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”?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
The second username is just a suggested Reddit username, I have one on my Reddit account because I was too lazy to think of an original name. It doesn't mean you're a bot.
And the first username looks like it belongs to somebody who owns a 2017 Subaru Impreza.
Honestly, what’s worse, that someone has so little empathy that they’ll just tell some innocent person that they should be separated from their loved ones because they didn’t say the right magic words as they went over the imaginary line, or that someone would invest the time and energy into creating software to do so automatically
Makes sense that they don't know how to spell 'moot', and don't care that this person's a friggin' engineer and our country would benefit immensely from their expertise.
That's far too subtle even for people with fully functional brains. No way Internet commenters are going to let go of their holy rage long enough to entertain that interpretation.
They kept saying that facts don't care about your feelings, so what is the point of that long ass post explaining why his girlfriend is the best immigrant?
My girlfriend illegal, should ahe be shot or deported? Easy
That's not how this works. I am legally married in Japan and wanted to get it official in the US as well and.... we gave up. I would have to go through all the hoops to get her an SSN or TIN or whatever just to get it done, at least in the county I used to live in. That proved to be a second problem to me because I couldn't prove current residence there (though that hurdle could be cleared by this person assuming only he needs to prove residence).
This ignores the fact that dude has been harboring an illegal alien, among potential other crimes, and the illegal alien is there in violation of stay which makes all future visa/residency stuff harder. If I get married THEN apply for some residency status for my wife, that's possible and not the most painful thing from what I hear (green card and citizenship are whole other things), but that goes out the window when things are illegal already.
Getting a green card, even after marriage, typically takes 6 months at a minimum. If they started the process now, she could still be deported within Trump's 100 days
Still need to apply for a green card from the Federal government. Marriage certificates from State/local governments are not sufficient on their own. You're basically trying to prove that the marriage is legit.
No, you have sanity backwards. This is a great argument for our legal system needing an overhaul so that only things that are enforced always are enshrined in laws. Murder is bad -- great law. Loitering as a concept -- dumb law used to abuse.
There will never be perfect laws. The idea of encoding behavior is absurd. What we need is let the laws handle the major ideas (don't kill etc) and let real live humans handle the details.