which I provided counterexamples against.

Your counterexample showed two countries deliberately not keeping the peace by actively disrespecting and changing the borders what the fuck are you talking about. Borders are dynamic (do I even need to say that? are we in 4th grade here?), and they're extremely often created through violence; nevertheless, borders stabilize when the parties decide to stop fighting. Even the DMZ dividing North and South Korea is static on the basis that total war awaits the country that violates it. Two parties do not have to be content with a border for it to be a border.

If I meant "keeping the peace" in some kumbaya fantasy sense with no skirmishes or threat of violence, then there would be no parallel to the wolves, because need I reemphasize: we are talking about wolves.

my motivation here is to undermine the idea that national borders are "natural"

And clearly the fuck they are, because here we are in a reality where borders exist and are enforced. Humans are not separate from nature. The meme is making fun of an appeal to nature, but it's nevertheless not accepting it as a precondition to support borders. It's saying even if your argument is stupid enough as "it's unnatural", it still makes no sense on its own terms. If you want to argue borders are bad, make an argument that borders are bad; if you want to make an argument that they're unnatural, 1) you're provably wrong and 2) even if you weren't, you're doing nothing to support your case to anyone rational.

Now I am wondering what happens if one pack is hunting something that ends up crossing into another pack's territory. Do they continue the hunt or give up because it's now the property of another clan? 🤔

why?

It is a mutual agreement between wolves and other wolves, in order to manage territory and avoid over hunting. They don't force other animals to comply. they don't force other animals to pay taxes to maintain it. There isn't one king wolf drawing those borders.

Except that it literally does???

I mean as far as I know, we also let other animals cross our borders. I have yet to see someone deport an animal cause it crossed a country border

They tag team it?

no idea.

Not when we build fences and walls.

Cool, now overlap with the paths of migratory animals

I know it's just a shitpost but it's so fucking stupid.

It's comparing a home to a country. Like arguing "If you're so against borders, I'll just come into your house at any time." No, fuckface, there's a difference between personal space and (what should be) public land.

Dolphins will get there one day too.

Hear that, Tuvalu?

Just redraw your borders and quit bitching about sea levels

they exist in piss

i cited wars as counterexamples against peace. if that doesn't make sense to you, im not sure we can have a productive conversation.

i completely agree that humans are part of nature. So if you like, everything we do (and everything that occurs ever) is "natural" because everything is part of nature, but that's a fairly useless definition. we also do some relatively unique stuff, too, that is not mirrored by other animals. Nation states are not the same as wolf packs or bonobo societies or whale pods.

the most important difference here is that nations have institutions (such as a border) that exist despite the actual relationship of the people on those borders. the people on both sides of the Berlin Wall didn't want it to be there. The people who live in Beebe Plain, a town divided by the US-Canada border, have much more in common with their neighbors than the politicians in Washington DC and Ottawa who make decisions for them. this is not the same as pack membership setting territory boundaries, this is control from a distance by strangers.

anyway this has been interesting, im gonna get on with my day.

Borders defined by conflict, competition for resources, in-groups and out-groups. We're all the same thing and evolution defines it.

They overlap significantly. In addition to what's seen in the image, the wolves' territories will move around due to various conditions. There are no fixed lines that could be likened to states' borders, only vague areas that can be likened to respecting personal space. Compare the wolves' ranges with the white line indicating the national park border also seen in the image, which does not move around based on vibes.

i cited wars as counterexamples against peace.

If your argument is that borders are unnatural because they're dynamic according to a complex web of interactions, then I'd like to sample whatever meth your ecology professor has been sharing with you.

If your argument is that an uneasy peace enforced by threat of violence isn't keeping the peace, then I'll point you back to what the other person initially said about wolves "keeping the peace".

Just noticed this isn’t the shitposting community

oof

Nobody denies the existence of boundaries between things in general

I do, I refuse to admit the existence of rivers!

Am I allowed to immigrate across countries if I engage in a match of melee combat with the leader of said country and perform well? Murder optional.

You have my vote, melee matches to the death preferred. I think the first two matches should be Trump, then Bibi. Is there any way we can expand this to billionaires before filling out the rest of the tour agenda?

Yes, exactly what they're saying. lol

No, it debunks the appeal to nature as a basis for ethics and civilization

Ok, sounds like we don't have to put so much energy into policing them then.

I pee on things when I walk around the farm

They are wolves they are killing other animals if they want to sometimes simply for the fun of killing them. Whats ur argument here?

Ants also wage war, with some species only stoping when the enemy colony is completely destroyed.

The lines they've set with their piss borders need to be refreshed but they absolutely have declared areas that others respect the boundaries at risk of getting attacked.

A wolf occasionally crossing that border - either deliberately or because the scent wore off - doesn't change the point that they're making. It's not like they put up a physical fence.

they aren't forcing other animals to comply

They might be. It's still no reason for us to do the same

They just haven't pissed into the ocean enough smh

argument is that they agreed on those boundaries and only wolves respect those. they did not set up a state to enforce those borders so no other animal cross them.

They are still animals, and those territories aren't analogous to modern states

Yes but humans are not wolfs. Each behave differently.

That's not accurate. Humans behave very predictably in most cases

Primates also have territories, and chimps, one of our closest relatives, have wars over them.

Only a half truth. Borders may have been loosely defined but they were absolutely defended with violence. You couldn't wander in and hunt in your neighbors woods, take their timber or set up a farm too close. Hell, sometimes they even had well defined natural borders or walls (see: Hadrian's wall, the great wall of China)

Moving through an area in large numbers might draw a violent response and you might be coerced to leave if you spoke the wrong language or dressed the wrong way. If you were an unknown group of strangers they may well let your boat sink or leave you to starve outside their walls. Modern states have simply codified these reactions into law.

Proto-states and the associated mechanisms developed extremely quickly once sedentary agriculture became dominant. If your entire livelihood is tied to a field of grain you no longer get to run or hide from conflict; controlling who can and can't get near it becomes imperative.

Is this meant to be serious?

If we were hunter gatherers I might believe you. People are just as rooted as trees. Almost nothing that sustains our civilization is mobile. Crops, forests, water supplies, minerals, etc...

If a freak famine (wind) causes a mass migration (swaying branches) onto your finite and fixed resources (canopy space), someone must lose fingers.

Is this what enlightenment is?

Only a half truth. Borders may have been loosely defined but they were absolutely defended with violence.

Yes, but the means by which that state violence was organized and carried out often looked very different. Obviously there was some sort of distinction between medieval lordships or what have you, but the organizational form of the modern nation state wasn't codified until the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the 30 years war. This was co-constitutive with the enclosure of common land, and the birth of modern capitalist property relations.

But the nitty gritty details are besides the point. The main thing I'm stating in my comment is that OP is making a falacious appeal to nature. As though a dog pissing on a rock somewhere says anything at all about how humans should conduct border policy.

Now imagine that 8.3 billion people are trying to pitch their tents all around you. You're going to have to work out something formal with your neighbors to make sure all these tent groups fit.

It really bothers me when people use "fear" and "respect" interchangeably. This borders on that.

For the Things? Yes.

"Unnatural" in their argument just means "adapting my idealized personal philosophy to accept this is too hard"

And they're so much smarter than us, we saw no reason to change such a winning strategy.

and bonobos, chimpanzee's closest relatives have found evolutionary strategies that work without wars. we have changed our ways of eating and living before, we can again. all we need, as a society, is the imagination to remake ourselves as we have before

The amount of "NO U" in this thread is hilarious.

Walled towns/cities used to be common. In some contexts, it makes more sense than walled countries.

People build structures to form their communities. Not everyone from outside the community can be trusted to respect the integrity those structures, especially when a rival community builds an army or if there are roaming bands of raiders or whatever. In those situations, a walled town becomes necessary for the common defense, provides a refuge for the surrounding villagers, and overall just makes it a lot easier for people to protect themselves.

Not only that, it's just much more practical materially. It's easier to build and man a wall one mile in circumference than it is to build one 500 miles long with no closure.

In the modern context, walled towns aren't really as necessary as they were in say medieval times when basically any land outside a fiefdom was more or less unpatrolled and most places didn't have a unified body-politic maintaining civic order.

However, as society breaks down, communities polarize, extremists turn to political violence, and law enforcement agencies no longer feel obligated to protect people, a time may come again when building a wall around your town or neighborhood and controlling access points may become useful. Especially in say a post-apocalyptic scenario where there's a complete breakdown of society and you can no longer trust that the people in the next town over or the trailer park beyond that aren't gonna bring violence to your door.

Of course now there's aerial technology which can defeat the purpose of a wall, but it might at least keep Johnny Redneck with his extra big-ass truck and AR-15 out of your town. And nets and things might snare drones before they can detonate...

I for one could go for a few less layers of abstraction...

Most countries dont but there are exceptions to the norm