Giving up some freedom is always a consequence of society: your freedom to swim in a lake is at odds with my freedom to dump sewage there.
I'd hope that Germany of all countries understands the importance of sovereign democratic government and the harsh conditions people will endure to preserve it.
In fact the behaviour of Germany (and France) in recent times has seriously worsened my perception of these countries. I wouldn't say they're clearly better in my view than the USA, despite Trump.
I guess besides the 'system' and the people that form it, Germany is actually very nice.
(And the US is way worse in all these respects anyway)
We need to solve our biggest issues at a global level because history shows that even if one country goes from strength to strength, sooner or later its surrounding nations can pull it down. Also usually the rise of one country is upon the ruins (or at least exploitation) of another, or others.
This is perhaps easier with Germany's population of ~60M vs. the US population of ~300M. I'm much more comfortable with something like this happening at the state level because, for example, I have almost nothing in common with the people of Alabama.
This 300M+ logic is the perfect strawman for people who don't want to solve problems, because the population of the US is only comparable to few countries in population and they are not in a good position...
Within the US, people are able to move across states at will very easily. It is not a "straw man" in that I did not present it as argument being made by someone else. I simply do not believe in centralized power and large homogeneous populations.
I have been to Alabama, and I often can not understand what they are saying whether you believe it or not.
Thank you. I hate when people use this as a former of argument and neglect all the difficult things the country has achieved. It's an excuse for laziness and the status quo.
My point was it is difficult for 300M people to agree on something, and I don't know what you are talking about otherwise.
See: your thread.
There's no amount of division that can neatly contain a group's interests. Gerrymandered maps are an extreme example. 60m vs 300m is no more meaningful a distinction than 500k (Atlanta) vs 6m (Atlanta MSA).
While technically true, surely there's degrees of 'containing group interests'?
I've been part of various groups with different sizes. Family > friends > Christian denomination (Evangelical) > Class (highly educated but very 'middle-class'), Country (The Netherlands), etc. To me it seems obvious that as the group gets larger, as well as more 'abstract', the group interest becomes vaguer and broader and less cohesive.
While I don't agree that comparisons on a state-level are the right kind of abstraction (perhaps more rural versus urban?), I do think that there's a huge difference in 'contained group interests' on the level of something like 'The Netherlands' versus 'The European Union' (the 'umemployed leeches' are at least my unemployed leeches, and not brown-skinned, etc.). And while I think the USA cannot be directly compared to the EU, I do think the USA is more similar to the EU than to one particular country within it. Or at least enough so that it makes that comparison very shaky.
I often find it difficult to remember this, because from the perspective of a Netflix-guzzling European the USA is a monoculture. But if the differences within the relatively small and relatively (globally speaking) homogeneous eurozone are any indication, the USA might be much less monocultural than it appears.
Another example is marijuana legalization, which seriously benefits people with certain diseases and psychosis. Further, it has shown in Colorado to reduce crime and increase tax revenue. It would have been significantly delayed if the federal government imposed authority of federal law in this case.
So there is a pretty compelling argument to be made that some issues seriously benefit from not being under one bureaucracy.
I never made that claim. It is simply that state level democracies is what we have in the US. I live over 1,000 miles from my nearest relative because that is where I feel most comfortable, even though I know very few people and have no connections.
seriously? you have very much in common with them. you want clean water to drink and air to breath, healthy food to eat, peace, a non-corrupt and efficient government, safety, medical infrastructure and so on ...
† source? The CIA :) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
Would it help you people if I said, Germany is 10^2M vs 10^3M? I'm I pedant, but this is ridiculous.
[Edit] There is something quite surreal to see a discussion about Germany’s positive image for people my age and above. I couldn’t have imagined this even ten years ago.