Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

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>If self-determination were absolute then for example the U.S. could get any territory it wanted by using its immense wealth to buy off local residents.

I mean, yeah. Thats how panama was born for example. Colombia was kinda mad about it at the time but of all the things the US gets shit for its not even in the top 10.

The US also tried to do something similar (and failed) to Kaliningrad. Only Russia objected.

Theres a pretty long history of the US doing this and nobody really minding.

>I'm sure there are some villages along the Russian border who would be happy to see their land turned into a U.S. military base in exchange for U.S. passports and big piles of money.

I wouldnt be so sure. Argentina tried the same thing with the falklanders and it didnt work. Likewise Trump with Greenland.

Villages also wouldnt survive if they were severed economically.

Crimea wasnt bought, anyway. It's just 90% ethnically Russian and objected vociferously to the maidan.

The U.S.'s historical strategy has been to find or create some credible faction wherever it wanted to meddle and then support it using any means necessary, ethical or otherwise, and coerce other countries to go along with it. In purely internal matters such as against the Native American populations it sometimes bothered with some fig leaf legal cover but other times it would just take what it wanted in the most brutal ways possible. I don't think it's ever actually fairly bought off a population though, so that's not really the same thing.

You framed your earlier comment as being about democracy without qualifications. I'm wondering how far you'd go with that. Is every border territory only a 50.1% vote away from changing countries? How often can these votes be held? Do they require international observation?

Even if you accept that votes can be taken by anybody and whenever, yes, you need international observer. Otherwise the vote will go the direction of whoever can coerce the locals the hardest. That's not democracy, that's not "the will of the people", that's a sham.

Gallup asked crimeans were asked if they believed it was a sham and 90% said no.

85% agreed with the result.

Russia didnt run that poll. We did. No troops were standing behind the answerers. It agreed entirely with the result of the referendum.

If we hypothesize coercion or fraud in crimea the poll would have disagreed with the results. It didnt.

Coming up with ever thinner pretexts for rejecting the result of this referendum is simply a rejection of democracy - that thing we are supposed to be fighting for.

>You framed your earlier comment as being about democracy without qualifications. I'm wondering how far you'd go with that. Is every border territory only a 50.1% vote away from changing countries?

I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.

>How often can these votes be held?

Not sure if theres a clear answer to that. If enough of the population wants a vote i guess there should be one.

If there is one and 90% arent voting for the status quo there clearly needed to be one.

>Do they require international observation?

Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.

If observers are absent and theres no evidence of fraud or coercion though thats not a good enough reason to reject a vote, especially when the result isnt close.

In crimea i find the "international observers" argument especially disingenuous though. The two sides were "referendum without western observers" (Russia) and "no referendum at all, ever" (Kyiv/West).

Ive heard hundreds if not thousands of people reject the idea that the crimean referendum was valid because of a lack of western observers. Not a single one of them rejected kyiv's position that there shouldnt be a referendum at all.

> I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.

The normal legality is that a state is governed by a national constitution that requires some supermajority to make major changes. Participating in a government formed by that constitution implies consent to it. If Ukrainian Crimea wanted to leave Ukraine then they could have looked for national support according to both regular and constitutional law. If they couldn't get the national votes then that's all there is to it. Democracy in action.

There are areas in the U.S. that heavily favor one party or the other, including rural border counties that went for Trump well over 80% in 2020. If one of these counties voted to secede after Biden won, that vote would simply have been illegal under laws they themselves had previously consented to. If prior to the secession vote some other country had sent passports and then troops to seize government buildings and "secure fair elections" or whatever, that would have been both ridiculous and hostile.

> Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.

Venezuelans or most anyone else are free to come into the U.S. and observe voting stations from the outside like any other private person who isn't actively casting a vote, and conduct whatever exit polls they can convince people to take.

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