Technology

responds with wall of text

"if you throw another wall of text I'm just fucking off."

Cute.

I know in practice it isn't but the only ones who realistically can turn it into an actual democracy are Russian people.

Don't hold your breath. Russians are absolutely scared into submission and honestly they're not wrong to be scared. Political prisoners don't have any real human rights nor do their families. In a country where the average person can barely scrounge for a car, a well-funded, organized resistance is unlikely to accomplish anything so complex and significant as a revolution towards democracy on their own.

That said, it's not like there isn't anything at all being done:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_Vladimir_Putin_in_Russia

Protests against Putin have been going on for a long-time, but Navalny's death has slowed things down somewhat. More openly acts of anti-government terrorism and openly fighting for Ukraine have been happening also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_and_Russian_partisan_movement_(2022%E2%80%93present)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Organization_of_Anarcho-Communists

These are far braver people than I, god bless and godspeed to them. But also, not something you can expect the average Joe Schmoe to be.

I don't think we should give them an exception just because their country has gone to shit.

It's not an exception, it's the rule. People and governments are almost entirely separate. State is an oppressor of the people that exists to benefit the top 1% and corporations, more often than not it acts in complete opposition to the interests of the people and they have no power to change it, whether it's outright a military dictatorship, one-party rule (China), practical one-party rule (Japan), two-party system (US), practical two-party system (UK) or otherwise.

It literally is. If it wasn't a choice you couldn't choose to become a citizen of a different state.

You can't choose, you can try to become one but for 99% of people it's not possible. You are in total ignorance of the realities of immigration. My parents were no oligarchs, but they were definitely really well-off, and if not for that I'd never have immigrated.

Not to mention:

Your initial citizenship isn't a choice

doesn't mean you can't choose a different sex as you grow older.

Yeah, but it also is a helluva undertaking. Transitioning fully takes 10+ years easily in practice and either being very lucky and living in a country with nationalised healthcare and having the patience of a saint to not only wait the eternal waitlists but also fight through both the incompetence, the lack of understanding and outright malice or have tens of thousands of dollars burning a hole in your pocket.

It's actually why people don't actually choose to do it. It's a hassle. In practice, you need to be motivated by something very hardcore, like a disorder that causes ever-present severe mental pain for instance - like Gender Dysphoria - to be able to see it through.

I started 9 years ago, and only just had SRS a few months back, and I still have all the legal shit ahead of me too. There are ways I could've optimized it, but hindsight is 20/20, and after countless nights wondering if I could've done it earlier and faster, the answer is yes, but only slightly so, or if I was simply orders of magnitude more rich, and not a semi-broke uni student for most of it.

When it comes to immigrating from somewhere like Russia to somewhere like the US or UK, even on top of the 10 years and enormous amounts of luck, talent and constant effort (education, job searching is 10x harder) the monetary figure gets up to hundreds of thousands of dollars easily.

Or should I blame my diarrhea on you?

No, but you should be a pragmatist and understand that it's not realistic to suggest people never get takeaway at all, because it's for instance - unhealthy - which is true in many cases.

People smoke, do drugs, drink alcohol and eat sugary foods despite all that, and self-control is kind of a myth, it has a lot more to do with one's circumstances than oneself. E.g. for someone who's only source of happiness in a dreary day is a bottle of a beer, it's gonna be a lot harder to stop than for someone who didn't care that much for it in the first place because they're rich and their life is not very stressful.

The "don't be poor" part of ILR is kinda stupid so if it's that I get it

That part is a non-issue, because if you're smart, self-disciplined and patient enough to get a skilled worker job in the first place and your job salary qualifies for the skilled worker visa by salary requirements then you won't have any problems saving the £3k+. Compared to like 4 years of university at what, £14k a year, it's barely anything.

have been regularly traveling in and out of the UK.

That was it for me. But I visited my parents for summer holidays when I was a literal child, long before I understood that Russia was not a place I wanted to be or the politics of it all, nevermind intricacies of immigration rules that would only concern me over a decade later, and it's not like I had anywhere to live in the UK outside the boarding school.

Out of all my peers from that school that wanted to stay, I'm the only one that's made it anywhere close, the others all have years to go for the same sorts of reasons.

And my point is that while getting a citizenship can be difficult, it is not impossible.

And I disagree. For most, it's an impossibility. My childhood friends in Russia didn't want to stay in Russia either, but being working class kids, they were lucky to even have a hacked PSP. Studying at some international boarding school is the only realistic route unless you're exceedingly lucky and extremely talented and it requires being very well off.

In general a lot of your rhetoric speaks to a meritocratic, individualistic and christian-work-ethic capitalist mindset, which can be a good thing, people should try their best and work hard, and I did, but ultimately I only had the opportunity to because of my environment. It's good to be conscious of such things as well.

As such nationality in international law can be called and understood as citizenship,[35] or more generally as subject or belonging to a sovereign state, and not as ethnicity.

Yeah, "belonging to a sovereign state" is just citizenship or "origin" in cases where no clear citizenship can be established.

When I tear up my Russian passport and burn it, I will no longer be subject to Russian laws, e.g. conscription, and instead be a subject of the British state in the eyes of the law.

Directly responsible? No. Indirectly? Yes. It's like people have no fucking clue what a country is. It doesn't just prop up out of nowhere. Someone somewhere defined a country and when it comes to democracies (even dysfunctional ones like Russia and the US) the people set up the country for themselves.

Please tell me you're not this naive, or you're not yet 18. This is not what countries are or how they came about, and the rest of your argument falls apart as a consequence of that. Please read up on the colonialist and early industrial periods (and prior too if you can).

There are recorded stories of people living within nation-states that didn't even know they did, or what the identity of it was or where/when it started and ended.

Even today, while not a nation state, many (not all, of course) Brits voting for Brexit didn't fully understand what the EU even was really, or who it included. Heck, I couldn't name you every EU country off the top of my head, and I'm a big Europe simp.

Also, the dysfunctions of the US democracy are simply incomparable to Russian "democracy", no matter how bad gerrymandering and electron denialism is, the fact that such things even need exist at all is the very proof of that.

If they're not responsible then who is responsible for the US supporting Israel? The politicians? Who votes the politicians in power? The people. The Lobbyists? The lobbyists lobby to politicians and the politicians get chosen by the people. The masses being stupid and easy to manipulate is a different topic, but it doesn't change that despite collectively making bad decisions the people are making those decisions.

Okay. I give you two options:

A) Shoot yourself with a shotgun B) Shoot yourself with a pistol

But if you shoot yourself, it's a bed you made? That's absurd. States give people a voice, there is no political model in existence that would actually allow the people to become the nation-state itself, for many reasons, including the fact it would be an absolute clusterfuck.

Even anarchist communes would have to have elected representatives to interact with each other and experts to elect to leave some decisions to on for instance, medical or climate policy, which would become a pseudo-state administration, and it's inevitable that such people have their own agendas as everyone does that would become divorced from the people, the role of representation (democracy, consensus, e.g.) in such a political system is to provide a check and a balance on it.

In western nations voters are a key to power yes, but only one of many, and hardly the most important one.

You may want to run for president for instance, and given the choice, people might vote for you a 100% and you may be the best president the US ever had, but you'll never be given that opportunity, plain and simple.

There's a lot more I could go into, but I'll leave it up to you to look more deeply into civics. Do it for yourself and for me, I've already fled one undemocratic shithole, please do not turn the west into a repressive populist junta and learn more about civics and history, thanks xoxo :)