Borders are trees covered in pee.

Checkmate, anarchists!

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.

Sigh Unzip. If that's what I've got to do to carve out some space, then so be it!

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?

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.

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.

Pretty sure their borders aren't made up of countries, taxes, and slavery.

I only respect borders marked with urine

Welcome to Border Peetrol.

Yeah but we're not wolves 😄🏴

Like this? https://lemmy.world/post/46019997

"Sorry sir, we have to deport you back to your impoverished, war-torn country, because wolves pee on trees".

Very compelling.

It's as good an excuse as any 🤷‍♂️

I mean we're on Lemmy in /c/sciencememes, i.e. (pedantic fuckweasels)² 😆

Are we just gonna ignore the parts where they cross over?

so unnatural sheesh

What my first 3d print looked like

Wind blows, trees' branches rub together and snap off twigs growing at the ends, creating gaps. They grow again, next windy day, they break again.

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.

The top quote is refering to borders as a state construction. Nobody denies the existence of boundaries between things in general

Yeah it's the abstract representation that's the problem. I didn't consent to this BS.

In Prometheus Rising, the comparison between politicians eking out borders is compared to animals rubbing feces and piss on trees.

Yes because it doesn't change the author's point in the slightest

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.

So you’re telling me that border skirmishes are completely natural?

The lines they are drawing are still imaginary and don't exist in the physical world.

This is actually fascinating because it demonstrates a social construct created by animals. Not all animals have the same intelligence, and in nature intelligence is typically found among animals living in groups. It requires intelligence to live and cooperate with others. To me it seems that these animals actually used their intelligence to preserve socially constructed zones for the general good of multiple groups of wolves, likely by staying where the right smell is and not going where the wrong smell is. Hopefully none of the wolves discover the prisoner's dilemma and become a wolf emperor by suddenly invading and enslaving their unprepared neighbors.

Animals are more civilised than Israelis it seems

No I'm telling you that if you're rooted to the ground close enough to a similarly rooted neighbors and the wind makes both of your arms wiggle hard enough, you might lose a finger. People can accommodate neighbors, move freely, and shelter from the winds.

Not a hard bar to clear.

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.

This just in, Lemmy user doesn't understand that analogies are imperfect.

Paw Peetrol

Aside from like not having a country name or formal procedures, I think you're probably mostly wrong actually.

Also, countries need authoritarian governments because lobsters pee on each-other's faces.

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 aesthetic garb of scientific rigor.

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.

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.

I've read that humans, chimpanzees and wolves are the only animals that have shown a capacity for genocide.

They do it for the duty free shopping

those wolves don't cross borders those because they already have what they need, and avoid upsetting their neighbors. not because the other wolf built a fance and has an army that will kill him, and is forced to live in his territory and pay taxes so his territory can be protected ny an army that will kill any wolves that enter without permission.

"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.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/life-of-a-wolf.htm

Might as well show plant tissues with defined cell walls and say "borders are natural".

more important, those lines are made for wolves and respected by wolves.

They aren't forcing the other animals to comply.

and they aren't forcing other animals to comply and pay taxes for the maintenance of those borders

some leftists are furries though

If you look closely, it's hard to find a "border" in the picture that isn't crossed.