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?

Well said

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.

TF you on? Just because there weren’t immediate, drastic regime level changes doesn’t mean they went “exactly nowhere”.

There have been many changes at smaller levels not being reported in mainstream western media. Public pressure called for MANY local officials to step down along with changes in law that have already started effecting everyday life, and at least in Thailand, some pretty major changes in how public officials are held accountable via more expansive auditing channels, thereby increasing transparency.

Not everything is a fucking hollywood movie wherein you have some Hunger Games style uprising against the elite.

In fact, it’s fucking insulting hearing people who haven’t an ounce of global exposure beyond whatever 2 or 3 media sources they shove their heads into saying “those protesters got nothing accomplished”.

Never let anyone tell you protesting doesn’t work.

Can’t wait till AI can just learn and utilize my consciousness on my behalf. That way I don’t need to exist.

Bruh you do understand House Repubs were the ones who passed the bills that prevented Biden from stopping arms to israel right?

Also false dichotomy. Just because one side is “pro-something” doesn’t mean the other side is automatically the opposite.

He works at the knife factory

There’s no way this dude has ever experienced even an ounce of happiness in his entire life.

WhatsApp? Isn’t that just like, a messenger? Would think you’d want better friends if you’re encountering hate speech in your group chats haha

We define people by their labor value in capitalist societies. It only makes sense headlines would refer to people thru the lens of their previous employer.

Basically, AT&T argues against it saying it’ll force them to innovate and be competitive with other services.

Won’t anyone think of the poor telecom shareholders??

Oh good lord dude.

You witness any bullies when you were younger? What happens when the bully keeps poking their victim, taking their stuff, harassing them, get other bullies to move in with them and their family (well Ok, not exactly a one to one analogy, but you get the point)etc. ?

Eventually they can’t take it anymore and punch back. MAYBE the punch was a bit harder than intended…does this justify the bullies actions to then mutilate, torture and kill them?? Not only them, but their families and loved ones who had nothing to do with the punch? To burn down the victims home, force anyone who had ever associated with the victim to leave as the bully burns down their homes as well?

I would surely hope not.

Lmao genocide is not a “highly complex geopolitical issue”

It is neocolonialism that has been going on for a while (not 1000 years??) and is now ramping up to full on blatant murder, genocide, and devastation for the Palestinian peoples.

I can think of something US govt can do literally right now to help; STOP GIVING ISRAEL FUCKING WEAPONS!

But then the poor investors of aero/defense industrial complex will whine and complain that their Raytheon stock went down 5% ☹️. Can’t have that now can we

My fragile masculinity 😔

Soooooo VPN?

I mean, it’s not really a false dichotomy though? Your statements suggest that we assign fault/root cause to the consumer. I’m suggesting we assign root cause to the manufacturer/lack of regulation. If at the end of the day, it’s the consumer’s fault they chose a product without conducting a comprehensive quality review of all components within the product they purchase, then the action of pushing government regulation contradicts that. Funding regulation doesn’t do anything to fix consumer behavior; i.e. root cause. But maybe I misinterpreted your statements.

As for your first statement, there are many problems with this reasoning. How can we reasonably expect consumers to perform comprehensive research studies on everything they purchase? If it turned out the specific manufacturer of Grade B wool that’s used for a certain sweater from a certain clothing brand is known for causing latent forms of cancer if worn for 2 years, that’s really on the consumer? C’mon now.

Besides, in this specific case, it turned out to be a catastrophic latent failure. It wasn’t even possible for an informed consumer to have predicted this sort of catastrophic failure.

By that rationale, we should be blaming those who picked a certain brand of hamburger meat for getting salmonella poisoning? I would think we’d want to push responsibility on the corporation and governmental oversight for change in food safety standards than mock those who got sick.

Ehh…iOS is arguably the most secure mobile operating system (excluding something like GrapheneOS) currently on the market.

I don’t give a shit what brand you use, because I don’t have brand loyalty, but I can see valid reasons for why someone might want to use Apple Macbooks. Shitting on the consumer here does no good. All consumers deserve the same amount of consumer protection, regardless of which tech overlord they happen to purchase their hardware from.

Eh…you can pick any two examples and show anything really.