Germany

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I have nothing against Germany. In fact, I have a lot of family there, and it's one of the nicest countries I've visited: the trains run mostly on-time, they have a nicer quality of life, and better services than many countries in the world.

But there are negatives too: a collectivist culture, bureaucratic, too many rules and too much intolerance. (Every rule/law/regulation is a way to tell someone else what they can/cannot do). And historically, they did a lot of bad things. I try not to rub that latter part in, because most alive today had nothing to do with that. But there's a reason that stuff happened there: and it is the collectivism that is the birthplace of Marx and Engels, and that socialist poison is infused in their water and culture, and exists (in its more moderate form), just waiting for the opportunity to spring out again.

Articles

German Liberty

Germany is a free society: unless you do something the collective decides you shouldn't. Then you're far less free than in America, or much of the world. The point isn't to bash what is a lovely country, and great people, it's to remind people that Freedom isn't how you treat people you agree with, but how much people you don't like or agree with, are free to do things you don't approve of.

Fascism

Fascism is overloaded (means different things to different people/groups), with a brutal history, so no one wants to be associated with it. Thus the side that it came from is going to do everything they can to obfuscate and pretend it came from "others". But fascism is more than an ad hominem attack: we can clarify conflicting meanings, and look at real history and motives. Just know that while some of us can handle the truth, reasonable intellectuals aren't usually found on internet forums or Facebook feeds.

Gini Coefficient

The Gini Coefficient (or Gini Index) came about when Corrado Gini (and Italian Sociologist) wrote the book: The Scientific Basic of Fascism. His idea was that you could make systems stronger than the individuals, if you just weeded out the threats to the collective and accepted fascism (democratic socialism combined with crony capitalism). His book, and the infamous “Gini Coefficient” he created, said that income should be evenly distributed, and if it wasn’t, then government should use that imbalance as an excuse to seize wealth and liberty, and redistribute it (fascism) to make things “more fair”. His coefficient is basically just that: a measure of how economically fascists (socialist) your country is.

Angela Merkel

I'm not a fan of Angela Merkel, she seems to be incompetent in her buffoonery, and single handedly magnified Germany and the entire EU's problems with everything she touched, from immigration, to green energy, to Russia, and so on.

In Pop Culture

Man in the High Castle

The premise of "what if the Nazi's and Japs won WWII" is a fascinating piece of alternate history. The premise exceeds the implementation for season 1: which turned in a mediocre spy thriller with a different backdrop. Season 2 is far more interesting and starts exploring what life and culture would be like, as well as the drama is more interesting. I'm hoping Season 3 continues the progression.

Dunkirk (2017)

This wasn't bad, but it was a bit of mismanaged expectations. Many will go in expecting a Historical War and action movie -- what they'll get is a vignette movie telling 3 different stories, with overlapping timelines. A British soldier pooping and fleeing from the pending german advance (over a week), a British guy with a boat coming to save them (over a day), and a RAF pilot (over an hour), and how those stories intersect. If it sounds overly complex, it is, but the stories individually aren't bad -- the same with the movie.