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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

> Then what are the prevailing mindsets in Germany?

I outlined them above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13271448

> And how much more noise would people be making, what is a "lot"?

At the heyday of the Snowden revelations there was a large outcry. When talking about opinions in Germany one always has to distinguish between the opinion of the citizens and the opinion of the government (these are often very different). Of course the German government has a very USA-bootlicking opinion about the Snowden question.

The fact that in Germany there (mostly) is free speech does not imply that the government is interested in your opinion. Take a nasty English joke about lawyers and replace "lawyer" by "politician" and you get the whole mentality quite well.

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> I outlined them above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13271448

I know, and it matches my experience. But the user tw04 seems to disagree with more than flimsy reasoning.

> Take a nasty English joke about lawyers and replace "lawyer" by "politician" and you get the whole mentality quite well.

I wish I could find it now, but Sebastian Haffner mentioned this in one of his books... the German tendency to consider politics as something dirty the private person better keep out of, while both despising and admiring those nasty politicians. I think that sarcasm is a form of cowardice. The way I see it, either you're a responsible citizen or you're not, politics is way too important to leave it to professional politicians. But that's neither here nor there.. one thing is sure, if I had a cent for every time an American or right-wing European tells me some nonsense about Germany, I could buy HN a pretty stylesheet.

> The way I see it, either you're a responsible citizen or you're not, politics is way too important to leave it to professional politicians.

The whole topic is a lot more complicated. It's rather hard to found a party: 2009 before the parliamentary elections I have been was sometimes at the regular meeting of the at that time new-founded Piratenpartei. Many attendees were paying for the election posters themselves (you can only get aids (Wahlkostenhilfe) when you already got many votes in a previous election - a chicken-and-egg problem) and were (in my opinion) working really hard alongside their regular job.

Also for most parliaments in Germany there is a so-called 5% barrier. That means that if you don't get at least 5% of the votes, you will get no seats in the parliament (except perhaps direct mandates - but for these you need a relative majority of votes in your district, which is even harder - nearly impossible for a new party). The 5% barrier means that you will need a program that attracts many voters.

That's kind of the opposite of what I meant. I say one shouldn't leave fishing to just people with a license, you understand everybody should get a license. The point is that politicians, in a democracy, if anything, should enact what consensus there is of politically active and informed citizenry, so to speak. Not sell their own ideas or even corruption to people who are rather disinterested in many vital areas. If people, every one of them, felt the buck stops with them, and saw absolutely no way to hand over their making up their mind about what the world is like and what should be done, then even just that would create so much pressure on political parties and corporations as to positively mold them. As it is, it's more the other way around, with all the lameness that entails.

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