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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Leopards Ate My Face
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Classic assumption that "the left" doesn't love this country.
Love that phrase…”love this country”.
What does it even mean? The citizens? The flag? The physical land and soil that encompasses “this country”? Love the government? If so, what about the government do you love? The governments policies? Laws? The constitution? The actual government employees? Which ones? The president? A combination? How is the combination divided?
Also, depending on the answer to the above, why? Because you were born here? You think it’s better than other countries? How are you defining “better”?
Stupid phrase imo.
For me loving a country is a natural love of home. It's a sentimental attachment. I want my country to be a nice place the way I want my home to be a nice place. I want to feel the pride of both. If my kitchen stinks because of spoiled food and piles of dirty dishes I don't feel right. Same when my country stinks of poverty, homelessness, sick people who can't afford cures, etc. I want my home to be better than that. Recognizing faults doesn't mean someone doesn't love their country. it means they're honest.
Well said
But why would the boundaries of your "home" be as big as a country?
Sure, being proud of yourself makes sense, and of your family and close friends and of the things were you or they have a strong influence over like their homes and what they do which in some cases means their jobs.
However being proud of something were you and those you hold dearest are but a tiny, tiny fraction with pretty much zero influence is not at all the same thing, especially if most of the great things about it are the product of the works of people long dead.
My point being that pride in one's country is an artificial thing which you've been pushed into having from the outside and as such is a prime vector to manipulate you (and all it takes is to listen to politicians harp about the greatness of one's country to see that it is indeed being used for that by some), not something natural like pride for you and those close to you and their deeds.
I wouldn't be surprised if my words above feel wrong, but under a cold logical analysis, do they come out as wrong?
I understand what they mean. I think this comes down to an exercise in semantics, and you are pushing the “country = home” analogy too literally.
Feelings of love and pride don’t need a pure rational root cause. They can exist in a more abstract sense, like in the case of “loving your home”. You can take pride/love in the work you do to clean your home, especially when realizing others will be living in it as well. I can “love” the earth, and want to take care of and respect it.
Love can be expressed in many different forms. I can both love my significant other and also love my parents. I think you can then extend this argument to loving something abstract, like earth, or your country, with a sort of rational basis being that I love my fellow humans and want to reduce suffering.
I don’t quite follow you here. To me, there is a difference between having love or pride in one’s country versus being nationalist. To me, the latter involves critical analysis and honesty about flaws, and working to fix those flaws. Nationalism on the other hand would be amount to uncritically supporting everything the country (or politician/government) does, which is I think what you are describing?
Also, how do you define what is “natural” vs “unnatural” pride?
I think the first part of your post kinda starts to answer what you quoted from me below it.
Love for your country is an emotion, so it's not rational or logic.
It is however something one gets from society because nobody is born with love for one's country nor naturally grow it by themselves without outside contact, whilst most people naturally grow love for their parents, brothers and sisters (or are born with it?) as well as love (in the broader sense) for some of the people you know well (i.e. good friends and in a different sense romantic partners).
Mind you, love (again in the broader sense) for a group one belongs to (for example one's sports team) is natural for most people, often to the point of being tribalism.
Anyways, the point being that countries are artificial, societal constructs, so that's the first part of "love for your country" being artificial and whilst the general cognitive mechanisms to learn to "love" a group is natural, for it to be for the very specific group which is a country, requires that you're somehow influenced from the outside towards it, if only by constant exposure to talk about "our country", so that too can be artificially pushed (maybe it might happen naturally from mere exposure and without a "push", though from what I've observed having lived in a couple of countries, the levels of Nationalism and Patriotism in a country seem to be positively correlated to how much the media and politicians talk about "the country" which for me indicates that for most people such love it's pushed on them).
"What does X mean to you?" isn't a cold logical question, so a cold logical critique or analysis is pointless, but you do you.
A friend who worked in D.C. for a while clued me in to the Rosetta Stone of understanding the right-wing mentality: It all flows from a deep, abiding self-hatred. They need constant reassurance that they are good people, because they don't really believe it.
Furthermore, they literally need an untermenschen (the poor, the homeless, the sick) to be better than, so their own success proves that they are good.
It's obvious when you look at it this way: America must axiomatically be all good, because they are Americans; with your criticism, are you saying they're not good?
I spent a lot of formative years in an extremely rural area. People would take a lot of their time running down the local area, mocking the state of the school we went to, how there was nothing to do, and so on.
But, I noticed two things - first of all, if anyone talked about moving somewhere else in the country, or to a big city, these same people would express shock and outrage and say overtly racist things like "but that's where all the nKLANGers are!". Also, few of them had actually went anywhere else - some of them had never left the county, few left the state, and very rare was it that someone had left the country.
Secondly, if the topic of the greatness of this country came up, it was the bestest evar, at everything, than any other! I sometimes would ask these people how they would even know, since, in some cases, they've seen almost none of this country and they have never been to any other, and they thought the area they lived in was kind of a shithole?
Yep, interesting how they're proud of America, they just hate all of the people and things in it.
It’s some damn good dirt
Well, Trump is obviously the country, so loving your country means giving him a pass for every one of his failures as long as he blames the other side and also blindly obeying and defending each and every one of his self-serving orders.
You know, just regular patriotic stuff.
Same with being proud of the country. Proud of what? The country doesn't do anything.
Whenever I’m driving through highways, hiking at the Adirondacks, walking around nyc, visiting my friends in LA, I’m always in the awe of this country. Fuck these people who think we don’t “love” this country.
Patriotic lefty marine corps veteran here, I’m so sick of the right wingers highjacking the word patriot. You are exactly correct in calling out the difference between nationalism and patriotism. I love this country and I hurt so much seeing what it has become over the last 20-30 years.
Agreed. I'm about as patriotic as they come. The wingers that say we aren't can get bent.
In all fairness it's only an assumption of those who confused Nationalism with Patriotism.
Patriotism (what can I do for my country) fits naturally with Leftwing principles (such as "The greatest good for the greatest number") whilst Nationalism (what can I get from being born were I was born) fits naturally with Rightwing principles (such as "What's in it for me?")
We tend to have strong mixed feelings on it in my experience. It’s got a lot of bad. Some of it is impossible to remove, but it’s also got a ton of good. And yeah the right doesn’t understand that when we criticize this country we’re trying to make it better. I want America to be somewhere I can be proud of. I want people to think positive things when they think of Americans. We could be fucking awesome. And in some ways we have been. I want us to be the country that a refugee from Iran I met a decade ago saw us as. I want us to see other countries doing smart things like universal healthcare and the metric system and join in because this is America and we deserve to do things the best we can.
Only 1/4, apparently