this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
143 points (85.2% liked)
Privacy
33339 readers
1123 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well said. And I think there's more. In the Anglosphere and the USA in particular, government and state are often conflated, but they really are two different things. The former is the cockpit, the latter is the airplane.
Things are different in European cultures. In Latin languages, for example, the government is understood to be the body of politicians in control right now, whereas the state is a sort of expression of the people's will and therefore has much wider legitimacy. Two very different things. I believe it's similar in German.
I sometimes wonder if this semantic quirk has exacerbated the general skepticism of English-speakers towards collective action.
I understand that "Regierung" (government) = executive branch "Parlament" (parliament, in the US congress+senate) = legislative branch
"Staat" (state) is an imprecise word as it can mean different things https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity) (see Definition)