To me, America is still the land of the slightly more free and little more brave!
I read this above report and can't believe it. When that this happen?
Our data privacy laws are thorough and sometimes an obstacle, but many projects got stopped because of privacy issues:
e.g. the digital stored medical records on ones health insurance card
The stop of the data retention directive by our beloved Bundesverfassungsgericht (they are awesome) is another milestone.
Core of our privacy law is that every person is entitled to reign over it's own data as the person pleases, thus every personal data processing is forbidden as long as there isn't a law allowing it.
But fear not my fellow neighbors, the EU comission (not so beloved) might overhaul the data privacy laws and you might gain citizen rights back: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/12...
It was also my perception that the Dutch had a live-and-let-live toleration, that seems like the opposite of the monitoring regime described in the comment. (I'm not really referring to marijuana, I'm speaking more generally.) To this naive outsider, who admittedly has something of a crush on Amsterdam, that level of monitoring is puzzling.
But maybe all those bike roads and dikes point to another aspect of the culture -- a little too well-supervised and well-engineered.
Conspiracy nut thinking? Not so fast my friend:
http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/news-brief/3696611-what-...
I think both events are related. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/anschlag-auf-das-oktober...
Why would normal citizens vote for the president? There are only two possible outcomes of that: a president gets selected who basically blocks what the rest of the government wants (this is how it works in the US and exactly what the FF wanted) or the people pick a president who would work with the government but would have been picked with your current system.
The problem is that there is no real choice here; you have a right-wing party and a slightly more right-wing party, and then a bunch of powerless minor parties. Nobody is holding the country ransom because there is no real disagreement. Occasionally the parties clash over the budget (as they did recently), but on the whole the country has generally followed the same path for decades now.
Remind me again how the large German cost line suffers regular tsunamis :-)
As your so keen on improving the lot of "labor" you are of course a union member and actively recruit and improve workers living conditions?
I got over 1000 of my members a better deal on their pensions and helped in gaining recognition for a bargaining unit in the UK.
Not nearly as important as avoiding having a bunch of lunatic extremists as two-party systems seem to devolve to.
I find the European governments of many parties all having a say in the government the best and closest to actual representation. I find the idea that the entirety of opinion in the whole US, all 350 million citizens, can be resolved to either Red or Blue absolutely idiotic.
Of course that doesn't happen, the parties both span the whole political spectrum, including complete overlap. I.e. the party name can be meaningless. It also means you can't be sure where a politician stands by his party alone. Contrast this with a european government where you stand with your party or you switch party. It's much easier to work out where someone stands.
>you are of course a union member
I certainly would be in a union but firms have been really good at keeping unionization out of IT entirely. But even better would be a government who recognized the power imbalance between corporations and labor and took steps to make things better on their own.
You do know that other 1st world democracys look at the sclerotic nature of the US system and shake their heads.
One member of the US legislature commented on the BBC that the house of lords was more Democratic than they where in a lot of ways :-)
And don't get me started on the obsession with Barak's race and the fact that the GOP the party of Lincon Seward et al has been taken over by the "swivel eyed nutters"
Now what's this about a beam in my own eye? And now you seem to be bashing how bad the US government is, yet we would be in agreement on this. Color me confused.
Giving the people what a majority of those people want is a very dangerous thing to do. Part of the theory being having constitutions is to limit the tyranny of the majority, though it is plain to see that in Joe Arpaio's case the limitations are not sufficient. What 51% of voters in Maricopa County apparently want is unacceptable.
[insert Churchill quote here]
They do run in partisan elections, but they are limited with regard to claims they can make about opponents, and a non-partisan commission evaluates the overall qualifications of each judge.
Are there issues with politicalization? Absolutely. But don't make the assumption that election == politics, and appointment != politics. An elected judge at least nominally is accountable to the people. The examples where this system doesn't work well is usually when machine politics corrupt the process of electing judges. If the judge was appointed, chances are they would be accountable to nobody at all.