> So that seems to be the crux of our disagreement.

I think we're having two distinct disagreements here.

One of them is in our political ideals, and I think we can explore their respective differences to mutual benefit, so long as we agree on common definitions for the terminology we employ. I do enjoy these kinds of debate and discussions as long as we've established a common ground of semantics, but if we're talking past each other by using the same words as identifiers for substantively different ideas, the conversation can be tedious.

Which is where the other disagreement that I think we're having comes into play: this conversation began when another commenter made a point about people who call Snowden a traitor doing so because they equate government with society. It's clear that in this context, and in the subsequent discussion we've had, that the words "state" and "government" are being used to reference a specific institution that exists for the purpose of concentrating and exercising top-down power. If, in the context of conceptualizing your own political ideals, you use the word "state" to represent a different concept, that's perfectly alright, as long as you recognize that it is indeed a divergence from the vernacular use of the term.

(Of course, if this is the case, and you do define the word "state" in your conceptual system to refer to the actual emergent order of civil society, then it would have made more sense to regard my distinction between state and society as a contradiction in terms, rather than "the antithesis of democracy".)

All of that said, let's get back to discussing the actual substance of our ideas.

> However, I also believe that it's a good idea to have institutions like the UN, to function as a world government capable of speaking for all of humanity.

How, in your mind, is it possible to have a single institution, composed of a particualar set of people, that can "speak for all of humanity"? There are billions of people - as soon as any two of them disagree on something, there's no longer a single position with respect to that question that is adhered to be "all of humanity". And I'd wager good money that you can find at least one dispute with respect to the answer to any question; so how is it possible for there to even be anything to say for all of humanity?

And, I've got to wonder: if some institution is indeed somehow speaking for all of humanity, who could they possibly be speaking to?

> So... smaller? Not really. I agree with your list of "families, friendships," etc., but I'm also happy with scaling the notion up to the species level, because there exist policies that we want to express at such a large scope.

Perhaps there are policies that you want to express at the "species level", but there are none that I do, so the "we" is at best an exaggeration. "Families, friendships, etc." actually are substantive social contexts, but "species" is only an abstraction.

> The problem is that you can't fully isolate problems.

The butterfly effect isn't a useful justification for turning every question into one of universal scope. Yes, there are things that may influence other things in incredibly remote and indirect ways, but we can still address matters by dealing with their direct proximate causes, and not by attempting to tweak every variable everywhere. In fact, we can only effectively solve problems by dealing with their direct and proximate causes; we don't actually have sufficent ability to comprehend, let alone adjust, phenomena at the macro level in order to effect outcomes at the micro level. Problems that we can't sufficiently isolate are problems that we can only effectively mitigate, not solve.

> Your local religious congregation has members who work in a few dozen different businesses, all of which serve the wider community and more than likely do business in even further communities.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. The religious congregation is one social context, the businesses are others, etc. Their commonality is only the fact that some of the same individuals happen to participate in both social contexts. Again, every particular grouping of people is a society unto itself; the actual participants in a business transactions are the ones involved in that social context, which has nothing to do with the religious congregation (unless the religious congregation is trading with them, anyway).

I think you're treating social groups like permanent, immutable things, that exist independently of the specific people involved in them. But that's not how it really works: if someone new joins your weekly D&D club, then that D&D club is now a substantively different social context. The equilibrium of expectations, understandings, etc. will have been shifted by the addition of a new person, bringing his own ideals, preferences, expectations, etc. into the setting.

> Something as simple as a teenager deciding to leave his parents because they're stupid is going to call into question what kind of community-level support he can call upon to survive without his parents' blessing.

But he's going to get that "community-level support" from an actual community - specific people with whom he establishes substantive relationships - and not from some abstraction mistakenly described as a "community".

> Every manifested law is going to find some way to clash with other manifested law. Who mediates the disputes for this, and under what rule of law do those mediations take place?

The fact that the collision is taking place reveals that there must indeed be some overlap among the relevant social contexts, and that overlap is a social context unto itself, in which law can be 'manifested' once more. Traditionally, we have used judicial process as the primary way of doing this, when no common ground between the parties exists outside of the conflict itself; and traditionally judicial process has generated law in a bottom-up emergent fashion.

As I mentioned earlier, we have many centuries of effective use of common law and equity as evidence that such a system works quite well; the experiment with supplanting law with legislated policy over the past century hasn't worked out quite so well, and indeed has often caused conflicts to escalate and to cause collateral damage to those who weren't party to the initial conflict in the first place.

> And I object to that. In a democracy, there shouldn't be prescriptive rules imposed by a small group onto the majority.

Nor should there be prescriptive rules imposed by "the majority" onto a "small group". Where people can't agree, they should agree to disagree, and disentangle themselves from each other to the extent that their values are incompatible.

But you are using the word "shouldn't" here, indicating a normative ideal. The word "state" in vernacular English, absolutely does describe the pattern that you don't want to exist. I don't want it to exist either, but I recognize that it does, and that it is, at least in this instance, a consequence of an attempt at a democratic system which failed in part because the ideology of democracy was successfuly leveraged to justify exercise of power, instead of regarded as a mechanism to constrain power.

> "It's important, I feel, to aspire towards democracy rather than resign ourselves to it."

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this aspiration, but I don't concede to make mere democracy the pricipal aspiration of political life. We don't create political processes in order to give everyone an opportunity in political processes; democracy is merely a mechanism, or an instrumentality, that we use in pursuit of more fundamental goals. For me, the fundamental goal of politics ought to be the maximization of human freedom, not the maximization of universal participation in politics.

> In practice, I don't consider any existing democracy to be sufficiently competent.

"In practice" means "in reality". When someone uses the word "democracy" in the context of topical political debate, they're referring to what actually exists, not what might exist and be called by that name. Like I said, I'm fine with discussing ideals, and exploring the full range of possibilites that we might aspire to, but let's at least clear up semantic ambiguity by not using the same words that already refer to extant things to also refer to idealized hypotheticals.

> I've felt that, in this thread, we've reasonably made it clear when we're talking about existing, present-day occurrences by citing "in America", but perhaps not?

The thread began by criticizing people involved in present-day occurrences in America; it wasn't, until now, clear where and when we were diverging from that context.