SolarCross wrote:I am doing no such thing and clearly you care nothing for "rational discourse".
Wrong again. When you say there is no such thing as "we," you are making the same kind of disingenuous and absurd claim as Maggie Thatcher when she said there is no such thing as society. There self-evidently and indisputably IS such a thing as "we,", just as there self-evidently and indisputably is such a thing as society.
There is no common allegiance either.
Yes, of course there is, to the community they choose to remain members of.
If you put all four in a room together they'd probably murder each other.
What nonsense. Why would they?
The more individuals you aggregate into your abstract "society" the more of an abstraction it becomes.
It's not an abstraction. It's just complex -- maybe too complex for some people to understand.
Regardless I was talking about the concept of the "public" which is NOT a simple synonym of "society" or "community".
True, the public consists of the people that make up the community. They are one factor that goes into making a society or community. Other factors are common interests, laws, government, etc., as already explained so very patiently.
Your crude intellect isn't even on a "kindergarten-level" if you can't grasp that nuance.
<yawn> I just
explained the nuance, which you were not up to.
public - webster definition
As noun it means:
"the people as a whole". It doesn't in fact necessarily exclude non-nationals.
It excludes visitors, anyway, which is what I said, because it is "THE people," not just "people." Are you not up to understanding that nuance, either?
The word "citizenry" is more explicitly centered on a nationalist criteria for who is in and who is out. Perhaps the Romans who originally coined the term used it in a nationalist way but now the word is not used in English that way necessarily.
Of course not necessarily. The word has different senses, as any good dictionary will confirm. But unless you are interested in pushing an equivocation fallacy -- always a handy option when you can't answer facts and logic -- those other senses are irrelevant to the point.
There is no community on that scale except as a literary conceit, a fiction.
GARBAGE.
In general the laws people are bound by come from different sources and do not apply equally.
Irrelevant. They are still part of the social structure.
Muslims can get a limited kind of sharia for example in the UK.
Irrelevant. That's their choice, and they are still bound by British law.
Every contract is a unique law in its own right and there are billions of them.
Wrong. Contracts are not laws. You know better than that.
There are local by-laws which only apply on a provincial level.
So there are levels of community, from local to national. So what?
Arguably every house and company has its own "house rules" and enforcement procedures.
So what?
We are speaking in English! The correct definition of "public" in English is how the English native speaker uses it. There can be no error by definition.
Nonsense. People use words incorrectly all the time. Sometimes these errors become accepted usage, but they are still errors. Indigenous Americans are not Indians no matter how many people call them Indians.
Anyway, as neither of us is defending socialism, we seem to be OT.