About Liberland
liberland.org
liberland.org
A good start for a country called Liberland, I expect that it is just a trollish post
Either that or I suppose not even libertarianism can trump Balkan relations.
I surmise from the other posts in the thread that a troll signed up with the username "admin" and posted that; the post no longer appears to be extant. Note, of course, the disclaimer on top of the board:
> Purpose of this forum is to allow communication between registered users on Liberland.org. Liberland officials don't make statements in this forum. Entries pretending to be official statements are all fake.
From their website: Liberland will accept anyone of any background as long they are not Communists, Nazis or other types of extremists.
Those countries tend to forget one thing - human factor. That humans are not the same and they might not be a "perfect" citizen.
Liberia did start out as something of a utopia[1]...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society
There's already too much tolerance of people that would enslave and destroy.
The reason is that people who are doing better than others (and who are forced by the communist _ideology_ to share so that everyone is equal), would leave the commune.
That is why North Korea and USSR kept their citizens inside the Iron Wall border. It "worked" only by forcing the able to their knees.
I'm sure Descartes would rephrase his famous though to something like the above, had he been contemporaneous of us (and tweet it as well).
These Liberlandeers need to create a proper national football team first to be recognized. Being between Croatia and Serbia, they should have no problem in getting good players.
Almost all of these European micro-states have national football teams which compete. Even Gibraltar has a team now (their home games are in Portugal). Vaticano doesn't have a team though, and I don't remember seeing Monaco as well.
:)
Basically, the minute Croatia accepted the current state of things (which they will probably have to do, once Serbia joins the EU), they would likely take over anything West of the Danube, ending "Liberland". As it is, they have to decide whether maintaining their (likely doomed) claims is worth accepting this "Liberland" entity trolling on their border.
1) if Serbia joins the EU, borders disappear because of Schengen, it becomes a somewhat-academic debate, Serbia keeps control of the Eastern bank.
2) if Serbia does not join the EU, borders stay in place, no EU state is ever going to help Croatia go to war for a few square-km of Balkan swamps, Serbia keeps control of the Eastern bank.
From this point of view, the incentive for Croatia is to extoll the maximum amount of compensation it can as part of the EU membership process of Serbia, because it's unlikely it will ever get anything more.
Then again, this would assume rational actors, and the history of those lands is full of extremely irrational ones, so...
For example, there has been a border dispute between Germany and the Netherlands for centuries about what part of the Ems-Dollart waterways belongs to whom. Even when, after World War Two, there was significant discussion about the border, resulting in small shifts of the border (http://archive.law.fsu.edu/library/collection/limitsinseas/i...), this didn't get resolved.
Result is that, in 2011, Google maps didn't really know where to put the border (http://www.thelocal.de/20110221/33241)
This conflict was finally 'resolved' in 2014 by deciding that the border will remain ambiguous (http://www.dw.de/germany-and-the-netherlands-end-centuries-o...)
In case Serbia wants to join the EU they need a vote from Croatia too and this is a legitimate reason to block entry. In case it doesn't enter the EU it's just status quo before a way is found to settle the dispute, something that has been done in a lot of post-Yugoslav succession cases with success.
Thanks for the ad-hominem, but I honestly couldn't care less who "wins", I'm looking at the incentives purely as a third-party observer (well, as an EU citizen, I guess I have an interest in keeping the peace over there).
> In case Serbia wants to join the EU they need a vote from Croatia too
Sure (well, until certain procedures become a matter of majority vote -- the EU is constantly changing, but I digress).
But let's be honest here: if everyone else wants Serbia in, they will lean on Croatia to make it happen; and a few square kms of swamps are not worth souring relationships with the likes of Germany. That's why I said Croatians will likely get as much compensation as they can, while they have the chance; after all, they are not going to take back those swamps with tanks anytime soon.
> In case it doesn't enter the EU it's just status quo
Yup, which is my scenario 2; and considering the status quo matches Serbian views, the only country with a problem remains Croatia. A rational actor would then pack it in, if maintaining a claim with very low chances made it not worth the trouble of dealing with a silly micronation on their doorstep. In fact, if I were Serbia I'd give Liberland all the help I get, trying to force Croatia to take charge of the area and add further legitimacy to the status quo.
GP is attacking your points, not your person, that's not an ad-hominem attack.
dis·in·gen·u·ous ˌdisənˈjenyo͞oəs/ adjective adjective: disingenuous
not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
"that innocent, teary-eyed look is just part of a disingenuous act"
Calling it an ad-hominem is certainly not off base. Due to some linguistic anomaly, a lot of people seem not to realize that this word has a significant component that indicts the character of its target. Sometimes it seems to be used in an ad-hominem manner, and sometimes it seems to be used in ignorance of that component of definition of the word. However, it's often impossible to tell with certainty whether the person is using the word to intentionally attack someone's character or not. In any case, using the word can be incendiary.
The word 'misleading' can generally be substituted in cases where one wishes to avoid the character attack.
If he said "You are lying" it still wouldn't be an ad-hominem in my book.
From wikipedia[0]:
> An ad hominem [...], means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments
By saying his points are disingenuous he's not attacking the person's character.
Its a descriptor of character/attitude/motive, which is a feature of the person providing the argument in relation to the act of providing the argument, not a feature of the content of the argument.
Some very small countries examples: San Marino, Liechtenstein, Andorra.
If you would do research on them you would see how many things they are not allowed to do by their neighbor. And how many things the country is forced to do. If they would start making issues, they would be just destroyed by economical blockage.
MAJORITY of landlocked countries are dependent on others. Only countries with established history and reputation can to some extent be independent, like Switzerland.
And if you think that international laws will prevent it, well Ukraine get rid of nuclear weapons and got GUARANTEES by Russia, US, China, France and few more countries they will protect it in case of any kind of aggression.
Running a country is hard, ideology or not.
I understand how people want to give the government credit for a lot of things, but are you really going to hand them credit for your own care for your children?
(I suspect this falls under the category of "being in such a hurry to say bad things about someone you disagree with that you don't stop to think the full implications of the insult through".)
Guess, even the weirdest pro-pregnancy activist would figure out abortion would be a much more humane way of killing than starving to death.
If the only reason you wouldn't sell children is because it's illegal, you should really never have kids.
From the linked article:
"But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.[2] The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive."
Not that I don't think that article is full of crap. If we're going to apply property-based libertarian principles to the letter, then we need to talk about the months of imprisonment in a dark and confined area that the mother imposes on the child :P
Of course as a practical matter, if the kid is young enough, or you live sufficiently far from other people, the kid cannot exercise its right to leave, and so effectively you can kill it by not providing food.
(I'm not defending this project or its ideology, about which I know nothing. HN discourse needs to be free of bomb-throwing regardless of the target.)
This country should be based on laissez-fair Capitalism, which is justified morally by Ayn Rand in her book "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal".
… which does not accept citizenship requests from Syrians, Kurds, Arabs, Russians and Chinese …
Not very libertarian in my opinion.
(Source: http://liberland.org/en/forum/?threadID=5510225855311e5b0b0c...)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...