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Well please forgive me for I'm just completely bitter towards this universe. I'm one of the people who love truth and hate hypocrisy http://www.overcomingbias.c... Hence I don't fit into this universe. I won't have any kids for I'm not enough of a sadist to bring new lives into this slaughterhouse. That's it.

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Forgive me for coming across as combative. My concern is not with sides, especially when I'm here. The local norms as I understand them, are about modelling "the problem" accurately. Or trying to, anyway. So the words we choose, their connotation matter. If you disagree with that premise, well.... I wrote paragraphs already, trying to work with your usage of "brainwashing", but deleted them, because I just don't like writing like this. It feels like wasted time.

I listened and I understand what you're saying, but I can't answer it, because I either have to ignore your terms and use mine, which would mean I'd talk past you, or I'd have to accept your imprecise, abstract, overdramatic terms, which I don't want.

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Lol. It is pretty hard to communicate with humans from time to time. Is your main concern the binary question of which side I'm on as opposed to which exact technical statements I support or oppose? OK I'm NOT an open border advocate or SJer. That is, I'm not your enemy. Now are you willing to listen to me?

In a rational world people will not magically agree on values. Hence if such agreement can actually happen there must be signalling, brainwashing or some other irrational process involved. Any society brainwashes people in it and only (political, economic and intellectual) elites tend to be able to be free from the social brainwashing.

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Seems like you want people to be different from what they are and don't care for them very much. Casually brushing off the values that bind people together as cruelty and hypocrisy. Dismissing load-bearing societal ideas as unimportant connotations.No countrymen aren't family members, they're countrymen. Countries contain millions of people, that can understand each other well, usually share a language and a culture. A country is massive web of mutual trust and goodwill. This is worlds apart from nepotism, where you only really trust and care for the members of your extended family.

Countries are large and people tend to marry those that are close to them. International families occur mainly in border regions or among the wealthy elite. This is not mysterious.

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>Countrymen are not family members

Ethnonats of any nation like to claim that countrymen are or at least should be really extended family. Moreover family members are almost always countrymen. Why?

I do not care about connotations in this cruel and hypocritical world. People ARE nepotist. I want people to think about the purpose of such nepotism and why it persists. It is a feature in military groups including countries, not a bug.

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Isn't that a bit circular? Cities have open borders, so they face more competition, and thus decide to have open borders because of competitive pressure. Does that mean that if cities could impose border controls similar to what nation states have, they would face less competitive pressure and so would decide to have more border controls?

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The UK is one of the countries which does strip the citizenship from her subjects. They do this to about 15 people per year.

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Some cities do have closed borders ... we call these "gated communities."

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A large countries government cannot afford to have that power. It makes political competition too ruthless. Modern states with millions of people have to avoid making the policitcs about Life & Death. That creates too many people with an incentive to compete for power, too many factors to ever make good predictions. "Niceness" and citizens feeling that their home, nationality and life is inviolate are necessary norms for a thriving modern state. Abandoning it leads to underperformance as seen with Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union.

Well... in China they sometimes just "vanish" billionaires, but I hardly think that's very wise of them. In any case, they're not doing it publically with great fanfare. I doubt China's power structure will survive like that long term. The trouble with ruthless rulers, is that they create ruthless subjects grinding axes. China is hardly a place to look for good governance in any case.

In antiquity you'd merely exile someone, because you don't want to escalate a fight with his whole clan. Napoleon was exiled, because you don't want to create a martyr. If you dislike whole swarths of people and wish to exile them for [insert reasons], you'll be facing a rebellion.

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You can apply to any firm you like. No corporate law will be stopping you (aside from voluntarily taken contracts). You can definitely leave a firm, that you dislike and often go to a direct competitor, not true for all countries. When you work for a country as a high official, when you pick another country, it's called "defection" and "treason".In firms that's just called "Tuesday" and noone will bat an eye.

Of course this doesn't work in every way, because it's an analogy.All analogies are bs, but not all bs is useless.Most sensible analogies have already been made and been exhausted. Robin Hanson often plays with strange and less obvious analogies, because that's where original thinking is easier to do.

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"Nepotism is the granting of jobs to one's relatives or friends in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, religion and other activities."

That's not an apt framing at all. Countrymen are not family members, so the scale is off for one.And nepotism has an universally negative connotation. Egalitarianism is also not free of mixed value judgements.If you model it as a debate between "good thing" and "bad thing" you'll not be able to understand it.

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Firms don't have open boarders. In fact, they're gated and guarded. That's a closed to outsiders system.

The premise of this post is BS.

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Yeah but firms aren't nepotist to the point of countries either. The immigration debate is between nepotism and egalitarianism, not meritocracy and egalitarianism.

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Firms don't have open borders.

You can't walk into one and decide you work there.

They hire people they think are qualified for the jobs they have available.

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So, once we have worked through the (what do you mean by borders? question) yes it is about competition pressures and how much capacity working class voters have to push back.

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There seems to be less to this comparison than meets the eye. Firms (at least as employment entities) have highly controlled borders--they have to hire you, you can be fired--with expansionary tendencies and can operate across jurisdictions. That is not really open borders as such. Indeed, the harder it is to fire people, the more cautious they tend to be about who they hire (i.e. "let in"). You can buy your way in to a firm as a shareholder, but then you become a risk guarantor. It is a particular form of commercial exchange to which you commit capital.Cities are ambiguous between jurisdictional entities, which are generally not allowed to control movement of people across their borders, or are some (territorially contiguous) level of density of population, in which case it is not clear exactly what one means by "borders" and who would "control" them. Cities do tend to control land use, often in considerable detail, and that has sometimes been used to block the residence of certain groups. Politicians such as James Michael Curley and Coleman Young have used city policies to drive away folk in order to make their own ethnicity dominant. The returns to controlling land use are much higher than any returns to controlling population movement as such, so there seems no reason for cities to demand border control from states that are not likely to grant it.States are the only one of the three with hard territorial borders. Leaving aside bondage systems which, by their nature, have to control exit-movement, states have historically not sought to control inward movement. Indeed, attracting more people meant more tax payers. What states have had strong controls over is who gets to control the state. That was defended bitterly. It is conspicuous that border controls start happening when states start acquiring broad electorates. In particular, working class voters tended to be strong supporters of various forms of border control. Indeed, generally still are. So, the question is not "why do states control borders?" but "why do working class voters support border control?". That is not a hard question to answer. Especially when the vote is their only significant political leverage and they are the group (unlike migrants and holders of land and capital) who do not gain significantly from migration, indeed, can be net losers from migration, and who are much more reliant on local networks for support and risk management that can easily be disrupted by migration.

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