Comment by PavlovsCat

Well sure, people in positions of power pretty much equally suck everywhere, I think we can consider this as baseline. But I do find it disturbing that "American exceptionalism" seems to be rather widely accepted the US population, and that they're not even ashamed to express it, and that state officials implicitly or openly do the same. I have no doubt that some people in Germany harbour similar sentiments, but they're really at the fringes and in the dumps in comparison.

Also, scale still matters. Killing a person or slapping them in the face are both violence, but there is still a difference, otherwise we could just reduce all to "physical and chemical processess going on" and completely stop thinking. I don't believe for a second that Germany, or even France, Italy or Russia (which I consider rather right wing) have programs to scoop up traffic from Google's internal network in place. Maybe they would like to, but they can't pull it off. And while I wouldn't bet on it, I wouldn't be surprised if China doesn't either.