Omar Kusturica wrote: "These former identities [i.e. Croat, Serb, Muslim] are also subjective, especially in the context of the former Yugoslavia where everybody was educated and ideologically formed on more or less the same socialist /secular/ cosmopolitan grounds." How can they be subjective? When fighting broke out, did people have to do surveys to figure out who was, at any particular moment, Croat, Serb or Muslim? What I have been told is that people knew who was what and there was nothing subjective about it. After all, it isn't like one can wake up one morning and decide to be Croat till lunch and then Serb for supper. Omar continued: "If you think, for example, that my sympathies for Islam spring solely from the fact that I was growing up in the former Yugoslavia, you will be off the mark." I thought nothing of the kind. One's convictions don't 'spring solely' from anywhere. But your experience in Israel would likely have been different if you had grown up a Jew in the former Soviet Union. My objection is to the claim that 'frameworks' like being Muslim, Croat, or Chinese are not subjective. That they are not subjective seems evident even from your own accounts, that is, they are independent accounts of the good from which we can derive meaningful behaviour. Hence the description of what the Chinese or Israelis do. If these were subjective, that is idiosyncratic, such descriptions would meaningless. Sincerely, Phil Enns Toronto, ON ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html