It very much is though. Plenty of other countries in EU like France or Romania for example but probably many more, don't have even remotely as many authoritarian and invasive BS laws as Germany does.
But the worst part is that Germans have gaslit themselves to think that their authoritarian laws are there "for their own protection". They don't even realize they have a problem, until they move and live abroad and learn you can run a country without your government have so many surveillance and speech control powers over what you can do or say in public about their leaders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_o...
Any scientist will tell you to not to look at the end data, but to look at the formula used to calculate the result and the way in which the data for the study was gathered. That's what's most important.
Depending on what your formula and data is, you can get to any arbitrary result you want, which is how scientists also had studies in the 1950s saying that smoking was good for your health.
> Any scientist will tell you
That said, why would anyone think such scores could be a reasonably accurate representation? You are aggregating such complex situations and with that you kill off nuance. It doesn't mean the scores are useless, but need to be used carefully. I mean even look at the chart and you'll see weird things pop out. Ireland is ranked 5th by the "Freedom in the World" Index and falls into the highest binning for all 3 categories: economic freedom, press freedom, democracy. Yet New Zealand is 3rd, falling into the second bins for economic and press freedom. Further down you see the US below Argentina yet the US's scores are significantly higher than Argentina in each other category and the US is tied with Mongolia (who has a major problem with Press Freedom).
It should be quite clear that these scores are missing a lot of important details. Like the US definitely has problems with Freedom of Speech (and growing) but you can call Trump and Clinton pedos on the internet all day and nothing will happen to you[0]. Nuance is needed and treating these indexes as black boxes is just harmful to a conversation about freedom.
2. An alpine train was coming by and I was doing the fist pump in the air to get them to honk the horn. A random stranger said that my actions were unwelcome and that trains are serious business.
3. When on bikes I did a skid stop to make my wife laugh, a random stranger said I shouldn’t do that.
4. At the airport, I had to pour out water before going through the security checkpoint. There was no bin to pour out water so I just poured it out in the garbage. A random stranger got quite upset and said the water does not go in the garbage.
Not to mention all of the very unfriendly interactions I had with locals. Honestly will probably never go back, people are so much more friendly and laid back elsewhere which is more my style.
And it's funny, because the first thought they have if you get fined (say you didn't include the impressum in your personal website, or nosy neighbor found you mowing the lawn on sunday), it's that you must have done something wrong, not that the law is unfair.
It’s a Rechtsstaat with hardcore legal-positivist brain. Rules aren’t guidelines, intent doesn’t matter, context doesn’t matter, fun definitely doesn’t matter.
I think that is the biggest disconnect for me. To me rules are guidelines and I will break them when they do not make sense. Following the rules just because they are the rules doesn’t fit my style, although I live in a place when population density is very low so I understand that people bending the rules here has less of a consequence than bending the rules in densely populated areas.
But 1-3? You must've really gotten unlucky...
1 I could only imagine in expensive restaurants,
2. I am seriously surprised by, because while the person manning the train would almost always ignore you, so would everyone else - no matter what kind of gesture you do.
And 3... While I cannot fathom doing that on purpose myself, I'm extremely surprised anyone would bother interacting with anyone about that? Definitely doesn't reflect my experience living here for roughly 40 yrs
Germans seem to have a cultural thing going on where they think the way they do things is the most logical and correct way, and think they're doing everybody else a favor by telling them how things are meant to be done. In fairness, so do Americans. But, for instance, I never hear this shit from the French.
At village scales, authoritarianism is given more credence by the individual because ones life boundaries are reduced to the immediate environment, which is not really sustainable without structured hierarchy.
Incidentally, this is also a factor in why American’s adopt authoritarianism so rapidly as well - spending 3 hours of ones life in a bubble, on the freeway, commuting, is extremely damaging to ones psyche. Road-rage and neighbor hatred abound in such circumstances.
The solution to authoritarianism is travel beyond ones bounds. The roots of totalitarian-authoritarianism grow deeply in the desire to be free of the ‘filth of others’ - once you expand your horizons to embrace that ‘filth of others’, through travel and cultural interaction, that ‘filth of others’ becomes ‘the flavor of others’ instead.
This is easily demonstrated: talk to a German who has never left their home town/talk to a German who regularly visits vastly different parts of the world. You will see the authoritarian in the former, but the libertarian in the latter.
It couldn’t have arisen just randomly or on a lark.
Look at it critically - whenever you encounter a totalitarian-authoritarian personality bloviating about “those people over there” (others), its usually based on the totalitarian mechanism of ‘avoiding affinity with attributes considered unsavoury’ (filth).
This concept has other applications. If you have two villages, separated perhaps by a near-insurmountable mountain or lake, or if one of those villages raises cows while the other raises goats - this is usually the basis of the formation of a new dialect, accent, or indeed entirely new language. However, when civilization occurs and those two villages merge into a broader community, that language changes to become a unity.
This is observable at an individual level, too. Any unacknowledged or under-recognized similarities/identities/differences between two or more entities will inevitably be used to justify segregation of those entities. The solution, as always, is to identify similarities/identities/differences in a cohesive manner - this is anathema to the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, who is usually pretty stubborn about enforcing, in totality, those under-acknowledged facets.
Of course the reason then subsquently can be inflated, conflated, mixed together strangely, contorted, etc… I’m not doubting that.
The most effective antidote to totalitarian-authoritarianism is a one-way ticket to somewhere distant.
German villages, as comfortable as they are, don’t really promote this antidote.
To what is this referring?
I got the Hitler reference, but not this one.