![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
That would be the guy who thinks it's the members of the Iroquois Lacrosse team.
As Wikipedia says: A nation is a group of people who share common history, culture, ethnic origin and language, often possessing or seeking its own government.
...
A nation is different from a country in that a country is the land that belongs to a nation, and from a state in that a state is the government of the nation and country.
...
Although "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.
I don't know much about the Iroquois Confederacy except that it helped inspire the Founding Fathers (or so I'm told), but... hell, that's what Wikipedia is for! Ah. It says that the Iroquois Confederacy is formed of six nations... which presumably each have a shared history, culture, ethnic origin, and language. And that's what you need for a nation! Government is an optional extra (and incidentally, just to clear that one up, you can have one even if nobody else recognizes it in the world.) When you combine all these nations into a confederacy, that confederacy of nations presumably from that point onward has a shared history and so forth.
So, while I'm still not sure they're making a worthwhile stand here, and I still haven't learned much about the Iroquois, I hope we've all learned a valuable lesson:
Before you tell people they're wrong, stop and make sure you're not the one who's wrong, because if you're wrong you'll just look like a fool.
(I knew there was something about that comment that bugged me, and it wasn't just the condescension! They were just wrong! Oh, I *hate* it when people are wrong.)
As Wikipedia says: A nation is a group of people who share common history, culture, ethnic origin and language, often possessing or seeking its own government.
...
A nation is different from a country in that a country is the land that belongs to a nation, and from a state in that a state is the government of the nation and country.
...
Although "nation" is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of "nation" coincides with the political concept of "state" are called nation states.
I don't know much about the Iroquois Confederacy except that it helped inspire the Founding Fathers (or so I'm told), but... hell, that's what Wikipedia is for! Ah. It says that the Iroquois Confederacy is formed of six nations... which presumably each have a shared history, culture, ethnic origin, and language. And that's what you need for a nation! Government is an optional extra (and incidentally, just to clear that one up, you can have one even if nobody else recognizes it in the world.) When you combine all these nations into a confederacy, that confederacy of nations presumably from that point onward has a shared history and so forth.
So, while I'm still not sure they're making a worthwhile stand here, and I still haven't learned much about the Iroquois, I hope we've all learned a valuable lesson:
Before you tell people they're wrong, stop and make sure you're not the one who's wrong, because if you're wrong you'll just look like a fool.
(I knew there was something about that comment that bugged me, and it wasn't just the condescension! They were just wrong! Oh, I *hate* it when people are wrong.)
