Too bad that’s a 13.5 hour flight.

I just don’t want to have cash on me. My wallet is already quite a stack of cards. Two debit cards, a credit card, two vehicle registration cards, a roadside assistance membership card, a driver’s license.

Well, yeah. There are guidelines for new infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean everything is up to date everywhere. There are roads that haven’t been resurfaced for quite a while that aren’t up to date. But on the whole it is very similar everywhere.

It’s only a small country though.

There is a Canadian YouTuber who lives in Amsterdam who makes videos about it: http://YouTube.com/notjustbikes I’ve lived here all my life so it’s nice to get an outside perspective on this all.

This post isn’t about open borders, it’s about the contrast in bicycle and road infrastructure between the Netherlands and other countries. The open border was just the setup.

The Netherlands has very specific urban/rural (re)design standards which are quite recognizable if you know them.

I get that country/state is a loose concept, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

The existence of foreign military bases and whether a political entity has committed war crimes are not typically considered in most accepted definitions of statehood. 85% of the countries on earth, literally a majority, recognize Israel. Going by for instance the criteria of the Montevideo Convention (permanent population, defined territory, government, capacity to have international relations) only the defined territory is debatable.

The thing with geopolitics is that international laws are more like guidelines. If a political entity can afford to exist through whatever means, and if it ticks most of the boxes of what we generally consider to be true of statehood, it is a country/state for all practical purposes.

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve read today. The majority of countries on earth are former colonies whose borders were drawn up by Europeans thousands of kilometers away. Not only that, Israel is a self governing geopolitical entity that has formal relations with the majority of countries in the world and can defend itself fairly well.

The US is a country despite the fact that the colonisation of North America was a net wrong.

You would have to define what a real country is, and how it is not the same as the geopolitical status quo of Israel. By any useful contemporary definition Israel is a country.

Claims in religious texts don’t mean anything if you cannot independently verify them. What matters is what people (with some power) believe, and a lot of people do believe it does and ought to exist. Enough for it to exist anyway.

One significant difference, though, is that you can’t blame a jewish Israeli for being born in Israel. In that sense they’re much different than the Western muslims who moved to ISIS territory.

Maybe Israel shouldn’t have existed in 1948, but we have to deal with the fact that it does.

That does of course not excuse West Bank colonialism and apartheid. But if I had a workable solution to that I’d not be writing Lemmy comments on the shitter.

As a European with a higher than average interest in North America, I can say with some confidence that Europeans don’t think about the Upper Peninsula at all.

For people from the early 1300s the left picture would be on the right.

Who?

Who?

Who?

83 degrees Celsius is too hot in any month

Spaghetti is an Asian-Native American fusion dish.

I thought that was what intended by the author.

lol

I was about to jump in. But yeah… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state

That’s quite a narrow definition of politics. I’d say anything that humans do that is perceived by others to be part of a social structure that maintains or challenges social norms and power relations is political.

Only if veganism itself becomes something nobody would challenge (like health is better than death, breathing is important) or if you are the last person on earth you can become the first apolitical vegan.

Pampas though. Brazil got this.