Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

In national politics, there's a government and that government has a police force and a military. Regardless of which political party or coalition is in control, the government goes on, day to day, running things, which includes holding elections, the magic which gives legitimacy to the process. As long as elections are real, the people are mostly willing to go along with it, so the consequences of utterly disregarding legitimacy remain remote.

International politics has no such entity, or at least none that has sufficient recognition. Therefore, it is essential that everyone play along with the norms, because deviating from those norms is more likely to spark a war.

Ultimately, a country is what a majority recognize as such; before you go away, however, consider how long you'd live if you insisted you were human but couldn't get anyone else to agree with you.

Don't worry, there'll be a major war to settle the issue sometime this century, I would bet.

One useful definition of politics is this: systems and behavior that result from people disagreeing without violence.

Politics can occur in convincing a group of people where to go to dinner, that your technical idea is worthy of effort, or that a President must be held accountable to the rule of law.

I'm suggesting it's fake in the sense that it pretends things are real which are not physically real, like national boundaries and countries and other jurisdictions. Los Angeles County has no physical existence beyond the people who pretend it's real.

> One useful definition of politics is this: systems and behavior that result from people disagreeing without violence.

I agree with this, but it doesn't capture people pretending administrative jurisdictions exist. How taxes work is a good example of the charade becoming useful: Services have to be paid for, so taxes must be collected somehow. How do you do that without making people feel like they're paying for a lot of stuff they're not getting? By drawing lines on a map and saying that everyone who lives within those lines pays these taxes, and everyone who lives outside of those lines pays those taxes, and so on. Poof: You have a way to pay for things which gives people some kind of choice in the matter beyond just voting. That's important because other, more real, effects of the economy can determine which areas have rich people and which areas have poor people.