US Think Tank Slams Germany's NATO Role

[Surlethe]

Bah, fine print. Insofar as the index of perception of corruption reflects the willingness of people to invest, it's a useful tool by itself, however. It's interesting to see how this breaks down by language.

[Saxtonite]

How closely associated is it with the stereotype that Germans are all sticklers for following rules?

Dont think it has any association. An uncle of mine noticed that when he was deployed in Germany, i.e. how everyone was in lines etc

The dogged insistence of a particular group of people that Germans were inherently evil and that their civilization was fundamentally flawed, even before WW1, and oriented toward aggression, and somehow different from the rest of Europe in the 19th century... All of which are demonstratably false, and yet nonetheless held as absolute tenets; were the primary reasons me and several other people ceased to associate with that group. There is a school in the US and Britain which holds that there is, more or less, something in German culture which makes them uniquely violent and dangerous to world peace.

I don't think it's a direct association. I think it's a legacy in certain British and Americans from WW1 and WW2 propaganda..... because the Anglo-American exceptionalism of the ideology and demonization of alternative expressions of western culture was nauseating and infuriating.

the hilarious thing was in that time period it was popular to say germanics were superior to slavs etc etc etc, even in Britain and there were remains of that sentiment in the UK and Canada in 1920s/30s.....and the second world war removed ANY remaining idea of that sentiment given how Nazi Germany took that logic to the extreme.

[ChaserGrey]

I wish that map broke the US down state-by-state. And if it counts the entire US as "moderately non-corrupt" ... well, wow./quote]

I'd argue that we are, at least relative to the entire world. Not so much because we're not corrupt as that a lot of places are worse.

It has to be noted that this map portrays the index of PERCEPTION of corruption, so it's not all THAT accurate. Just the best you can do, since measuring actual corruption is extremely difficult by definition. So two countries which are in reality moderately corrupt can have different perceptions of it by the populace.

Man, I would love to do that survey. I probably wouldn't get any useful data, and might get my legs broken doing it, but it would be a blast.