Interesting to watch all the bitter fighting over control of the narrative. I feel like the comment threads all over the internet are a more interesting story than the story itself.
How would you even know if you did? What would you have to see or experience about reality or yourself to make you change your mind? How can you know that you haven't already experienced such a thing and just didn't recognize it?
To me that's kind of like saying "how would you know if you're addicted to nicotine if you never tried smoking? You could be feeling the pull of the addiction already and not even know it!"
I know that's an extreme example, and quite negative, so may not map fully to what we'e talking aabout. It just sorta popped in there.
Things without boundaries will eventually cease to be things. Anti-discrimination laws remove many effective ways for communities to form boundaries around themselves. A lot of terrible shit about our society follows from this.
Well, that is very close to the meaning of 'nation', which is why international relations students often talk of the nation-state; the nation is the cultural community, the state is the national-level government.
Some nations have no state, such as the Kurds.
Some states have multiple nations within, such as the USA (which is where the hyphenated-American thing had actually started; it made perfect sense to speak of a German-American or an Irish-American, because these persons would often merge elements of both nationalities).
Make things. Don't engage in primate coalition building, that never helps. Having descended from a long line of hominids you should be more suspicious of your brain when it comes up with ideas that it can rationalize as "making the world better" and just coincidentally happens to correspond to "seeking power and status."
A lot of the stuff on the cypherpunks was added fairly recently I believe. At least, I don't remember those sections being there the last time I read it.
Gwern has an interesting approach to writing articles where he continually updates and adds to them so that they improve over time. See: http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content
