So with the three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail-coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county between him and the next.
I would like to write a Fiction novel "No Humans in the Universe".
I mean except Humans all other animals, birds and plants exist.
What will be the impact?
Can you assist me?
Culturally and geologically Guam's one of the Mariana Islands, but politically it's a separate entity with less autonomy than the NMI.
American Samoa has even less autonomy than Guam; even though being born on its soil doesn't grant full American citizenship it's still under American control.
In 1993 at a "U.S. Territorial Issues" panel, Leland Bettis described how the American government maintains a "disingenuous federal position" that American colonies are not actually colonies, which "is only believed by those who are so far into self-denial that they are blinded by their own heat."
(The whole thing is archived on C-Span, I haven't actually memorized the quotes)
Specifically, after WWII the USA had seized the Marianas from Japan, when only Guam had been a US colony previously. So the UN forced the USA to give the Northern Marianas more independence options but let the USA continue to govern Guam however it liked.
I read the following passage in the book Is that a Fish in Your Ear?, and the part about originals presented as translations got me wondering why authors do this:
Are readers in fact able to distinguish, by the taste on their linguistic and literary tongues, whether a text is "original" or "tran...
@BESW yep, because AS is "unorganized". That is to say, the US has never passed a law saying that the protections of the US constitution (and therefore US federal laws and righs) apply to AS. There is some justification for this in that I'm told AS regards property rights very differently: land is communally owned rather than individually, and inheritance therefore works very differently.
The argument is that asserting US law over AS would endanger this traditional aspect of Samoan lifestyle and culture, which the natives wish to preserve. I'm not qualified to assess how far this concern is actually held by said inhabitants / how valid it is, but that's the stated justification anyway.
Living where I do, I see only the downsides. Like American Samoans have to go through a naturalization process if they want to move to the mainland. It's automatic, in that there is in theory no barrier to American Samoans moving to the mainland and the grant of residency is immediate; but still, having to hang around for six years before you can move from a green card to a US passport is icky.
But that's also why American Samoans don't get birthright citizenship. Those born there, I mean. And AS has its own immigration protocols separate from those of the rest of the US. Like, I couldn't have moved from India to American Samoa and continued on the path I did to US citizenship, I'd've'd to get American Samoan citizenship first, then moved to the mainland and gotten a green card, then gotten US citizenship
Ultimately, though, American Samoans are disenfranchised. They can't vote in any presidential elections; they have no representation in Congress except for a non-voting member in the lower house. This is true for the other colonies as well (including DC), but at least the others have the protections of the US constitution. American Samoa is ... to use @Mithical's word, weird.
And Bettis is absolutely right. Those six places are colonies. There's no other word that fits.
I'm trying to find a short story I read many years ago about a guy living in a futuristic "hive" society in which everyone lives in cells, connected (I think) by computers; the substance of the narrative is that the protagonist is attempting to contact his mother, who he's been told is dying, and...
In November 2018, the Guardian reported that a 400 year old manuscript volume containing several poems by John Donne had been recently discovered at Melford Hall in Suffolk, England. In addition to the Donne poems, the volume contained "extra poems by different authors added by new owners over ti...
I would like to write a Fiction novel "No Humans in the Universe".
I mean except Humans all other animals, birds and plants exist.
What will be the impact?
Can you assist me?
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