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> is quite irrelevant to its status today as one.

You are the one which talked about how Germany has always been a nation state, as if that were a good thing.

> Poland basically expelled its German population after WW2 for example. ...

> Poland is a nation-state

Umm, you should mention the additional role of the Allied powers and the Postsdam Agreement in the ethnic cleansing of Germans from post-war Poland, and how it was based on the belief that a homogeneous population would be be more stable. And you should mention how the nation-state could only exist because of the near extermination of the Jewish population.

Had that not happened, Poland would now be as much a nation-state as Belgium or Finland.

So far I am not liking the processes used to make nation states.

Let's see, you said Italy is a nation-state, right? I've visited the autonomous region of South Tyrol. I guess the native German speakers are a cultural minority that a nation-state can have, right?

> saying that Germans don't have the right to control their borders and maintain their country as their country

I think I've spotted the racism. Define German. Define "their borders." Is Austria German? Is South Tyrol German? Should they be in German borders?

Is the Danish minority of Southern Schleswig German?

Do Germans need to be Catholic? Or Protestant? Can Germans be Muslim? Can Germans be black? Can Somalian refugees be German? Can the grandchildren of Turkish guest workers be German?

As an American, I find it bizarre and bigoted to call native-born Germans "Ausländer" just because their parents didn't come from Germany. Is that the nation-state you're talking about?

To me that just seems like a continuation of 19th century racist nationalism.

You never said it explicitly but you are referencing the French Reporters sans frontières (RSF) ranking, which is a European organization which is obviously predisposed to rank European countries highly.

I find their ranking highly suspect because they put the Netherlands at number #4, one of the highest rankings, while in reality the press in the Netherlands is in a dire state: literally all newspapers of record are collectively owned by just two Belgian (not even Dutch) mega-corporations. Is this really one of the most free countries? It's like Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg together owned all newspapers in the US.

And the US is ranked suspiciously low, at #55, below a country like Belize. Belize! Look at what RSF itself writes about Belize:

> With no daily newspapers, the pool of media outlets is small, and of those considered mainstream, some are supportive of political parties, even when privately owned. Independent media are scarce and access to funding is limited. Most of the advertising funds that media publishers rely on come from the government and their distribution are often dependent on the party in power.

Am I supposed to take it seriously that this is better than the US? That Belizeans have access to a more free press than Americans do? It seems more plausible the ranking is bogus.

This is all ignoring that we live in a world almost completely dominated by disinformation.

The media have clearly aligned themselves to not report on whats actually happening. Right wing supporters get a carefully curated "view" of whats going on. Left wing media pushes outrage over ever minuscule detail while purposefully obfuscating whats really going on.

> This is exactly the type of outcome Trump supporters were looking for.

Trump supporters or republicans? Trump supporters at this point are rabid lunatics who post nothing but "librul tears" memes on facebook. They have no connection to reality. Republicans are trapped in an algorithmic cage, where everything might not be ideal, but gosh darn it, its for the good of the country!

> If you want to interact with the right wing people or read what they are thinking, that’s effectively what X is for right now.

I dont know how a rational, technologically inclined, person can scroll through X and not see that its 60% bots and propaganda. X is not reality, it is Elon's personal propaganda machine.

> this constant hand-wringing of “nobody supports this, I don’t understand, crisis crisis crisis” is unproductive and ignorant of the reality of the political landscape in the US right now.

What is the political reality of the US right now? You're conflating the peoples' response to the information they're getting to the actual reality: The US government is being destroyed by a hostile group of actors, with most likely criminal motives.

Yes, but that's talking about radical political causes.

> The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size.

There are more than 1 million 150-159 year old Americans that receive social security and America is funding trans comic books for children in Peru. Do you think the OIG was doing a good job?