God bless this jurisdiction
One of my favorite words of late is jurisdiction, used instead of country, nation, or state.
This occurs to me because Creative Commons has had to use jurisdiction rather than country, as the former is more neutral, important to some in cases where distinct legal systems exist within one nation state (e.g., English law and Scots law) or where nation states do not recognize each other as such China and Taiwan.
It happens that this use is a good fit for my anti-nationalist agenda. A country or nation is easily anthromorphized as the fatherland or motherland, personified in the form of a ‘great’ leader, thought worthy of cultish loyalty and sacrifice, blessed by a diety, and nearly always constitutes a geographic monopoly.
‘Jurisdiction’ by contrast sounds functional, neutral, even neutered. Jurisdictions often overlap. A jurisdiction is something to be arbitraged, a country is something to live, die and kill for. An individual to a jurisdiction is as an employee to an employer, an individual to a nation is as a serf to a lord.
Smash the state, call it a jurisdiction.
January 26th, 2006 at 22:58
[...] Note that I don’t really care about which jurisdiction or jurisdictions Taiwan, Tibet, the Spratly Islands or elsewhere fall under. One jurisdiction, n systems would be preferable to the current arrangement, if the former led to more freedom, which it plausibly could. I post some independence-oriented links simply because I know that questions of territorial control matter deeply to states and my goal here is to increase my FCR. [...]
February 10th, 2006 at 0:17
[...] Not to mention better than flying the flag of a jurisdiction. The beauty of the Net Prophet is that it is not merely a symbol for free speech, it is free speech (where “free speech” is communication that someone wants to forcefully suppress). [...]
March 25th, 2006 at 15:21
[...] There are many holidays around the world that have their origins in revolution, e.g., Bastille Day and the Fouth of July, but these are mainly celebrations of the jurisdictions that followed revolution and their supposed national identities. [...]
March 28th, 2006 at 22:37
[...] Anyone who professes to care about inequality and does not call for complete freedom to move, live and work across jurisdiction borders is deluded by the fog of jurisdicitonism. [...]
May 29th, 2006 at 11:39
[...] On this Memorial Day (U.S.) I honor draft dodgers, deserters and others not stupid enough to be darwinized at the command of their parentlandjurisdiction’s politicians. [...]
August 27th, 2006 at 18:53
[...] There appears to be lots of debate about all of these numbers, take them as approximations. With that caveat, consider that in the territory the jurisdiction of Israel controls or has military dominion over (Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza) there are about 5m Jews and 4.5m Muslims with the latter number increasing faster and more solidly religious than the former. [...]
February 12th, 2007 at 20:58
[...] entire collaboration industry. The more remote collaboration is effective, the more location, and jurisdictions, can be treated as subjects of arbitrage rather than held in esteem by bound [...]
May 28th, 2007 at 2:09
[...] dodgers, deserters and others not stupid enough to be darwinized at the command of their parentland jurisdiction’s [...]