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[Maximum Spin]

Well, to respect the right you'd need to respect the land they declare too (which is technically stealing land from the government so that's an obstacle?).

Who said anything about land though? You said, "an Individual should be able to declare themselves a nation unto one". The terms of property ownership add a dimension, but...

And anyone going onto their land would legally be viewed as a foreign citizen too, so there's a whole mess there. If they shoot them, is that murder? Defence against a violation of soverign territory? Illegal immigration that needs deportation? A declaration of war?).

I can already shoot trespassers in the US without having to be another country, anyway. It's a popular pastime out here in the wilderness. The more serious problem would be property taxes.

(And by the way...

Whenever they left that land, they'd be a foreign citizen (so that's a whole thing) instead so there'd need to be all the complexities of that (with basic diplomatic immunity if they're recognised as head of state?).

Diplomatic immunity doesn't really work like most people imagine it does.)

[MorleyDev]

Well yeah, DI doesn't work like "I can shoot anyone and do what I like because foreign!". For one, it's very easily revoked and won't stop you getting arrested. You just might get deported and banned rather than jailed so long as the crime wasn't severe enough. Which is why I had a question mark, "would it be extended automatically or require agreement with the government first?".

And shooting tresspassers still gets police investigations to establish what happened and if there's any culpability, court cases, legal obligations to report. You can't just shoot someone, bury the body, then forget about it because they were "on your land". But when an agent of a nation shoots someone acting as that nations agent, that's a whole other category of issue to some randomer shooting someone.

Really, in many senses all land is the government that contains it's land, it's just most have some laws in place that stop them doing what they like with it immediately if you're got prior agreeement to let you do stuff with it instead. And extra checks/balances/systems/institutions in place to (try and) force everyone to uphold that.

I guess, in what sense is a nation without land a nation? What are you a nation over? What are you governing? How can you recognize soverignty of a nation when there's no land to be soverign of? There's a reason life has suuuucked historically for landless peoples after all.

(I'd say right as I'm using it, rights are extended by governments or collective agreement in them, they don't exist in 'nature' but are artificial constructs we have managed to secure collective agreement to stick to. Self-evident just means "we think it's obvious why they should be universally granted by government so we won't bother to explain it")

[Dostoevsky]

So the RESTRICT Act has made it to the floor of the Senate while everyone was paying attention to Trump.

Okay, so I basically skipped the last several pages, but wanted to double check on this -- where did you hear it made it to the Senate floor? Aside from the standard initial introduction & referral to committee I'm not seeing any activity. Committee hasn't acted on it and it hasn't been discharged either, so it wouldn't make sense for there to be fresh floor activity.

[Doomblade187]

Nobody wants or expects the right to protest to be restricted. That would be, as you say, patently ridiculous.

Au contraire, multiple red state governments have done just that!

[Maximum Spin]

Any water flowing through pipes onto property would be being stolen from the US government too, stuff like that. No bridge maintainence if you declared an area of land that contains a bridge...

Do you have to edit your posts quite so much?
Okay, without committing to the idea that this should even happen in the first place, it seems obvious to me that, if the US DID recognize your suburban house as independent territory, it would have the right to cut off water supply in the absence of a water use treaty between your nations; but you are most likely already paying a utility company for your water, so there's no reason why that contract couldn't continue to hold irrespective of the hypothetical flag on the hypothetical flagpole.

If you mean some other unrelated land, though... you can't seize land belonging to other people anyway, regardless of whether you are declaring yourself a separate country or not, because those people have the right to self-determination too.

Well yeah, DI doesn't work like "I can shoot anyone and do what I like because foreign!", it can be revoked basically instantly for one. Which is why I had a question mark, "would it be extended automatically or require agreement with the government first?".

Well, people don't get diplomatic immunity "automatically" in the first place, there has to be some diplomatic agreement between the two countries, so...

And shooting tresspassers still gets police investigations to establish what happened and if there's any culpability, court cases, legal obligations to report. You can't just shoot someone, bury the body, then forget about it because they were "on your land".

Sounds like you live in a city.
I jest, but you can't just shoot, shovel, and shut-up tourists from another country either. And, like I said before, in practice, you are very unlikely to be able to execute any treaties with the 'host government' establishing an international court system, so the most likely outcome is that the government prosecutes in its own courts, and, if you refuse to extradite, invades your country (house) to forcibly arrest the fugitive. In other words, the same thing that happens if you're a citizen.
This is really central to my point: The whole thing is basically theater.

Plus in what sense is a nation without land a nation? What are you a nation over? What are you governing? How can you recognize soverignty of a nation when there's no land to be soverign of? There's a reason life has suuuucked historically for landless peoples after all.

This was historically a completely workable concept? Sovereignty doesn't relate to land in the first place. Governing is a matter of laws, not land. eg, historically, a sovereign was often sovereign over people, and those people were subject to the sovereign's laws regardless of where they were. If you, a subject of the Whatever Crown, did a crime while on a trading trip to some other place, that would be between your sovereign and the other sovereign to work out - there are many cases where a king trying to punish the subject of another king was taken by the second king as an act of war. I'm not committing to this specific model, because it doesn't seem appropriate for the context, but I am using it as an example of why land and sovereignty have no necessary nexus.

[MorleyDev]

Sorry, I keep thinking of slightly better ways of phrasing and it balloons from there.

I mean, all of human society is an element of theatre. Countries, Borders, Morality and Ethics, these are all just collective lies. None of them are actually like...real things. But they're often useful lies because the alternative to the lie tends to be...well, to quote Hobbs: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

[None]

let's all remember what happened when the sovereign nations of the indigenous people of america and to the people whom were not beholden to the government lived on land that the states decided was theirs

hint: it's genocide

In politics actually worth talking about, it's been discovered that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gifts/luxury trips from GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow without disclosure, violating the requirement that all judges must disclose gifts valued at more than $415 (which would include a nine-day private jet/yacht trip estimated to cost more than $500,000).

You reckon he paid his taxes on the $500k gift trip?

[McTraveller]

Claiming sovereignty doesn't make it so - unless you can back up your claim to supreme ultimate power, you don't really have it.

Best people (or nations) can claim is "uncontested sovereignty" or perhaps "effective sovereignty", which is a temporary situation granted by being left alone by entities which may actually have greater power.

Consider even the bizarre claim that "sovereignty is upheld by the courts" - well in that case the court has the ultimate power...so not the one claiming sovereignty.

:thinking:

[EuchreJack]

Okay. Let me just. Let me just put it like this.
Maybe I'm the one who knows best what I'm talking about, and if I lead with the American Revolution and then give examples like the CHAZ and Kosovo, maybe I'm really not talking about SovCits, no matter how much you want me to be talking about SovCits.

You're skipping over the American Civil War. Don't do that.

let's all remember what happened when the sovereign nations of the indigenous people of america and to the people whom were not beholden to the government lived on land that the states decided was theirs

hint: it's genocide

In politics actually worth talking about, it's been discovered that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gifts/luxury trips from GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow without disclosure, violating the requirement that all judges must disclose gifts valued at more than $415 (which would include a nine-day private jet/yacht trip estimated to cost more than $500,000).

You reckon he paid his taxes on the $500k gift trip?

So what?
They all do that. Scalia certainly did that.
Although his wife's actions are concerning.
Then again, she didn't care that he attempted to fool around with other women. And probably succeeded. So at least he's loyal to her publicly.

[EuchreJack]

Claiming sovereignty doesn't make it so - unless you can back up your claim to supreme ultimate power, you don't really have it.

Best people (or nations) can claim is "uncontested sovereignty" or perhaps "effective sovereignty", which is a temporary situation granted by being left alone by entities which may actually have greater power.

Consider even the bizarre claim that "sovereignty is upheld by the courts" - well in that case the court has the ultimate power...so not the one claiming sovereignty.

:thinking:

Yeah, that's why people try to invoke God in their discussions.
I talked with God last night. He said we're on our own, and he actually expects us to pay our taxes. The jerk.

[EuchreJack]

Nobody wants or expects the right to protest to be restricted. That would be, as you say, patently ridiculous.

Au contraire, multiple red state governments have done just that!

Hold on, New York also passed laws to restrict your right to protest.

And to be fair, ever since the words "vagrant" and "trespass" were created, local government has tried to pass laws to criminalize protesting.

Honestly, I am getting sick of hearing "never before has..." Because it's bullshit. Most, if not all, of today's problems existed when Cain killed Able. It's just that every generation has to find out for itself that the World Sucks, and they think "oh boo hoo, things are so bad, since I was born yesterday, things must have been better then".  Well they weren't.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have old folks who find great comfort in feeling like the World is going to end when their miserably short lives end, or even before! Nah, that's garbage too. The first Christians thought they could get out of living by just waiting for the Apocalypse. They were told "Nope".

[Maximum Spin]

Okay. Let me just. Let me just put it like this.
Maybe I'm the one who knows best what I'm talking about, and if I lead with the American Revolution and then give examples like the CHAZ and Kosovo, maybe I'm really not talking about SovCits, no matter how much you want me to be talking about SovCits.

You're skipping over the American Civil War. Don't do that.

I mentioned the Civil War multiple times.

[McTraveller]

The first Christians thought they could get out of living by just waiting for the Apocalypse.

The first Christians didn't think "apocalypse" meant "end of the world" though. To them, it literally meant "revelation" or "unveiling."  And that's not even considering most of the first Christians were martyred; it was mostly second-generation Christians that read the Revelation of Jesus to John (given it was about 50-60 years after the Crucifixion).

[Lord Shonus]

There was a strong belief in early Christianity that the Second Coming, and thus the end of the world, would be very soon. This is due to Mark 13:30 ("Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.") which was long interpreted as "my disciples will still be alive when I return" message. A more modern interpretation of this is that He was prophesying the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, which the disciples interpreted as the End Of Days because they could not fathom something so horrible.

[None]

So what?
They all do that. Scalia certainly did that.

So let's start holding them to the standard befitting the highest court in the nation, what do you mean so what? If they're all rotten, then let's start cutting out the rot.

Hello, here's rot. I mean, Scalia is rotting, too, but that's different.