perhaps it better we do not leave these things solely to chance.
If rounding. But not by much rounding required at all... beyond astronomical odds. Yup. Or so it seems from here. We may be in error with our estimations.
You're a naive-realist. You think what you think is reality.
Stubbornly wilfully ignorant too.
And a [dangerous] fool, seemingly oblivious to self fulfilling prophecies.
None of this is intrinsic and irrevocable.
Existential tautologies make for uncompelling fallacies, contrary to the confidence with which you swing that cudgel to try win your argument. Self fulfilling prophecies too... more than just fallacious, are farcical. A lot of tragedy there. I hope we each and all get the healthy distance to see the comedy in that, rather than perpetrate and suffer it.
[Thanks to everybody putting in the effort dealing with this. It's too steep a Brandolini's Law charge for my spoons stock to diligently take on thoroughly... So I continue here more as a general commentary stepped back from getting tangled up in all the...]
Strawman, moving goal posts, redherring, non-sequitur, ad-hominems, false dilemma, appeal to antiquity, appeal to novelty, circular reasoning, appeal to ridicule (ironically), appeal to authority, loaded language, ignoring counter-examples, conflation, equivocation, ... on and on it goes.
You seem to have decided you're right, and keep doubling down, despite the cogent arguments and corrections offered your way, contorting your position to prevent entertaining^1^ an idea from outside the world view that you seem to identify with, and fight to protect like your life depends on it.
It does not.
The ignorance that dies is not you.
I hope you find a healthier peace of mind in this.
I expect you'll more likely continue to reject^1^ any idea not conforming to the naive-realist world-view you subconsciously perceive as you.
^1^ "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting nor rejecting it."
I'm fairly sure that for the vast majority of time and populations of humanity, borders have been a total non-thing, and of the miniscule remainder, the vast majority remaining have been soft borders. It's not intrinsic at all.
If we cease suppressing all the emancipatory technologies that avail abundance to each and all, what concern remaining is there then for borders, when there's no resource disparity evoking scarcity mindsets and resource wars and plunder? What use even a border then, when we each can have our own spaceships?
Far far from intrinsic. Such a tiny conceptual box, conflating contemporary circumstantial constraints imposed, as if intrinsic. We are so much more than what's imprinted upon us from your prison walls.
How do you feel about safe spaces
wat.
I'm struggling to fathom the purpose of this non-question.
Too many possibilities, too many directions one could take a response to that [including [perhaps wiser] none].
What safer than ability to remove oneself from danger instantly? Seems self-evident what I "feel" about safe spaces. So, I'm still (and all the more) stumped by the purpose of this line that starts like a question, but then lacks a question mark, hinting some kind of rhetoric implied, yet what it appears digging for is already on the surface... so...
wat.
Safe spaces are a micro border, a way for people to separate themselves from other people for their mental health. Should they be allowed to do so and does that have any relevance to the larger discussion about borders? I think it does. I think people instinctively want borders to protect themselves from others who might mean them harm. It's natural and inherent to humans. Just curious what you thought, given your stated stance on borders.
Well, first of all, seems like someone else's goal posts have been moved, trying to slip in a conflation of intrinsic and inherent. These are not the same thing. Leaving the "It's natural" appeal to nature fallacy aside, if it's inherent, then that in no way contradicts what I've offered.
"Micro border"... likewise, seems to be shifting language to contrive reality to fit an already held belief.
Sounds like conjuring micronations from like-minds and shared-experiences, and even, I dare say, groupthink [(precursor to mass formation, and totalitarianising psyche, in which no one is safe, from each other, in the hyper-rational (irrational) desperate social dominance demand for social conformity more equal than others, where any and all atrocities are seen as necessary virtues, ever worsening as each try to prove themselves more devout to the group, to save themselves from the group)]. Yeah, that could become problematic, and a self fulfilling prophecy succumbing to the classic first failure of game theory, the tragedy of the commons, where having it aggravates the reason for having it, causing a feedback loop. It's kinda like outsourcing your circular reasoning, cajoling others to be complicit in it, and then likely even blaming them, othering them. Those dirty outsiders, look at them, disrespecting our micro-bordered safe space. Hehe.
In some sense, this can be seen as an energy control drama^1^, perhaps starting with some "aloof" mixed in with the (at least) "poor-me", perhaps even escalating through "interrogator" to "intimidator", to preserve what, initially, may have had good intentions, but becomes a separation that leads to destruction.
... I forget who that's attributed to ~ "separation is the path to destruction"... Siddhartha Gautama? J Krishnamurti? Gandhi? A handy concept to have around to consider and measure against. Always more, in "the longer now"^2^.
First, tackling:
Like needing permission? Like a binary, allow or disallow? Not sure that's a healthy way to tackle it. Sounds like the one tool in the toolbox is the ban-hammer, and every situation, to strike the situational nail, or to not strike the situational nail. Much more nuance, much more richness of growing cognisance and comprehension available in learning about things, rather than first reaching for allow/disallow.
For socio-societal-psychological explorations, sure, why not. Some relevance, in exploration, sure. But to wield that like it's the core root and same-same, nuh-uh.
I can see that it can. But not all. Leans more to mere academic exploration, than the direct substance itself. More side garnish tributaries than the core crux. May be helpful for broader [foundational and supporting] understanding, or may be used to contrive felling the main trunk.
And what compels and propels activation of this instinct?
Yes... which sorts of circumstances inherit such?
(And yeah, I did poke a LLM [& Deepl] to help provide the etymology clarification there... I don't know Latin off the top of my head. Felt that needed done, since this is a very commonly shared conflation to false synonym, depriving us of an important distinction between intrinsic and inherent. Defy the Orwellian newspeak truncation of language! Harr!).
So beyond the appeal to nature fallacy, what's cooking us? n_n What's trying to bake-in these divide-and-conquer abusable traits? Because we can see situationally, it's not always so, and thus not ubiquitously appearing intrinsic. So what situations evoke it? Who's causing such? Who benefits?
^1^ ^2^ Heh, that's two references to The Celestine Philosophy there, I did not expect to make when I started writing this reply.
First, how do you figure borders intrinsic to humanity? Second, we should hope that you're wrong, because if we keep trying to exterminate each other with more and more advanced weapons, we're going to find a solution to the Fermi Paradox real quick.