How much do you love your country (and more granular jurisdictional units)?

i love my city but only as it pertains to the rest of my country

otherwise, i don't take any pride in being part of imagined communities.

I love my city and my state. My country I love in a sort of abstract, ideal way: flags, cars, fireworks, pretty girls, baked goods, etc. but have been feeling like it has been functionally mangled for years.

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I love my island

I am finding it increasingly difficult to love my city although i would use it as a primary point of identification, rather than country. There's so much horrendously wrong with my country of residence and country of family origin that it's tough to love them in any meaningful sense. I love things about them, though.

http://www.touchoffinland.com/images/Picture%20038.jpg

i love (well, like) my city and my country. idk about my state tho - what's to love about it? states seem so blah. we should probably do away w/ them entirely.

Well of course I'm proud of my granular jurisdiction unit.

http://www.arktimes.com/binary/1ba1/1353439807-walmart.jpg

i like my city, i like my part of the country, i don't give much of a shit about my country, i am condensing all sorts of feelings and ideas within "like/don't like" here

I would say I'm patriotic to the degree that any thinking person can be patriotic. I do think the U.S.A. is closer to being an "ideal country" than most other countries. I love my city though I recognize there are plenty of shitty things about it. I'm ambivalent about my state.

i don't think the life i live + opportunities i have would be available to me in most (any?) other countries in the world but the US so i'm grateful for that

No particular local, state, regional or national pride/patriotism.

well, yeah...

you'll never catch me defending this place

― the presidential candidate inside me (WmC), Thursday, June 30, 2011 10:58 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

I love my city and esp my state. this country I view with a mix of contempt and idealism

love my state; the relationship between it and my country is even knottier than they usually are (imperialism a super-easy concept for hawaii kids: just look at a map) but i love my country too, in increasingly irrelevant theory.

a globe, i should say. maps will lie.

the number of totally smart and educated people who when they've heard i'm flying back to honolulu from l.a. or portland say "oh that shouldn't be so bad, like an hour?"

idk about my state tho - what's to love about it? states seem so blah.

ladies and gentlemen, the east coast

The idea of loving a political entity just doesn't strike much of a note with me, although I must say that the USA is not half bad when compared to the 160 or so other nations in the world.

A deep love for my state (Oregon) comes to me quite naturally, but not conceived of as a government, but rather as my home, the place I have always known, the land that I live in and walk upon. Incidentally, it is an amazingly lovely place. I take an interest in my state's politics, mostly because they mean something to me and affect my life in intimate ways that national politics often do not. Besides, I can make a small, but measurable difference in state politics, but my influence nationally is nil.

My city is a nice place, too. I like it here. Love would be much too strong a word, but I appreciate its advantages and don't take them for granted. City politics here are responsive (the population is only ~30,000), but uncomplicated, so they don't need a lot of my attention.

USA is not half bad when compared to the 160 or so other nations in the world.

Yeah, I think we're maybe just a quarter to maybe 40% bad.

when i love a country (i love maybe two and a half) it's about loving its history more than loving a political entity. but haha, history, what a horrible thing to love.

and aimless otm abt love-for-state having even less to do with government. it's about land, mostly, and a little bit about people.

a quarter to maybe 40% bad.

USA government is crap compared to just about anywhere in western Europe. We'd probably match up moderately well with places like Poland. Maybe Italy. But bring places like Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan or Bolivia, not to mention Sudan or Congo, into the conversation and our failings begin to look much less profound.

I am pretty into CA's policies as a state government, things like Prop 13 aside

we created the best statewide higher education system (that used to be FREE to residents! just insane to think about in today's climate), we've been at the forefront of environmental and energy policy, state beaches are all public, huge parks system, etc.

we were also the first to elect that dipshit Ronald Reagan to political office

well I'm not gonna stan for every electoral choice we've ever made obviously...

we've made some pretty shitty electoral choices though

you wanna rank the governors now or what

Im new to my state and city. I like my city a lot. But its kind of an oasis inside a friggin bizarre state. Love certain things about my country, but hate others (mostly related to politics).

Same applies to the city and state i grew up in (Chicago, IL)

I must repeat what I've surely said elsewhere on ILX, that regardless of what I think about the USA or its culture, when I leave this country I quickly discover that it has shaped me and marked me in ways I rarely recognize. I can never not be an American now. Even if I moved away, I'd carry it with me.

We don't... have States where I'm from? And no, county isn't really any kind of substitute.

I feel some attachment to the identity of "Londoner". Was born here; imagine I'll die here, but hate it as much as I love it.

England can get tae fuck, being born in an oven doesn't make me a pasty. But "British" feels like some kind of cop-out in some ways, but the only thing that applies in other ways, but "love" or "pride" as in what? The whole ~concept~ of Britain as in Empire and one nation on this island dominating all the others (and in fact every other country on the globe except a few not worth invading) is gross and icky and something to be ashamed of TBH. I probably only identify as "British" to specify "Not-English" (insert some bit about the ahistoricality of "Celtic" countered with some Cornish Nationalism here?)

I'm gonna go with "some other jurisdiction not covered her" coz you said naught about Duchies (or which side one should pass them on).

I'm somewhat attached to my city, though I would never say anything like "I love my city/province/country" since this basically feels like saying "I love governments".

I love my planet, galaxy and universe I guess.

i was at a nonprofit picnic meet-n-greet thing the other day, and one of the activities was a social bingo card where people were supposed to walk around and talk to everyone and meet people who met certain conditions to fill out their card. in my typical apathetic style i didn't participate because i don't usually care about winning and i didn't want to meet new people. but of course there were a handful of people who were gung ho about it and were darting from table to table filling out their card. one of them said "i can't help it - i'm competitive with everything i do", and i said "well you live in the right country for that" or something. which isn't profound or anything, of course, but it was one of those weird moments where you step back and see yourself as part of a society which is influenced by certain things, esp. money and power and competition. and yeah, most westernized societies are based on competition in the pursuit of money and power, so it's not like the united states is unique. it does seem like the degree to which people in the U.S. pursue those things (and are encouraged by those around us) is fairly extreme.

i'm probably wrong about all of that, but regardless, as the social bingo game continued and i kept drinking free beer i started to think about what it means to be at odds with the prevailing norms of the people in your country. i don't love my country, that's for fucking sure. would i be a true patriot if i was really into making money and buying stuff? then again,

maybe it's just because i grew up in a really terrible racist part of america and i'm accustomed to looking at the people around me and thinking "god wtf is wrong with everyone"? it makes it hard to feel a sense of community when you grow up by a KKK meeting site. completely unfounded theory, but it seems to me like love/pride of one's neighborhood/city/state/country diminishes as you get further away from your home. most people seems to like their cities (if they didn't, they could leave, theoretically). but as you increase to states and regions and nations, and these entities have more and more power over your lives and you have less of an influence on them and connection to the people, the pride diminishes. uh, unless it's the olympics or soccer. anyway, i guess i'm trying to say that i never established a pride of my hometown, and so maybe it's hard for me to skip a level and suddenly be into the idea of being from a state, or a country. sorry for incoherence, my standard disclaimer

rmde @ city
h8 state
<3 USA

i like my neighborhood, city, metro area, state, region and country just fine.

each is of course grotesque and unlovable and living itself in any historical moment is arbitrary and preposterous etc etc

even when i'm In Opposition, as karl describes, i'm a mirror

I love my city and my country, but my state has some pretty terrible problems

it's funny, when i was younger i thought america was a force for good and capitalism For All Its Excesses was the most just and workable system etc etc, but i also thought of myself as a tabula rasa totally outside of and unaffected by american culture, as some kind of cosmopolitan intellectual who chose what to believe and how to feel. now i believe the opposite of both of those. the more dissident i get the more american i feel.

sry don't mean to put on airs w the word "dissident". u know what i mean. unhappy stoner, not sakharov.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

wtf at this poll

no "I'm ashamed of my country" option?

no "I'm not sure what my country is" option?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

jurisdictional unit is a strange phrase. strangely, i love my province, but mostly the parts that lack a "community", by which i mean its forests and general nature. its biggest city is alright. i "like" it, but like many cities, it has its good and bad. i belong to it by some soil-vegetation interrelationship miracle

displacement hurts more

Love my city. State is pretty horrible, TBH. Country, depends on the day how I feel.

i love my bed