this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
923 points (98.2% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
41709 readers
3943 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The entire Russian war of aggression is about moving lines on a map in the first place. It's a text book example of the stupid shit people start doing precisely because of our obsession with borders.
Not really about "moving" the lines. It's about Putin wants other people's stuff, and the biggest picture way to define "not Putin's stuff" is "everything within the internationally agreed upon lines over here." It's not an obsession with borders, it's that they're a definition of the historical land of specific peoples and cultures. You don't want the whole globe named World of America, right? Lines that keep anyone willing to use force out of an area because the people within those lines said "nope, this is us, not you."
The no borders crowd doesn't want America to be anything more than a geographical term. There wouldn't be borders and there wouldn't be states. Possibly some sort of global federation would be acceptable depending on who you ask.
They're right in principle. Borders are man made and lead to a bunch of conflict. The nation state is an arbitrary unit that has gained an absurd amount of power.
In practice of course few people would say we can just abolish borders over night and hope for the best. But criticizing it by saying that Putin would do this or that doesn't work because Russia wouldn't exist in this scenario and Putin would just be some powerless random guy with rapidly declining mental abilities.
This pretty much ignores all of human history, though. We create leaders and territory needed to farm food since before we could write about it.
So those human tendencies you'll just... What? Say are illegal with no government to enforce it? It just makes no sense in practical terms.
Yes, it intentionally breaks with human history, which has been largely built around and fought over borders for a really long time. What people argue is that it's not human nature but learned. We organize ourselves locally and in communities, there's nothing natural about patriotism and nation states.
I personally think they are correct in fundamental parts of their criciticism, but that doesn't make it a realistic goal work towards any time soon. What we can do is to question the premises we are trained to accept and to think critically about how we should structure our societies going forwards.
Arguing we can't abolish borders because of Russia and America is a bit like arguing nukes can't be abolished because of the need for nuclear deterrence. It might make some degree of sense as a practical argument, but not as a normative stance.
I'm certainly not saying that Putin keeps borders in place. I'm explaining why borders are used to define the conflict. Otherwise you're taking about a full census and genetic testing to figure out which households are Ukrainian, and thus likely not willing to submit to the force on someone that just showed up from somewhere else wanting to tell people how to live.
Borders came from agriculture. Farmland. Who gets to feed their children the food they grow. Who can graze livestock where. Case in point, herder-farmer conflict is a huge problem across Africa. Because there are no real borders for Fulani herders, or fences for farmers.
there's a Tucker Carlson interview and it sums up the situation quite aptly. In a sense that none of it makes any sense any way you put it - it's just ye olde imperialism like its 1708
It’s not really about the borders per se, but it is about territory. Russians feel they need land (specifically railroad) access to the Sevastopol naval base in Crimea. Russia itself doesn’t have any warm water ports—they all freeze in the winter. So, during the Soviet Union, the Crimean peninsula was developed as an international port and naval base. The infrastructure was built with taxes from all the Soviet citizens, including a lot of Russians, under the assumption that Russia, as part of the Soviet Union, would have access to that port in perpetuity. As a result, some Russians feel ownership over this naval base, even though it’s deep in Ukrainian territory.
I don’t think Putin really cares about the Donbas much, except that it can be territory to protect access to the port. It is about borders, but it’s not quite as arbitrary as you say.
Russian strategic anxiety about not having a warm water port is quite literally older than America. This is some Peter the Great-era (early 1700’s) shit. I’m not excusing any of it, but I rarely hear anyone talk about this stuff in the English language media even though it’s like. The primary reason for the war.
EDIT: do the people downvoting me think Putin cares about the Russian speaking people in Donbas or something? This war is about strategic access to trade routes, not some territory and civilians.
It isn't about who paid taxes on what decades ago. It is all about stealing territory and the resources within them. Remember the original goal was absorbing ALL of Ukraine into Russia by force. The port is just part of it.