It's a pretty natural want though. I'll go to a coffee shop owned by my brother before I go to a random other coffee shop. Especially if products are more or less interchangeable. What's wrong with wanting to give your business to someone you know well, and whose product/work has a direct influence on your life? Do what you want, obviously, but I don't think it's a weird moral problem whether you want to support those closer to you.
And yet I could fly thousands of miles to Washington state or California and "know" people much better than if I flew thousands of miles to Latin America, Iceland, etc.
There is more to 'closeness to people' than distance, there is also shared culture, civics, values, etc. etc.
You'll find a lot more common culture between people in NYC and London than you'll find between Atlanta and Portland, or Little Rock and San Francisco.
As someone who's moved both across the US and across the ocean, stopping to embed myself culturally for several years each time, I think you overestimate this bond.
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It's a pretty natural want though. I'll go to a coffee shop owned by my brother before I go to a random other coffee shop. Especially if products are more or less interchangeable. What's wrong with wanting to give your business to someone you know well, and whose product/work has a direct influence on your life? Do what you want, obviously, but I don't think it's a weird moral problem whether you want to support those closer to you.
Nothing, but it's impossible to "know well" everyone in a nation, making this sort of blind nationalism simply delusional at best.
And yet I could fly thousands of miles to Washington state or California and "know" people much better than if I flew thousands of miles to Latin America, Iceland, etc.
There is more to 'closeness to people' than distance, there is also shared culture, civics, values, etc. etc.
You'll find a lot more common culture between people in NYC and London than you'll find between Atlanta and Portland, or Little Rock and San Francisco.
As someone who's moved both across the US and across the ocean, stopping to embed myself culturally for several years each time, I think you overestimate this bond.