To first order, the degree to which your humanity is acknowledged by societal consensus is almost perfectly modeled by the territorial extent through which you can move pretty freely. I think this is why I react so strongly against walls/borders.
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Prisoners, homeless people swept back periodically into "bad" blocks, refugees, developing country people penned into weak-passport zones, etc etc.
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In a way, nativism, property rights, and other forms of territoriality are a red herring. People with power to claim exclusive power over territory X generally have a roaming range FAR bigger than X. If you have a US passport and enough $, your roaming range is most of the world.
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Territorial claims are entirely about restricting the roaming range of others. Territorialists would scream bloody murder if you told them "fine you can have territory X so long as you never leave it"
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Guesting/hosting protocols and reciprocal roaming rights are where the meaning of "human" is legislated via de facto patterns of mutual recognition of roaming rights. Anyone you wouldn't allow in to territory you claim exclusively is in some mild way, your prisoner.
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Like, I have a nice apartment in a big metro. The cops and firemen and landlord have some rights to bust in without my permission. With respect to everybody else in the world, I'd let in almost anybody under particular conditions. So who do I "imprison" by claiming the apartment?
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Like, I'd probably let in almost anyone credibly claiming a bathroom emergency.
My "prisoners" would be people I wouldn't let in under any circumstances besides violence. So likely seriously unraveled/unhygienic homeless people, diseased people, people who seem threatening.
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loving this thread, but let me point out that you can flip this. As a woman, I'm extremely cautious about letting ANYONE into my apt, including eg nicely-dressed well-spoken person I've just been on a first date with. Apt can then be seen as the limited space I am a prisoner of+
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Replying to
right, but there's something beyond perception here in the degree to which (our) society enforces territoriality, so that in your framing women (and people of color, and disabled, immigrants, etc) have a kind of limited visa to public spaces. Not a strict binary
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Replying to
Yeah I get what you mean. Your face is your visa scoping your rights in public as well. That generalizes to everybody to some extent though. White men are not exempt when they travel in non-white countries, even if their prison is a restrictive halo.
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