I'd say that German is the sense of comfort towards nudity.
> There're nude beaches everywhere.
Well, islamic countries are very unlikely to have them.
When it comes to European countries, there are, however, some religions (ie. catholicism) are generally more conservative, and in countries with such beliefs, nudism/nudity is considered sort of "hippy", or strange in general.
Something I found really amusing is that in saunas in the north of Europe, "for hygienic reasons", people is invited to be naked. In the south, "for hygienic reasons", people is invited to keep clothes on.
There are certainly plenty of nude beaches and nude ranches in the U.S., but Germany certainly might be more accepting of nudity in public.
In Iceland, people are invited to shower in the nude with soap before getting in the sauna or hot tub "for hygienic reasons". Personally I like that one better than naked or clothed for hygiene.
Isn't that everywhere? I mean, if you go to a gym, don't you shower in the nude after your workout with plenty of nude people? That's every gym, in America, Germany, or wherever
I’d say yes, it is. Gyms where I live are a tad less public though, and not everyone at the gym showers at the gym. The showering before swimming in Iceland is something everyone there does, and for Americans it is a bit different than what we’re used to at a public swimming pool, hot tub, or sauna.
Spaniard here, it is a mix and match. There are plenty of nude beaches but also people that frown upon topless. In my experience people tend to separate themselves in more secluded parts of beaches for topless, away from kids (if only to avoid some more conservative people complaints); and for nudity (which is definitively looked at as being extravagant / “hippie” as said above), if there are sand dunes and some bushes, people generally go there.
But I’d say people argue way more about having dogs in beaches than about nudity.
Hygiene is a common excuse to enforce clothing culture. It is very similar to ban against burqa, and when France banned full-body swimwear it also cited hygienic reasons.
Here in Sweden you actually have a easier time finding a work place that accept burqa compared to a work place that accept people being barefoot. I find that to be a bit odd but then clothing is 99% cultural and has very little to do with logic.
How is a full body swimsuit less hygienic than any other piece of swimwear?
When looking it up, it looks like the actual claim is a mix of hygiene (not specified) and "upholding secular values", so it's absolutely an attack on displaying religious affiliation in public. Does that mean they also ban crosses, kippahs, and Dastars, or will they continue to target a specific religious group?
They seem to somehow relate terrorism with everyone who follows Islam, but that's like banning crosses because some predominantly Christian group commits an act of terrorism (white nationalists are often Christian).
I agree, but from spending a fair bit of time in both countries, America has a lot of advantages over Germany as well. For the poor, working, and lower-middle class, Germany is far better to live in without doubt, but for the well-off, it's a tougher comparison.
I would rattle things off, but it's more like an aggregate of small things rather than big things like "free healthcare", and I don't want to seem petty and discount the critical importance of healthcare and education. But as one example, if you want to create a tech startup, there are many reasons why it's better to do it in America than in Germany. Other people's lives matter more than fulfilling one's "Uber for dogs" startup fantasy or something, to be sure, but people optimize for different things given their personal circumstances.
You should look up the origin of that quote. Not only is it paraphrasing part of a story and not an actual quote, but it's referring to people that voted to enact communist policies and ended up poor, instead of creating a society where everyone had everything they could want. They didn't want to admit that they'd been fooled by the government, so they were the "temporarily embarrassed millionares".
Here's the original John Steinbeck quote it's paraphrased from, if anyone's interested:
>"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
>"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
Pretty much, yeah. I think there are some advantages America has even for a good 50% of that 90%, but, again, they're small comforts compared to things like being healthy and alive or having an education. I like both countries and could see myself living in either place, but there is something in some parts of American culture that I seem drawn to.
That said, we may not be too far off from a time where America has single-payer healthcare and some change in our education system (maybe free public university, online school, or trade school for all families making under $150k/year). Combine that with some police and prison reform (some of which is already happening), and I think America takes the clear lead. Maybe wishful thinking, but good to have something to strive for. Both countries could learn from each other.
This is how they drive innovation, to over simplify just a bit, you are either an innovator or a peasant. A bit of devils advocate here: Would we have the MRI machine without extreme competition? I hope so, but I am not convinced. What technological revolutions will/have come from Germany?
They invented the electron microscope, so it’s highly likely. Germany played a huge role in technological development of cars, rockets, radar, nuclear physics. It’s hard to find an area of modern technology that a Germanic country wasn’t part of developing.
ETH Zürich continues to be one of the top 3 CS schools in the world.
A poor example indeed. I'm a globalist so I don't personally care, I just truly want to believe the Americans extreme capitalist model has accelerated global development. Their impact after WW2 has been hard to deny, I also sometimes think that the rest of the world was decimated so they had a long period of insulation and defacto dominance simply because the rest of the planet was beat down.
> simply because the rest of the planet was beat down.
Or, also, because your currency was established by treaty to be the de-facto means of exchange to stabilize the postwar economy and then later became the defacto means of procuring energy security so that all countries would be enticed to trade with you in order to obtain some of it. Plus NATO cold war defense against commies.
.. but that might poke a hole in the whole notion of an 'extreme capitalist model'
(if one means this in the smithian free market sense)
One did. In your opinion, how should their foreign economic policy of the next 100 years proceed in order to help facilitate and spur continued growth?
The division between Protestant and Catholic parts in Germany is (as far as I can see) much more than about religion, similar to Ireland; these are just convenient names.
I remember watching a video called Hippies From Hell in which a bunch of German lockpickers (from Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik) were picking locks.. at a lake, naked.
It didn't strike me as German; it striked me as part of hacker culture. Was I wrong?
Hey chupa-chups, this thing about nudity is of course a generalization.
However, I'm told all Germans absolutely adore asparagus, are passionate about them, and it is always an appropriate topic of conversation, whether discussing their many variants or how to cook them.
From personal experience I can confirm a corporate event for a famous bank consisted on a field trip for asparagus-gathering, and that once the season starts, they pop everywhere in the schnitzel sauces of daily menus every week :)
David Hasselhoff caused the unification of Germany, so everyone loves him :D
Sorry if this is offensive to some folks, but the folklore here is that David thinks he caused the reunification while everyone over here (that I know of) thinks he is a freak :)
Since this caused around -10 points until now I guess I offended somehow :) What I said is true for anyone I know, so I guess there's something I don't understand regarding the perception of "The Hoff", so please inform me :)
> David Hasselhoff caused the unification of Germany, so everyone loves him :D
> Sorry if this is offensive to some folks, but the folklore here is that David thinks he caused the reunification while everyone over here (that I know of) thinks he is a freak :)
No, what causes the unification of Germany was not David Hasselhoff's song Looking for Freedom, but Scorpions [1] with their song Wind Of Change [2], [3] (yes, I am aware this song is actually from 1991 - let us ignore this historical correctness, just as we do for David Hasselhoff).
For any Americans interested, I suggest reading up on the American Association for Nude Recreation https://www.aanr.com
They have a bunch of affiliated clubs and resorts around the US. They all have strict rules against anything inappropriate in public.
Sometimes it's nice to go out in nature without a barrier between you and the wind, rustling leaves, chirping birds, etc. All of the ones I've been to have WiFi in case you still need to get work done.
Anecdotally, if you have body-image issues, spending some time nude around others (like at a nude beach) can actually help alleviate them. Seeing other peoples asymmetrical, weird and quirky bodies makes you realize that it's the norm.
Going to a gym with a shared locker room or communal showers can have this effect, too. Even at a place like a gym, you will find very, very few people who are perfectly "cut." And while we all tend to obsess over the ways in which our bodies are weird, it can be liberating to realize that everyone else's body is weird too.
Dunno, I'm pretty non-puritan and got desensitized to nudity of all shapes just from the web, but the lesson was that I shouldn't assault people's gaze with my pitiful physique.
Just an FYI, the German word for naked is "nackt", not to be confused with "nacht", which means night. Which might not seem important, unless you, like my sister in law, accidentally signed up for a "nackt wandelen" or "naked hike", as opposed to a "night hike" at her daughter's university (Freie Universität Berlin) when she went to visit her last year.
Fortunately her daughter saw the mistake long before they attempted to attend. I can only imagine the scene had she not discovered the mistake before showing up!!! :)
Also of note, English speakers really have trouble pronouncing either correctly (They get conflated, really. As in, pronouncing ck/ch). Hence the confusion. (Anecdotally, I have lived for years(4) in the States.)
Well, German actually has the similar word "wandeln", which means something like "to stroll" and is often used in phrases like "unter den Toten wandeln", which can be translated as "to walk among the dead". So this is quite similar to the Dutch "wandelen" but used in different situations.
I get the idea that once you've accepted nudity then it would follow that you can do anything at all nude. But nude sledding sounds miserable and cold. Is this a translation issue or does someone actually think laying down naked in the snow on a toboggan and riding through winter's bounty is fun? Germans can be odd, but this sounds dumb.
As a American Midwesterner I have gone out with friends in shorts in the snow before and I know a lot of people who have done a polar plunge (i.e. jumped into a somewhat frozen lake). The fact that it's kinda dumb is also what makes it extra exciting.
> Is this a translation issue or does someone actually think laying down naked in the snow on a toboggan and riding through winter's bounty is fun?
I know Germans who indeed find this very funny. But afterwards, better put on warm clothes or even better go into a sauna. So it is clearly not a translation issue.
To be fair, German sleds usually look like this [0], so you are not lying down on the snow (unless you fall off), but sitting upright and quite far off the ground.
Not really... The Nazis burned porn, not books... Germans have been subverted into giving away their own country, being taxed excessively and drained by the EU. And you can go to jail for criticizing the rootless group who has perpetrated these things. The idea that exposing your body is "freedom" is inversion. HN is controlled by the same types of people who think "progress" is the opposite of progress.
I also particularly enjoy the "Germanic Stare Down"[0] culture; being free to look at anyone and in the eyes without that being considered hostile is something I consider healthy as well. Compared to other places where lack of eye contact can make you feel isolated and alone, a pair of eyes and a smile in the street can bring a sense of belonging.
The friendliness of a pair of eyes depends quite a bit on the context. This culture seems quite potent in (German-speaking) Switzerland as well, but at least as a visible minority I seem to experience far more less-than-kind stares that wouldn't be acceptable in the US or the UK, for instance. Giving people license to stare can certainly make others feel like they don't belong when it's indiscriminately applied.
I'm visibly not German as well, so I understand what you are saying. Though, I believe it is better than non-looking cultures, because now that they are looking I have the chance to portray the image of who I am, which is a non-hostile, open and warm person that I believe to be, and most of the time this non-verbal communication is picked up by the person staring and I get an attitude shift that corresponds to my attitude. If you immediately feel threatened by the stare, that will be displayed on you, and that will make others look at you even more cautiously. It is not the staring the problem, it is the solution. It is a body language and it can be used collectively for acknowledging who is fit and who is not for the community and also a non-violent ostracization when that one feels so uncomfortable that flees. In a non-staring culture, people never get a chance to read you, they simply glimpse and then immediately make a judgement based on their own presuppositions and then treat you as such. Not in Germany, they will stare until they understand.
They are probably trying to figure out where you are from. As an American with Norman and Germanic ancestry I get stared at periodically when shopping, and I think they are trying to figure out what is off about me. I definitely do not perceive it as friendly or welcoming in any way. What is unique about the Germanic stare down is there is no effort made on the part of the starer to avert their gaze or even acknowledge that they are staring. Walking towards the starer usually encourages them to turn away.
People will always try to figure you out. But with the German stare this communication is enhanced, you get feedback on their feelings for you and you can respond to that with your attitude. In other cultures, they make a judgement and there is nothing more to be done, they close down. In Germany this channel of communication and feedback stays open and works, in my experience, collectively. Once you develop an attitude that works that stops the ugly stares in the grocery, then stares become less threatening in general, collectively. It does seem to be a kind of a super-organism behavior that isn't very well understood, which is why I find it fascinating.
This is something I've always struggled with. I grew up in a part of the world where you just don't make eye contact. Ever. Spent many years in and around colleges where folks were the opposite - very heavy on eye contact. And so I adapted. Moved back home after college and suddenly I was "too creepy" for everyone, even my family.
Feels like much less of an issue since I moved to Texas, where folks in the smaller towns are far more on the German side of things anyway, and folks in the cities are the usual everything all at once. Only really noticeable whenever I go back home to visit. I guess now I'll always be a bit too alien for them.
West Virginia, specifically Charleston. The general lack of eye contact was more pronounced in remote groups and less prevalent in Charleston proper, and I really never noticed until I spent time up in Morgantown at the university. Seems far more common in the deeper southern coal fields and almost non-existent in the north. Presumably this has to do with immigration waves and when parts of the state were settled (or when the industrial owners brought in large numbers scab labor), but I've never seen a study on it.
The fat-positivity lunatics are going to have a field day with this one...
"People who stay in shape and look good naked have 'fitness privilege' and 'naked privilege' the privilege of being able to look acceptable naked because they are able and willing to exercise and be healthy - this is oppressive and not fair"
I really hated going to nude camps with my parents during the summer. I think that was a form of child abuse. For me, freedom is being naked alone in the wilderness where there is no one around, not in some crowded area with other naked people.
What caught me in this article is that it puts naked children in the pool in the same corner as nudist adults. The former is very common outside the English speaking world in general while the latter is rather a Germanic thing. Personally I find places that don't allow nudity for small children quite strange - it's basically sexualizing them way too early.
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