imomus

Exchange "Berlin" here for "London", and your post exactly resembles the kind of rant you used to crank out every time you passed through London. So all that stuff about the special evil of Anglo-Saxon culture, the "anglosphere" etc. was a load of rubbish after all! I do think the drink-fuelled antisocial aggressiveness is something you encounter in most Northern European cultures. Not so much in Latin cultures. I live in Paris, and sure, you get the rudeness of shopkeepers and the authoritarianism of petty officials. But you don't get the binge-drinking. And there seems to be a general overlay of "civilisation" for want of a better word in relations between people.