Crooked Timber » » Flights of fancy
Crooked Timber » » Flights of fancy:
On reflection, maybe the ban on carry on luggage won’t be so bad: without a pc, let alone a phone, there need be no guilt about watching some movies on the seat-back video instead of working.
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I wonder if it might be worthwhile to think of these recent changes to flight rules as part of a larger cross-purpose war against cosmopolitanism. terrorism keeps people at home, the flight restrictions keep people at home. the lack of travel certain impinges upon peoples capacity to see the other as self in terms of worldliness….
Making the world more parochial, less worldly through these actions will have grave consequences for future generations. Parents will fear more for their children and that is a different kind of fear than the televisual terror theater. The cutting back on international travel and international education worries me more than than terror because by giving up the cosmopolitan perspective, we are confronted with the binarity of us vs them, which I think is already exacerbated by the whole idea of a ‘homeland’… The u.s. is not a homeland, it is a melting pot, it is where people come to be free. Nazi germany was a motherland/homeland. anyway, as you can tell i think the u.s. and the u.k. are manipulating their senses of nationalism in really problematic ways and I think one way to counter that is through travel, now they are making travel difficult, so what then can we do?
