> Your basic argument is that if X sometimes causes problems, we should be glad to see X gone. That's not my basic argument. My basic argument is that the very

> Your basic argument is that if X sometimes causes problems, we should be glad to see X gone. That's not my basic argument. My basic argument is that the very concept of "big" ideas as defined by Gabler is fundamentally flawed because: (1) the "bigness" factor of an idea he uses is a measure of how influential the idea is; (2) ill-informed people (think children, some rural communities etc) are much, much easier to influence than well-informed ones; and finally (3) there were proportionally many more ill-informed people in the past than there are today. So we might as well be in the golden age of ideas but neither one of them ever becomes "big" because they are all in fierce competition with each other. Or perhaps not -- but the basic point is that the way we measure this "bigness" is flawed. > American nationalism isn't the same idea as Chinese nationalism or Indian nationalism. Of course it isn't. America was founded before the wave of nationalism took over Europe. American nationalism is to European nationalism as ham is to hamster -- only the name is similar. Nationalism in most countries in the world was modeled on European nationalism. Examples: Lebanese nationalist Kataeb party was modeled on Spanish and Italian Fascist parties (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kataeb_Party). Pakistani nationalism stems from utopian visions of Muhammad Iqbal, an idealist poet influenced by Romanticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal). Ukrainian nationalism holds as holy populist-Romanticist ideas of Taras Shevchenko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko) and owes its ideologic form to Dmytro Dontsov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Dontsov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Dontsov). One of my biggest realization in the past years has been that nationalism isn't some "natural" tribal tendency but an ideology like any other that only uses ("perverts") the tribal tendencies for its own purpose and which was built and formulated nearly exclusively on a populist form of Romanticism that spread throughout Europe in the middle of 19th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism).