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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

̶N̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶t̶e̶s̶ State level actors are already involved, through sheltering criminals seen to be damaging the economies of other states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maksim_Yakubets

The burdens of heated economic warfare are falling on private companies, because laws against ransomware can't practically be enforced. If these crimes were taking place entirely within the sphere of a single state, capturing the perpetrators wouldn't be completely impossible as it is now.

Is your company prepared to be raided by a highly trained state-sponsored militia? Would we expect every company to ensure that its facilities can withstand artillery bombardment?

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You write nation state but link to an article about a Russian. Outside of the United States[1], ‘nation state’ is not synonymous with ‘country’ (for example Russia and Iran, two commonly mentioned adversaries, are multiethnic states rather than nation states).

If you don’t want to write ‘country’ because it isn’t fancy enough, you can say ‘state level actor’ or ‘government actor’.

I realise this is a stupid nitpick but this is a hill I am willing to die on.

[1] lots of people in the national security sphere in the US like to use the term ‘nation state’ but they also use lots of stupid terms that don’t seem so much into everyday language. I do notice some media outlets or government sources outside of the US using alternative terms like the ones suggested above.

I don’t see how being multiethnic makes Russia or Iran not have national identities (the requirement for being a nation state).

It's fine, I'll go change it. Let's not get distracted by a pedantic side issue.

Why isn't Russia a nation? Its a large group of people ruled by a single government. Isn't that a nation?

A nation is about a shared identity that binds people together, not necessarily ruled by a single government. For example, the Kurdish nation is spread across several states, so not ruled by a single government but a nation nonetheless. Whereas states can encompass various nations. In short, the Russian nation is different from the Russian state, and calling the Russian state a nation-state can be misleading.

American Heritage says a nation is a large group of people with one government. Merriam Webster says a nation is an area of land with one government. Leaving people out entirely. Cambridge dictionary has the combination of those as the first definition, but adds the cultural definition second. It seems like this word is flexible enough in common usage to cover both uses with context necessary to distinguish usage. Dieing on that hill seems excessive.

It depends, I think the distinction is more important if you're a member of an endangered, stateless nation, because in that case the term nation-state implies that your people does not exist as a nation, whereas if you belong to the dominant nation within a state, then it's the other way round, it's in your interest to reinforce the idea that there's one nation (as opposed to multiple ones), and therefore prefer the term nation-state.

Sounds more like a country than a nation. Nations are more cultural which is why there can be a Navajo nation or a Kurd nation without there being a Kurdistan and the Navajos being part of the United States with limited autonomy. As is the case with anything in this sphere, the edges can be a bit fuzzy and not everyone agrees on the definition of nation.

A nation is a loosely defined concept popularised at the end of the nineteenth century by the French and German with each a different definitions relating to a mostly fantasied shared history and vague appeal to a common identity and whose usefulness diminishes quickly when it’s not about justifying war and persecution.

Meanwhile what you are talking about is a country: a sovereign legal entity which actually exists.

I agree with the post here -- it is a terrible error to brand an entire nation as "criminal" when it is antagonists within doing antagonistic things. This is fundemental to the concept of Justice -- on the other side, it is fomenting prejuidice directly to tar an entire set of the world, wherever.. thirdly, it ignores a lot of context

I'm not sure why you went on this massively pedantic rant, or why you chose Russia as the hill to die on.

Russia is actually a fairly good example of a Nation State. It has a largely homogeneous population of Russian speaking Rus people, and the minorities mostly live in autonomous regions that were created to be run by the various ethnic minorities in Russia. There's even a Jewish autonomous region in Russia. Russia is pretty solidly in the Nation State category.

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