As we discovered in the previous post, the state doesn’t have anything to gain any longer from ensuring everybody’s welfare. This means we are moving towards a model where nothing is expected from or offered to a significant part of the population. This large group of people will still have formal citizenship but will be de facto stateless. They will neither pay taxes not vote. In the US, this is already a very significant percentage of the population.
We are all making fun of the conceal-carry crowd, and they are very funny. However, they are sensing a great change happening: the interest of law enforcement agencies in prosecuting crime is waning. Police is getting militarized because its purpose is changing. It looks like an army because it is becoming one. This army is defending those with a functional statehood from the stateless-within-a-state.
Living during a tectonic shift is never very easy. Even people who are not entirely sure what a nation-state is feel disturbed by the news it is dying. And the changes we are seeing around us don’t look very attractive. But nobody ever gained anything from blindness. Besides, every state-form has both positive and negative characteristics. If we know what the new contract between the citizen and the state is, we will know how to adapt to it and won’t flail about aimlessly.
Clarissa's Blog 
So globalisation wins? So libertarianism wins?
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Of course, there is no stopping globalization. Save for some really horrifying ecological or technological catastrophe that would obliterate most of the planet, nothing can stop it.
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Imagine a modern day East India Company with its own private army telling the sponsoring state to go fuck itself. And the state backing down because it has no effective power at all.
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“Imagine a modern day East India Company with its own private army telling the sponsoring state to go fuck itself. And the state backing down because it has no effective power at all.”
– The company is about to stand in lieu of the state.
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As a tweet that resonated with SF fans went, “Unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.”
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Let’s also remember that there is less oppression now than at any time in human history.
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We are all making fun of the conceal-carry crowd, and they are very funny. However, they are sensing a great change happening: the interest of law enforcement agencies in prosecuting crime is waning. Police is getting militarized because its purpose is changing. It looks like an army because it is becoming one. This army is defending those with a functional statehood from the stateless-within-a-state.
All of the above makes sense except: the conceal carry crowd doesn’t significantly overlap with the people-who-neither-pay-taxes-nor-vote-crowd. They can actually call the police with the highest amount of expectation that the encounter would end well for them.
Certainly they make a lot of noises about not paying taxes, but they aren’t serious. The serious ones end up in shootouts with government SWAT teams and lose because they don’t bother to get tanks or nukes. The survivalist crowd (the serious ones) don’t bother walking into Starbucks with AK-47s because in the new world (in their eyes), there will be no Starbucks; they’re too busy canning and trying to create their own power grid.
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“All of the above makes sense except: the conceal carry crowd doesn’t significantly overlap with the people-who-neither-pay-taxes-nor-vote-crowd.”
– Of course, but the state is retracting its functions for everybody.
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Not everybody. Wall Street was fine. Techies in SF are fine.
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The general trend is: those who are doing well now will do better. Those who are doing poorly will do worse. And I mean well and poorly in every respect.
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Er, this SF was San Francisco. The other SF was science fiction.
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Who is the conceal-carry crowd? I don’t understand this expression. Help me please.
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Americans who care a great deal about :
” Concealed carry or carrying a concealed weapon (CCW), is the practice of carrying a weapon (such as a handgun) in public in a concealed manner, either on one’s person or in close proximity. […] While there is no federal law specifically addressing the issuance of concealed-carry permits, all 50 states have passed laws allowing citizens to carry certain concealed firearms in public, either without a permit or after obtaining a permit from local government and/or law enforcement. ” [wiki]
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It’s a reference to Americans who want to be able to carry guns on their person (that is, they want to carry concealed weapons). This is legal in some states.
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Now it’s clear. Thanks for the explanation to both of you.
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