In California it’s illegal to have a pet gerbil; in other states it isn’t. You wouldn’t for one moment cite this as an argument that California is a country. Or would you?
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words (and the practical answer is that we have the word “state”, which usually means a country but also means California). But I’d certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country, and I’d warn people travelling there that the states of the US have some of the properties of countries and therefore it’s important to e.g. check state laws in a way that you wouldn’t do for subdivisions of more typical countries.
On the other hand, here is an empirical question where the models do in fact differ: Alice’s model predicts that Dubai is a member of the UN and that the UAE (being nonexistent) isn’t, while Bob’s model predicts that the UAE is a member and that Dubai (being part of the UAE) isn’t. Which model’s prediction is more accurate?
Or how about this: which entity has embassies in other countries? Also an empirical fact. Which model predicts it correctly?
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you’d want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you’re better off modelling it as a vegetable.
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words
However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an answer. The stopsign “that’s just an argument about the meaning of words” is useful in cases where a genuine ambiguity about the meaning of a word has caused a discussion to be diverted from its main topic, which was something else. But here, the meaning of words is the topic (as I noted in my reply to RichardKennaway, I entered this thread exclusively to point out the official political status of Dubai), and there’s no ambiguity about what the answer is. Indeed, there’s not even any argument. Rather, what we have is me pointing out a certain fact, and you (and others) evidently seeking to justify ignorance of that fact. To the extent there is any argument, it’s about how important the fact is, not about whether the fact is true.
The answers to semantic questions, when they exist, may not be ultimate or necessary or fundamental or even important, but they are still real.
But I’d certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country
Well, I suppose that depends on your point of view. For me, the US is the central example of a country, because it’s the one I live in and am a citizen of. I would in fact be curious to know what your idea of a “central” country is. One that’s smaller? Okay, but smaller countries still have political subdivisions (as indeed, do U.S. states themselves), and the whole point of political subdivisions is that policies may differ among them. France has a lot more centralization of policy than the US does, but I’ll still bet you that the municipal code of Paris is non-identical to the municipal code of Marseille. Spain’s “autonomous communities” definitely have differing laws from each other: Catalonia, for example, has banned bullfighting, which would be unthinkable in other parts of the country. Do you doubt that one could multiply such examples at will?
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you’d want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you’re better off modelling it as a vegetable.
“International-law technicalities” include things like what embassy you have to go to to get a visa to travel to the place. I dispute your implicit marginalization of these “technicalities”, just as I would dispute any notion that a tomato’s biological status as a fruit is mere pedantry. Biology is important, and so is international law.
But I didn’t intend to get into an argument about that, because I didn’t expect it to be controversial.
The answers to semantic questions, when they exist, may not be ultimate or necessary or fundamental or even important, but they are still real.
Language is a tool for communication. Daniel_Burfoot’s original post was clear (and “compare Dubai with other cities” would have been misleading); while a formulation like “compare Dubai with other zones where a particular legal and administrative system applies” might be technically more correct, I don’t think the difference justifies the verbosity.
Well, I suppose that depends on your point of view. For me, the US is the central example of a country, because it’s the one I live in and am a citizen of.
I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by “how distinct their political subdivisions are”, and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?
France has a lot more centralization of policy than the US does, but I’ll still bet you that the municipal code of Paris is non-identical to the municipal code of Marseille. Spain’s “autonomous communities” definitely have differing laws from each other: Catalonia, for example, has banned bullfighting, which would be unthinkable in other parts of the country. Do you doubt that one could multiply such examples at will?
A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical.
I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia...I’ve heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries
In the above, “the UAE” should replace “Dubai”. If the UAE is so heterogeneous a country that greater specificity is required, then it should read “the UAE (particularly Dubai)”, just as someone might write “the USA (particularly New York)”.
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is; they should be respectively “corrected” to {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, UAE} and {plane, train, boat, car}.
I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by “how distinct their political subdivisions are”, and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?
Mildly, but that disagreement is tangential. Even if the UAE has the most distinct political subdivisions of any country in the world, it is still a country, and its political subdivisions are still political subdivisions.
The distinction between a country and a non-country is pretty sharp as far as human societal constructs go. We have established institutions for adjudicating this question (such as the UN, international treaties, diplomatic relations, etc.), and the results they present on the specific case of Dubai vs. the UAE are pretty unambiguous.
A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical
I doubt it is, when adjusted for size (of both territory and population).
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That’s the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is
Again, I disagree; it’s a useful set for practical purposes, in the same way as {lettuce, cucumber, tomato}.
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That’s the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
Again, very much a US peculiarity. A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
To be explicit about something I wasn’t explicit about in my other reply:
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is
Again, I disagree; it’s a useful set for practical purposes
There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the “wrongness” of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists’ ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you’ve utterly failed since it appears you didn’t know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.
I am having a hard time understanding your motivation for vigorously defending ignorance of the UAE’s existence from my attempt to correct it. As far as I can tell, you’re worried that someone who thought Dubai was a country and knew that alcohol was legal there might, upon learning the indisputably true fact that Dubai is inside a country called the UAE, conclude that alcohol was legal in the rest of the UAE also—apparently on the assumption that products cannot be banned at any lower level of government than the national, in any country in the world. But anyone who makes such an assumption is likely to be suffering from a model of governance too fundamentally broken for this discussion to even matter to them. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine how a situation where someone practically benefited from ignorance of the UAE’s existence would even arise. After all, it would be unlikely for a foreigner to end up in Dubai without learning about the UAE in the very process of getting there. (If, as a result of this discovery, they hatched a plan to take alcohol from Dubai to some other emirate where it wasn’t legal, perhaps they would have been better off not knowing that the latter was in the same country; but it would be too late.)
Given this, I really don’t understand what the harm is in educating people about the existence of the UAE in a context like this, a discussion of hypothetical geopolitics on a sophisticated website. I didn’t even claim the fact was terribly important; the parentheses in my original comment were intended to be the functional equivalent of labeling the comment a “nitpick”. I do think that it is the kind of fact that readers of this site ought to know, if they don’t already. It’s not as if the cost of learning it were high.
A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
This is once again tangential, but what matters here is not whether policy contingently happens to be uniform throughout a country (because all localities agree on the correct policy), but whether the uniformity necessarily holds because localities don’t have the power to make their own policy. For example, the fact that alcohol is legal throughout Australia is presumably a mere consequence of the fact that none of the states or territories have chosen to ban it, even though they theoretically could if they wished. (EDIT: Actually, Australia does have dry zones, though this seems to refer to public or outdoor consumption.) It goes without saying that alcohol policy variations are not limited to outright bans; for instance, in the Netherlands, it is apparently true that
Drinking in public places is not banned by national law, but many cities and towns prohibit possession of an open container of an alcoholic beverage in a public place
(emphasis added). The point here is that practically-important policy is very often made at non-national levels of government, all throughout the world.
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words (and the practical answer is that we have the word “state”, which usually means a country but also means California). But I’d certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country, and I’d warn people travelling there that the states of the US have some of the properties of countries and therefore it’s important to e.g. check state laws in a way that you wouldn’t do for subdivisions of more typical countries.
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you’d want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you’re better off modelling it as a vegetable.
However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an answer. The stopsign “that’s just an argument about the meaning of words” is useful in cases where a genuine ambiguity about the meaning of a word has caused a discussion to be diverted from its main topic, which was something else. But here, the meaning of words is the topic (as I noted in my reply to RichardKennaway, I entered this thread exclusively to point out the official political status of Dubai), and there’s no ambiguity about what the answer is. Indeed, there’s not even any argument. Rather, what we have is me pointing out a certain fact, and you (and others) evidently seeking to justify ignorance of that fact. To the extent there is any argument, it’s about how important the fact is, not about whether the fact is true.
The answers to semantic questions, when they exist, may not be ultimate or necessary or fundamental or even important, but they are still real.
Well, I suppose that depends on your point of view. For me, the US is the central example of a country, because it’s the one I live in and am a citizen of. I would in fact be curious to know what your idea of a “central” country is. One that’s smaller? Okay, but smaller countries still have political subdivisions (as indeed, do U.S. states themselves), and the whole point of political subdivisions is that policies may differ among them. France has a lot more centralization of policy than the US does, but I’ll still bet you that the municipal code of Paris is non-identical to the municipal code of Marseille. Spain’s “autonomous communities” definitely have differing laws from each other: Catalonia, for example, has banned bullfighting, which would be unthinkable in other parts of the country. Do you doubt that one could multiply such examples at will?
“International-law technicalities” include things like what embassy you have to go to to get a visa to travel to the place. I dispute your implicit marginalization of these “technicalities”, just as I would dispute any notion that a tomato’s biological status as a fruit is mere pedantry. Biology is important, and so is international law.
But I didn’t intend to get into an argument about that, because I didn’t expect it to be controversial.
Language is a tool for communication. Daniel_Burfoot’s original post was clear (and “compare Dubai with other cities” would have been misleading); while a formulation like “compare Dubai with other zones where a particular legal and administrative system applies” might be technically more correct, I don’t think the difference justifies the verbosity.
I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by “how distinct their political subdivisions are”, and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?
A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical.
Here is more of the context:
In the above, “the UAE” should replace “Dubai”. If the UAE is so heterogeneous a country that greater specificity is required, then it should read “the UAE (particularly Dubai)”, just as someone might write “the USA (particularly New York)”.
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is; they should be respectively “corrected” to {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, UAE} and {plane, train, boat, car}.
Mildly, but that disagreement is tangential. Even if the UAE has the most distinct political subdivisions of any country in the world, it is still a country, and its political subdivisions are still political subdivisions.
The distinction between a country and a non-country is pretty sharp as far as human societal constructs go. We have established institutions for adjudicating this question (such as the UN, international treaties, diplomatic relations, etc.), and the results they present on the specific case of Dubai vs. the UAE are pretty unambiguous.
I doubt it is, when adjusted for size (of both territory and population).
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That’s the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
Again, I disagree; it’s a useful set for practical purposes, in the same way as {lettuce, cucumber, tomato}.
Again, very much a US peculiarity. A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
To be explicit about something I wasn’t explicit about in my other reply:
There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the “wrongness” of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists’ ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you’ve utterly failed since it appears you didn’t know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.
I am having a hard time understanding your motivation for vigorously defending ignorance of the UAE’s existence from my attempt to correct it. As far as I can tell, you’re worried that someone who thought Dubai was a country and knew that alcohol was legal there might, upon learning the indisputably true fact that Dubai is inside a country called the UAE, conclude that alcohol was legal in the rest of the UAE also—apparently on the assumption that products cannot be banned at any lower level of government than the national, in any country in the world. But anyone who makes such an assumption is likely to be suffering from a model of governance too fundamentally broken for this discussion to even matter to them. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine how a situation where someone practically benefited from ignorance of the UAE’s existence would even arise. After all, it would be unlikely for a foreigner to end up in Dubai without learning about the UAE in the very process of getting there. (If, as a result of this discovery, they hatched a plan to take alcohol from Dubai to some other emirate where it wasn’t legal, perhaps they would have been better off not knowing that the latter was in the same country; but it would be too late.)
Given this, I really don’t understand what the harm is in educating people about the existence of the UAE in a context like this, a discussion of hypothetical geopolitics on a sophisticated website. I didn’t even claim the fact was terribly important; the parentheses in my original comment were intended to be the functional equivalent of labeling the comment a “nitpick”. I do think that it is the kind of fact that readers of this site ought to know, if they don’t already. It’s not as if the cost of learning it were high.
This is once again tangential, but what matters here is not whether policy contingently happens to be uniform throughout a country (because all localities agree on the correct policy), but whether the uniformity necessarily holds because localities don’t have the power to make their own policy. For example, the fact that alcohol is legal throughout Australia is presumably a mere consequence of the fact that none of the states or territories have chosen to ban it, even though they theoretically could if they wished. (EDIT: Actually, Australia does have dry zones, though this seems to refer to public or outdoor consumption.) It goes without saying that alcohol policy variations are not limited to outright bans; for instance, in the Netherlands, it is apparently true that
(emphasis added). The point here is that practically-important policy is very often made at non-national levels of government, all throughout the world.