Why is nationalism decreasing...

I understand what you're saying Scrye, and I guess I wasn't giving you a fair shake by mentioning that conditions have improved drastically since the outbreak of the war in terms of police tactics used by infantrymen.

But it's still a tad... Unnecessary.. To start mowing down buildings in an LAV when the Insurgents are held up in a house with a highly populated neighborhood.

Immigration is also huge issue in the USA, and our borders are far from open.

edited 3rd Jan '11 3:56:55 PM by storyyeller

Yeah, but your issues are with illegal immigration, Belgiums is with taking on more refugees than we can handle and not having an effective screening process for who we are letting in.

Also our police force is horribly corrupt.

edited 3rd Jan '11 4:23:38 PM by saladofstones

I blame the mow-down tactic on our concerns for personal safety. It's much easier to avoid taking casualties by utilizing strong assault tactics rather than police tactics. As fun as it is to be the 1-man for a stack when room clearing, my chances of getting early admission to a graveyard were far greater than my chances of walking out of there. I have been pretty lucky so far. But despite the advantages of wrecking a house, The Brass wants mission accomplishment. So that's the reason we do the (tedious) police work. Infantrymen still have their biases though, they'd still rather see something blow up than see one of their boys get shot so that we can preserve real-estate values in Afghanistan, not because it's cooler, but because it makes more sense to us. But the mission has turned combat into politics. And we conduct the police work, even if we bitch about it the whole way. That's probably where the misunderstandings come from.

Oh no, I see where you're coming from. My biggest emphasis was that you guys don't have experience with a law enforcement mentality in the same manner as military police. We're trained to interact with civilians, y'all are trained to destroy shit. It's no ones fault really.

That's very true. A lot of the shit we train on is engaging the civilian populace and such. We've gotten good at it, but every time I talk with one, I end up walking away hating them more and more. It's not psychologically healthy, but whatever. As long as we get the job done, right?

edited 3rd Jan '11 9:24:41 PM by Scrye

You're not alone in that, just think, every time an MP walks away from dealing with a drunk infantryman, he hates them more and more.

The feeling is mutual. :P

I hate gamblers and gambling after working the door at a bar/casino for a year. It happens.

Knight in Sour Armour? Policing makes one a suspicious bastard?

For me, it's them that make me hate them. I can't speak for Barkey or anyone else.

Big cultural gap? It's okay, in Morocco we have entire regions of assholes. In France they have Corsica, in Italy they have Sicilia. In the USA they have the Deep South.

The South has a much greater mood of hospitality than the North. The KKK is not the South.

Back on topic. Cultural difference is a huge understatement.

...and the south-bashers show up finally!

Y'know, people, there are good people who live below the Mason-Dixon line. This site has a few of them. I'm related to some of them. Maybe all the bashing is the reason so many Southerners own guns.

@pagad: No, it's okay. The whole war was fought by lies even more than weapons. After the Thirty Xanatos Pileup that happened, nothing said concerning the war should be taken for granted. I'm trying to be as objective as I can and working hard to find the truth, but what if, actually, I am wrong? The real truth will probably never be known. @Raw Power: I will try to briefly explain the history of the conflicts. It may turn into a wall of text, but hey, at least I was trying.

As you probably know, in the 19th century Serbia, just like other Balkan countries, was fighting for the liberation of its territories from the Ottoman Empire. In the neighboring Austrian Empire, there was also a sizeable Serbian population, as well as Croats and Slovenes (two other nations from the South Slavic group). After WWI, when Austria fell, Serbia had a large part in the carve-up of its territories. There were two possible options: Greater Serbia, which would encompass all Serbian-populated areas; and Yugoslavia, which would be a larger territory encompassing the areas populated by Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with the possibility of uniting with Bulgaria (it didn't happen). Serbs, with the support of Croat and Slovene politicians, opted for Yugoslavia, and it was created in 1918, immediately after the war. Soon after, a coup was staged in the nearby Serbian-populated kingdom of Montenegro, and it joined the new state too. It was a more-or-less centralized constitutional monarchy, ruled from Belgrade by the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty. There arose the problem - Slovenes and (especially) Croats, who were wealthier and better educated than Serbs, wanted a greater deal of power in the state, federalization, change to a republic and moving the capital to Zagreb, Croatia. Serbs didn't agree, and the next ten years were marked by disorder in the state and even shootouts in the Parliament, culminating with King Alexander I Karadjordjevic establishing a pseudo-fascist dictatorship with him on top in order to impose order, which lasted five years until his assassination. In 1939, a compromise was made, which granted Croats a great deal of autonomy, but that couldn't stop the rising wave of Croatian nationalism and separatism. In 1941, when Hitler attacked Yugoslavia, he made a pact with the terrorist Ustashe group, constisting of Croatian ultranationalists, and granting them independence after the fall of Yugoslavia.

More coming soon...

Okay, how about instead of the Deep South I say Jersey?

How about you just stop generalizing via region?

Fine, how about you stop hating a country as a block?

What, we can't hate N.Korea anymore?

^^I'm working on it.

It's not as if the N Koreans were at fault.

Forgive me for jumping in here, but hating North Korea does seem sorta cruel. Hating the North Korean government certainly, but the North Korean people? That's not on. They're victims, not enemies.

North Korea is basically Nineteen Eighty Four made manifest. Nearly seventy years of brainwashing, oppression and starvation by an utterly incompetent, extraordinarily isolationist, belligerent, hyper-totalitarian state would leave you completely fucked up as well.

Nationalism rises when certain foreign ideas or nations or peoples do very bad things to your country. Of course, this is troublesome when it convinces some to discard good foreign ideas, but it's still understandable.

"snailbait, Fri, 24th Dec '10 10:37:50 PM from psych ward

Being proud of a country you were coincidentally born in seems kind of odd to me. Please don't flame me for saying that... I'm an American myself, but I'm far from nationalistic. Not sure if that makes me a small minority or not."

Being proud of anything is kind of odd. Even your talents and virtues come from your birth and environment.

LOVING your country on the other hand is no more irrational then loving anything or anyone else.

Thread Hop.

I am not entirely comfortable with the term nationalism - I love my country but I don't think it's better than every other country at everything ever. With that in mind, I take issue with that saying about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels.

As an American, I am comfortable with the idea that I might only love my country so much because I had the good fortune to be born in a modern first world industrialized nation where I can afford all manner of modern conveniences. In fact, I would say that my gratitude for that forms part of my national identity and hence, why I feel that I need to give back to that nation in some way.

I can see the same sort of thing in other countries, even in developing countries and especially in Africa where, despite the fact that they are poor, you will find no shortage of people who go overseas to study with a view to returning one day and working towards the betterment of the scrap of land they happened to be born on. When I lived in Kenya, I found that even the average minibus driver had some reasonably articulate opinions on their politicians, relative to their education level.

Because of this, I think that nationalism is not "merely" about what scrap of land you were born on. It's your scrap of land. You take an interest in its successes and failures. You share in its triumphs and tragedies. It's like a lot of things in life; you don't get to choose what you're born with but you do get to choose what you make of it.

Now as for nationalism decreasing, I don't really have any raw data on that, just anecdotes. I can't detect any general trend - in some places people are rallying to a particularly ugly form of nationalism while in others, particularly in the developing world and the rapidly growing BRICS, people take pride in how far they have come as a group. I guess you could say globalization would account for a decrease in nationalism among certain groups of people, and I suspect that these people include late high school - college students, since I have never heard any other demographic pontificate so much about the idea that something is a social construct. Also, people who have grown up under the umbrella of mobile careers like the UN where you might be reassigned to a new country every few years. Third culture kids, I think they call us.

I actually got the impression that in some parts of America we were going the way of Germany. Like, it was wrong of us to go and defile those poor Middle Eastern civilizations. We're sorry. I guess we are pretty evil.

Come on, guys.

edited 14th Sep '12 8:34:44 AM by HouraiRabbit