Patriotism

[Alexander's Horse]

patriotism is a sense of belonging and duty to a state, it means more on days like today when 5 Australian soldiers died in Afghanistan.

[dannubis]

In principle, why should that mean more tp you than those recruits who got blown up in front of a police station? Unless of course you know one of those soldiers or their families personally.

Mind you, I am not trying to / have the intention to talking down on their sacrifice.

[Jon Miller]

The issue is that humans are human and not robots.

Some humans have a sociological basis which isn't tribal/selfish/family only/etc. Well, I would argue isn't mainly...

But most don't.

The question could be as easily turned to you.

In principle, why should recruits getting blown up in front of a police station mean the same to anyone as soldiers dying due to protecting (in some fashion) their country?

JM

[lightblue]

You could argue that patriotism is a form of tribalism, a sense of greater belonging to a certain part of humanity than the whole. In the past it has also often swayed easily towards nationalism.

[Jon Miller]

Nationalism/Patriotism does share a lot of similarities to tribalism, but it has the advantage of being to a nation instead of to another type of tribe (religion, culture, ethnicity, family, etc).

It is a lot easier to be inclusive or to be at peace with your neighbors with nationalism than tribalism.

JM

[Lorizael]

Although I think America is a pretty rad country, I have no sense of patriotism. I identify myself based on what would kill me. Osama would try get his minions to suicide bomb me, so I'm American. Hitler would try to gas me, so I'm Jewish. Testicular cancer would force me to kill myself, so I'm male. And HIV would cause me to die of the common cold, so I'm human.

[dannubis]

Nationalism/Patriotism does share a lot of similarities to tribalism, but it has the advantage of being to a nation instead of to another type of tribe (religion, culture, ethnicity, family, etc).

It is a lot easier to be inclusive or to be at peace with your neighbors with nationalism than tribalism.

JM

And yet, since the advent of the nation state we managed to kill ourselves at an exeedingly rapid pace.

[dannubis]

The question could be as easily turned to you.

In principle, why should recruits getting blown up in front of a police station mean the same to anyone as soldiers dying due to protecting (in some fashion) their country?

JM

Because in both cases they are humans meeting their maker prematurely ?

[Aeson]

Family->Tribe->City State->Nation ... The obvious next step up the ladder is speciesism. Now we just need some aliens to fearmonger about and we can circle the wagons worldwide ...

(I am not including the following for various reasons that would cause, or has caused each to fail utterly:

racism, continentalism, hemisphereism, haircolorism, sexualism, handedism*, genderism

*this one might actually work ... if it weren't for those ambidextrous double agents )

[Pekka]

The older I grow, the less patriotic I'm becoming.

As people, we are average at most. Perhaps a bit more stupid than other considering we are a rich country, yet we have such a great disparity between the rich and the poor, middle class isn't there anymore and we STILL tax everyone to death (except the rich). Then we stick our heads in sand and believe the poor aren't that poor and homeless have many options, they're just lazy or alcoholics.

I don't care about my fellow countrymen anymore than I care about other people. I have a certain level of caring on individual basis but it's got nothing to do with nationalities. I'd like to continue living in a democracy, so I support having an army and fighting off foes who'd want some more resources. Other than that, let's see some hockey every now and then but otherwise I don't care.

I care about my family. That's it. What ever is best for us is what I support and do. We'll go for our happiness and not push people under the bus along the way and we'll be just fine. I'm not into flag waving. I'm into my family. The fight I'll be for is us versus aliens should it happen. I'm down for humanity and humans, I'm rooting for us for sure. But as far as nations go? Nah.

edit: just wanted to say that if someone is extra proud and it benefits them, that's good. If someone asks me "Are you proud of your country", I'd truthfully have to say "I don't understand the question". I really have trouble of being of any feeling or opinion of an abstract thing, this construction of extended tribe with rules and whatnot. We have bunch of *******s and couple of good guys. What can I say? I'm not ashamed of it either. It just is. I'm proud of my kids because I know them. I don't know my countrymen. I know my family. We're good folks. I know bunch of *******s who I would not consider good folks. Am I proud of them? No.

What about the wars we've fought? Well, I didn't fight in them. What about the first GSM call? I wasn't part of it. Just because some other people did it with the same passport doesn't mean that I'm part of it. In my world that is. If my hockey team wins, I didn't play in it. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy it, I'm a fan, I'm loving it. But I don't feel like I get any credit for the success of others. I do, however, feel good about their success. But it's really their good effort. And my tax money doesn't pay for everything, even when I'd like to think so.

TO me, this is an important thing because especially today, it seems that many of us think that we're helping those less fortunate when we post a facebook message, or "like" something, or ... you know, the poor or sick or isolated or lonely, they don't exactly benefit from it. We, the rich, just get a feeling that we did something. This circle jerk needs to end. We take so much credit for stuff we don't do, both in good and bad. We need to participate more ourselves and THEN we can take credit and feel good about it... make a difference to someone. Instead of chanting our country's name or thinking "it will take care of everyone".

[Alexander's Horse]

see? Patriotism, what is it worth? 5 soldiers die and no-one comments. Casualties often now end up on page 20 of the newspapers, just before the funny pages, except maybe in local newspapers.

Pay attention those of you of military age.

[Elok]

see? Patriotism, what is it worth? 5 soldiers die and no-one comments. Casualties often now end up on page 20 of the newspapers, just before the funny pages, except maybe in local newspapers.

Pay attention those of you of military age.

Why? With no draft and no risk of actual invasion, military conflicts touch nobody except soldiers and their families. To the rest of the country, they're basically invisible. After a while we started to feel bad about all the young folk coming home from Iraq in boxes, but it took a looong time for that to become solid--years. I object to the latest round of wars because they serve no interests other than war profiteering and the preservation of our national vanity. Indeed, patriotism seems like it was one of the main ingredients to our recent mess; 9/11 killed something like 4,000 people, but that same year we apparently lost more than four times as many just to drunk driving. Or so a hasty search tells me ( http://www.alcoholalert.com/drunk-dr...tics-2001.html ). And that happens basically every year, without years of planning and exploitation of a ridiculously antiquated security apparatus.

Anyway, instead of a limited retaliation aimed at destroying OBL, we just spent about ten years, a ridiculous amount of money, and substantially more than 4K additional (American) lives. And we're not really done yet, though we're winding down and soon the fanatics will be able to undo most of our work in a matter of weeks. Why did we do all this? Because THESE COLORS DON'T RUN YOU RAGHEAD ********ERS OORAH!

[Lul Thyme]

And yet, since the advent of the nation state we managed to kill ourselves at an exeedingly rapid pace.

This is a common misconception : per capita, less people died of murder, war or violent deaths in general in the 20th century than in any century before it (according to the best estimates we can make).

Take WW2 for example. Because it is rather recent and unprecedented in scale, we tend to think of it as a murderous war.
Yet, on a per capita basis, it was less deadly than wars of the past.

In the US for example, it was more than 7 times less deadly than the Civil War (0.32% vs 2+%) (the Civil War was deadlier even in absolute terms).
Another example : Germany, about 8% of population killed during WW2 (including civilian losses), yet, during the Thirty Years' War, Germany lost 25 to 40% of its population!

Heck, it's estimated that the casualties of the Mongol Conquests during the 14th and 15th century were the equivalent of over 10% of the WORLD population.

See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll

for some data.

Note that this does not include all the small conflicts which are not remembered today, for example two small neighbouring states warring on each other. These used to kill lots of people but became non-existent with the rise of nations. (Of course you have bigger conflicts, but way less in general, that's the point.)

Same goes with murder, according to our best estimates. A lot of people tend to think of now as a time when you are at high risk of being shot anywhere anytime, but, on a per capita basis, murder rates are exceedingly low compared to past centuries.


In the long run, the past trend has always been for the world to become less violent, not more. Thinking the opposite is, unfortunately, a very common misconception, which I think is partly due to media overexposure.



In any case, I've drifted pretty far from topic, but my point is that, while I'm not very patriotic or nationalistic and I think that our current concept of nationalism could be (and will be) eventually "improved" to be more "global" and "open", it is certainly better than whatever existed before.

[Elok]

In our Civil War, a substantial minority if not an outright majority of fatalities were due to disease, because medical technology was horrifically primitive and sanitation in the camps nonexistent. It's harder to say with the Thirty Years' War--it was probably a double punch of starvation and disease, caused largely by the way wars were fought back then: giant wads of mercenaries who never got paid on time or got proper support, and who therefore resupplied by simply levying "tribute" from whatever towns they passed by or through. A few such armies could loot a town bare of food and supplies really quick. Undernourished populations caught diseases much more readily. Of course, the fact that the war lasted thirty years was the biggest reason for its astonishing death toll. But a simple Pinker-style per capita death toll isn't going to yield much definitive, especially with the confounding variable of technological progress. The argument's been made that the per-capita figure looks a lot lower for the twentieth century largely because of the agricultural revolution. And to go from those figures to any broad conclusion about political systems, when there are so many variables involved...eh, that sounds really iffy to me.

(personally, I think tribalism and nationalism equally revolting in different ways)

[Elok]

Also, the Civil War was certainly well into the era of nationalism/the nation-state. The 30YW was on the brink of it, IIUC; the Treaty of Westphalia is often hailed as a sign of the emerging modern era of nation-states. For the present argument, a comparison of those particular wars seems beside the point.