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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Almost entirely off topic, but I was caught off guard by the following line:

> Your dedication is unsurpassed, your patriotism unquestioned, and your skills are the envy of the world.

Your patriotism unquestioned! I wonder, is there any democratic country outside the US where patriotism is so much a thing? What does it mean, really? I love my country, so I'll do.. what? What would I do that I wouldn't do if I didn't love my country? Are those things actually always the right thing to do?

I'm not really getting to a point here. I'm just surprised that a term as strong as "patriotism" is used to casually. Do common people in the US really identify with being a patriot? Or is this just army-speak?

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> Do common people in the US really identify with being a patriot?

Patriotism originally meant you were willing to sacrifice something for your country. Presumably the smallest measure of that sacrifice would be spending your time developing well-founded opinions about how the country should operate. (Just take a look at the federalist papers: 85 long, dense articles arguing in favor of the minutest details of the constitution. And the expectation was that people would actually read them!)

Unfortunately patriotism doesn't mean sacrifice anymore. It means something akin to a fingers-in-the-ear, uncritical fanboyism. Just plaster everything with flags and soaring eagles and call it good. It's not sacrificing everything (like Snowden did), it's something you do instead of sacrificing _anything_, even the time it would take to educate yourself on what your country is doing. And as a bonus you get to flaunt that very ignorance as an additional point of pride.

And yeah, common people here in the US definitely do embrace it to a nauseating degree.

> Patriotism originally meant you were willing to sacrifice something for your country

Yes. That's why Snowden is a patriot, not fat bald men sitting around in a climate-controlled building in Utah, listening to mp3s of private conversations (and posting them to Youtube -- we're certainly not very far from this).

Those NSA characters don't sacrifice anything. They probably look like Newman of Seinfeld fame. Calling them "heroes" is hilarious (as well as Orwellian, but we're used to that).

> They probably look like Newman of Seinfeld fame.

So it is not possible to be fat and bald and still be willing to sacrifice for your country?

Benjamin Franklin's vision of "A Republic, if you can keep it" requires questioning in a desire to preserve what can, in fact, be lost.

What Keith is going for here, is , "My Country, right or wrong", blind following.

Well when the job is literally "National Security" then no, it's not weird that you would refer to the patriotism (a nationalistic term) of the workers.

Maybe they want to make the PATRIOT Act look like a good thing?

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