Insightful.I've committed to love, honor, and cherish one woman. I made that commitment in front of all this woman's family, friends, my family and friends, and most importantly to myself. Do interlopers try to intercede? Yes, of course. And I give them a polite but unambiguous decline to their offers. Why ... Because my wife and I have something precious.Likewise for our country. I pay taxes, and subject my liberties to obey the laws of the country. If our country goes to war, I'm right there to defend our country. I don't have a second citizenship. I'm fully invested in the strength and stability of the United States of America. I look with a jaded eye upon those with dual citizenship. To me they have no dedication, no commitment to a country. Such as someone who exclaims "I'm a citizen of the world." You may think they're a citizen of everywhere, when in fact they're a citizen of nowhere. When shit goes wrong, and their country needs them to help-out ... they pack up and head out.Imagine how you'd feel about a husband with an ill wife who packs up and abandons her in her time of need. Oh he was there when everything was going well, when the sex was good ... but when her needs outweigh his needs, he suddenly has an open marriage, he's married to all the women of the world.
You seem to be using "nation" to mean "nation-state." You also seem to imply that it is fully within the power to the person seeking to commit to join a nation to do so.
Regardless, there exists an awful lot of work on national identity and the perceived benefits in nation-membership, including quite a bit that directly addresses the usefulness--and limits--of metaphors comparing nations to families.
Language barriers are an obvious non-political factor when it comes to inhibiting cross-border interactions... it's easier for me to visit or do business in Canada than Mexico, because I don't speak Spanish.
Isn't the difference a manifestation of the tribal, "us" vs "them" tendencies we have, where we tend to view people from our own country as part of "us" and foreigners as "them"? Limits seem to reflect other tribal affiliations too, e.g. people who emigrate are often allowed to bring family members.
It's unclear to me whether your movements within and among nations refer to traveling (as in tourism), just living an another place for a while, or emigrating. It's also hard to model the difference between "within" and "without" in this situation as analogous to kissing "within" and "without" a marriage. For marriage, a mutual commitment is clearly what is going on (or so it seems to me). But for, say, emigrating, there is a huge infrastructure of political restrictions that constrain most situations. For just living/working in another company, not necessarily permanently, it would be interesting to see how much more closely "without" resembles "within" when the countries involved are all in the EU, where there are few restrictions. But outside of such a situation, druthers, it seems to me, have little to do with the difference, whereas with marriage, it's all about druthers.
Insightful.I've committed to love, honor, and cherish one woman. I made that commitment in front of all this woman's family, friends, my family and friends, and most importantly to myself. Do interlopers try to intercede? Yes, of course. And I give them a polite but unambiguous decline to their offers. Why ... Because my wife and I have something precious.Likewise for our country. I pay taxes, and subject my liberties to obey the laws of the country. If our country goes to war, I'm right there to defend our country. I don't have a second citizenship. I'm fully invested in the strength and stability of the United States of America. I look with a jaded eye upon those with dual citizenship. To me they have no dedication, no commitment to a country. Such as someone who exclaims "I'm a citizen of the world." You may think they're a citizen of everywhere, when in fact they're a citizen of nowhere. When shit goes wrong, and their country needs them to help-out ... they pack up and head out.Imagine how you'd feel about a husband with an ill wife who packs up and abandons her in her time of need. Oh he was there when everything was going well, when the sex was good ... but when her needs outweigh his needs, he suddenly has an open marriage, he's married to all the women of the world.
Think about commitment.
You seem to be using "nation" to mean "nation-state." You also seem to imply that it is fully within the power to the person seeking to commit to join a nation to do so.
Regardless, there exists an awful lot of work on national identity and the perceived benefits in nation-membership, including quite a bit that directly addresses the usefulness--and limits--of metaphors comparing nations to families.
Language barriers are an obvious non-political factor when it comes to inhibiting cross-border interactions... it's easier for me to visit or do business in Canada than Mexico, because I don't speak Spanish.
Isn't the difference a manifestation of the tribal, "us" vs "them" tendencies we have, where we tend to view people from our own country as part of "us" and foreigners as "them"? Limits seem to reflect other tribal affiliations too, e.g. people who emigrate are often allowed to bring family members.
It's unclear to me whether your movements within and among nations refer to traveling (as in tourism), just living an another place for a while, or emigrating. It's also hard to model the difference between "within" and "without" in this situation as analogous to kissing "within" and "without" a marriage. For marriage, a mutual commitment is clearly what is going on (or so it seems to me). But for, say, emigrating, there is a huge infrastructure of political restrictions that constrain most situations. For just living/working in another company, not necessarily permanently, it would be interesting to see how much more closely "without" resembles "within" when the countries involved are all in the EU, where there are few restrictions. But outside of such a situation, druthers, it seems to me, have little to do with the difference, whereas with marriage, it's all about druthers.