Talkin' and thinkin' about...

I'm having lots of disparate conversations today, all of them interesting and all deserving of a long thoughtful post in and of themselves.  But I wanna know which of these, if any, you are interested in. So here's a sorta synopsis.

I'm having an email exchange with another blogger about patriotism.  It started out because he mentioned he joined the army during the first gulf war even though he didn't believe in the morality of the war.  And he did this because, he argues, that whatever the rightness or wrongness of the motivations behind the war when your country is actually engaged in the fighting there's an obligation of some sort to support them and even go fight it.  (Stephen, I hope I'm presenting the argument here fairly).  It's an argument I've heard before but don't really "get".  Does this mean if we were Germans back in the 30s and we didn't believe or support the Nazi Party we'd still be obligated to fight with them against the Allies?

The second part of that discussion involves him being Native American.  Where do you place your allegiance then?  What is your home turf?  The nation-state that colonized your people?  Why do so many Native Americans join the Army? (he has a post on that here)  And what about a warrior-ethic (if that's the right word to mean to value the right to self-defense) for oppressed societies?  Does that necessarily get turned into terrorism if the US doesn't recognize your group's sovereignty?  So what is sovereignty?  And who decides?

And then there are conversations over at FLA Politics (in the comments section here) about how empires decline (by overstretching themselves and not taking care of the environment and all that) and how Bush's budget proposals are so emblematic of that.  And also  the power of bookgroups and salons, small groups getting together to just talk about and discuss the issues of the day and that got me thinking of how much I love small groups, the egalitarianism of them, the democracy of them, the participatory-ness.  And how we're so lucky to live in the 21st century because we could, theoretically, combine all the wonderfulness of small groups with the political force of networked constituencies and wouldn't that be a way to get the best of both worlds (egalitarianism and democracy AND political power).

And then I've got some idea in the back of my head about sexualities and attraction and relationships... and by the way, people had such a great conversation going on down there on that first open thread I don't want to cut it off because it's gonna get knocked off the front page here so I'll post a link on the sidebar for a little while in case you want to keep it going.  As for which of the above topics, conviently highlighted for you in red, I'm not really going to post more on all or any of them ('cept for maybe sovereignty or patriotism) but I still thought I'd throw them out there.

Comments

[kate.d.]

hey, sorry i couldn't fix that typo for you, but feel free to go back and delete/repost the comment if you want! blogger is funny sometimes.

i love the idea of salons...especially calling them 'salons.' very turn of the century, you know? 'small groups' makes me think of college classes or training sessions, whereas 'salons' implies a voluntary gathering and a more broad range of possible discussion topics. plus, i think of yeats and his pince nez and his seances, which are all also fun and amusing in an intellectual sort of way :)

so, i definitely advocate for the return of the salon. my friend steve didn't even know that 'salon' had any connotation beyond hair - he was thinking about starting a discussion group, and i said "you could call it 'steve's salon,'" but i was met with puzzled silence. so sad.