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.
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 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
Same with being proud of the country. Proud of what? The country doesn’t do anything.
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.
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
*moot
Can we deport this inbred, middle-school-educated Trump supporter and keep the Colombian industrial engineer instead?
I mean, deport him where? Any other country would probably deport him right back here.
… Antarctica doesn’t seem to have much in the way of law enforcement, so they likely wouldn’t deport him back to us.
Could we Try there?
So he could fuck up the only thing really going on there which is scientific studies? Fuck that. There’s entire deserts that would love to have him
You make a good point.
The sand consumes all.
The penguins must feed
You’d be wrong there, they have police and they are in fact strict, the US marshal system does not fuck around.
The ocean, out of an helicopter. It’s what they voted for.
Can we start deporting the inbred uneducated to the great Pacific Garbage patch?
Colombia? Duh.
How about the sun?
Launching things into the sun takes a lot of energy and complex calculations. It’s interestingly easier to send something out of the solar system than into the sun
To be perfectly honest, I’m not actually worried about whether or not he makes it to the sun.
Oh now you want to risk these unstable geniuses to be the first things aliens find about earth?
Aren’t the calculations easy? The energy is insane though.
That’s an insult to unicycles.
No, no. It’s moo; like a cow.
Have I been living with Joey too long, or did that actually make sense?
How can a cow have a point!?
It’s like a cow’s opinion… it’s “moo”.
Them big ole cows with them horns whats in them roe-dee-oes with them there fellers a-hangin on their backs an also I think in italy where fokes go a-runnin alongside them cows seem to have two pretty dang-on good points atop their haids f’yous ta ask me
That’s the point, he don’t have a cow
If it’s a unicowrn?
No it’s μ
For all the people not getting the joke.
Also *too.
No, she’s special, unlike those other lazy libruls.
I personally know, or knew (I stopped talking to him) a guy who was on welfare for 10+ years, but always ranted loudly about people on welfare being freeloaders. Their situation is always special in their minds, unlike all those other lazy moochers.
Conservatism is correlated with a complete lack of empathy. They have trouble understanding other people are sentient beings, let alone equally deserving of freedom. Any problem that doesn’t affect them is just a lie made up by evil Others to take away what they rightly deserve, which is everything.
Not sure if its the same study that we’re talking about here, but there was a study done on conservatives and (neo)liberals empathy levels towards others during the covid pandemic’s initial onset, one of the works it cited as supporting evidence looked into political biases in relation to empathy in 2010, and while those classified as liberals (not remembering how they defined liberal for the paper, will have to find my citation & check later) more often attributed external factors to people’s suffering (someone is poor because they suffer from bigotry based discrimination), conservatives almost universally attributed personal factors to those same people’s suffering (someone is poor because they use drugs) UNLESS that person was listed as conservative in which case they were more likely to attribute it to an external factor.
They do have empathy, just only for those who are also conservative.
Interestingly, if I’m recalling which paper it was correctly, jordan b peterson (who is now a right wing influencer) actually contributed to it, this was BEFORE he started appearing in right wing circles and was while he was still someone who would be considered respectable
IMPORTANT: I’ll have to find my statistics notes to back this up, so for now, please take this with a heavy grain of salt
If I caint ruhlate to ya then fuck ya buddy. Fuck all uh y’all!
Praiz Jesus, amen!
100% spot the fuck on, sadly.
Right now I can see two futures.
One where the 2026 election gives the Dems control of both Houses.
The other where the 2026 elections are cancelled for national security reasons.
Or the Republicans push through “election security” laws that gerrymander the whole country to the point that Democrats can never gain a majority in either house ever again.
This is 100% how every single dictatorship in existence today works. Almost all countries in the world hold elections. But some are more democratic than others. Every single tyrant in power today has been or claim to have been democratically elected.
“Authoritarians get voted in. They never get voted out.”
There is absolutely a third future where the Democrats refuse to change their platform and fuck this up again. Don’t be naive.
The Dems have flubbed it many times.
The people who are sitting around doing nothing haven’t won anything yet.
Name me one time that the Left letting the Right win has helped anything.
But yes, keep telling people not not voting D will help. [/s]
But yes, keep telling people not not voting D will help.
Never said this.
One where the 2026 election gives the Dems control of both Houses.
We’ve got lib media trying to argue that the 2024 election indicated a rightward shift of the electorate.
It remains to be seen if the dems are just going to keep doubling down on trying to be republicans from the previous election.
Here’s the thing. If the Left doesn’t vote, they look at the people who do vote.
I was educated by some old school Communists; folks who actually were in Spain fighting Franco and who got blacklisted in the 1950s.
One story they always told was that in 1968 a lot of young radicals were saying that Humphrey was as bad as Nixon and they would never vote for him
The folks who had been around told the non-voters that Nixon was truly terrible and that they should do what they could to defeat him.
I’ve yet to see an election where the Left sat by idly and got anything good.
Here’s the thing. If the Left doesn’t vote, they look at the people who do vote.
That’s just gaslighting. Black people are the single most reliable dem voting bloc, and get fuckall from the dems, but are still blamed when they lose.
Meanwhile, republicans vote for republicans. 5% of dem votes in 2024 came from registered republicans, down from 6% in 2020.
I’ve yet to see an election where the Left sat by idly and got anything good.
That’s the main point. But please, prove me wrong. Show me a time the Right won big and the Left benefitted.
My argument isn’t a prescription of “the left shouldn’t vote”, it’s observations that “the left has absolutely nothing to do with the dems moving to the right” and “when the dems move to the right, they perform worse”
The dems go to the right because left policies hurt their corporate benefactors. Everything else is a post-hoc justification.
Look up Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority.
They had a simple program to purge the GOP of anyone they didn’t like. They would show up at every local GOP event with enough people to get their way on any issue. If twenty people had gone to the clubhouse the last time they’d had to pick the new county clerk, the MMs would show up with fifty.
Pretty soon those county clerks and sheriffs were Congress members. All it took was some on the ground organizing.
AOC and Omar did it.
Aren’t you proving his point by pointing at AOC and Omar? AOC and Omar are proof leftist policies are popular and when you compare their stance on the economy, immigration and Isreal, they’re on opposite ends. A and O are pro-worker, Harris ran pro-business. A O don’t want strong border control, Harris ran on stronger border control. A O wanted to stop the support for Israel, Harris toed the party line of doing nothing.
AOC and Omar are proof that there is a left demographic to appeal to. Harris’s campaign is proof the DNC would rather appeal to the right. The election is proof appealing to the right doesn’t work.
The electorate has clearly shifted right. That’s why this time the right side won, whereas last time the left side won. I hope (but am by no means certain ) that a high quality left-wing candidate can help to shift the electorate back to the left.
Is that why quite a few progressive ballot initiatives and referendums also passed?
Trump got the same number of votes, the dem’s base just didn’t turn out because they abandoned them to chase after “moderate republicans”, again.
The electorate didn’t move right, the democrats did.
I’m hoping for the first. But I fear it will take many blatantly awful things happening to counter all the indifference, ignorance, and complacency around us.
Because the hate is insurmountable otherwise.
I admire your optimism, but what do you think will turn people away from Trump in 2026 that didn’t turn them away this year? It’s not like we haven’t already seen a Trump presidency.
Trump got the same number of votes this year he got in 2016.
Dopes who thought Harris wasn’t worth voting for is what screwed us.
“absolutely mute” 😆
The opposite of when you mispronounce a word because you’ve only read it in books.
These dummies don’t read and heard this word wrong.
I learned the word “moot” from Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords on PC. I am wondering if I am more of a dummy or less of a dummy than someone who learned the word from reading and someone who learned the word from hearing it.
I learned this word in a rather unusual way. One day as a bored teenager, I was sitting around thinking of funny sounds that could pass as real words. “Moot” came into my head and, out of curiosity, I decided to look for it in a dictionary.
Needless to say, it became a new favorite. Moot. Moot. All these years, and it still sounds funny to me.
Yeah, like a mime’s opinion. It’s “mute.”
I wish these people were on mute once in a while.
Fun fact, if she renewed that visa with her plans to go to school in Florida, but then stayed there… She’s ineligible to ever become a citizen because she lied to get a visa.
That’s so sad…
That poor woman fell in love with an ignoramus.
I mean, she lives in Florida… she’s not that bright either.
TIL Tennessee is in Florida.
Hilarious how you strategically cut off the next five words, clearly saying she’s “still here” (in Tennessee). 🙄
Just admit you misread it and move on.
I read “She’s still here” as in “she’s still in the US”.
you’re probably right.
Florida is still a shithole though.
There’s no "probably’ about it.
if true, why didn’t he say “we live in Tennessee”?
She getting deported to?
To Columbia.
I don’t think Trump’s regime is going to work that hard at deporting everyone to the right country. She might end up in Mexico or even Rwanda.
Assuming they even know the definition of deported. They don’t seem to understand the definition of words. I still think Trump thinks asylum means people from insane asylums.
But this is my fear. They just start stripping citizenship from people who have been here legally to arbitrarily hit their quota numbers. Brown and got a bit of an accent? Naturalized in the last couple of years? Hope you’re not here on January 20th. That day has a very ominous feel to it to me.
I say this as a man married into a family of Salvadoreños. People aren’t treating this with the gravity it deserves.
Read about this in a Bill Bryson book. Cant remember the details. But during the 50s the US “government” discovered that a Finnish born man (with legal residens and married to an American woman) had been a member of the Finnish communist party in his youth. The shipped him out on the first plane for Europe, and only told gis wife after the plane landed
They’re all Mexicans right?
Or in Puerto Rico, for that matter 🌚
Colombia but yeah
What if they meant DC.
Then they right haha
To NYC according to the news media.
“She loves this country more than 3/4 of the folks on the left”
I’d like to see what data they were referencing for this claim.
Oh, that’s simple. There’s a doctor with a rubber glove and a flashlight that helps them get their data.
I hate this country. Mostly because of Trumpers, but I’ve got spare reserves for, you know, history.
The left hates the evil this country does. The right hates the people who live in this country but are slightly different than they are.
These fucking people
It would be somewhat understandable if they were actually ideologically consistent…
But watch that person bend over backwards to say why Elon musk (or Melania trump) shouldn’t be kicked out of the country, or have his citizenship revoked, after it came out he was doing the exact same “illegal immigrant” thing.
Colombia is probably going to be safer in 4 years.
Her work ethic is absolutely mute.
What? Did you say something?
I literally couldn’t see any other thing in the text. I bet the colombian girlfriend with the industrial engineering knowledge knows the difference between mute and moot, but the maga mouthbreather of course was born here, so it’s him we get to keep…
Afraid of they spelled it right someone would think they were insulting her by calling her a cow. Moo.
She should pay income tax…
So US has 1/4 of China population and can’t compete economically.
World is in a sharp fertility crisis.
U get free humans coming to your country to help u with that economic problem.
U should use those people, dumbest thing u can do is deport them and waste tons of money in the process.
U want cheaper houses - that’s how u get cheaper houses ffs
Ice Cube Face
“Bye Consuela”
Ice Cube Face
Maybe she can instead stay in the new complexes for migrants. And wonder if deportation is actually the plan when the trains arrive because maybe her education included gas chambers.
