• JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    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.