Whoa! Now here's a take on the SCOTUS Military Tribunal Decision I hadn't considered!
No, the analogy isn't perfect. But it just struck me as a sort of "if this keeps going in this direction" sort of thing.
I mean, you already have the legal definition of a corporation as a "person". I mean, how far a jump in logic is it to have something very like GENOM with it's own private security "army" becoming a stateless state?
Because that's what the corporations in a lot of genre cyberpunk are. And I wonder if we just gave the real life corporations another tool to be more like that?
Scary, ain't it?-Logan
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"This kind of thing tends invariably to devolve into the kind of "No, Nakajima, THIS is true power!!" argument that only really works if you're yelling it from the cockpit of a giant robot . . ."
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Quote:I'm a gamer geek far more than I am a politics buff, so you know what immediately came to my mind? The Private Corporate forces in sources like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020. Stuff like Lone Star Security and the various other Merc Armies for hire in worlds like that.
Today's Supreme Court ruling seems to me a remarkable point in the development of a kind of quasi-sovereignty for non-state organizations.
Were there to develop an Anti-Qaeda force, a private military to pursue Al Qaeda and win the war on its own terms, then their members would also have the Geneva Conventions apply to them, were they ever to be apprehended or detained by the US, yes? In other words, if the Geneva Convention now applies to a non-state that is a non-signatory in the eyes of the US, does it not then apply to ALL non-states that are non-signatories?
This is quite a large new degree of sovereignty that has been granted to non-state organizations. How will the concept of citizenship evolve with decisions like these?
If protections that normally accrue to states after debate and ratification can now be given over to non-states which have no mechanism for ratification, let alone debate, one can easily imagine a scenario in which non-state organizations form themselves and immediately possess the rights of a state, with no corresponding need to adhere to any laws in their own activities.
If this is the case, then we have the answer to the war: it will be privatized, and its ultimate victories won by uninhibited private military actors, not the hamstrung citizen militaries of nation-states.
No, the analogy isn't perfect. But it just struck me as a sort of "if this keeps going in this direction" sort of thing.
I mean, you already have the legal definition of a corporation as a "person". I mean, how far a jump in logic is it to have something very like GENOM with it's own private security "army" becoming a stateless state?
Because that's what the corporations in a lot of genre cyberpunk are. And I wonder if we just gave the real life corporations another tool to be more like that?
Scary, ain't it?-Logan
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"This kind of thing tends invariably to devolve into the kind of "No, Nakajima, THIS is true power!!" argument that only really works if you're yelling it from the cockpit of a giant robot . . ."
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